When scaling their business, many of my clients in the Glasgow area will be familiar with this phrase: have a business that works for you, not because of you.
What do I mean by this? Well, small business owners tend to do a lot of the business’ work themselves. From lead generation to marketing, it’s common for business owners to be essential for more or less every aspect of the business to run effectively. Whilst this can seem like a good way to work initially, when a business starts to grow and scale problems quickly appear.
Instead of being central to everything, I coach my clients to build a business that can run perfectly without their involvement. How can this be done?
Give Your Team Responsibility
For business owners looking to take a step back from the day-to-day functioning of their business, one of the most important things is giving responsibility to your team. This means empowering them and allowing them to make decisions that affect the business.
This is a great way to motivate your team. If they have more responsibility for the business, they will feel a greater sense of ownership. As a result, you’ll have a more motivated team who are proud of what they do and have some real influence over what happens within the business.
Scaling with Systems
One of the reasons why many of my clients in Glasgow get caught up with running all aspects of their business is they don’t create the right systems. They are used to doing things in a way only they know about, meaning it’s very difficult to hand tasks over to the team.
By implementing the right processes and systems you will find the rest of the team are able to handle much more without you than you might have thought!
This isn’t just about making the business less reliant on you, the business owner, though. It’s about making it less reliant on any individual at all. Systems make onboarding of new team members far easier, as they will have pre-set instructions and rules to learn and follow. So, as people come and go from your team, it becomes quicker for new employees to get up to speed and less harmful to the business when those who already know the systems leave.
You’ll see greater consistency in what your business delivers because of effective systems. As your business grows, this is a valuable asset which will allow your business to carry on growing in a healthy and sustainable way.
Without systems, there will come a point where individuals who have their own way of doing things will have too much on their plate to handle it all. At this point, delegation becomes very tricky in the absence of systems. It means a slower process to get people up to speed, and more time taken to train them up. Both teacher and team member will lose valuable time that following systems would save.
Summary
So there are two things that business owners need to do to ensure they can grow and scale their business in a healthy and sustainable way.
By handing responsibility to your team, you will have a more motivated and empowered group. This means less weight on the shoulders of you – the business owner – and a culture of ownership within your team going forward.
As your business continues to grow, having the right systems in place is essential for allowing delegation, training and keeping standards consistent. People learning how to complete new tasks will have set rules to follow, making the learning process far quicker and meaning they carry out tasks in the same way as the rest of the team, leading to a consistent result.
I offer a range of training for business owners in the Glasgow area to help them get their business where they want it. Take a look at my programmes to find out more.
