RUNNING A BUSINESS DRAMATICALLY OR ANALYTICALLY
When there is a lot of drama happening in a business, and they have upsets with staff and customers, there are four main reasons:
The measurement of production and results is not being tracked.
Training materials are not in continual use.
Inadequate written policies and written procedures are constantly added and referred to.
No correction or effective ongoing training of staff is being done.
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KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS (KPIs):
When staff is not monitored by KPIs, metrics, statistics, analytics, standards, or whatever term used to measure results, there are always internal and eventually external issues that become so distracting that expansion will be minor or contraction will occur.
There must be transparency of who is producing what and who is not. When key information about the business is kept secret or not known about, the group will get into a state of confusion, especially at a management level. When accurate numbers of results in all areas of a business are established, order will start to go in, the drama will diminish, and the non-producers will be exposed.
Financial management and profitability data must be available to senior executives in an easily understood form. If not, trouble amongst owners and execs is inevitable. Some business owners refuse to share the financial data with senior execs and then complain about those executives when viability is at risk. The demise of partnerships or a business is 99% of the time brought about by financial issues. Business owners, executives, and staff have to all operate any organization by the actual numbers, or it will drift off into oblivion by opinions and guesses.
STAFF TRAINING
It is almost impossible to scale a business without consistent staff training, of some kind, in place. It is a weak area in most small businesses, but it is often the main reason they don't expand. Why does this occur? There is no training on the correct way to build a business at any school or college. The main reason the majority of college graduates go and work for a large company is they have no idea how to build a business.
Many business owners who graduated college have confessed to me that their certificates did them no good at all and attained their business acumen after they graduated. This is rather a sad state of affairs. However, once the reality of this is understood, it behooves all parents to seek out some online training program that would give their children a good grounding on how business works so that they can make a decision whether to start their own business or choose a career working for others.
If we look at business expansion analytically, we would see that if we found suitable material to train our staff on, specific to their position, they would get better at their jobs. Unless the reading of policies and procedures is made an important part of staff's weekly actions, they will be lost to the storage room or on a hard drive in some old computer somewhere.
POLICIES AND PROCEDURES
The most disorderly organizations I have been asked to help get organized have always lacked policies and procedures being available or being distributed regularly to staff. The policy gives the viewpoints and purposes, and the procedures outline the steps and actions to be carried out. Policies and procedures are also part of one's hat and also for the smooth operation of the whole organization.
STAFF CORRECTION
When staff members' mistakes are allowed to slide by or not corrected, it is an injustice to them, and their value to the company will begin to diminish. Good staff is allowed to go bad because no one took the time to show them the correct procedure or found out what they didn't understand about it. When a person doesn't immediately learn from their mistakes, there will always be something they don't understand about it. This is why it is important to have a Quality Control Division where you can route staff to find out what it is that they don't understand.
With these four areas being worked on and continually improved, an organization can not help but expand in an orderly fashion with high morale amongst all personnel.
Sincerely,
Graham Payne