Managing a Small Business
Can be a Big Job!

Managing a small business is more work than most people inside or outside of a small business realize. From small business, to home based businesses and to complex manufacturing and/or technology businesses (and everything in between), running a business needs your time and resources.

Like most effective leaders, when you are starting a small business, you focus on your idea, your niche, your specialty – whether that is a product or a service and whether that is in a business to business (B2B) environment or a business to consumer (B2C) environment.

You organized for the idea. You put together a small business plan; you had to (to get financing). You talked to people you trusted. You got excellent small business advice and decision making tips. You planned how you would run your business and built an operations plan. And it (the business) began.

It very likely took a lot more blood, sweat, tears, time and money than the brief summary above but I want to get to the main point: now comes the hard part.

You need to plan for your small business growth.

This probably seems self evident. But after the excitement and stress of startup, the operations-side of business is necessary and rather unexciting.

Business managing includes understanding your strengths and weaknesses and what you need to do to capitalize on your strengths and to minimize/eliminate your weaknesses (which might mean capitalizing on the advantages of outsourcing and contracting someone to do what you can't or don't want to do; e.g. many entrepreneurs are not in love with the bookkeeping function and find that easy to outsource).

It also means you need to learn and/or use strong decision making skills and problem solving techniques. It includes learning and using effective conflict resolution tips and strategies. And it includes defining your small business scope or reach (this can also be your market but scope takes it beyond market and encompasses the business itself.)

It means that you need to be able to focus on improving and changing your business as needed; and doing the market research and survey development (using free online survey tools) necessary to find out what your customers, suppliers, employees and other stakeholders have to say.

You need to be organized in your business and in your life to be successful in business, and in decision making,

And managing your small business includes executing your plan (if you don’t have one, or need to update it, or your business has changed significantly, check out the strategy section of this site for advice on how to develop a strategic plan or review a strategic plan checklist or a simple business plan ).

As you execute your plan, you need to ensure that you measure business performance (also known as key performance indicators or KPIs) – preferably real-time measures that tell you how you're doing at that moment in time (rather than finding out at the end of the month that you're below plan by 20%). For example, most e-commerce businesses can tell you by the minute how your business is doing in terms of traffic and sales.

Make sure you measure and manage not only the business’ functional areas such as sales, finance and operations.

But also measure and assess the impact and role of human resources (e.g. employee turn-over, demographics, length of service, days absent/late); product or service development (e.g. how many new products or services, time to market, time to sales goal; success/fail rates); quality control (e.g. spoilage or non conformance as a percent of sales), customer satisfaction (survey ranking for response, knowledge, frequency of purchases, growth by account) and whatever is key to your small business success.

You need to ensure that you manage your customers' experience and have a strong front office management program. Additionally you need to build strong communications within your organization. Understand the importance of active listening and effective communications; and coach and manage your employees to develop strong skills.

You also need to recognize that no business is static; that the need for evolution and change is critical in the business world. You need to be able to become excellent at managing change; which will enable you to become increasingly more successful in your business.

Steps you must take once you've started your business:

• You build the business plan.
• You execute the plan.
• You measure business performance.
• You adjust either the plan or the performance to get the result you want.

It sounds simple. However, operating your small business takes time and effort and resources.

Starting a small business and operating it is all about planning, executing, measuring, adjusting and then continuously improving your management of the business.

Keep your focus on all that you need to do for your small business to be successful. That's the real challenge.

P.S. To review the success factors for operating your business, we recommend the following site: Best Home Business Review.

Return from Managing to More-For-Small-Business.

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