Is that your plan?

This plan may sound reasonable (and exciting) but in fact, it’s not appropriate or realistic for 99% of small businesses. As was offered in the recent G Myth blog, growing a business as a means to solve its problems is like buying a mansion to deal with a messy house: the result is often a bigger mess. In fact, it’s not uncommon for growth to literally kill a business.

It’s easy to dismiss this notion but it’s important to really consider the implications of growing before you’re ready: loans, overtime, waste, inefficiency, temporary and contract labor, etc. These things add up quickly, tend to pick up momentum, and can easily lead to bankruptcy. It happens often, though the people it happens to don’t tend to advertise it.

Growth has to be scalable and sustainable. And the prerequisite for this type of growth is competent and effective management — starting with your ability to manage yourself. This is where it all starts — your capacity for self-management sets the tone for the whole organization.

A critical piece of your self-management is your ability to stay organized and out of overwhelm. Business growth requires not just more of your time, but more bandwidth — more space — in you.

Here are some questions to help you get real with yourself and how you’re doing on self-management. Do you feel consistently overwhelmed? Do you finish your to-do lists? Empty your inboxes daily? Work more than forty hours a week?

Is there space in you for the business to grow?

Now imagine your leads tripled next month. What would break first? Are you doing all that selling? Delivering? Would you have to hire? Train? When would you outgrow your space, your technology infrastructure? What quality problems do you have today that will explode with those new leads?

For most businesses, the path to growth is one step at a time. Your self-management is the basis of effectively managing others, which leads to responsible employees who serve customers efficiently. The efficient production of your service or product is what creates value. Value increases profit. Profit fuels growth.

The SOBO 2013 results told the straight story: developing infrastructure (clear roles, accountability, training, etc.) to support growth is the path to growth. And you can’t build that infrastructure if you’re constantly overwhelmed and putting out fires.

“If you build it, they will come.”

Josef Shapiro

PS: Join me at the Self-Management webinar on June 18. Be passionate about getting organized–it’s the first step to growth! 
 

But at some point passion wasn’t enough, and your fuel started running low. As the business grew, and got inevitably more complex, it took more of your time (and money) to get the same result. It can be incredibly frustrating and hard to understand why what got you there stopped working. And there’s not much help in the ‘business help’ industry – mostly what you’ll find are solutions that are ‘new and improved’ ways of doing something you’re probably already doing too much of – which is focusing on the top line.

This week, more than 13,000 people downloaded our latest annual report on small business success – and are taking another approach. They’re seeing the compelling results of building something called the “Ownership Stack” – doing things like writing down their values, creating an integrated marketing plan, and profiling their ideal customer. Owners who implemented all nine components of the ownership stack had nearly 60% greater odds of reaching their profit goals.

Here’s why it works:

1. Having these documents and sharing them with your team is a guaranteed way to get buy-in, and get everyone working towards the same goals in a hurry. You’re creating the ‘emotional’ systems that define your culture and inspire your team.

2. We don’t make real changes until the pain of not changing is bigger than the pain of staying where you are. Writing down where you want to be and comparing it to where you are will get on your nerves, in a good way.

3. It gives you the room to focus your efforts – to make sure you’re focusing on the right things as the business leader. This way, the next 5,000 things you do are serving your long term vision, and not just tackling what’s in front of you.

The Ownership Stack is literally a game changer. It works because it fixes the problems of today – creating more sales and better customer experiences – but it does something far more important in the process. It gives you back the feeling that you’re really after – which is to feel more in control and more optimistic about the months and years ahead.

When you find yourself working harder for less reward and satisfaction, you’re at the crossroads of continuing to play small or going big. In this case, bigger is truly better.

Jonathan Raymond

PS: We’re hosting a free webinar addressing this, called Solving the Growth Paradox, this Thursday. Register here 
 

We are the job creators,
the biggest taxpayers,
and the engine of economic growth.

We are innovating right now.

Our strength is our ability to adapt.

We weathered the recession.

Our community is proud to buy from us,
and together we are slowly but surely lifting the country out of a tough spot.

We answer the phone and roll up our sleeves every day to deliver real value.

We dream of doing even more.

