Small Business Failure - Reason: Management Control

The typical scenario is you work hard all week, have no live and at the end of it all little money to show for it. This is often a sure sign of loss of management control in a small business and start-up business, like SOHO-, SME, SMB-, Micro-, Lifestyle-, Home-, DIY-, Hobby-, Boomer-, Professional-, Personal businesses.

The small business health-check questions for this episode are:

• Do I know what is going on in my business in all areas or have I abdicated some responsibility to staff? You can pick and choose what you do work-wise everyday, you can not pick and choose what you should know about and make decisions about - this is your business, not your staffs business - act like it.
• Am I running my business or is it running “itself”? No business is running itself, other than into the ground!
• Do you know how your cash-flow is doing? Done this one before, yet it always comes back to this, check it out.
• Do you have an overview of your small business fixed costs and sales, are you happy with the situation? I guess you could always do better, but if you do not know the details you can not improve your situation.
• Is your vision in line with your small business targets? You need a vision for your business, that will allow you to develop your small business strategy and plan, so you know where you are going - don’t just drift along.
• Have you asked your staff lately? Have a power-meeting with your staff once a week, to see how they are feeling about your small business, last week or the next few weeks. It will motivate them and give you a new insight in how others see your small business.

The central message here is to be involved in ALL areas of your business ALL of the time - in a management capacity. When I hire people I always hire people who do something better than I, but you have to stay involved.

You can see other reasons for small business and personal business, like contractors, freelancer, self-employed, sole-trader and virtual assistants failures in my Health Check Category, if you can add to this list please do so, I would welcome your comments.

4 Responses to “Small Business Failure - Reason: Management Control”

1. IanH
   
   Said on August 28th, 2007 at 11:51 am

   Hello Stefan. Just a quick question:

   What’s the difference between a “Power-meeting” and a “Meeting”?

2. Stefan Töpfer
   http://www.winweb.com
   
   Said on August 28th, 2007 at 12:48 pm

   Hi Ian,

   For me a power meeting is a short weekly meeting with staff, to discuss any issues that have arisen during the week.

   By discussing these issues everybody in the company knows what is going on, “em-powering” them to understand my vision and decisions, while at the same time giving me the opportunity to learn where my vision for my business has not made it to my staff. So I can work on my communication skills to do a better job in future.

   ST

3. Paul Simister
   http://businesscoaching.typepad.com/the_business_coaching_blo/2008/04/business-failur.html
   
   Said on May 11th, 2008 at 9:40 am

   Hi Stefan

   I had forgotten how good your blog was. I used to be a regular visitor but lost the habit of popping over but I was reminded when I was following up on Google searches to my business coaching blog for an article of business failure.

   I won’t be away for so long again.

   Paul

4. Stefan Töpfer
   http://www.winweb.com
   
   Said on May 11th, 2008 at 10:21 am

   Hi Paul,

   Good to have you back.

   Stefan

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