Are you a business owner that wants to take your company to a whole new level of performance, profit, and success? Then what you need is some solid small business consulting. We help business owners just like you accomplish your goals.
I'm a small business consultant, and in this article, I'm going to show you some top strategies that you can implement right now in your business to start getting the results that you want. Also, if you are looking for a little help to get things moving, that's what we are here for, so just give us a call.
Small Business Consulting
When it comes to running a small business, there are so many challenges that make it one of the hardest jobs out there. In fact, the majority of small businesses actually break even or lose money.
But it doesn't have to be that way.
If you get down to what's really happening in a business, it turns out that usually the fundamentals are being ignored.
Either the owner or manager is not implementing best practices or is simply unaware of them.
From my experience, usually owners find success early on based on their sales abilities.
However, as time goes on and the business gets bigger, new challenges come up when the business needs to grow.
That's why I'm going to lay out the basics of small business growth for you so that you can see for yourself the different areas of business and how each area relates to others. You have to look at business like a giant puzzle. Even if you are missing only 1 piece of the puzzle, it's incomplete and can have problems.
Most of our clients have the majority of the puzzle put together, and are only missing a couple of pieces. Unfortunately, without those pieces, the business is suffering instead of prospering.
The whole point of consulting is to have the experience and awareness to identify the missing pieces, and to then prescribe how the business can integrate those pieces to get back on track. That's where we come in.
Dallas
We have awesome clients all over the United States. With that said, I did want to point out that being located in Dallas, Texas gives us access to some amazing businesses in the area. If you are in DFW, then please give us a call. I would like to take you out for coffee on me and hear about your business.
Pillars Of Business
From my experiences with businesses, I've noticed some trends that come up over and over again. It turns out that there are five pillars in business that are required as a foundation before the business can grow effectively.
Here are the pillars of every business:
- People
- Process
- Product
- Cashflow
- Legal
Let's jump into the details for each of these. For those businesses academics out there, you will see some ideas here integrated from experts like Marcus Lemonis and Robert Kiyosaki.
People
The people in your business are not only your employees, but also your customers. The business needs to channel all of the talent and energy of your employees to fully serve the needs of your customers. It turns out that it's not such an easy task.
Problems come up because life is complicated. Things that are unexpected happen all of the time. Employees have their own life issues to deal with, and typically the owners of the business are struggling with their own massive challenges.
That's why it's important to have the business focus on people. You have to constantly work on keeping your customers happy, and your employees motivated. If either of these fall into disarray, then your business is in trouble.
Process
The processes in your business are the difference between poor quality products and services and world renowned products and services. A process is simply a captured set of steps that brings in materials and work to produce a desired result. It's a recipe.
The challenge here is that great processes are hard to develop, and even harder to maintain. It's so easy to just let processes fall to the way side and just do what's either fast, easy, or both.
However, processes are what create quality. That's why it's critical that processes are the priority in your business. The only problem is when they become the only focus, you end up with a lot of waste in your materials and work effort with unnecessary steps. That raises costs, reducing profit. It's a fine balance to hone your processes so that they are efficient and effective.
Product
Products are the outputs of your business. This can be physical products or services. It's the end goal and why your customers or clients pay your business. The whole point of a product is to precisely hit the needs of customers.
Where businesses can miss is mixing their egoic attachment to ideas with the products that they deliver. In the worst cases, businesses will often blame the customer for not understanding the product or service, and that's how you know you have a serious problem.
The best solution here is a constant feedback channel between your customers and your products to make sure that the customers' needs are always taken care of exactly how they want it to. Remember, customers' needs change over time. That means that a business's products and services must change too in order to maintain alignment with the market.
Cashflow
Cashflow is simply the way money travels through your business. From the front door revenue, all the way until the net profit hits the bank account. You have to see cashflow like blood flow in the body. If the heart stops beating, blood flow stops, and the organism dies quickly. The same is true for cash flowing through the business.
There are many problems that can happen here from lack of sales to the business bleeding out cash due to unaccounted for expenses. The key is to have proper accounting in place so that money is tracked, and you can see how it moves through the business.
