Paul Guilfoyle chartered accountant

It is a remarkable consistency of business owners that they set up a business in which they themselves are qualified to provide the service or product.

It is this working within the business that creates one of the most common frustrations that owners encounter as their business career develops.

A wonderful book that highlights this is “The E-Myth Revisited” by Michael E Gerber. This is excellent reading and will keep anyone interested in understanding the most common issues faced by entrepreneurs.

In the most profitable businesses we see, the entrepreneur has released him or herself from the business by systemising each part of the business and allocating responsibilities to other people within the organisation. This process of gradually delegating and systemising jobs that are currently carried out by owners is the path to maximising the value of a business.

This process of systemising your business can be a minimum of 3 years of processing and starts with the following areas to review:

1. Identify the key systems the business needs to succeed
2. Organise the business in a way that everyone clearly knows their objectives and responsibilities
3. Implement Total quality management (TQM)
4. Manage employees to get the best out of them
5. Build systems and put procedures and scripts into place so that they can work
6. Monitor and improve the systems

Armed with these processes you should have:

1. Identified the key systems and started the process of standardising the way the business works.
2. Written a management plan with targeted results.
3. Created a detailed organisational chart with key employee objectives and position statements.
4. Set an action plan.

Taking these steps can be frustrating for owners and does involve an element of “letting go” but ultimately is the main route to maximising the capital value of any business.

Making your Future Plans a Reality

Finding the time to work on your business rather than falling into the trap of always working in it, requires discipline and a structured methodology to make it happen.

Here is a checklist to help highlight the things to do and help set priorities for your business.

We have assisted many clients to achieve their long term goals by having a structured Strategic Plan in place.

Strategic Planning Checklist

Issues Tick if this is an issue Rate on a scale of 1 to 5
(where 1 is unimportant & 5 is very important)

We don’t have an annual budget
We have trouble making decisions
We don’t produce monthly figures on a regular basis
There are no clear lines of authority
We don’t have regular management meetings
We don’t get the whole business together often enough

We seem to lose a lot of customers
We receive a lot of complaints from customers
We need bigger customers
We need better customers
We have not offered new services/products to our customers recently

There is no clear future leader of the business
We do not have a funded retirement plan
We do not have a clear successor to the business

We can’t find good staff
Our staff are not motivated
Our staff do not want to take responsibility
We have high staff turnover
Our staff don’t have sufficient skills
We should get rid of some members of staff
Sometimes we feel like we are working for the staff

No one is responsible for marketing
We don’t have a Marketing Plan
We don’t understand what is different or unique about our business
Our customers don’t understand what is unique about our business
Our staff don’t understand what is unique about our business
We don’t have up-to-date marketing materials