Friday, December 10, 2010

Reclaim hours as a business owner

Many business owners spend so much time working in the business that the long term viability of the business suffers, they remain hands on for far too long. The first way a business owner can reclaim time to allow them to focus on managing and growing the business is to hire someone with the right experience and delegate, this is often a hard thing to do as many owners struggle to "let go".

An alternative is to formulate standard operating procedures (SOP's). That is to:
  • work out how a job needs to be done
  • write down the process (flow charting is a useful tool)
  • train someone to use process
  • measure results
The key point here is to measure the results. With the right operational and measurement techniques and systems in place a business owner has no need to micro manage and can direct their attention to strategies to ensure growth, or to those areas that do not produce the expected results.

Having standard systems in place also means that no-one has to play the blame game. If something goes wrong the first question to ask is "Was the system followed?". There are several possible answers and scenario's:
  • If the answer is no, was it because there was no system for that situation, if so you have an improvement opportunity to create a standard. If the answer was just the employee did not want to follow the system they can be informed that employment is contingent on following the standards. If the employee was not aware of the standard then again there is an improvement opportunity through staff training.
  • If the answer is yes then the system needs to be reviewed for appropriateness, relevance and usability, another improvement opportunity.
Businesses who are not looking for ways to be continually improving their product, service or processes are limiting their success.