Business skills and lessons learned

As a small business owner, you bring your know-how from past successes and failures to your business. As the business grows, you continue to build on lessons learned and hone your business skills. For many small business owners, “learning from doing” is the primary teacher.

Do your business skills match your business’ complexity?

I recently shared six tips on this topic and asked other small business owners about their experiences. How did their business skills match the complexity of their business when they first opened? How have they dealt with this tension throughout their business’ evolution? What advice would they want to share with others?

In previous posts Heidi Gibson of The American Grilled Cheese Kitchen and Rachel Saunders of Blue Chair Fruit shared their stories with us. Here are two more business owners tackling complex issues and leveraging their management skills.

Elizabeth Leu
Fiddlesticks

When Elizabeth Leu started Fiddlesticks, a children’s boutique in Hayes Valley, she thought she was prepared. She first worked for someone else and learned as much as she could about the retail business. Elizabeth also took the Renaissance Entrepreneurship Center Business Planning class.

She started her business with a solid foundation of hands-on experience, working for others, and thoughtful planning. Yet she couldn’t prepare herself for what it would actually feel like when she was completely responsible for her own business and all its complexities.

“As a small business owner you have to be the master of all in everything you do, and that’s not easy. You have to wear ALL the hats and ideally, they should all fit. I think management capacity is finding the correct fit with all those hats — and that’s hard! It takes a lot of time and experience to get them all to fit.”

Elizabeth’s advice:

Learn as much as you can about every role in your business.

“You may love only a few of those hats but you have to figure out, master and tolerate them all — at least in the beginning until you can outsource. Once you get strong enough to outsource, you still need to understand how it all works to keep a watchful eye on the whole operation.”

Stay positive and just keep going.

“I have worked very hard to grow my business and I have had some significant setbacks. With every setback I can either choose to learn from it or become bitter and harbor frustrations. I have worked hard to learn from them. All of the setbacks were complex and difficult, especially because it was uncharted territory for me. But I learned and I am still learning. What is it they say, ‘two steps forward, one step back’? As long as you move forward, business complexity feels easier because you keep breaking it down, tackling it piece by piece.”

Claire Keane
Clairesquares

Claire Keane, owner of the artisan, handcrafted sweet treats company Clairesquares, says that her business skills did not match the complexity of her business when she started. She had a steep learning curve. But Claire gained the skills she needed by seeking out specific business knowledge and support and her daily experiences in business brought many lessons learned.

Claire’s key steps for developing core business skills:

Write a business plan.

Claire took the 14-week Business Planning Class at the Renaissance Entrepreneurship Center and wrote a business plan. “To this day, I frequently remember key pointers from each class.”

Join an incubator.

Claire joined La Cocina’s Incubator Kitchen and received the help of that community and all their support services.

Attend lots of workshops.

Claire learned from others to increase her skills. “Whenever there was a workshop relevant to my lack of skills, I made sure to attend it. I was able to take tips from each training and apply it to my business immediately.”

Develop a support team.

Claire knew that she could not do it all alone. “It was very helpful to have a business mentor, new business friends with similar start-up business pains and other friends and family to lean on for advice to get me through the learning curve.”

Keep at it, even through failure.

Ultimately it has been Claire’s tenacity and her perseverance that has made her business a success. “No amount of workshops can prepare you for real world experience. In the end, I learned from trying, failing, and trying again.”

Check out these additional tips on balancing business skills with business complexity. What has worked for you and your business?

How to Handle Business Complexity

A common issue for small business owners is the relationship between business skills or management capacity and the complexity of the business.

If you start a business slowly, you may be able to handle everything yourself. If you only have one or two products or a limited customer/client base, your systems can be quite simple. But…

Are you financially sustainable?
Can you generate enough capital or cash flow to reach break-even?
Is the business profitable?

To create a self-sufficient business, you may have to scale up or increase your business’ complexity. And as you do so, your business skills and management capacity must keep pace. Getting this balance right is an on-going issue. To grow the small business, things get complicated… perhaps more than you can manage well.

Is it better to wait until you have all the skills to handle the increased complexity?
Do you go ahead and grow now and hope that you will develop the skills “on the fly” to be successful and sustainable?
Should you hire someone with more expertise to help you?

