It's more than likely your business started with a conversation about something that was missing in the world and 'what' you could do to fill the gap.
Alternatively, you may have built your business from a passion to do things differently or better. Your ‘why’ is often the subject of how you got to where you are today. Simon Sinek even wrote a book about it.
In those fast, exciting early days, there’s rarely time to think about the ‘how’ of running your business. But it’s this part of the journey that I want to focus on.
It’s perfectly acceptable for things to be reactive and organic during the start-up phase. You’re proving the concept, building your brand and customer base, and establishing where you can make the biggest difference.
But once there’s a team, however small, or a range of products or services, or you want to expand into different markets, having a clear idea of ‘how’ you do things (and capturing it) is essential.
What do I mean by ‘how’?
The ‘how’ of running a business is all to do with what goes on behind the scenes. Imagine you’re bringing in a manager: how would you do things? How would you help them understand where information was held, how to find things, who needed to know what and in what order everything should happen?
When I work with clients, we approach things using four pillars:
Planning
Process
People
Performance
Of course, each of these includes many more moving parts.
Every function of the business needs a plan, feeding into the overarching business plan which communicates your strategic direction. Processes consist of repeatable tasks and activities; how you manage your people creates your culture, and tracking and measuring your performance is critical to ensure you meet the right standards of customer satisfaction and maintain the right levels of profits, income and outgoings and a healthy cash flow position.
However, all are interrelated and all need one thing: consistency.
Having a consistent approach to how you run your business means you are putting all your resources into continually moving forward. The alternative is different people interpreting tasks or activities in different ways, duplication of effort, a range of outputs and standards and the potential for things to get forgotten.
How do I know I’m getting it right?
All businesses are different and the optimal way to operate will become clear as you gain greater visibility through planning, capturing key processes, and using your systems to report and analyse performance and other outputs.
However, there are a couple of questions I always ask business owners which you could consider:
1. Are you spending more time or money on something than you should be?
2. Are you losing time or money where you shouldn’t be?
3. Are you wasting time or money on any part of your business?
I often find business owners have a perception of how the business is running, and often that perception is that things are running well, but when we conduct an audit and uncover the detail, the results are not always what they expected.
So how well do you truly know what’s going on in your business?
If you’ve grown, you can be assured that you’ve lost the granularity you started with. If you’ve got more people working in the business, you will have lost some of the consistency you started with.
Don’t dismiss the ‘how’ stage of running your business. Scaling a business means scaling any problems or issues too so it’s critical to understand what’s going on before you grow.
If you’re interested in getting a better understanding of how your business is currently running, contact helen at helen@simplifiedoperations.co.uk
