Just imagine, you bought a car, what will you do? Carry out maintenance in a timely manner, look for gas stations where there is no singed gasoline, wash, polish, wax and all sorts of nano-solutions and protect with an alarm - well, if you are of sound mind. It would hardly occur to you to be afraid to start it and only admire it, fill in cheaper oil bought on the highway, wrap it in cling film, score it for breakdowns until the brakes completely fail and leave the protective system for later. Is it logical?
It would seem that with business everything should be even more careful, attentive and pedantic. Not at all: look at a different business and think, what is it still holding on to, where is its remarkable resource hidden in order to survive all the problems? And then you look: but no, he was liquidated, with debts, on the run ... But you could work and work. Why this happens, what is the dislike for business and how to fix it, we will now discuss.
Do you love your business?
. Think whiskey? But no, valerian!
Let's analyze the main signs of dislike for your business.
One for all
Micromanagement is perhaps the most controversial point of the list. Managers suffering from this managerial illness cannot allow employees to make a single independent decision: he will listen to all the conversations of salespeople, read logs, collect a hundred reports from each, poke his head into all procedures, etc. And it will do it endlessly and with everyone. Do not confuse micromanagement with the desire of the leader to keep abreast: in a small business, one of the main values is to embrace all processes and direct them in the right direction.
Micromanagement is a sign of distrust in employees. Such behavior is exhausting and reduces the level of independence of the team. It turns out approximately the same effect that can be observed if the parents hit the child on the hands and ask him not to touch anything, so as not to scatter and break. Employees become lethargic, try to blame decisions on each other or on the boss, are unable to start and complete the task. At the same time, the load on the micromanager is growing and at some point he ceases to cope with an avalanche of small and super small issues, problems, tasks, calls, letters. A very deplorable situation is emerging.
The fight against micromanagement lies in the ability to do two things: trust and delegate. But since the problem lies more in the field of psychology than in the inability to work (on the contrary, almost all micromanagers are capable, smart and active), then you need to persuade yourself first of all:
- understand that not children work with you, but experienced professionals who are ready to be responsible for the work;
- realize that you can stop the problem process at any time;
- accept your leadership role and confidently manage, not interfere;
- create a list of what can happen as a last resort and categorize the risks.
And calm down.
Irreplaceable no
Staff turnover is a big problem for any company, because hiring an employee is much more expensive than retaining. If employees leave, and you have the only argument after them “there are no irreplaceable ones”, then be prepared for the fact that an unstable team will not be able to bring a good result.
Find the cause of the turnover, hire a good HR specialist who will not count vacations, but deal with the adaptation and development of staff, form a team management strategy. Once you have a working backbone, it will become easier for you to manage and easier to hire: your base employees will do some of the work for you.
All later!
A big mistake of entrepreneurs is to develop a team and business, but leave the development of infrastructure for later: the purchase of business applications, software, etc. This, of course, applies to non-IT companies that have enough Excel for work (and even Google Docs). The later you come to building up and developing your IT infrastructure, the more expensive it will cost you, because implementations and installations will be urgent, training will be complex and long-term. If, in addition to all this, you postpone the purchase of licensed software for later, and use pirated software, then you can additionally wait for guests from the K department. They are somehow unfriendly.
Here's what to do as soon as possible.
- Establish license management: combine rental and purchase of software, have only licensed products, prohibit employees from installing pirated copies of software on office hardware.
- Decide on the format of support for your IT infrastructure: it can be your own system administrator, an incoming specialist or an outsourcing company.
- Set up a single print control center (even if you only have 3-5 printers and a lot of documents, this may already be important).
- Set up an information security system: mail management, network connection settings, user security, anti-virus software, differentiation of access rights for employees, etc.
- Buy to work with clients - there you will keep all your transactions and client base safe.
- If there is a help desk or employees provide support along with other duties, make it easier for them to work and provide yourself with monitoring - install , which does not need to be trained and in which you can “start” as quickly as possible.
Gradually, you will learn how to manage the entire IT system of the company and realize that this was your best investment in the development of the market. Because even cool employees leave, but software with valuable data remains.
We have nothing to lose!
Ignoring security issues can teach a hard lesson to the business owner and cause damage up to the loss of the company. In our time, underestimating security issues is an unaffordable luxury. You must do everything to keep the business and its data secure. We will not repeat ourselves, we discussed the issue in detail in the article .
Fraer's greed ruined
No money is invested in the business. The entrepreneur decides that the money should only be taken and not invested in development - after all, sales seem to be going on, production (if any) seems to be breathing, but something is allocated for purchases. In the long term, this is fraught with the collapse of all operational activities, because. current resources will be depleted, and new ones will have nowhere to come from. We should also not forget about competitors who invest in development and reach a lower cost or higher quality, which means that the “thrifty” business will lose either in terms of price or product. I would single out three areas in which it is especially dangerous to save money.
- On good employees.
- On product/development quality.
- On the automation of production and operations.
