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Owner-Manager of Business - How to Get Control?
Question: I am the only owner and CEO of my own business. I would like to plan, but urgent – not always important – items always come up and take all my time. I feel as though I am reacting to each crisis as it happens and not really managing the business. How can I get control?
Answer: A successful business will have a purpose, act with effectiveness, and repeat the act with the same effectiveness. Strategy defines and thereby creates the purpose. Execution of the strategy creates the effective result – profit. Replication of this act creates the process that ensures profitability. If you are the owner and CEO of a business that is profitable, these things have happened. The business world is dynamic and unkind to those businesses that cannot change. Over time, the purpose of the business must change. With the change in purpose, the actions taken by the business must also change. If successful, those actions must be replicated with a change in process than can be repeated.
No matter how simple or complex a business it must manage three things: (1) communicate strategy to articulate purpose; (2) deliver execution of purpose through innovation, growth, and positioning by implementing project after project with each change of purpose; and create a consistent customer or client experience through the replication of process.
If you are the only manager, you control management by articulating strategy through the telling of the story of why the business does what it does, changing as appropriate the purpose of the business from time to time. As the only manager, you must also manage the execution of the strategy by implementing action steps and resources to carry out every innovation, revision, initiative, or campaign emanating from changes in business purpose. As the only manager, you must also create the process to receive and implement the tasks and action steps to maintain through consistency the replication of the actions to successfully carry out the purpose of the business. As the only manager, you must recognize the discrete roles and spend part of your time in each role. If you ignore a role, your business success will suffer. You will then feel as though you are chasing crisis after crisis, rather than controlling and managing the business. As you hire staff, you should first hire for your weaknesses in performing or managing one or more of the three roles.
Everything starts with the plan. Without the plan, you do not know what to execute. If you do not create an action plan and make it into a process, there is nothing to replicate to continue business profitability. You cannot take charge of the business without making a plan to articulate the purpose of the business.