When you are running a business in its beginning stages the only thing you focus on is making it work. Somehow. Someway. (Insert Snoop Dogg reference here if necessary.) Everything else seems unimportant in the grand scheme of things. In reality growing your business is the most important. But there is a proper way to do it. This brings me to one important rule for your business, don’t wait until you need it.
Growing our businesses is hard enough without having to worry about the more seemingly inconsequential aspects of our business.
Take for example the process for hiring people for your business that I talked about a couple of weeks ago. When your business starts out, you wish you needed to worry about hiring more people. You are mainly satisfied when you can pay your own bills let alone helping someone else pay for theirs.
When you look at hiring a little deeper, you realize that the time for hiring more people in your business is the time where your business is stretched with operating at its current level. You need to alleviate that pressure by hiring some help to take over some of the responsibilities that you or someone else is handling.
It seems to make sense to wait to worry about this until you are faced with a hiring decision amid times of growth. However, if your business is outgrowing your current operation and you have never dealt with this before, it can be an extremely stressful time. In this case, are you really going to be able to pull together an effective hiring process?
The answer is that you can but how effective and well thought out will it be? Hiring the right staff is important do you really want to throw that together in the spur of the moment? The answer there is no.
Hiring aside, this is the case for many of the different operational aspects of our businesses. We always wait until we need something to begin looking for them but by that time it’s too late and you run the risk of not making as good of a decision.
If there are areas of your business that is not in place, take some time to develop a framework for how you want them to look when they are fully developed. You will thank yourself for it later.