De-stress your business

Most business owners and managers live in a pressure-cooker environment where they sit in a hot seat and are ready to explode at any moment. Every day to them seems like a ride in a speeding vehicle—feeling like no one else can take control of the wheel.

If you feel like that, you’re not alone. We’ve discovered that the majority of small business owners and managers operate in the scenario described above. Most of them would like to find a better way, but they spend so much time in a reactive mode working in their business that there is little time available for them to proactively work on their business. They are unable to spend the necessary time to plan and orchestrate activities to reach the next level of success. If you are not slipping backwards, nor going forward; you may be a victim of the tyranny of tediousness.

A few may even enjoy this situation because it makes them feel important and critical to the success of their business. Some managers create greater job security by making themselves indispensable to the business. However, your goal should be to ultimately make yourself dispensable to your business. This can be accomplished by making your business a systems-dependent operation versus a people-dependent. If an organization is dependent on certain people to make it operate effectively, then losing one or more of those people will have a negative impact on operations. A systems-dependent business allows the organization to continue everyday operations even if someone leaves because another person would be able to carry on by following the system already in place.

The best examples of systems-dependent businesses are franchises—such as McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Jollibee. An interesting statistic from the U.S. Department of Commerce states that 95 percent of all franchise businesses succeed. When someone buys a franchise, she not only pays for the right to use the business name, but to learn and use the success-proven systems that will allow the franchisee to duplicate the franchisor’s success.

By emulating the strategies used by successful franchises, you can duplicate their ability to create a turnkey system. With the implementation of this system, your business will eventually be able to run without you. The secret, then, to become dispensable in your business is to allow it to operate without you and still create consistent results.

Consistency is the one big difference between franchises and small businesses. Consistency means reliability or uniformity of successive results, and it may not be what your business has if you are absent, on vacation, or just turn your back for a few minutes. Consistency is achieved by doing the same things in the same way so it produces exactly the same results every time you do it. Customers should know exactly what they can expect from your business, no matter who serves them. Consistency will determine the reputation of your business, and your reputation will determine if your business will grow, stagnate, or crash and burn.

Effective systems produce consistent performance, so the important point for you to consider is what systems do you have in place right now? If your systems, or the way you do things, are not written, then you will constantly need to tell people what to do and where, when, and how to do it. You are running your business in a reactive mode and it will be very difficult to create consistency through other people. Inconsistency means dissatisfied customers and problems that you will need to deal with. This will take away time from more rewarding or sales-generating activities, and it can create more stress, less productivity, and poor morale.

At one seminar, it was discovered that every person who had taken their companies up to $100 million dollars in sales a year had one thing in common that helped their businesses grow fast. All of them had policies, plans, and procedures that were used to operate the business. When you don’t run your business in a reactive mode, like most businesses, it allows you to have more time to work on your business and create the systems that will move your business to the next growth level. One of our clients grew their business from half a million to more $1.5 million in sales primarily because we helped them develop systems, which freed the owner to focus on high-leverage activities.

You can de-stress your life and business if it becomes systems-dependant and produces consistent results for your customers. Eventually, such a business will allow you to leave for longer periods of time, and eventually allow you to minimize or eliminate your involvement, and hire someone else to manage the organization.

(Rik is a business instructor at NMC and Janel is the owner of Positively Outrageous Results. They can be contacted at: biz_results@yahoo.com)