Invest in the best resources and you will get the best results. In particular, automation can free up a significant amount of employee time, which can be spent on building a customer base and improving service.
My money: I waste where I want
Money is invested with special madness. Such companies are immediately visible: salespeople are sitting at MacBooks for 120 rubles. everyone, everyone has at least Salesforce or SAP deployed, the office is located in the best business center of the city (necessarily in the center!), corporate parties are held on exotic islands. And this is not the mythical manufacturer "Manone" from Begbeder's "000 francs", but an ordinary Russian small business - for example, a flower company, an event agency, and even a software developer. And then it seems like I want to say: “Well, since there is so much, let him spend it.” Is it fair? Fact. However, there are a couple of nuances that turn such spending into madness.
The development of any company is cyclical, since it is subject to both fluctuations in demand and seasonality, and is all the more sensitive to the political situation and the state of the economy. Employees get used to the good and react as negatively as possible to changing conditions in times of crisis. This is fraught with mass layoffs, general dissatisfaction and a boycott of work (“I worked at N of my capacity, received a bonus and a corporate party in Antalya, and why should I comply with N when it became 0,3 * bonuses and the corporate party was held in the sports village of the Ramensky district?” ). Alas, that's how humans are. Yes, there are employees who will work with the same or even greater enthusiasm, but in the general mass, everything will be exactly like this.
If investment occurs only in external attributes such as office equipment, corporate parties, press conferences, etc., and nothing is invested in software, development, production improvement, the situation will practically be no different from the one where there is no money in business do.
In addition, your employees as an investment object may simply not care about your efforts, for them this is nothing more than a comfort zone. They will enjoy a cool environment and good technology, but they may ignore and not use expensive software - for example, because it simply does not suit them, does not correspond to the logic of the company's operations. Still, the office infrastructure and IT system is not the best place to collect brands.
Just remember: any investment must have potential and must have a rational purpose. Predict ROI before you spend money on the next batch of the latest laptops for staff who calculate plan indicators in Excel and sit on social networks. networks and on Pikabu.
From zero to hundreds in 3 seconds
Unattainable goals are set. And I will not be mistaken if I say that micro and small business in Russia is ill with inadequate target planning. More precisely, you can’t call it either planning or goal setting - pure fantasy. Many start-ups and small companies today are created for some extremely short periods under the influence of various business coaches from a well-known firm. Coaches introduce to managers the idea that you need to set ambitious goals and go only towards them (to understand the scale: "businessmen" 18-20 years old set a goal of 100 million per year and a personal income of 2 million per month, while they do not can answer the question in what area their business will be). However, among those who bypass coaches, there are also enough dreamers in order to “grab a third of the market”.
The goals of the company at any stage should be small, discrete, specific, measurable and achievable. This is facilitated by:
- analytics (a sober look at the state of affairs),
- organization of business processes (recognition of gaps, weak links and the number of black sheep),
- planning (rational distribution of resources),
- operational control (analysis of the activities of employees and their results - but not the profile of the use of working time!).
There is no marketing, marketers are parasites
“To hell with marketing, our product will sell itself,” these are the words you can hear from small business executives. Particularly advanced ones quote Artemy Lebedev, who wrote a hundred years ago that there is no marketing in Russia. In fact, even the most advanced and classy product needs a promotion effect and at least a primary presentation to the audience. But there are plenty of marketers-parasites and agencies of the same kind. Indeed, the first negative experience can drive you away from the habit of investing in promotion for a long time.
My advice is not going to be brand new: do your own marketing. The reason is outrageously simple: no one knows better than you, your company, your needs, your customer, and the benefits of your product.
Competitors.net
The business owner believes that he has no direct competitors and convinces employees of this. From the outside, this is a very beautiful and contagious position: we have no competitors, we go ahead. In fact, there is practically no business that has no competitors and is an absolute monopolist (especially in the IT field), and ignoring competitors is a direct way to lose your place in the market, because. you do not try to build up and do not understand how to offer yourself to the client so that he does not have comparisons in your head that are not in your favor.
There are competitors, both direct and indirect. The first and main task is to analyze competitors: product offers, pricing policy, promotions, affiliate program, etc. The more information you know about them, the easier it will be for you to work with clients and develop your product solutions, relying on your experience + customization.
Eat what they give
If a company is sure that its product is primary, and let the client use what the company offers him, it will not be easy. The product should be created based on the real needs and requests of customers, work for the customer and help him solve problems. We may also want to build into our game, not a visual editor of business processes, but a cloud helpdesk turn into a knowledge management system, for example. But if our clients need reports, processes, calendars and primary documents in CRM, they will be there; if they need a simple helpdesk that can be deployed for any business in - 1 hour, it will develop in this direction. Because users want to work with the tool they need, and not hammer nails with a Faberge egg (well, or a simple egg at the price of Faberge).
Therefore, never put the product in the first place and do not force the client to use what you think is necessary (remember how often convenient familiar interfaces are changed to less good ones for the sake of some company goals), but offer him what he wants:
- accumulate hits, build a backlog and implement features from there;
- conduct periodic surveys and questionnaires;
- analyze requests by type and solve problems with what is mentioned most often;
- do beta testing.
