Operations? Management? Leadership?

The First Decision

The first decision to go into business is fairly straightforward. You see an opportunity that you have the skillset to take advantage of. You note that the other players aren’t doing it like you could and therefore you know that you can add value.

Great. Start the business.

The Second Decision

The business grows and newer opportunities present themselves. You have brought on other skilled persons to share the workload. You may also have brought on some administrative specialists. However you notice that when you’re managing the team resources, planning out the budgets, fielding calls from clients, pushing ahead on new business opportunities and keeping clients happy, your service provision (technical or creative) slows down. So you jump back into the skillset that got you into business in the first place and start cranking out some great code or delivering some beautiful photos.

Clients are happy again at the quality of your work and spread the word. More opportunities come but you realise that while keeping the current clients happy you’ve missed a few opportunities and bungled a few proposals.

Then you look at your cash flow for the last 6 months and realise a pattern…

Your income spikes up when you are deep in your area of expertise, when you are delivering quality products or services and getting paid for those deliverables.

When those jobs end and you have to get into business development mode, write proposals, do presentations etc. your income decreases and you start eating into your company savings or recurring cash flow. It’s decision time again… do you get deeper into your expertise and hire people to do the business development, management, client development and represent your Brand? Or do you hire expertise that you can train while focusing on being the client interface, managing the experts, creating and communicating your Brand and developing your business network?

The Third Decision

You know you can’t win with the inescapable cycle resulting from the second decision. You have to hire people but you also have to step back from both operations and management.. you have to lead.

Leading means having some clients feel that you’re too good for them now. Leading means your team delivering the product / service to a slightly level than you can do (because you’re the best!), but being able to deliver 10x what you could do on your own.

Leading means backing away from certain decisions and trusting your team to make the right one. Leading allows you to focus on what your real skill is. Because it never was just your talent. It was the vision to see the opportunities related to the talent, and having the grit and temerity to push forward and create something out of nothing.

You could also just keep on being the best in your field, until the second best is able to scale you out of existence.

#BusinessMusings