We do it,
because it’s who we are.

Download the Small Business Manifesto as a PDF

P.S. Thanks to Cameron at PixelSpoke for inspiring this piece.

You can make your business better in a few hours by removing a few positions – not the people in them – but some positions that are an invisible drag on your business. There are two kinds of supervisors, neither of which produce real value – they’re only there because something else more essential is missing.

The first kind is the “Mother Hen” – and there are just as many men in this category as there are women. That’s the person everyone goes to with their complaints about their job or about the business – where they “unload” and then go back to work. In a lot of small businesses, the Mother Hen become an informal HR department – sometimes they’re even described that way.

The second kind is the “Taskmaster” (again, man or woman). Those are the supervisors who spend their day watching over people – sometimes obviously and sometimes in more subtle ways – but they spend their day keeping track of other peoples’ days, their work and their time.

It seems like the Taskmaster would increase accountability and the Mother Hen employee happiness. The irony is that they do the opposite. The Taskmaster can get you more compliance but actually stands in the way of your employees really caring. People who have to be told to care never will. And the last thing people who actually care want is to be lectured to about it.

On the flip side, it seems like the Mother Hen helps people get along, so you don’t have to deal with “people problems”. But what they really do, despite their best intentions, is keep the problems from surfacing where you can deal with them and allow people to get better at conflict resolution between themselves. Giving a disgruntled employee an unofficial “complaint/suggestion box” just fans the flames of their negativity, and they’ll try to enlist everyone else to justify their victimhood.

When you give someone a supervisor instead of a real manager, you rob them of the chance to really own their job for themselves – to be self-accountable – which is the secret ingredient to growing your business beyond you as the owner or lead technician.

Why are the Mother Hen and Taskmaster there? Because the business lacks a real and vital management system. Without a real management system, you won’t get employee ownership. Without employee ownership, you default to needing supervisors.

The good news – which you’ll find out as soon as you take action – is that your best employees are dying for this change. They hate working next to people who need supervisors, because they are the ones picking up the slack for those people. They’re tired of hearing the complaints of people who need a Mother Hen, and they hate seeing the team’s performance get dragged down by the people who need a Taskmaster.

This doesn’t mean firing anyone. It means crossing boxes off your org chart (or, more likely, realizing that some boxes got created over time that you didn’t actually put there). It will shake some things up and there’s no guarantee your former supervisors can make the pivot into a higher value role. But you give it your best and trust that if it’s right for the business it will be right for everyone involved, even if there’s pain in the short term.

Don’t fall into the trap that if you do away with supervision, then all “that stuff” will fall on you. It won’t, at least not in the way you think. All you have to do is remember that this is exactly the opportunity you’ve been looking for all along – because it answers the questions you’ve been living with since the day you started growing your business:

• “How do I get my people to really care about the customer?”
• “Why don’t people really own their jobs?”

If you find yourself saying you don’t have the time or the motivation to do this work, it just means there’s one Mother Hen or Taskmaster still on staff, and you’re working for them.

Jonathan Raymond

PS: As long as you address the underlying cultural and people development issues, your Mother Hen could become a great salesperson or customer service manager (they are good listeners), and your Taskmaster a great Project Manager (they understand the value of structure).

Please join me for the free State of the Business Owner Key Findings Webinar, an in depth discussion on key business development practices. Register now.

Here they are:

1.  A Written Vision for what the business will look like, act like, feel like and perform like when it’s treating customers how you want it to, every time.

2.  A Clear Set of Values that come from your heart, and inspire a team of people who share your priorities and won’t fight you on the definition of great work.

3.  A deep understanding of your Ideal Customer, so you’re spending those precious marketing dollars speaking to their needs, and not wasting energy trying to reach everyone.

4.  Position Agreements for your employees – think of them as Job Descriptions 3.0 – that are focused on results and values, not tasks and policies.

5.  A Revenue Plan that is both realistic and stretches you – so you stay in control while you have something for you and your team to reach for.

6.  A Marketing Plan that isn’t scattershot, but rather is designed to meet your ideal customer where they are with what they need.

