10 Commandments. Used throughout history as an effective way to get crucial information across (by, let’s face it, some extremely powerful people). Here’s part 1 of our 10 commandments for managing a small business.
Here goes:
1. Think straight
Maintain a detached point of view. Managing a growing business requires unyielding dedication that can consume the body, impair the senses and warp the mind. Such effects are harmful to the individual and the enterprise.
Clinical objectivity is the only preventative. Growth implies and entails risk. Risk begets failures as well as successes. Wide perspective gained through non-business experience or study helps one endure the pressures and accept with equanimity the results, good and bad, of business decisions.
2. Travel light
Limit the number of people at first to those who can agree upon and contribute directly to that which you are trying to accomplish.
3. The Customer is King
Define the business of the enterprise in terms of what is to be bought, precisely by whom and why.
A business can prosper to the extent it performs its particular tasks effectively and efficiently. The nature of the tasks to be performed usually changes over time as those served change.
The successful company predicts and responds to its chosen customer needs. Customers, therefore, define the business, at all times. Some customers are growing in their ability to buy, others are declining. The astute manager ascertains which is which.
4. Write it down
Prepare and work from a written plan that makes it clear who in the total organisation is to do what, by when.
Without execution, there is no payoff. The process of committing plans to paper is easy to postpone under the press of day-to-day events. In the absence of a document, fully coordinated usage of the resources of the business is unlikely.
5. Hire Experience
Employ key people with proven records of success at doing what needs to be done.
People do what they like; they like what they know. Experience adds depth to knowledge.
The best indicator of how a person will perform in the future is how he or she has done in the past in the same or related activity.
The criteria for selecting key people are dictated by the plans and blueprints for the business.
So that’s part 1. Part 2 to follow shortly. In the meantime, if you have any questions or want to talk over your business, please get in touch on 01634 540040 or email me at: andy@aktax.co.uk
