Are your personal values and business goals in alignment? If not, you’ve got a major problem on your hands.
Think about the manufacturing process for a moment. It always begins with raw materials. In a small business, guess what? You, the owner, are that raw material!
This means that your own personal goals, beliefs, and reasons for starting a business are crucial to your success. You might start a business to do any of the following:
- Make more money to provide for their family.
- Provide the owner with a certain lifestyle.
- Deliver a valuable service to customers.
- Offer a great workplace experience for employees.
- Serve God.
- … or a combination of reasons!
The reasons why someone might get into business are virtually endless. The point is that every business owner has specific goals that are unique to their business.
Some business owners may be satisfied with owning a small, family-owned company. Others may be hungry to build a large, highly-profitable empire. Some have plans to sell their business several years down the road. Others plan to hold onto it and eventually pass it on to their children!
The Number One “Rule” of Starting a Business
No reason for starting a business is necessarily right or wrong—just different. Assuming you’re not breaking the law, your goals and motivations are completely up to you.
But there’s one major rule that every business owner needs to adhere to:
Your business must be fully aligned with your goals, beliefs, and reasons for being in business.
If it doesn’t, make no mistake—you’ll find a way to sabotage its success. Believe me, I’ve done it!
This is why it’s so important to know your business goals, your reasons for starting the business, and your core values before you start any of the work. If you haven’t already, write them down, as they need to be reflected in all of your systems.
Imagine how differently your business would operate if one of your goals was to provide a local service rather than a national service, for example. You’d need an entirely different set of systems and processes for producing and delivering your product. You’d probably need different employees and areas of expertise. You might even need a different building and capital!
This is because your business’s success depends on the quality of its systems. In fact, your business is a system—a set of processes working together to reliably produce an intended result.
Fine-Tuning Your Business’s Systems
The only problem with systems? Most people think they’re boring. On the other hand, smart business owners understand that improving systems helps them achieve the following:
- Make more money while doing less work.
- Have more time and energy to focus on the work that matters most.
- Make far fewer errors and produce less waste.
- Quickly and permanently fix mistakes that do occur.
- Maintain control of the business.
Systems run the business, people run the systems, and the systems become the solution to the problem that affects all businesses: how to deliver a quality product or service to the customer every single time.
Whenever you encounter an issue with your business, it’s because one of three things occurred:
- You didn’t account for the issue, and it needs to be accounted for in the system.
- The issue is accounted for, but the employee didn’t follow the system.
- The issue is accounted for, but it’s not clear, in which case you need to revise the system or retrain the employee.
Take Back Control of Your Business!
Ready for a little homework? If you want to improve your business’s systems, there are a couple of books I highly recommend reading:
- The E-Myth Revisited by Michael E. Gerber.
- Work the System by Sam Carpenter.
Finally, do you want to run your business, or do you want the business to run you? Every business has systems, whether you’re aware of them or not. If you didn’t create them, your employees did. If your employees didn’t create it, your customers did.
Who do you want to create your systems? After all, it’s your business, and it’s supposed to reflect your goals, beliefs, and reasons for doing business. It’s time to get back in the driver’s seat and build the profit machine you envisioned when you started!