Yesterday I talked about working IN your business vs. ON your business. I started to explain that all of us are guilty of working IN the business. So… how do you work ON your business? Especially, if you’re small and have no choice but to work IN your business. How can you do both?
Well, I struggle with this myself, but everything worth doing well, requires you to do it poorly at first. So let me tell what I have learned. If you have to work in your business, you better be designing a repeatable system to perform that job. Why? because if you don’t make a system, how can you ever hand the job over to someone else so you can go back to doing your CEO duties, instead of making sales calls?
Like so many of us, I find myself a technician, playing business. But the more I play, the better I get. The idea of a repeatable process in everything we do, is far from simple. Just stop to think about everything you do in a day that is for your business. Do you pack boxes? call vendors? hire contracts? engineer a product? or answer customer calls? All the power of a business lies in having a process for each step you do. Why is that so important?
You can’t count on having good people at every position. You often can’t count on having good people at any position. So, make the job trainable, make it repeatable, make it easy. Now, don’t get me wrong, if you can get great talent, strive to keep it. But let’s face it, you won’t have those people at every position. And if you do, it is only a matter of time before you lose them. Good people can rarely be kept forever. The only way to combat that is create a position that almost anyone can do.
you ready to start working ON your business? Then documenting what you do? It won’t be the final draft. It will still evolve and get better over time… but everything starts somewhere.
Thanks for reading,
Mike