1. Set goals.

The number one business management tool you can use to better your business is goals.  Long term goals, short term goals and mid range goals too.  In fact, when you started your business, you wrote a business plan right?  Did your business plan include your goals?

Business goals can include anything from how much you want to gross this year to how many hours you want to work.  In fact, it’s a common business management goal to work as few hours as possible and make a substantial income.  It’s one of the reasons many people start an online business in the first place.

So what are your goals?  As you write down your goals, take the time to make sure they meet the following criteria.  Are your goals measurable?  It isn’t enough to make a goal that you want to make more money or you want to work less.  How will you know when you’ve achieved your goal?  Quantify your goals so they’re measurable and you know when you’ve achieved success.

Make your goals timely.  What is your deadline for your goal?  If you don’t have a deadline for your goal, they’ll slip away and never get accomplished.  A deadline makes you accountable for your goals.  Along with timely is the ability to make your goals attainable.  There’s nothing worse than setting a goal that is so beyond your reach you end up feeling defeated.  Create your goals wisely, establish a plan to achieve them and you’ll create a pattern of success that will expand beyond your business and into your personal life too.

 2. Set your business up the right way.

By setting your business up, we’re talking about both as an entity, LLC, sole proprietor, s corp. etc.., as well as setting it up separate from your personal life.  Get a separate business account.  Obtain a business address and phone number.  Separate and set up your business as an individual entity. This not only protects you legally it covers you with the government and tax system.

Take the time to meet with an accountant to get a best practices system established for accounting, this means all of your payables, receivables and taxes.  If you take these measures in the beginning, you’ll make your business life easier both day to day and in the long run.

3. Automate what you can.

The wonder of doing business online is that there are so many features and tasks you can automate.  Invoicing can be automated, shipping and fulfillment can be automated.  Email marketing can be automated, tracking your web statistics, advertising and even content distribution can all be automated.  Automate everything you can to enable yourself more free time to spend on tasks that generate profits or simply to give you more free time to enjoy your life.

4. Outsource well.

 Speaking of saving yourself time.  Outsourcing is a fantastic tool to give your business a step up and to give you a little less stress.  Many self-employed business owners, work somewhere between 40 and 80 hours a week.  It can be a lot of stress to own a business and handle every single task and responsibility.  That is just one reason to consider outsourcing – save your sanity and spend more time focusing on you and your family.

There are a number of tasks you may be considering outsourcing.  They generally fall into a few categories:

• Administrative tasks.  These are often time consuming tasks that do not have a high hourly value, yet they need to be accomplished to make your business run effectively and efficiently.

• Professional tasks.  These tasks often fall under the realm of copywriting, scripting, managing an affiliate program, marketing tasks and the like.  They are important to your bottom line, however they can be effectively handled by an outside professional at a nominal hourly value.

• Technical tasks.  These are tasks that may take you some time to learn how to do.  They often fall under the realm of creating software, databases, special web languages, and so on.  These are time stealers simply because of the time it would take for you to learn how to do these particular tasks.  Their hourly value can be quite high.  The impact on your bottom line varies from task to task.  If you’re creating a new web element, it may contribute directly to profits.

Take a look at your job description. What can you outsource to make your business run more efficiently?

5.  Tell people what you want, not how to do it – create systems and accountability.

Delegating responsibilities is good business.  Here are a few ideas on how to work with others for maximum results.

• Establish a system of communication that works for both you and your employee.  Use the system to include what you want accomplished and by when. Use the rules for goal setting; make the task measurable, timely, and attainable.

• Communicate the task clearly.  Make sure that all deadlines, resources, and task responsibilities are thoroughly communicated.  Ask your employee questions to make sure task is understood.  Once you assign the task, let it go.  When you let go, you can focus on tasks required to grow your business and improve profits.

• Upon completion of the task provide feedback to your employee.  If constructive criticism is required, sandwich it between positive feedback for best results and to ensure a quality working relationship.

 

6.  Business plans and budgets.

It is a good business practice to have a business budget built right into your business plan. This is particularly important if you plan on seeking financing for your business.   Having an accurate and realistic budget will enable you to make educated spending decisions.

When creating a business budget your first step is often to determine your expenses.  Your expenses include operating costs, taxes, the costs of outsourcing, marketing, publicity and so on.  Make a list of all categories you anticipate having costs and all areas where you already know your expenses.

A budget is not a money diet, it is a spending plan and this is particularly important when it comes to your business.  You want to make sure you have enough money to pay your bills and grow your business.  Track your expenses and income and review your budget often.  If you find you’re spending more in one category, make the adjustments in your budget.

When it comes to owning and operating a business, a few good business management practices can go a long way.  Take the time to organize your life, outsource and automate what you can, establish processes to communicate your needs clearly, and structure your planning and spending in a way that makes sense for you.

As governments search for solutions to the current finanial crisis others are looking for who to blame and business schools are getting their share of the blame.

A colleague – who also holds and MBA – sent me the article “Harvard’s Masters of the apocalypse” in early May. Which discusses the accolades given and the business cases written by business schools at the heart of this and earlier crises and says;

Business schools have shown a remarkable ability to miss the economic catastrophes unfolding before their eyes.

The debate is being played out on the Harvard site, where Harvard defends itself saying that those responsible for the companies and organisations involved in the current crisis graduated some years ago and the courses have changed since then. Yet the Harvard graduate writing in the Times article above points out that both Enron and RBS were studied as best practice up to the time of their respective falls. Granted RBS was studied from the perspective its successful acquistion and integration of NatWest, but still the company has fallen a long way in a year, and the CEO is now labelled as the “world’s worst banker” (according to Daniel Gross at Slate). So the defence offered by Harvard doesn’t really hold.

