As a business owner, you have likely
acquired many skills and are wearing many hats in your business. Although admirable, your versatility can
often lead to slower growth for your company.
This happens when you become the bottleneck. Here are five places to check to make sure
you haven’t become the bottleneck in your own business.
1.
Managing everything.
It’s definitely good to keep tabs on
everything that’s going on in your company, but once your company grows, you
may find yourself inundated with information.
Instead, try managing by exception.
You don’t really need to know
everything that’s going on in your company; you really only need to know when
things do not go smoothly, or when there are exceptions. Design a set of management reports that allow
you to see these exceptions easily without having to wade through a bunch of
information. This will save you time and
help you focus where your expertise and skills are needed most.
2.
Doing too much production.
Probably the most common small
business mistake is working in your business instead of on your business. If you’re still generating billable work or
working too much in production, it should be work that no one on your staff can
do and work that requires a very high skill set. Otherwise, it should be delegated to
staff. And if you don’t have staff, then
they need to be hired.
3.
Not doing
enough marketing.
As a business owner, you are the key
person that will be bringing in business, forging partnerships, and creating
new opportunities for revenue. If you
spend your limited time doing other things, marketing often goes undone. Not marketing enough can dry up the pipeline,
cause cash flow problems, and get a company in trouble really fast.
4.
Being the
only one who knows how to do something.
When employees have to wait on you to
show them how to do something, you can easily become the bottleneck in the
process. As you train each employee, do
it only once by writing procedures for the task as you train. That way, you never have to train anyone on
that task again. The newly trained
employee can show others, and you can be out of the loop, freed up for more
important things.
5.
Having to
review and approve everything your employees do.
A great employee is one who is
empowered to make as many decisions as possible without further layers of
supervisions getting involved. Often, a
decision can be “cookbooked” so that the decisions can be pushed down the lower
layers of management. Take a look to see
if any of the decisions that you are making can be documented and pushed down
so that you don’t have to get involved.
That way, your employees will have the right balance of authority in
order to do their jobs.
