Does this sound familiar to you? Your whole day goes in solving problems - operational or
customer related - and in working out financial issues. Your business cannot run without you. If
you go away for a week, what will happen to your business?
How do you handle firefighting? And how do you grow your business if you spent all your time
firefighting?
Here are some tips from India’s leading Business Coach, Christopher C. Doyle, on how you can
free yourself from operations and firefighting and start focusing on growth. Christopher has been
working with small business owners (under 3 crores to 50 crores turnover) since 2010 and all his
clients put together added an amazing Rs. 3000 crores to their business revenue by following his
growth strategies for small business owners.
Want to know more about how you can get FREEDOM from firefighting and GROW by 100%?
Click here!
Christopher recommends that you implement a 3 part method that will give you freedom from
operations, from routing work and from firefighting and will help you grow your business and grow
your profit:
Part 1: Processes
It is extremely important to create processes for every part of your businesses. Now you may say
you have processes. But most business owners refer to processes for tasks or materials (for
manufacturing companies) when they refer to processes. And that leaves out the other very
important processes that are required for freedom from operations.
You need to design, develop and document the following for every process in your business:
1. Task flows: how one task flows into another and where decisions are made
2. Material flows (where tangible products or inputs are involved in the business flow): how
materials move from one place to another. It is important here to measure the productive and
unproductive stops in the process and set benchmark turnaround times for each stop
3. Information flows: how information (in the form of documents or files, whether physical or
electronic) flows from one part of the business to another and who is responsible for each flow
4. Management Information flows: how MIS flows (in the form of reports). Where reports are
generated, who generates them, in what form and where the data for each report is stored
5. Layout and physical flows: especially important for factories where tasks, materials and
information flow from one physical workstation or machine to another
If you are not creating and documenting all the above in your processes, your process creation is
incomplete and you will never gain freedom from operations and firefighting.
Part 2. Delegation
Delegate responsibilities to team members - for tasks, for flows, for reports and for decisions. In
most cases, business owners hesitate to delegate for the following reasons:
1. They feel that they can do the job better than any of their employees
2. They feel that their employees are not ready to take up bigger responsibilities
3. They are afraid that their employees will make mistakes
It doesn’t matter how large your team is or whether you have HODs (heads of departments or
not), delegation is the best way not only to free yourself from operations but also to develop your
employees. Christopher’s clients have implemented delegation in their businesses with
spectacular results by using his proprietary 5 Step Execution Model that enables successful
delegation while increasing accountability and ownership among team members.
Part 3. Review
A solid review process is required to ensure that you are informed of progress, you get status
updates and can take corrective action where required. Again, this is part of the 5 Step Execution
Model. Ensure you do a 10-15 minute daily review with your team. Follow it up with a weekly
review and a monthly review and you will be able to monitor every part of your business without
getting involved.
Whether your business is less than 3 crores or 50 crores in turnover, you follow the above steps,
then you, too, can join the long list of small business owners who have gained freedom from
firefighting, grown by more than 100% and, together, added more than Rs. 3000 crores to their
business.
Want to know more about how you can get FREEDOM from firefighting and GROW by 100%?
Click here!
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