The success of your business is limited - by you. Sustainable expansion of a profitable business happens as the leader's personal management skills expand to take it to the next level.
There is always a danger that if you do not grow your skills to carry the business, it will be difficult to control and you will not make the most of its potential. Therefore building your own management skills is vital as your business grows. You need to lead it into the future.
You may have already moved to a place where you are no longer doing so much of the day-to-day work in the business, but it’s critical to concentrate on managing areas such as staff relations, supervision, staff control, time management and delegation.
At this point it is important that you increase your actual skills in people management, and feed those skills through to your staff team. The aim is to build a strong resourceful team that will not collapse if you are not present.
The way you communicate with your employees, suppliers, and customers will change as you step back from dealing with them as frequently as before.
Your staff will also need to be trained to accept that your position has changed. You will not be as available as previously, so they need to understand how contact with you will work in the future.
You may actually focus on building stronger ties with certain valued suppliers and customers, and delegate the hands-on dealings with the others to key staff.
Remember, business is all about relationships so you need to keep working on the networks central to your success. Train up staff to represent you but never lose touch with key contacts.
You will also want to focus on improving your methods of communication. Make sure you have consistent and established information systems that can support your new ways of communicating and can accommodate your planned growth.
It is vital that you have control of your production flow systems and work on streamlining processes as you plan for growth. If this is an area of skill gap for you, consider getting advice from a mentor or business advisors who specialise in building processing strategies for growing businesses.
Further ideas for building your management skills base:
For more information see the Growing Pains business guide.
