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.

Scrum for Small Businesses

No, I’m not suggesting that a game of rugby is the way to mange your small business.  Scrum is a technique more commonly used as part of Agile software development by businesses like Google and Nokia.  High Tech companies are hotbeds of innovative ways of doing things.  Developing a new phone is high risk and manpower intensive and the competition may launch something better while you’re halfway through building it.  This kind of environment demands that an organisation be focused , flexible and responsive and Scrum is one of the ways that they achieve this.

Scrum evolved in the ’90s* and got its name largely because of the most visible aspect of the process – a daily team ’scrum’.  The daily scrum lasts for no more than 15 minutes and each team member has to state what they achieved yesterday, what they plan to achieve today and if they anticipate anything preventing them from achieving this.  Take a moment to imagine this within your own business, how long does it usually take for you to find out what everyone is doing and whether they’ve got outstanding jobs from last month because of a problem they can’t solve by themselves?  And this is just the beginning…

The complete Scrum system

Scrum also shares many points of similarity with systems like LEAN and Six Sigma – team members pull tasks from the list and thereby take ownership of them; management focus is on removing barriers; the whole team has visibility of progress towards the overall goal.

Scrum’s main flaw is the overhead in organisation required once the task gets too big for one team (more than about 8 people).  But this makes it ideal for most small sales and service businesses and for small but urgent projects.  I’ve implemented Scrum processes within the context of large technology projects in the past and believe that they could deliver great results within the small business context.  If any readers are looking for innovative ways to increase the responsiveness and flexibility of their business – to meet customer needs faster and better – call me on 027 4776 881 and I will come and tell you more about Scrum.

* Scrum references are:

• DeGrace and Stahl, Wicked Problems, Righteous Solutions (1991)
• Ken Schwaber , Advanced Development Methods
• Jeff Sutherland, John Scumniotales and Jeff McKenna, Easel Corporation
• Sutherland and Schwaber, Scrum at OOPSLA ‘95 (1995)
• Schwaber and Beedle Agile Software Development with Scrum (2001)

New Technology

From the business (ie non-technical) perspective the introduction of new technology should be a symmetrical process.

The process should include all of the following stages:

1. Vision – what the business will achieve through the technology.
2. Business Requirements – what the business actually wants to do with the technology.
3. Functional Specification – a translation of step 2 into terms describing what the technology needs to do in order to enable the business to do what it needs to do.
4. Technical Specification – a translation of step 3 into what specific technology will be used for each element.
5. Building – assembling all the software and hardware described in step 4 into a system.
6. System Testing – testing that all the software and hardware does what was described in step 3, individually and all together and fixing as necessary.
7. User Acceptance Testing – testing that the business can do what was defined in step 2 and fixing as necessary.
8. Implementation & Review- implementing then assessing whether the business is achieving what was defined in step 1.

Project cost and time over-runs, failure to acheive expected benefits and general dissatisfaction with new technology are often a result of a failure to fully complete one of these steps.