Small Business Growing

Archive for November, 2011

Small Business Growth: Getting Control of “Overwhelm”

A question was recently  asked by one of our Entrepreneur’s Journey participants. (The journey is a faith-based educational program for small business owners in the Northern Virginia and DC area).

“How do you deal with that feeling of being overwhelmed…having too much to do and not getting it done?”

Good question.  Most of us in the world of small business have to deal with this challenge.

You might not solve this problem in a day,  but you can invest 30 minutes to get a start that can be life changing.

The first thing is to not accept “overwhelm” as inevitable, and schedule a 30 minutes block to get started on a strategy that will move you toward an increasing sense of control.

Work through three primary dimensions of your business:
• your physical space
• your mental space
• your daily habits

Our Physical Environment becomes automatic and taken for granted.  But the level of order, clarity, simplicity, and ease of use of your physical space has everything to do with how efficiently work is done.  The order and refinement of all the things you need to use to accomplish work has everything to do with personal performance and personal emotion.

POINT:  get your personal space in a state of extreme order and neatness, maintain it, and watch what good things start to happen.

Our Mental Space includes all kinds of “stuff” that sits in our minds and hearts.  The point here is to reduce and simplify that mass of perceptions and feelings down to a few key areas of our work that are the focal points.  You will have more that three things in your work life, but identify the three really important areas of your work life that will be at the top of your list.

POINT:  Radically reduce the mental clutter, by getting clear about the three most important things in your business at this time.

Our Daily Habits determine how the day plays out.  Sure, stuff happens that you can’t control, and things arise that you must respond to.  That is small business life.  But our habitual ways of doing work determine a good deal of our productivity, as well as how “overwhelmed” or “in control” we feel.

POINT:  Take a good look at how your daily habits are helping or hurting.  Some habits are like fuel on the fire of “overwhelm” – such as jumping from one task to another before finishing anything – and other habits will start to reduce “overwhelm” and increase a sense of positive control.  For example, starting the day with a clear image of what we will focus on, and staying with it, in spite of potential distractions.

Overwhelm is not a condition of nature.  It can be reversed.  It just takes starting somewhere.

[Fran O'Neal provides consultation and installation of a simple, low cost, easy to use marketing and business retention system that helps small business owners get and keep more customers.  Email Fran with questions or for more information on this resource.]

Small Business Success: You Must Have Systems

The past two weeks in The Entrepreneur’s Journey we have been working through Systems and Processes for small business.

Identifying and improving the primary systems and supporting processes for your small business is critical for sustainable success.

Many small business owners get the idea that they need clear, repeatable steps that produce a predictable result, but they are not sure how to get the whole business to the place where it is lean, process oriented, and fully “systematized.”

System and process thinking and execution can transform your business, and take you to a whole new level of business performance.  But it won’t happen with one single step, or in one 30 minute time period.  You’ll have to work at it over time.  But for the business that clearly lays out their major systems and the supporting processes, there is a whole new level of possibilities that will open up.

We work on this challenge in The Journey and it is a joy to watch participants make progress.  By the way, the next cohort of The Journey will probably start around April of 2012, so if you are in the Northern Virginia or DC area, we certainly invite you to learn more about this program.

Where do you begin if you are serious about crafting or re-crafting the major systems of your business?

Start with identifying the overarching categories under which you will list your systems. This is simple.  You could start with something as intuitive as Before, During, and After.  “Before” might include your marketing and lead conversion activities.  “During” might include the delivery of your primary product or service,  And “After” might include your follow-on activities such as how you stay in contact with past customers.  You could also nest your Administrative and Financial support functions here.

Another way of categorizing the high level activities of your business might be Marketing, Sales, Operations, Product Development, Financial, and Human Resources.  Obviously your high level Category identification depends on the size and complexity of your enterprise.

The next step would be to identify the Systems and Processes that fit under your prime categories.  More about that in the next post in this series.

Getting your Categories, Systems, and Processes identified and organized so that you can perform the functions of the business in a lean, coherent, and repeatable manner will separate you from many of your small business competitors.  And as someone who has consulted with many large organizations, I can tell you that even, or should I say especially, big businesses are nowhere near as lean, and systematized as they could be.

Once you get hooked on well formed systems, you won’t want anything less.

[Fran O'Neal provides consultation and installation of a simple, low cost, easy to use marketing and business retention system that helps small business owners get and keep more customers.  Email Fran with questions or for more information on this resource.]