7.  A Repeat Sales Plan driven by powerful customer experiences.

8.  Visibility into how you’re doing through a system for Tracking Your Marketing efforts, so you have actionable data to maximize your impact.

9.  A simple dashboard of Key Business Indicators to track your progress towards your vision, so you can course correct in real time.

You don’t have to get all these elements perfect. And you can’t do it in a day – these are “roll up your sleeves” pieces of work that we’ve been coaching clients on for 35 years. But just imagine – what if you had one by the end of June? And another by the end of July? Image how different your business will look in nine months.

Jonathan Raymond

ASHLAND, OREGON (May 16, 2013) – For today’s entrepreneurs, starting a business is not all about the money.  According to the 2013 State Of The Business Owner (SOBO) Report, announced today by business coaching leader EMyth, the top three reasons today’s entrepreneurs start their business are: freedom to pursue new opportunities; following their personal passion; and, to gain independence from other’s control.  Money, in fact, ranks fourth.   EMyth commissioned the State Of The Business Owner project, now in its second year, and surveyed more than 1,700 business owners to gain insights into the real challenges that small and midsize businesses face on a daily basis.

“My business was broken and I didn’t even notice until it was almost too late,” shared Shawn Busse, CEO of marketing firm Kinesis based in Portland, Oregon and 2013 SOBO survey participant.  Busse personifies one of the top SOBO survey findings highlighting that it’s dangerous to make revenue the primary focus when trying to grow a business.  In early 2010, Kinesis, like most small businesses, was hit hard by the recession and hurting financially after taking on too many project-based clients with the hope of boosting revenue.  “I realized I would never get control by just focusing on revenue.  I needed a more sustainable business model to weather the economic ups and downs.”  By early 2011, Busse had turned his company around by transitioning to a new retainer-based revenue model and solidifying his company’s core values.

Helping businesses find and make these types of strategic business changes is at the heart of EMyth’s coaching program.  A leader in transformational business coaching for more than 35 years, EMyth’s ‘people first, systems second’ approach helps owners create a strong company culture to support their strategic objectives.   The EMyth program takes a balanced approach to employee and systems development to stabilize operations and allow businesses to scale while ensuring a great customer experience.

“We know that running a small business is tough and time is ticking,” said Jonathan Raymond, CEO of EMyth.  “Owners need answers they can trust, with clear guidance on what to do next based on their unique situation.  That’s what we do best.”

The 2013 SOBO Report certainly points to entrepreneurs needing more guidance and insight.  Another burgeoning entrepreneurial trend identified, entitled the “overconfident entrepreneur,” finds that 85 percent of business owners believe they have a competitive advantage, and 50 percent believe that their employee’s productivity is better than their competitors.  While passion and commitment are essential traits for a successful entrepreneur, EMyth counsels its clients to keep overconfidence in check.

“You simply can’t argue with statistics,” continued Raymond.  “Only 50% of new businesses survive the first five years and only a third will last ten years according to the Small Business Administration [1].  But these same small businesses are essential to our economy, as they create more than 60 percent of new jobs on average in the U.S.[2] EMyth focuses on coaching entrepreneurs to create balance between their professional passions and their bottom line goals.”

The 2013 SOBO Report also reveals insights into the importance of values to business owners’ hiring decisions.  The Report found that 85 percent of business owners have written company values and 70 percent of them say alignment with those values is a major factor in their hiring decisions.  However, owners are struggling to have their employees use those core values in daily decision making – only 44 percent of respondents felt their employees did this to their satisfaction.   EMyth recognizes that this is the value of great business coaching – to get everyone from the owner to the employee to the customer personally invested in the company’s success.

More information and insights from the 2013 State Of The Business Owner Report are available at stateoftheowner.com, on EMyth’s Facebook and LinkedIn pages, and on Twitter at #sobo2013 and #emyth.

Survey Methodology
Designed by PixelSpoke, more than 1,700 business owners worldwide responded to a 60 question online survey in early 2013.  The 2012 SOBO research won a Best Paper award at the prestigious USASBE (United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship) conference in San Francisco in January 2013 and was published in Entrepreneurial Practice Review in the Winter 2013 issue.

