I was recently asked what I see as the biggest, most important challenge in running a successful small business. If I had to choose just one thing, what makes the difference between achieving sustainable growth or bumping along day to day, stuck in a rut of fire fighting and the feeling you're running flat out just to stand still? And, forced to choose a single factor, I'd have to go for Time Management.
It's maybe not the answer you were expecting. A lot of small business owners would offer a more tangible challenge such as:
- Managing their cashflow - collecting the money you are owed in time to pay your suppliers, meet payroll and pay the mortgage each month
- Marketing - attracting a profitable stream of enquires from qualified prospects
- Sales - professionally helping prospects to buy your products or services, and getting them over the line to make that commitment today at a price you can make a profit on
- People and recruitment - getting the right people in your business and getting them to do their job to a level of skill and enthusiasm that gets anywhere near the standard of if you were doing it yourself
However, in my own experience of working with hundreds of small business owners who are facing these typical challenges (plus a whole range of others!), often these problems are showing up as symptoms of an underlying problem with Time Management.
Sure they are all real problems, and when you're facing them they bear down on you with what feels like the weight of the world, but often I find that if you can get the business owner time to stop and think they have a pretty good idea of what they should be doing to overcome the challenge. The real problem is that they're too busy running flat out coping with everything else at once to get chance to stop and think, or more often still, to have the discipline to follow through on those ideas and put them into practice.
Too many businesses are just getting through the day reacting to things are they come up, dealing with matters as they become urgent without the perspective and self control of focusing on what is really important. Then, particularly in a small business, this drags the owner down into facing the stress of the problems listed above.
Getting a grip on how you're spending or investing your time gives you the headspace and control you solve or avoid other challenges in business.
So, for my key factor for small business success I went for Time Management. What would you choose? What do you see as the biggest critical success factor for small business owners today?