Once measurements are in place, awareness is possible. Then, actions can be taken in order to correct cashflow problems and establish much better processes in the business.
Legal
One of the most neglected areas is legal. There is good reason why lawyers are expensive. It turns out that if your business is not taking care of legal issues, those issues grow up into becoming massive problems down the road.
Did your business forget to create solid contracts around a big job? Guess what, six months later that project became a colossal mess and now that customer is suing your business for massive damages. What could you have done instead? Take care of legal properly.
Usually, $10 spent on legal now, mitigates a $1,000 threat down the line. Imagine what $100 problems could do to your business if left unmanaged.
Psychology Of Business
The next area that comes up often is in the mind of the business owner. Your psychology plays a critical role in how you think and what you do. Therefore, it's important that you understand the key forces at play in your head.
If you haven't read it, a great book is E-myth Revisited. In the book, the author breaks down three key parts of business owner's mind:
- Technician
- Manager
- Entrepreneur
If you don't balance these three key areas, your business will struggle. They work together to make a more complete business owner.
Once you properly balance them, your business will start soaring, since it sets you up to properly handle the pillars of business that we discussed earlier.
Technician
The technician is the part that just loves to work. It especially excels at the type of work that you have mastered through experience. If you ever find yourself wanting to just jump head first into a project and start grinding, then it's usually the technician talking.
The problem with the technician is that it just wants to work for the sake of working or getting things done. If you gave a technician an axe, it would immediately start chopping down trees just because that's what makes it happy.
What gets people into trouble here is not that the technician likes to work, it's that the technician doesn't care what work is necessary, not necessary, or that can be delegated to someone else.
Ideally, the energy of the technician needs to be used in alignment with the manager and the entrepreneur.
Manager
The manager is the next part that most people develop. It's the part that is comfortable telling other people what to do, based on what it thinks should be done. Sometimes, people can struggle becoming comfortable telling others what to do, but that is critical in business.
Other times, people are too comfortable telling others what to do, and are constantly barking orders. Micromanaging is the easiest way to kill the morale of your employees, while also damaging efficiency.
The balanced manager knows when to give direction, and when to let others get the job done. Insights into who needs guidance and how much at the perfect time is the goal here.
Entrepreneur
The entrepreneur is the big picture, big dreaming part of the business owner. In fact, you engaged the entrepreneur whenever you first dreamed about starting your business.
The role of this part is to identify big picture needs in your market, and to envision how your business fits in serving those needs.
Problems arise when people get stuck in this mode of thinking, and either don't have the energy of the technician to do the work, or the skills of the manager to outsource the work to others.
Ideally, the entrepreneur should be the dreamer and visionary, and should hand off specific objectives to the manager, which in turn can figure out the specific tasks that need to be done and given to the technician to carry out. You have to do this all in your own mind, so it's difficult.
Conclusion
In summary, running a business is a major challenge. It's no wonder why so many businesses struggle to make money and stay in business.
That's why it's critical to know about the major pillars of business. You have to always be developing the people, processes, and products/services in your business so that your business serves the needs of a market place.
You also have to make sure that the life blood of your business, cashflow, is always flowing properly. And if you don't treat legal with enough importance, then perfect storms can come in and level your business.
Not only are the pillars critical, but you also have to get your psychology right. The balance between the technician, manager, and entrepreneur can either put your business on the road to success, or to failure.
It's hard for one person to do this alone. That's why we are here to help you along this journey with our small business consulting services. What we do is help you identify which areas in your business are missing, so that you can fix them and get back on the road to success.
For example, we can help you get more visitors to your website with our SEO services for small businesses. Then, we can help convert those visitors better into paying customers. We also focus on maximizing your profit margin. When all of these areas come together, it's possible to get multiples of improvement in your business.
No matter where you are in the United States, we can help. If you happen to be in the Dallas Fort Worth area in Texas, then we can even meet you in person. All you have to do to get started is give us a call, or click on the button below to schedule an appointment. We'll take it from there.
