Small Business Services (SBS)
Common Dynamics & Assessment
Every business, large or small, struggles with change and loses money as a result. It’s normal. Businesses are made of people, systems, and services. There are no perfect people, sometimes people leave, sometimes roles change, and sometimes new people join a business. Most systems can be improved as new intrabusiness dynamics emerge, staffing changes happen, or the markets shift. Service delivery models change based upon market changes, staffing changes, and technology changes as well. Businesses are dynamic, changing, and, often, struggling with conflicts due to all of these reasons and more.
“Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.”
The quote from J.F.K. is true, change is literally the law of life. Change is literally normal. Although most leaders in business are hiring people and creating systems that keep the business as “consistent” and “stable” as possible, nothing is perfect. You might invest a lot of time or energy finding a system stabilizer, like a good C.O.O., but even with the best executives change is inevitable. Creating resilient systems if they don’t exist, or improving systems to become more resilient to change is extremely important. Resilience can mean a few different things. Resilience can mean changing staff who can make the system more robust. Resilience can mean looking at systems and changing some processes or procedures. Resilience can simply mean leadership doubling down on principles and empowering their teams to perform differently. It’s not always obvious where the challenges to resilience lie in a given business. This is why it’s important to have a formal, thorough, assessment of people and systems.
Strategic Planning
After a formal assessment of people and systems, we can then create a plan to collaborate effectively. The results of the assessment will be discussed with all relevant stakeholders, with the hopes of identifying a hierarchy of people and systems to intervene upon, and then begin setting goals (see next) and benchmarks for success, which, if done correctly, will all have the ultimate result of increasing profitability.
Empirical Progress
Nowadays in particular, data is everything. As an academic and former COO, I’m accustomed to working with data (e.g., KPIs) and running experiments. With a formal assessment and the correct strategic plan, we can use benchmarks and create experiments for performance improvement which will help you increase profits. Employees and leaders have interpersonal and emotional investment in business outcomes, often biased by their personality, culture, and ego needs. This means they cannot be fully impartial. We have to be objective, we have to be impartial, and this is the upside of having a consultant. As a consultant, I am results driven because all that matters is: did our experiment work and did it make you more money? If it worked, but wasn’t profitable, the experiment failed, I failed.
Different types of experiments can be run in a consulting context. For instance, if the major problem is a disaffected but bright/capable leader, then we can try a few months of coaching and strategic mentorship to help the leader get back on their game. Another classic problem I have seen in small businesses is when communication and systems management are not aligned. It’s often the case that we have to learn how to talk to each other more effectively, or negotiate disparate strategies/systemic demands more effectively. So, in this case we can run the experiment of embedding the consultant in meetings to identify and highlight these communication issues or systemic demand mismatches, and the consultant can help the staff learn how to identify and resolve said issues more effectively, wasting less time (money) and increasing productivity.
In some cases, folks in small businesses are not very closely monitoring productivity, which can make sense. Sometimes you start a business with a friend or colleague, not planning for it to grow (in terms of staffing or complexity of projects) so quickly,so you run the business when it was more like a small startup. As businesses grow people can easily overlook different types of “time management” costs. A few hours here, a few hours there, doesn’t seem like a big deal at first. But if this happens regularly it can cost businesses a lot, even making it difficult to become profitable. Many “break even” businesses struggle with time management. Sometimes time management relates to people and personalities being mismanaged (e.g., under-managed), and other times the systems/procedures aren’t efficient for the project at hand. For example, what if a project has too many employees involved at various stages of the project? Sometimes people have a salesperson involved in “strategy” meetings or project management meetings, but maybe that’s not necessary. I’ve also seen the opposite problem: key employees missing from important meetings and so we have to have additional multiple meetings, time/money burnt in redundancy. Either way, businesses lose revenue this way. So, we have to run the experiment to see if managing personalities differently or shifting processes/systems will save you more money, maybe even make you more money.