Small Business Owners
Small Business Owners are some of our most fun clients to work with. They typically have incredible vision for where they want to take their business, are driven to get it done, and challenge the status quo.
However, sometimes Small Business owners are so focused on their vision and drive that they have blind spots to other important aspects of their business.
A Small Business with Unhappy Customers
For example, Don started his business from scratch in his own garage. He knows the products and services of his business like the back of his hand because he invented them, nurtured them and sold the heck out of them. As his business expanded, Don hired great people to produce even better results, however he could not let go of the hands-on involvement. His people, though very skilled, were micromanaged and not trusted to do the work they were hired to do. Don soon had morale issues in his business, and this led to broken processes and unhappy customers.
Mismanaged Small Business
Janice loved everything about what her small business had to offer. She loved to talk about their products and services to anyone who would listen. She loved joining her salespeople on client calls and added that extra zing that got clients excited. Unfortunately, Janice did not like many of the other, more mundane aspects of her business and she routinely avoided them. Things like State and Federal work requirements, managing profit and loss statements and obtaining the proper business insurance were just not Janice’s thing.
Great Business / Broken Processes
Marianne worked with her team to set up processes around just about everything in her business. These processes ran extremely well, until without warning, Marianne would override the process. Often she would just go to one employee and ask them to do something different from the process that had been agreed upon. This led to unhappy managers who felt Marianne would not involve them in the decision making by simply going around them and often created other customer experience issues.
Small Business Owner Ogre
Once Ted’s small business began to take off and he hired employees, his frustration began to grow. He could not fathom why his employees were not as excited about their products as he was. He was bothered by the fact that they didn’t work the hours he worked or were not as efficient and effective as he had been when he did their work. His demands became overbearing, including requiring that his workers stay late and come in on Saturday morning.
These are all examples of where Small Business owners fix their focus on a few things and forget that there is a whole business to attend to. They sometimes don’t hire people they can trust to attend to business and then get out of their way and allow them to do their work. They don’t focus on building consistent processes, training people to those processes and having specific agreed-upon steps that are taken if, and when those processes need to be changed or overridden.
At True North Skills, our focus is to help small businesses build and strengthen their success. Call us at 425.835.2124 or schedule an exploratory call to discuss your needs, schedule a Small-Business Analysis or learn how our Business Coaching can make an impact on your ability to make better decisions for your business.
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