When I was about four years old and playing cars on the floor with my brother Rob, my other brother Paul started making a funny noise.
Looking over, I noticed that Paul's face was a funny bluish color, his mouth was open, and inside I saw that he had a wooden building block with the letter C lodged in his throat.
Yelling for my mom who was in the kitchen was all that I could do. Mom ran in and tried unsuccessfully to get the block out of his mouth before rushing Paul to the hospital where they were successful in dislodging the block, saving his life.
As business owners, we often get ourselves into trouble by trying to swallow too much.
We take on too many projects without thinking. We choke on our workload caused by our micromanagement. We swallow the unsavoury fact that we are not profitable like we should be.
As a business coach, I look around and see what happened to my brother, happening on a too regular basis.
In many cases, business owners have the building blocks, but aren't using them properly. We are not building our business into something that is valuable. Instead, we seem to be playing with these building blocks in a manner that makes no sense. Sometimes this is because we don't know exactly how to build our businesses.
We are experts in one thing or another, but not the business. We know a couple aspects of business, but for reasons that are not our fault, we are unable to see how the pieces fit together.
Here are the five building blocks I work with in my system to ensure that business owners have reduced stress, the business is valuable, and it is serving the needs of its customers. These are the building blocks that every business owner should work with:
Block 1 - Planning: Strategic planning is key to building your business. Having a clear understanding about what your mission to your customers is.
A vision of how that business will grow and personal goals about what you want out of the business. Once you have clarity, you can start playing with the other blocks.
Block 2 - Profitability: This is a building block that many business owners fail to understand.
By knowing what your profit potential is and where you need to look to ensure that you are building and growing a profitable business is key. There is no use in growing sales if you lose money every time you sell something.
Having a clear understanding of how business works and what you need to do to ensure that your business is going to be around to serve your customers and feed your family is crucial.
You need to look for profit holes and potential, develop scorecards, reporting, and measurement of aspects of your business that contribute to profitability. You must develop marketing and growth plans for the business that doesn't overwhelm you and can allow you to live the lifestyle you want.
Block 3 - Your team: Unless you are some sort of consultant who is doing everything by yourself, you need a team to support you and your customers.
Growing and developing your organization, and managing your team through your leadership, is a key building block of any successful business.
Block 4 - Systemization: Having systems in place allow you to grow your business with little effort.
Effective systems reduce stress, allow for duplication of services, and ensure that your employees can do the job when you are not around. Systems ensure that your customers get the same service they deserve each and every time they contact you.
Every organization can be systemized to ensure stability and reduce stress.
Block 5 - Value: Nobody looks out for the future of small business owners. No one is going to put money away for your retirement but you.
As small business owners, we don't have the benefit of working for a big corporation or a government agency that will pay us thousands of dollars a month when we retire. The truth is, most businesses close down without the owner realizing value for their years of hard work.
The business has to be valuable and saleable when the owners are ready to retire.
If you find yourself choking on your some of the building blocks you are playing with, think about using those blocks differently so that you have breathing space and time to ensure your success.
By focusing your efforts into ensuring that you have the right blocks in place to enable your business to achieve what it needs to will go a long way to reducing your stress.
Dave Fuller MBA is a certified professional business coach and the author of Profit Yourself Healthy. Choking on your business? Email [email protected].