These postulates, although sharpened for the IT-sphere, are suitable for absolutely any industry.
These are your problems, not our tickets
Service problems are the plague of the XNUMXst century for business. Despite hundreds of other people's fails that spread over the Internet at the speed of a fiber optic connection, companies, especially in small businesses, continue to score on customer requests, do not respond to questions on time, and remain indifferent to problems that, by the way, are associated with their product.
There are several reasons for this behavior:
- high staff turnover and low professionalism of support staff
- the lack of systematization of client incidents and the closeness of the support system (or you can put and work quickly, transparently and comfortably)
- lack of work regulations and low level of support control
- the absence of a support service and support services in principle (for example, in one of the pharmacy chains, it is not a supporter who communicates with you, but some kind of regional manager or supervisor; and yes, it only looks loyal, but in fact unprofessional).
But if your service is bad, then your competitor will be good. And since we operate in a time of non-price competition, you won't get very far with discounts and PR. Therefore, establish a service, at least a basic one, not according to ITIL and not with SLA - just organize normal customer support and you will see the effect.
Business processes - for large
For some reason, small companies believe that automatic business processes are the lot of large companies in which complex chains of interactions are built. This opinion is wrong. If a company is small, this does not mean that it should obey the spontaneous development of events. In the company, everything is a process: from the preparation of the mailing list to production and warehouse relationships. If you want to meet deadlines, control those responsible and organize a routine, you need to build processes, and it doesn’t matter how you do it: in BPMN notation, in a native graphics editor, based on other solutions. The main thing you will have:
a) clear and verified process diagrams;
b) appointed responsible;
c) specified terms;
d) triggers and transitions;
e) expected result.
Yes, tuning and automating business processes is not an easy story: first you need to conduct a deep analysis and reengineering of everything that happens in the company, and only then move on to creating diagrams and automation. But you will free up the time of employees and calm your nerves and the nerves of customers who are extremely disloyal to missed deadlines.
Today three, but small
Not those candidates who are suitable are hired for work, but those who “pass the price”. Alas, this is a common phenomenon in the regions: there are not so many good candidates, they know their own worth, and sometimes it may seem that the company does not need his level in principle. This may turn out to be a mistake: a hired professional with his knowledge and experience may turn out to be a locomotive that will take the product to the next round of evolution. On the other hand, sometimes it’s better to hire an inexperienced employee and “grow” a highly specialized specialist out of him - this is also good because he is less likely to leave the project (but you need to be prepared for this too).
But still, most often, employees who are willing to go for little money meet the principle of three "n": inexperienced, unskilled, unreliable. Together with them, you get the risk of future costs for missed deadlines, customer dissatisfaction, and even information security problems. There is another “n” - underestimated (they believe that their specialists are “so-so” and are ready to work for cheap), getting such an employee is a kind of jackpot for business, especially if you can raise his self-esteem.
Guru, give me a sign, $ sign
The executive or middle managers believe in consultants and coaches. They hire consultants for a lot of money, spend time, listen to ads along the way, become part of the experience that the coach will carry on, and not the fact that they are not competitors. In fact, most trainers bring you nothing more than a squeeze from the books you read, which can not always be rolled out to your business processes. Well, it’s completely strange to hire consultants to rally the team, improve the organizational climate and reduce the degree of toxicity. Alas, this also applies to IT companies.
Do you want to change something or build processes according to new principles? Then, as in the previous paragraph, learn a simple truth: no one knows your business better than you.
- Invite salespeople to read a book about sales, and at the end, conduct a couple of brainstorming sessions and internal trainings, where they themselves will build a methodology and exchange chips. These will be those chips that they are ready to use and most likely already use on a daily basis. There just isn't enough consistency.
- Form a system of internal meetups and trainings, where employees can regularly share what they can do well: from working in a CRM system to working with texts or testing a product.
- Develop informal guides and a public knowledge base that every employee can access. This is one of the best forms of transfer of experience in our time.
- If you hire an external trainer, talk to him before paying and concluding an agreement, ask about the methods and specific things that he is ready to give in the class. Don't trust customer reviews (guess why), don't take "cheerful kids", etc. It must be practical. Assign a separate condition: no advertising, no additional recommendations from your colleagues, only work on the target problem.
The main guru of your business is the manager, the main Jedi are the employees. In a short time, a stranger will not be able to submit information in a way that will be useful to the company.
Among the possible signs of “dislike” for business, one can single out uncertainty about success, anger bordering on despotism and paranoia, and fear of difficulties. But in fact, we knowingly put the word "dislike" in quotation marks. Because any leader wants his business to grow and develop, and his behavior is largely determined by his character, judgments and understanding or misunderstanding of the laws of business. Therefore, do not get angry, do not blame others for problems, and customers for inadequacy. Love your business, take care of it - it will love you back.
Source: habr.com