Beyond sole trader

There sometimes seems to be a huge chasm between the world of the sole trader and that of the small business owner.  It’s certainly a gap that many trip over, while a few disappear into the depths forever.

Where does the time go?

The biggest challenge for people going through this transition is time.  It’s likely that a major reason for the change is that you’re really busy and have more work coming in the door than you can handle by yourself.

Unfortunately, avoiding mistakes that will haunt you for a long time requires spending some time thinking about what you’re doing.  Considering alternatives and planning your courses of action.  Having a regular scheduled session with a coach or mentor or an experienced friend will help to ensure that you do take the time to consider how you want your business to grow.

I tend to divide these discussions up into categories:

Transition factors for small businesses

People includes

• thinking about what you do and how much you’ll be willing to let go of
• defining roles and the characteristics of the people you want to work with
• leadership and delegation skills

ICT includes

• how you’ll communicate with each other and with clients
• how you’ll share and record data

Process includes

• how you’ll control what happens when and avoid duplication
• how you’ll share tasks
• how you’ll manage time-scales
• how you’ll keep consistent messages to all your staff and to customers

Market includes

• where you’ll find the additional business to keep extra staff going
• evaluating marketing and PR options
• planning your marketing campaign

Each session is focused on one of these categories but often items come up with are much larger in scope and I pull these together into a discussion about where you want to take your business in the medium and long term.

Strategy includes

• Defining your vision
• Developing a strategic plan

Often the strategic plan will result in some tweaking of the earlier categories but I’v found that it really helps to keep your thinking focused to start with rather than trying to define a strategy from a blank sheet of paper.  The discussions on the how, what and where help to give you a sense of perspective.  This leads to a much more realistic strategic plan and achievable business growth.

If you’d like me to help you succeed at leaping the gap between sole trader and small business just call me on 03 442 3645 or fill out my contact form.

Managing Change

It’s impossible for business change to be wholly confined to systems and processes – people are always involved too and therein lies the key difference between project or programme management and change management.  The first two are primarily concerned with delivering tangible changes while the later is focussed on enabling the people impacted to accept, adapt and take ownership of their new environment.

Resisting change is a part of being human, we all opt for the familiar and secure over the unknown and high risk most of the time. Change = Risk. Individuals are naturally risk averse or risk seeking to different degrees and that’s something that a change manager can’t do anything about.  So to manage change effectively we need to use other, more accessible levers.

In order for change to achieve the desired results each individual involved must

• be dissatisfied with how things are right now
• share a vision of what things can be like in the future
• understand the first, concrete steps that they can take towards that vision

AND

• the product of all of these three must outweigh the individual’s resistance to change.

This is the Gleicher formula (usually written as: D x V x F > R where D = Dissatisfaction, V = Vision, F = First steps and R = Resistance) which is one of the fundamental theories of change management.