State of the Small Business
Between starting, growing, and selling my own small services business, and being involved and consulting with a LOT of other small businesses, it gets a lot easier to see the common issues and the available options to resolve them.
This message is for you, small business owner and/or operator, to let you know that these (and many more) are common occurrences, shared by your colleagues, are in many ways inevitable as your business passes through certain stages of growth, and most importantly, have relatively simple solutions to fix if you are willing to think a little differently about your business.
Although this list isn't exhaustive, it is some of the most common I have seen along the way. Please think about them carefully and be honest with yourself. Burying your head in the sand and "gutting it out" is not the answer. As the leader, it is your responsibility to recognize your personal areas of needed growth as well as that of your team.
Your work week is too full. You spend a lot of your time working in your business, performing tasks, working with your team, clients, and fighting fires, etc.
You have hit a sales/growth plateau. You cannot increase yearly sales to grow at the pace you want.
You grow but are unable to sustain it because additional backlog of work produces poor operational delivery.
You don't have a leadership team, or the members are not truly leaders, or it contains people you don't trust to handle critical and important functions.
You aren't making much profit, or don’t really know how much profit you are going to make until the end of the year.
You don't track or drive utilization targets for your delivery team.
You don't specifically focus on a sales pipeline, process, and planning effort.
You run your business on a cash basis - you look at what's in the bank and accounts receivable as your primary indicator of how well you are doing.
You don’t perform a formal financial operations review each month.
You don't think about or put any energy into the concept of working ON your business instead of IN your business. You don’t take clarity breaks.
You aren't a member of a business owner / CEO peer group and/or you don't have a coach
You feel like a fraud and question yourself and your ability to RUN your business.
You struggle with employees being accountable within your organization, which prevents you from trusting them to hand off responsibility.
You don't effectively plan yearly and quarterly goals or struggle to hit those targets.
Meetings are a chore, or some people feel like they are a waste of time.
There are plenty more. Hopefully this list gets you thinking, and if you are experiencing any of these elements or others you have identified, it's important to understand that you have options to overcome these hurdles. Keep an eye out for subsequent articles or preview some of my past published material where I discuss some of these items in a little more detail. As always, please don't hesitate to reach out to me if you ever want to talk about your situation or potential solutions to these issues. You are not alone, and the solution is probably more simple than you think.
I hope this helps,
-Ryan
