13 Nov Managing a small business—is difficult?
Managing a small business is more difficult than managing a large business.
Owner managers generally start their own businesses because they are good at something and believe they can build a successful commercial business off this base. Often they are good at the vocational aspect of the business, but are virgins in others areas such as the energising of their commercial model. Just because you are a skilled operative doesn’t necessarily equip you to becoming a successful commercial business person. There is a different dynamic required to achieve this.
Our brain has both a right and left side. The right side is the creative side and the left represents the more logical traits. Two thirds of the population have a reasonable mixture of both right and left characteristics. At both extremes you get the outliers who tend to be recognised for their more extreme characteristics. The more extreme right brained people tend to be visionary types, who tend to have a clearer picture of the evolving landscape than others. Here is the fertile ground for artists of all hues. Those with a more developed left brain tend to see the world as more black and white where everything needs to match and be in its place. This is the more familiar territory for engineers, accountants and other such persons who deal with critical precision and consistent accuracy.
Each owner manager has his/her own personality profile, but naturally enough none of us have the “full shilling”. We all have both our strengths and weaknesses. The critical implication of this for successfully managing our businesses is that the range of these skills is required to varying degrees depending on our businesses position on its business lifecycle.
Every business starts from an idea in the head of the entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs tend to be more right brained visionary types. They can visualise the picture of their proposed business before it’s born. But unlike extreme visionaries, entrepreneurs don’t just visualise and talk about it, they also have some left brain characteristics which facilitates them to go and turn their vision into something commercially tangible. These right / left traits are poles opposite and don’t necessarily lie comfortably with each other. Yet both are critical ingredients for the successful baking of the businesses commercial loaf.
In a large business the MD has the resources to build a team of specialist around himself / herself. Here the MD can ensure that there is balance within the team for the commercial task on hand, while at the same time, there is not necessarily balance within the heads of the individual team members.
You as the owner manager are by far the most important input into your business model, while at the same time being its limiting factor. By building your own relevant management capacity and adopting other balancing tactics, you are enhancing your business chances of being still standing at the end of this recession cycle and being fitter to exploit the emerging opportunities.
You as the owner manager of your small business cannot afford the range of such resources in-house and so you have to try and manage issues you are often ill equipped to manage. In the course of a typical day you may have to wear the following range of hats. These are accountancy, HR, marketing, selling, negotiation, operations, legal, logistics, PR and many more. All owner managers are good at aspects of these, but it’s impossible to be well enough equipped to perform adequately in all these areas. Some hats fit, while many fit badly.
Being the owner manager of a small business is a lonesome journey. You have to make all the critical decisions on your own. You don’t have the support of a team like the MD of the larger businesses. It’s often at the follow on implementation of these decisions where the mental isolation really manifests itself.
Just because you as owner manager cannot afford to have a management team around you in order to achieve balance between the right and left type characteristics, you nevertheless must be innovative on how you can achieve the necessary balance to round off your own biasness’s profile. One way of achieving this balance is to build a trusting relationship with one or more experienced business people, who will both challenge and guide you along your otherwise lonesome journey. These relationships can be either informal or formal. The formal ones can be energised via your local County Enterprise Board, who will allocate aMentorto you. Its best if the mentor has an opposite profile to your, so that together there is more balance within the team rather than balance within either head. The evolving business relationship needs to be trusting and challenging, since its being built for the purpose of equipping you and your business to become more commercially successful. Like all resources, you as the owner manager must optimise these types of opportunities.
This recession will eventually end and there will be a new boom. Opportunities are more transparent post the event. Five years hence many of us will look back on 2011 and bemoan the fact that we didn’t see the opportunities that existed or didn’t have the confidence to exploit them. There is the herd instinct in many of us. This was evident during the Celtic Tiger era and also over the last four recession years. To win you have to break away from the herd. By the time the herd arrives it’s already too late. A good mentor will help you to make this break away from the herd.
While all the post Celtic tiger waffle type analysis of the economy is going on, entrepreneurs are busy figuring out their next business opportunity. The real heroes of our economies are business people. We create the wealth which supports the rest. This country needs entrepreneurs and calculated risk takers and we must be careful that we don’t regulate entrepreneurism out of existence. I believe that we as business people will succeed in spite of the obstacles. My fellow Kerryman Richard Cantillon invented the word entrepreneur and his style is required to kick-start ourselves onto the next ascending cycle.
None of us as individuals can do much about the macro economy. We do have the capability to better manage the variables that are within our control in our individual businesses. By better managing our own business models, we will start to make our “slice contribution” to the global economy recovery. Your business mentor will challenge and guide you to achieve this.
I believe that as the owner manager of your business you must understand that your have to professionally manage your business as per the following two time frames
1. During the current dip.
2. Post the current dip.
Many businesses have reached the point of diminishing returns in relation to their cost cutting tactics. Now they will have to focus on the revenue side of their business equation and put in place appropriate action plans in order to grab a bigger bit of the smaller market. You are the person responsible to make this happen.
Are you prepared to pay the price necessary for the future success of your business?
If you have a dream to more successfully build your career or business, this book titled JACK —Business lessons from life, Life lessons from business, is a must read for you. It contains a unique opportunity for you to gain valuable practical exposure to Jack as a role model and to a range of ideas, methods and techniques which together will both challenge and guide you in your future career and business journeys. By reading and internalising just some of the 198 nuggets of wisdom contained within its covers, you will substantially increase your own competence for self management and uncap your latent potential. Let JACK be your Mentor.
The book is available from most good bookshops or from our website.
If Jack could do it—so can you.
Blaise Brosnan is author of Jack and previous to that, the book You are the Limiting Factor. His website address is www.mriwex.ie