Who is Driving Your Business?
5/6/09 at 10:49 AM by Tony Lael As described in The E-Myth – Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About IT by Michael Gerber, all of today’s small business owners are playing three roles.
Entrepreneur - envisions the future, but lacks execution
Manager - organizes everything, but forgets the big picture
Technician – gets work done, but to the detriment of all else
Each personality or person in these roles needs to each push beyond their comfort zones in order for the business to be successful at the next stage. So how should you push your business beyond its comfort zone?
Take some time to think through how these personalities or people playing these roles can push past their current comfort zones – here are some tips.
Give the Entrepreneur a business dashboard – by having a quick, easy to understand financial dashboard of where the business is and where it is headed the Entrepreneur is free to implement his next idea with the Manager operationalizing it for him.
The Manager must tie operations to company goals - connect the Entreprenuer’s vision to performance goals for the business and make certain the Manager understands how she is going to organize the people, processes and systems to meet those business goals – she might try using a professional services automation platform to accomplish this.
Schedule all the recurring work for the Technician – have a work plan for the Technician where time is blocked off so they have structure to their day. Any recurring ‘maintenance’ work should be pre-scheduled by the Technician so they know what their daily priorities are and how they can work around them.
Once you understand who is driving your business, who is supporting the operations of your business and who is handling the technical work it becomes easier to make sure those personalities or people are given what they need to push beyond their comfort zones and grow the business.