Twitter Chat On May 16, 1 p.m. PST
EMyth CEO Jonathan Raymond and PixelSpoke CEO Cameron Madill will host a chat on Twitter at #sobo2013 and #emyth on Thursday, May 16 at 1 a.m. PST.  Raymond and Madill will further discuss the survey findings and answer questions.

Upcoming Free Webinars
EMyth will host a series of free webinars for small and midsize business owners interested in learning more about the 2013 State Of The Business Owner Report and how those insights can help direct and improve their business.  The first webinar, scheduled for Thursday, May 30 at
10 a.m. PST, will focus on key findings from the 2013 study.  A webinar schedule is available at stateoftheowner.com.

There’s a more sound approach to reach those goals. It starts by remembering that building a business with solid fundamentals has a very high likelihood of attracting new customers (and keeping them), and that it almost never works the other way around. Adding sales and new customers into an unstable business will simply expose the weakness and dysfunction already there, leading to potentially disastrous results.

Next week we’ll release State of The Owner 2013 – our annual research project surveying small and midsize business. As we saw in 2012, successful owners and entrepreneurs are increasingly aware of this myth. We’re seeing an important trend – a declining emphasis on new sales tactics in favor of “deeper” organizational work. It’s a great reminder of a deep and painful pattern we encounter with many businesses – what we call the “growth paradox.”

The Growth Paradox:
1. You want to feel in control, so the business isn’t overwhelming you like it is today.
2. You assume that the way to get there is by increasing sales.
3. Whether or not your sales actually do increase, you still feel out of control.

It’s easy to see how you can stay stuck in the loop if sales don’t increase. What’s more challenging to accept – because it goes against the “sacred cow” in our business culture of increasing the top line – is that rising sales numbers are no panacea for whatever is really ailing a business.

What happens when you add higher volume sales into antiquated back-end operations and financial systems? What happens to the customer experience if you increase the customer base by even 10% in a business being run primarily with disengaged employees? It’s like pushing more water through a leaky pipe – you can easily flood the whole building.

Things start to get dropped – errors on invoices, customer issues get brushed over, everyone is stretched even further than they were yesterday. And remember, it’s not just the new customers that suffer – it’s also your loyal long-term customers, because your team can’t take care of them like they used to.

If the investments haven’t been made for the business to scale, those new customers start driving up your direct and indirect costs (which are now skyrocketing instead of scaling) and margins get squeezed. Profits start going down instead of up. And then the spotlight gets really bright – people start wondering whether you really thought all this through. Clients often come to us in exactly this moment. It’s far from the only one, but it’s one of the ways the leadership seat gets really hot.

Low sales numbers are a real cause for concern, but they are nevertheless a symptom of a deeper issue that, if it remains unaddressed, keeps the business and the owner inside the Growth Paradox.

Don’t spend all your energy looking for more sales. Direct most of it – let’s say 75% – into driving real growth by investing in the future. Take advantage of the amazing solutions out there to streamline your operations, so they’re ready. Build a culture that really cares about your customers, so they can handle whatever comes. Become a better money manager before you have more of it to manage.

There are powerful investments – some of the best of which are free – that you can make in your business that will get you closer to your goals, sooner. Sustainable growth starts with a shift in focus – from “closing” sales to cultivating them.

Jonathan Raymond

PS: Thanks to EMyth Coach Janet Beatty for the inspiration for last week’s article.

1. “I’m a           ” (“control freak” or “tyrant” or “type A person”)
2. “I know that about myself but I can’t change it, it’s who I am.”
3. “So I surround myself with people who aren’t like me.”

It’s usually spun better than that, of course. Instead of tyrant, it’s “I’m just strong willed.” Or instead of “people who aren’t like me,” they’ll say things like, “my managers ‘balance’ me or ‘keep me in line’.”

How do you think those other managers feel about that? If you’ve been there yourself you know that having to work around “the boss” and compensate for holes in their leadership is a huge drain on your day and the company culture in general.

But the real problem is in the second part – because it asserts a lie as a conclusion – that real change is impossible.

