This week, mind the bottleneck!
Why is that? Well, because you probably make most of the important decisions, and the risk is, if your business is growing and you have more things going on in your business, you have less and less bandwidth to understand and anticipate the challenges that you are likely to face.
Why does this tend to happen? Well, in my experience, what tends to happen is as the business grows and goes from strength to strength, you have more volume coming through the business; there’s just simply more things to do and when you’re a smallish business you tend to have functional responsibilities as the Managing Director.
The more work that happens, of course there’s more to do within finance, operations, marketing, sales, and whichever bits of those functions you work within your time gets absorbed into those areas.
Still, the challenge is, as your business grows, you need more people to be able to cope with that growth, so you hire more people, and then what starts to happen is, you have all of this extra work on the functional side of the business.
Still, now you’ve got additional managerial workload because more people have more questions, they need training, they need support, and what happens is your workload just kind of exponentially increases and you may be experiencing this now or have even experienced it in the past.
So what happens is, you run out of bandwidth, there isn’t enough time to do everything, and that’s when you are at risk of bottlenecking things because you just stop making decisions promptly you just put everything to one side. After all, you’re so busy dealing with the day-to-day, you can’t think beyond tomorrow.
If you can identify with that, start paying attention to the things you are bottlenecking, start paying attention to the decisions you’ve been sitting on for weeks and months, and just start paying attention to what’s really going on.
Your mission is to get rid of as much of the functional stuff as possible to give you more bandwidth to be able to develop your people so that they can do the doing for you It’s the only way if you want to grow your business properly and if you want to scale.
If you’re looking for more small business tips, then we’d like to see you every week on “Mind Your Own Business,”
Marco Soares is an award-winning business coach in Sussex and is available if you’d like help implementing these tactics.
