You leave the office at eight in the evening, and by the time you get home you have answered three more messages from your team. You spent the whole day closing orders, haggling with a supplier over price and sorting out a delivery problem yourself. Yet if someone asked whether your business did better or worse this month than last, you would have no clear answer.
You worked a full day, and none of it was managing your business.
What does business management mean?
Managing a business means deciding which part of it gets your time and money, then checking whether that decision paid off. Closing orders and answering customers still has to happen, but that is the day-to-day work of the business, and if it fills your whole day, nobody makes those decisions.
In The E-Myth Revisited, Michael Gerber gives these two jobs their names. Deciding about the business is working on it, and the daily work is working in it. If all your time goes into working in your business, what you have built is a very demanding job you can never take a day off from.
Why management always slips in a small business
A large company has a separate manager for finance, sales and operations, and making those decisions is their job. In a team of five, every one of those decisions is yours, and you are also the person who has to close today’s orders.
Daily work always feels more urgent, because a customer is waiting for a reply. Nobody is waiting for you to decide where next month’s advertising budget should go, so that decision slides to the following week, every week, until it finally gets made in a rush. Until you use delegation to hand part of the daily work to your team, there is no time left for working on the business.
Working on the business starts with diagnosis
There is so much to do that you stay late at the office every night, so you hire someone else. Two months later you are still staying late every night, because every order has to be approved by you first, and the new hire is waiting for your approval just like everyone else.
Had you checked where orders were getting held up before you hired, you would have seen that most of them were waiting on you. Where you feel the pain is rarely where the problem is, and in business anatomy I explain why. So before you spend time or money, use a few simple numbers to find where the problem actually is.
One hour a week for management
Set aside one fixed hour a week for working on your business, say first thing Monday morning, before you open your messages.
In that hour, compare a few numbers with the previous week: the week’s sales, how many customers bought again, how much money is left in your account and how many orders went out late. Pick the number that got worse than all the others, and decide on just one thing you will change about it this week. Next week, the first thing you check is whether that number moved.
If you cannot carve even that one hour out of the daily work, that is the first problem to fix.
Once you have found a problem this way and fixed it, the next step is systemization, so the same work keeps getting done right without you there.
If you are not sure which number to look at first, the business bottleneck checklist asks a few questions about each part of your business and shows you where the main problem is. And if you want to learn this kind of diagnosis from the ground up so you can do it yourself whenever you need to, that is exactly what the Business Anatomy course is for.