Running a Small Business

Lesson 3: Organization and Planning

Setting up your business so that it runs smoothly. Tips on which systems work and which don't - organizational startegies.

Introduction

Two key elements of running a small business are organizing the small business in such a way that it runs smoothly and planning what you're going to do with your small business. Both are important for the present-day operations and for the future when you will some day be looking at selling or handing your business over to someone else. Both now, when you want to hire someone to do some of the work and in the future, nobody will be able to come in and perform effectively if the business is not organized clearly and has plans with goals and targets.

Many small business owners are tremendously stressed from keeping everything in their heads and trying to remember what's next. This is very counterproductive because, not only does it draw the owner's attention away from where it should be, it isn't an effective frame of mind when you're discussing with customers. Your work and what you have to do should be recorded. You should plan your work by working from those records and you should schedule your work so that you can do it with time to spare. The spare time can then be used to deal with emergencies or for working towards reaching your business's goals. Once you achieve this, you'll be calm and focused for your meetings and phone calls with your customers.

Keeping records deals with what you're doing - the next step is dealing with what you're going to what you will have to do. Planning starts with goals and works backwards from there. You reduce the goals to tiny steps that need to be taken, schedule the steps and track progress. You'll be surprised how liberating it is when you no longer have a huge and distant goal that has to be achieved in front of you but rather a tiny step that has to be and can easily be taken today.

The final step in organizing and planning your business is to plan for failure and unexpected events. Such things will happen. If you've planned for them, they become hiccups on the road to success. If you don't plan for them, they are major, paralyzing disasters which can lead to the failure of your business and the forced abandoning of the goals you've worked towards.

And there's a link back to ensuring quality. That process can be applied to any activity - we explored how to apply it to production in the previous lesson but it can also be applied to running a business. "Define" your goals, "Decide" how to achieve them, "Carry Out" the activities and "Check" your result. That's planning which results in organization. That's what you have to achieve for your small business.

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