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Guest post by: Casey Gollan Become an Author

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Predictable, controllable business growth occurs when you work ‘on’ your small business.

You may have heard of the phrase that you should work ‘on’ your business rather than ‘in’ the business (The E Myth Revisited, by Michael Gerber). But do you really know what it means?

It’s simple.

“Working ‘on’ your business” means that your work efforts are focused on documenting the business procedures and processes (or ‘systems’). You can document these procedures and processes in each area of your business whether it’s in admin, marketing, finance, production, sales or operations.

The other side of the coin is “Working ‘in’ your business”.

Working ‘in’ your business means that your work efforts are focused on doing all the day-to-day tasks that are required for the business to operate. Tasks like answering the phones, serving customers, ordering, cleaning, getting the mail, and doing the banking. In simple terms, any task that you could easily pay someone else $10 to $40 per hour to do.

Working ‘in’ the business, for a business owner that wants to grow their business, is a trap.

Why? Because simply speaking you’re performing tasks that a $10 to $40 per hour employee could do.

The important thing here is that by working ‘on’ your business you could be bringing into the business an extra $100 to $10,000 per hour! So not only could you be covering the $10 to $40 per hour you pay someone, you could bring in an extra $90 to $9,900 per hour.

So consider working ‘on’ your business, it’s crucial for business growth.

When you work ‘in’ the business, you aren’t working ‘on’ improving the growth of your business long term. It’s a day to day focus. And it’s hard to get out of, because you ‘train’ your staff and your business to rely and depend on you.

If your business relies on your skills, or relies on you being in the business – you aren’t running your business, it’s running you. It literally depends on you to survive!

And the dependency on you or any key team members can be dangerous. Because what happens if someone gets sick, leaves or passes away?

The bottom line is that you haven’t really got a business you have a job.

It’s a tough ‘pill to swallow’, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

The key is to work ‘on’ your business. That is, document the processes of your business that produce the services and the quality products you deliver. And that includes documenting the way you carry out your own work.

You need to document how you get your customers, how you greet them, how to sell to them, how to process orders, how to produce or provide your product or service, how to deliver it and how to follow up your customer. You also need to document the administration side of things as well.

The benefit of documentation is that it allows your current and future staff to follow a step-by-step system that you know will achieve the result the ‘system’ (procedure or process) should achieve.

Ideally speaking, when your ‘systems’ have been documented, anyone could come into your business, follow the systems and achieve similar (if not the same) results.

By doing this you will be able to ‘free’ your business up from having to depend on certain people. Including yourself.

Once you have documented systems, specialist people are no longer required as they once were, because the ‘formula’ for how to do the things they did – is written down, step-by-step.

It’s just like following a cooking recipe for a chocolate cake.

The ingredients and cooking steps are laid out; you just need to go through them several times to get the comfortable with following the recipe and cooking the cake.

Sure you may make a few mistakes the first few times, yet as you repeat the process over and over, you get a better tasting chocolate cake!

The same goes for your business.

You may document how to answer the telephone when it rings.

Then, when you have a new employee starting in your business, you take them through the ‘How to answer the telephone’ steps.

At first they may be a little nervous, yet with a good half an hour of training based on the ‘system’, the new employee will be answering the telephone just like you do!

And you can do this for each and every area of your business.

Once you have this, you can step out of working ‘in’ the business to work ‘on’ the business. Your staff will have ‘systems’ to follow the day-to-day systems which achieve predictable results, which in turn means that your business will be successful without you having to be there. You can be working ‘on’ the business to get the business growth you know your business can achieve.



Copyright © 2005 by Casey Gollan. All Rights Reserved

Business Coaching expert Casey Gollan helps grow businesses by $1 million to $10 million in 1 to 3 years. Since 1996 his coaching programs have added over $375 million to small businesses. Go to his Melbourne Business Coaching website and watch a free business growth video series.

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