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Guest post by: Sam Ediscot Become an Author

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Despite the high percentage of failure of small businesses particularly new start-ups, small enterprises have a unique advantage over the big corporations. For a start, small businesses don’t have the same inertia of an elephant (and you know what they say, you can’t teach and elephant to ‘break dance’).

The 3-E model for success is one of those very specific strategies that small business owners can use to transform the operational and profit performance of their business, literarily overnight. In this short article, I’ll present the fundamental principle and framework for the application of the strategy. But first, let’s review the components of this model.

The 3-E Model:

The model is very simple and consists of three elements namely Energy, Education and Enterprise Effort, hence the name 3-E. Though this model is being applied specifically to improvement of small business performance, it equally applies to even the largest of business entity.

For you (or anyone for that matter) to create any significant wealth (profits), you must learn and use the stability principle embedded in this 3-E model. The sequence in which you do or apply this, underpins your success or failure in business both in magnitude (i.e. how profitable) and direction (i.e. growth or decline).

As a small business, you can make a major impact on your profitability and growth if you apply this model to what you do. The key is the sequence of application of the model and this is Energy-Education-Effort.

Where you have an advantage over large businesses is in the inertia. With large corporations, there is need for consensus among the senior members of management, which usually leads to delay in applying and using effective tools and strategies. But with you as a small business owner, decisions can be very quick, especially if the benefits are quite apparent; there are no red tapes involved. For that simple reason, the results are very often very quick and dramatic.

Now here are the details behind each of the three elements within the model. Take your time to examine these and see how it can be apply within your own business.


Energy: This is the sum total of human resource (manpower) that can be made available for use in your business. This finite resource is what makes and breaks most small businesses generally because most small business owners and operators are short on this resource. This is often coupled with the wrong notion that businesses must possess all the essential resources critical to their success (i.e. large corporation mindset), which usually forces operators into very tight corners where they end us chasing their own tails trying to keep too many balls in the air at the same time, resulting in the failure modes listed below, to mention but just three:

1. Becoming ‘Jacks Of All Trades – diluting the energy that can be applied to greater effect in increasing profitability.
2. Little or no joy from operating the business – quickly resulting in high stress level.
3. Poor visibility of business direction – giving rise to dejection, disappointment and consequently business collapse and failure.

The truth is no business has or need to have all the resources critical to its success, all you need doing is learn how to expand your areas of influence where resources are concerned.


Education: In a nutshell, this is the acquisition of expertise through learning and applied knowledge in order for your business to produce its desired fruitage (profits) now and into the very distant future. Here also many small businesses fare badly because of the limitations imposed on them by cash-flow.

The best that small enterprises do in this regard (from surveys and chambers of commerce statistics) is invested a token sum from their profits, if at all, on their business education, in order to further enhance their performance and profitability. There are techniques that small business operator can use to become and remain a savvy business owner that will cost little or nothing compared with the benefits.

For example, how about piggybacking on other people’s efforts and sweat, where they do all the donkey work, incurs all the huge expenses and for you, all you do is tap into the final tested and working solutions.

Besides, do you know that for every 1% of business profit spent on improving your business education, your chance of remaining in business increases by another 12 months? And by the way, education here does not mean going to school or studying huge volumes of highfaluting technical jargons. It simply means acquiring the knowledge and experience to know when you can and cannot do something and the intelligence to seek for help outside of your own domain, if that’s what it’s needed).


Effort (Enterprise): This is where you translate all the outputs from the first two Es’ into very specific usable potent that can be applied to your business performance, to give you the competitive edge to remain in profitable business. This is where you shouldn’t rely only on your own understanding and strength. This is where the tyres meet the road and you should seek the help of small business consultants specialising in SME operations for you to truly realise the huge benefits this can bring.

Though there are few consultancy firms specialising in small business operations, my own school of thought is to go only for one based entirely on results. That means you shouldn’t part with a cent until you get the agreed performance end results (apart from initial token fee they charge for taking on your work).

I am a strong believer in ‘payment for performance delivered’ as far as consulting work is concerned. Instead of a blind leap of fate in getting whatever solutions the consulting firm developed for you to work, agree up-front on what you’re prepared to pay for results and based on how well the consulting firm can deliver on the set of agreed objectives and measurable goals with respect to your business performance. The beauty of this approach is that you don’t have cash-flow to worry about and paying for working implemented solutions would not be much of a problem.


Conclusion:

That is a very brief introduction on the 3-E model as it relates to small business operations. The beauty of this model lies in the fact that no single business or individual has all of the three Es in sufficient quantities to guarantee their own success, they all have to find a method by which they have to extend their areas of influence in this respect, so as to tap into the three Es available from others.

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