Recently an acquaintance who advises “creative professionals” (graphic artists, web designers, print designers and similar folks) asked me to contribute some wisdom to a collection of business advice he was putting together for his clients.
The rules were firm: Offer two sentences of advice that I would give to struggling business owners.
Two sentences. No explanation. No details.
No details? What fun is that? Producing standalone sentences wasn’t nearly as difficult as percolating down everything I teach into a short list of two sentences. Not sure I can pull that off.
When I work with a business owner who is struggling to turn around their business, we start with seven fundamentals and go from there. Firing five of them wasn’t easy but this is what we ended up with after a little handwringing:
Number One – “Measure EVERYTHING in your business that you care about and use your findings to drive your decisions so they are based on facts, rather than emotions or seat of the pants guesswork.”
Let’s dissect that sentence, as I purposely stuffed a lot into it.
“Measure EVERYTHING in your business that you care about”
Pretty simple.
Decades ago, Peter Drucker is alleged to have said “that which is measured, is managed” (or something along those lines).
What matters is that you identify the key things that matter in your business and start keeping track of their performance.
It might be number of web visitors per day, the number (or amount) of orders each hour, or how many inbound calls you take per week.
Whatever your numbers are, measure them, don’t just guess. Refine them over time. Improve how you measure and change (or add to) what you measure if the original numbers aren’t doing the job.
That brings us to “…use your findings to drive your decisions so they are based on facts, rather than emotions or seat of the pants guesswork.”
We all think we know our businesses (and we should), but it’s very common to find that we’re missing something when we stop guessing and start looking at hard numbers.
Whatever the numbers turn out to be, your decisions will be better if they’re based on facts rather than guesses.
Number Two – “Stop working in (for) your business as if you are an employee and start working ON your business as if it is an investment.”
Once again, let’s break the sentence up and talk about it.
“Stop working in (for) your business as if you are an employee…”
Before you get the wrong idea, I’m not saying you shouldn’t be doing real work or hard work, and I’m certainly not slamming employees.
What I am saying is that you should be doing the RIGHT real / hard work. The work I’m talking about is the most valuable work in your business.
Most likely if you are the owner or some sort of big cheese at your place, there’s work that only you can do – and it’s likely the work that’s the most valuable, highest profit generating work at your business.
Why not find a way to organize things so that’s what you actually spend your time on?
If you enjoy sweeping the shop at the end of the day, that’s one thing and you’re entitled to that if you wish.
What I’d like you to consider is this: if you spend six hours a week during the work day doing those kinds of tasks – what could you produce in that six hours if someone else was doing them?
“…and start working ON your business as if it is an investment.”
The key here is all about not getting the most valuable asset (from a strategic point of view) caught up in the day-to-day of the business.
I know, sometimes it has to happen. Day-in and day-out though? Nope.
If you work for yourself and you are the only employee, then you obviously have to delegate something to someone (like a bookkeeper or perhaps a spouse).
What can you spend your time doing – even 10% of your time – to grow your business? To make it a stronger competitor? To expand into a related market? To improve your marketing or sales expertise?
Want to learn more about Mark or ask him to write about a business, operations or marketing problem? See Mark’s site or contact him via email at mriffey at flatheadbeacon.com.