Some commentators predict that the age of the MBA is over, I don’t think so – and not just because I happen to have one. But there need to be some changes.

Conflict of Interest

The first thing that needs to be addressed is that there is a fundamental conflict of interest; students pay a lot of money to join courses – making it difficult for school’s to kick students out for either bad performance or unethical behaviour. At my school, in my year, there was one student who cheated and one who did not perform, taking a second attempt at every exam. The exam retakes were legal but both guys have the same degree as me, effectively undercutting the value of my degree. But they paid the same as me.

Silo Thinking

During the degree subjects are studied separately; finance, accounting, organisational development, HR, marketing are all kept separate. Business ethics and shareholder management come far down the list. But the subjects affect each other and need to be integrated. A friend who went to IMD told me of one case study they did where each group recommended strategy changes to grow the business. At the end the professor of organisational development criticised them all saying “this is a family business – why did you all assume that the right thing to do was to grow big? why did none of you think of the current culture of the company?”

By getting out of the silo thinking students would be required to integrate finance, marketing, growth, organisational culture and ethics in developing their strategy.

Subjects studied

Beyond the risk and return ration and the discussion of WACC I don’t remember much about risk management. Judging by the current fall out it’s been missing from some other school curricula.

Underlying assumptions

The underlying premise of almost all of MBA teaching is that the company should grow. That you measure the success of the company by market capitalisation, or by market share, or by any other simple numeric measure relating to size – one company director boasted of headcount.

But companies can define other measures of success particularly if they’re private companies and not driven by the shareholders’ expectations.

There are other changes suggested, doctors and lawyers have to register each year, ship’s captains and pilots have to update their training regularly. Perhaps it’s time for this level or professionalisation to occur in the business world. Afterall the accounting is regulated and audited, internal processes are now guided by SOX. Certifying business leaders might be the only thing left.

Your business day has just begun and you quickly whip out your clearly written plans. Pardon? Did you say you don’t have a written business plan? Then join the club, ‘Business Owners Without Plans’. The main problem this club faces is that the majority of it members’ businesses are likely to fail. Business failure rate is high and a crucial reason for this is lack of planning.

If you belong to this group and I did once, you’re probably an entrepreneur or a creative person. The idea of planning feels boring to you, seems unnecessary and involves a lot of detail. And you’d rather be doing other more interesting things. Your way of working is probably a lot more spontaneous, exciting and in the flow so you don’t want to be restricted with plans. However, without plans you can to easily end up very unfocused, not achieving the results you desire and ultimately face the failure of your business.

So, what’s your reason for not having business plans? Besides the usual reasons, like not having sufficient time to plan, not knowing how to do it or where to begin, perhaps you think that planning doesn’t fit in with your entrepreneurial and creative spirit. After all, this is who you are and you don’t want to lose this. Now fear begins to surface; fear that you many need to change personally or fear of failure. While plans stay in your head, it’s not so frightening and real. Putting them in writing, brings them closer to fruition and although you may say this is what you want, is it really if you’re not willing to commit them to paper. Planning your business takes it from being a hobby to a fully-fledged business. Although a lot of people would say that they operate their business as a business, in reality most operate them as hobbies and don’t take them seriously. Then they wonder why they’re not being very successful and getting results.

I feel one of the problems for creative and entrepreneurial people is that when they consider business plans the picture that spring to mind is of hours pouring over enormous pages of details. That’s enough to turn them straight off. However, it doesn’t need to be that way. There is a way to develop plans for your business, and to be creative and entrepreneurial at the same time. These informal business plans are ones that you’ll use yourself. If you need a business plan for outsiders, such as your bank or investors then this approach might not be for you. It could however be a good process to get your formal business plan started.

Instead of thinking that you need to commit hours to working on your business plans, I invite you to start with just five minutes. Now, without any thought of the appropriate way to do it, just write down the things that first come into your head for your business. Simply capture any goals, strategies, problems, your current situation and positioning. Writing down your plans, clarifies, organises and prioritises them, and clears vital space in your head.

The next step is to tap into your strengths as an entrepreneur or creative person. You’re probably fantastic at coming up with ideas and solutions, and may well be intuitive. So, you’ll tap into all of these using the power of questions. You’ll use questions to come up with answers and solutions that you’ll put into your business plan. Your business plan need only be a straightforward review of your present situation, your strategies, resources and goals. Nothing complicated or too detailed.

Here are some questions to obtain you started:

What is the current business situation?

What goals do you have for your business?

What problems and challenges is your business currently facing?

What strategies are you using?

What strategies do you need to use?

What resources and opportunities do you have available?

Okay, so having spent five minutes on your business plans, I now invite you to make a commitment of five minutes each business day and continue working on your business plans. Once you’ve responded to the above questions, put on your creative and entrepreneurial hat, and come up with your own thought provoking questions to answer. Take your creative and entrepreneurial spirit, and use this to perfect plans for your business that keep you focused and producing the results you want. Once you start laying down some plans for your business and experience the benefits of doing this, you’ll find it easier to continue. The most important step is getting started.

As an entrepreneur or creative, what will it take for you to begin putting some of your business plans onto paper?

What planning for your business do you currently do?

What further planning do you need to do? ie. Sales, marketing, business development.

What will it take to start writing down your business plans?