One of the hardest challenges you go through when you are a small business is growing your business and maintaining control of your business. It is very common in a small business to have the owner(s) control a great deal of the sales and operations. This is necessary to get the business past the first few years in which most businesses fail. Once you get through this stage if you want to grow your business, you need to decide to leverage your time.
For instance if you are one of the owners and you are in charge of all the sales, you have to realize that you cannot do all the sales in the company and grow your business as your sales capacity will get maxed eventually. The key is to hire smart and frankly hopefully have some luck and bring on a good sales person who you can train, has a natural sales talent and is a people person. Once you do this you will realize that you do not have to control every sales element and you can start to concentrate on the larger sales prospects that otherwise you would have not been able to target as the time would not permit. In addition you spend more of your time selling as opposed to putting together sales proposals.
Similarly, on the operations side, it is very normal to have one of the owners produce all of the work in a small company. But this can cause problems because when you grow you cannot do it all and if you do production suffers. The key is to analyze all the tasks in your daily job and decide which tasks can be done by another employee in order to free up your time to concentrate on tasks that are important to growing the business. An example of a task that needs to be done when you are growing your business is implementing processes in your operations, concentrating more on the high level aspects of operating your business.
As we grew our business we went through all the challenges and leveraging your time is key and is only possible if you find great people to work with your company, which I am pleased to say we have a great staff at Canada’s Web Shop.