Like all good justifications for not changing, this one has some truth in it. It’s true that you need to know your weaknesses so you can make sure they don’t drag the business down. You do need to surround yourself with people who have complementary strengths. The question is: are you really doing these things to better the business? Or are you being the wrong kind of lazy – trying to take yourself off the hook for having to look in the mirror?

You can of course avoid this uncomfortable work, most people do. There are plenty of incredibly (financially) successful people who never do real honest work on themselves as a leader.

But employees and customers are looking for that kind of leadership more than ever – they want to know that you’re looking at impacts beyond a narrow focus on the bottom line. People don’t split work and life the way they used to. The world is in the process of rejecting that well-worn phrase to the contrary because we realize that business – especially small business – has always been personal. And we want it to be more personal, not less.

When you take this idea down to the day-to-day of running a business, you’re joining a new conversation about management – about self-management – and it goes like this:

1. “I’m not great at           ” (“managing people” or “working with budgets” or “delegating projects”)
2. “Even though I may never be great at that thing, I’m going to keep working on it if for no other reason than I want to inspire my employees by modeling transparency.”
3. “I don’t want anyone who works here to have to carry me. I want self-responsible employees – because those are the real innovators – and I know they don’t want to work for someone who doesn’t take seriously the responsibility that comes with leadership“

When you take this approach and really work at it, you start to see that before you weren’t actually managing anyone – they were managing you. Or managing around you, more likely. You start to see how everyone else was working overtime not to balance your weakness, but to compensate for it, which leaves them less available for their real job.

You could say the ultimate goal is to become your own manager. It might be the single most productive thing you can do.

Jonathan Raymond

The symptoms of what isn’t working about your business are easy to see. Those are the things in plain view, the things that “keep you up at night.” And it’s just as easy to see (though often harder to admit) how struggles at work are impacting the rest of your life.

One way of saying it is that what is happening is easy to see, but why it’s happening can be a lot tougher to find and solve.

If you try and solve it at the level of the symptom – let’s say it’s “not enough sales” – you’ll soon find yourself chasing after quick fixes. You’ll go from a technique you learned in a workshop to a tactic you learned in a book. Or maybe you’ll hire an expert (with the subtle implication that hiring them takes you off the hook for having to solve the real problem). And the clock of small business survival counts down one more merciless beat.

The alternative is what at EMyth we call “going meta,” or simply put “finding the real problem.” An EMyth Coach might say: “Okay. Let’s assume the problem isn’t necessarily the need for sales but rather the need for increased profits. If we start there, that gives us the room to figure out what the real issue is. Maybe what’s causing the lack of new leads is that there isn’t a clear brand commitment? Maybe what’s changed isn’t anything in the sales department but that resources are being pulled to chase after new customers (expensive) rather than invest more in the experience of current ones (less expensive) which will lead them to tell their friends?”

The answer could be anywhere, but the critical point is it’s never really “more sales” or “team-building” or hiring experts. It’s about fixing the problem at the root, which is what real business coaching is all about, so the problem doesn’t come back up tomorrow somewhere else.

Sometimes meta comes as an insight – a counter-intuitive idea – that goes against the grain of conventional wisdom or previous experience. But the real juice is down one more level – on the ground floor of real business transformation – where it’s personal. It’s having the courage to see and accept how you, as the business leader, are responsible for why things are the way they are. Almost never are you directly responsible for the problem that’s in front of you, but you are 100% accountable for the background conditions that allowed the problem to be there.

Can you get better business results without working on yourself as a leader – by working on “it” without working on “you”? Absolutely. So the business will improve, sales may even go up, but what about you – you personally?

“Work on it, not in it.” It’s the viral phrase EMyth has been famously associated with for decades. And it’s, in my opinion, a far more profound statement than its originator ever imagined. Because it’s an endless invitation – a “meta” challenge to keep looking, to keep evolving the personal reason each of us is in business beyond the money, to share our passion with the world more boldly than you did yesterday, and to do that with integrity especially when times are tough.

Going meta is critical to finding out “who you are” – as a business and as a leader. It’s the tool you need to actually turn over every stone, including the one you don’t realize you’re carrying.

Jonathan Raymond

Learn more about meta – watch the Intuitive Management Webinar free ($100 value)