Owning a business can be great, as long as you go in with your eyes open but there are a lot of common misconceptions – here are some of them:
Myth 1. I’ll be my own boss.
Wrong. Unless you know how to do otherwise, you will work as you did in your last job, only this time your customers will become your boss, and can hire and fire you like any corporate superior.
How do you know when your business is at this stage?
Aneta Pazeski, Director – SME Centre, CPA Australia, says the point at which a business decides to employ an in-house accountant will differ depending on many variables including the size of the business, the rate of growth and the strategic goals.
“There are no set criteria as to when a business should employ an in-house accountant,” she says. “It largely depends on how the owner wants to grow the business and the rate at which they want it to grow.
Who can help?
As your business grows, it should begin to take on a life of its own. Unless it’s structured to do this, its ability to grow will be limited. If you have structured it well, it will need less and less of your input in the day to day technical work. Your capacity to be everywhere and do everything is no longer as important as it was in the early stages – and indeed your recognition of this is one of the factors that will allow the growth. Your role becomes more one of providing direction and identifying and developing the management skills your people need, in order for you to focus on the more strategic elements. It becomes critical that you think ahead and plan, and your planning needs to include the resources upon which you can draw.
A real estate agent client of mine (let’s call him Paul) came to me recently with an interesting and not uncommon dilemma.
He has a great salesperson in his business who looks after the majority of his clients. However, Paul feels as though he is losing personal contact with the clients due to his stellar salesman. He is worried that if the salesman leaves, he could very easily take some of the clients with him. So how does Paul reconnect with clients without overstepping what his salesperson is doing?
Okay – everyone knows a business needs systems. But what do you do when you have systems and they aren’t being followed? Or when they are being blatantly ignored?
You go and find out why. You ask.
There are many reasons why this might be happening. Here are just seven.
1. The staff just don’t see the point
Sometimes a system is put in for the sake of the system and not much else, or the reason is that the outcome has never been explained properly. I once saw a system of the way toilet paper was put on the holder. It was important to the owner, but the staff thought it was way too .. um .. detailed!