Small Business Acceleration - Be the Leader!

"I'm too small to be a Leader. We don't need to spend any time on that!"

Those were the words from my small business client, Paul. He didn't mean that he was too short. He meant that in his mind, his $4 million business was too small to need a 'leader.'

After all, he wasn't running a computer software company or a car manufacturer, 'just a local services business.'

He brought me in to work with his management team on improving their overall performance. The company had been started by his father, a selling dynamo and charmer who had everyone who worked for him happy when he walked through the offices. "Dad" turned the business over to Paul when he decided to retire up the coast with Mom.

The company's facilities services business had a good reputation and customers who were generally satisfied with the services. But those same customers' internal business goals of cost containment meant they were always willing to entertain lower priced proposals from the competition.

Paul was suddenly wearing both the Sales Manager hat, and also the President hat. He'd been wearing that sales hat for 18 years, and he didn't know what a President's hat was supposed to look like.

Since Dad's retirement, the company had undergone steady erosion from competition and constant turnover of the junior staff. And Paul was tired of feeling like the company was stalled.

Paul asked me to work with him and his managers to get them refocused and into action growing their business. I found they were stuck with all the common challenges of small businesses:

* Key decision makers were feeling overwhelmed by the challenges of the business

* Work groups were silo'ed as each 'manager' tried to carve out their turf and have a sense of control

* Meetings were more about disagreements than using information to make decisions

* Sales plans had bigger goals without describing the targets for the sales team

* Staff felt like "It's just a job" and were on the look out for more pay

And so on.

Paul's initial reaction to the idea of Leadership was typical. Many small business owners, entrepreneurs, and even professionals view their sphere of influence with a 'small' lens. They believe their company or their department needs to hit some mythical size, often ten times it's current sales, before having a 'Leader' is important.

What they don't understand is that even a two-person partnership needs 'leadership time' to grow and thrive.

* Each business needs a Vision that inspires everyone who shows up to work to bring their best experience, intelligence and efforts with them each day.

* Each person in every company needs a sense of being acknowledged, assisted and appreciated or their attention drifts off to other areas than the purpose of their work.

* Each manager needs a model for how to build a business case for the items that needed decisions across functional areas.

And each business owner, key decision maker, manager needs to use the simple leadership techniques that hold the entire work effort together, and keep it focused forward.

Leadership is the series of activities that take place when the rat race of running a business is paused for a moment and one person communicates directly with the heart of the others in their business.

Paul's notion was that Leadership would divert his attention from managing the business's sales. He couldn't have been more wrong. It's as relevant for the owner of a small business as it is for the Leader of a mega corporation.

Whether I'm consulting to an individual company, or coaching MasterMind groups of professionals who want to grow their business, the key I'm teaching each person is that small efforts have enormous payoffs.

For Paul that meant we started him with three easy High Payoff Leadership steps:

* Inspiring his sales force with measurable sales targets: tripling the number of boutique hotels the company served in a 20-mile radius in the next 18 months.

* Empowering each of the functional areas of the company to design and deliver services packages for that target market that kept those customers delighted and staying with the company.

* Encouraging his staff by running meetings where he kept sharing how proud he was that the team was going after and winning the business that fit their targets.

In total, those activities required that Paul learn 5 new ways of talking about business, and took only 35 minutes per week of his time.

In one month his team's time spent in meetings shortened by 30%. In four months the company had no turnover. In six months they had doubled their business in their target market.

Isn't it time you put High Payoff Leadership on your calendar? by Linda Feinholz