Hello everyone, here is a little thought for the day.
For busy small business owners “Plan your escape now. If your business depends solely on you being there, no one will want to buy it when you retire.”
As business owners, it is easy to get stuck into working in your business and not spending enough time working on your business. As a result, when I started thinking about this blog, I wanted to give you some practical steps that did not require a huge IT investment. In fact, you can implement these steps without changing any IT at all. So here you go.
Top Tip Number 1 - Schedule your time off
Taking a break is a low risk way to see how robust your business systems are. Before you go however, here are some things to keep do in advance.
- Document what you do
- Plan who will cover what responsibilities while you are away
- Prepare a set of instructions for your team to follow and get them to record their actions
- Brief them before you go
- De-brief them on your return and evaluate the results.
An added bonus may be that by using the new systems you have set up for your break, you will be able to delegate some of your current workload – a break without taking a break.
Top Tip Number 2 - Delegate one of your current tasks
Think of something that you are doing regularly now. Ask yourself, “Am I really the only person who can do this task?” Write down the steps you take and share them with a member of your team. Ensure the actions are clear so that you and your team can track what is actually happening. Go through it a couple of times until they can do it on their own.
Top Tip Number 3 - Empower your staff to take on aspects of your role
As owners, we get nervous about what happens when a new customer contacts us. This is partly because we never seem to happen enough and partly because of the investment we make finding them in the first place. However, whilst you may not want to surrender complete control, your team can at the very least deal with the initial enquiry and setup a meeting for you. You can then take over. Having a standardised script available with the click of a mouse will go a long way to helping remove this pressure. This tip ensures you have excellent communication between you and your team which leads to a seamless customer experience.
You could put all 3 tips into action in the next 60 minutes if you wanted. Of course, to be scalable and more robust, means putting a little more thought into the process. It may also require a little outside help. This is what Arbutus Ridge is all about – helping you manage your business through the use of better IT and business processes. That's why we created our Jumpstart IT service packages: to meet the needs of today’s small but yet growing businesses like yours. Business who are increasingly looking to integrate their office's contact management, email management, automated accounting, marketing intelligence, remote working and internet commerce.
In any event, I hope these tips help you as you think about designing your business to meet your personal goals. As part of Jumpstart, Arbutus Ridge offers a variety of IT and business related services to help streamline your operations. Interested? Then by all means get in touch!
Regards,
Barry Larson
http://www.arbutusridge.co.uk/
Better systems for your business™
2 comments:
Interesting article, Barry! Too many small business owners are caught up in the survival battle. They should heed your advice!
Thanks Nigel. Many times, it's the simple things that make the difference. We are alway happy to share our knowledge. Our goal is to teach our customers how to use their systems to deliver business value. As this blog shows, you don't necessarily need IT to start doing this, but when you are ready to go to the next stage with your IT, we are there to help. Barry
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