To manage your business’ increasing complexity, it is essential to focus on these six key areas:

1. Pay attention to the your weak links.

Your lack of skills as a small business owner in any key area of your business (management, operations, finances or marketing) can limit your success. There is a good chance you already know your areas of weakness. Cash flow management? Operational systems? Managing others? Take the time to identify a key weakness and make it a strength. (Think about a simple SWOT analysis.)

2. Improve your own business skills now.

Find the help you need NOW before your current knowledge limits your business. This may mean taking a class, reading a book, following relevant blogs, finding a peer mentor, or working with a business adviser or coach. The key is to put aside some regular time (every day, week or month) for your personal education.

3. Bring in others with the skills you need.

Being a small business owner does not mean that you have to know how to do everything yourself or that you have to do it all alone. Often the smartest approach is to hire someone who can do a particular business task better than you. This could be an outside professional or an employee with skills in the specific area of need, such as a bookkeeper to help you manage cash flow, or an employee good at sales. (It may only be a short-term need until your internal systems improve.)

4. Take a leadership role.

You may have started your business because you love making your product. But to create a successful business you may need to hire someone else who can make the product at a cheaper price. This could be an employee that works directly under your supervision, or an outside manufacturer or co-packer. (See these six tips when planning to hire employees and step into a leadership position.)

5. Put good systems in place.

It is challenging to take on larger projects, additional clients or more employees if you don’t have clear (and documented) systems. It is hard to hire someone else to help you if you need to take a lot of time to show them how to do the work because it is all in your head instead of written down. Without good systems, it is also harder to take a break!

6. Don’t stop planning.

Growing a business can sometimes feel like a set of spiral movements around and around—seemingly sending you one place and then another. Yet your business challenges and your careful responses to those challenges can create a great foundation for growth. A solid business plan can also help you predict and prepare for the complexities ahead. Remember, planning isn’t a one-time thing. It helps you to take the pulse of your business—over and over again. So, take the time to identify your weaknesses, challenges and opportunities and create a plan to take your business to the next level.

At Paul Terry & Associates, we work with many small businesses that are confronting the tension between management capacity and business complexity. Some clients are eager to grow their businesses but feel stuck, unsure how to reach the next level or increase sales given current skills or resources. Some clients are struggling to keep up with the demand for their products/services. Using an action planning approach, we work with small business owners to assess the current situation and create a road map to reach their goals. Our goal is to help clients prepare for the road ahead, manage the increasing complexities, and build businesses that are profitable and sustainable for the long term.

Strength In Numbers

September 17, 2013
Current Climate for Small Business, Money, Trends in Small Business
PTA
1 Comment

Raising money for an emerging or expanding small business is usually a necessity and “bootstrapping” (pulling yourself up from your personal resources only) is often not possible after the initial launch stage. Finding money has typically meant visiting banks, knocking on every friendly door you can think of, and asking your family for help.

In a recent post I mentioned some local funding resources and a couple of online tools for raising capital. These days, using internet tools to solicit funds from the community or find potential investors is a popular (and often quite successful) alternative to the traditional means of raising small business capital. New business owners can now secure start-up or expansion capital with a little bit of support from a lot of people. “Crowdfunding” is really a strength in numbers strategy.

There are many online crowdfunding platforms to choose from and sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo are just the tip of the iceberg. Each one is different and some may only be a good fit if you meet certain criteria.

Many of these platforms can’t be used to solicit loans or offer financial returns or equity to supporters. They are essentially tools to get “grants” from friends, family and your wider community. You can offer small thank you gifts or perks in exchange for their financial support (such as a t-shirt branded with your company logo or an invite to a “members-only” event related to your business). These little offerings can inspire people to give, even in small amounts.

With the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act (JOBS Act), which President Obama signed into law last year, there may soon be changes to the crowd-funding landscape. The Securities and Exchange Commission is in the process of finalizing and implementing rules on a provision of the Act that could make it possible for people to use crowd-funding platforms to raise investment capital from “Main Street” investors.

In the meantime, there are a number of online sites that can be used to target accredited investors or to secure a loan. Fundable is geared toward small business start-ups who can choose to offer rewards to their backers or equity to accredited investors in exchange for funding. CircleUp is an equity-based crowd-funding platform that focuses on angel investments in consumer product and retail companies. EquityNet, which calls itself “the original crowd-funding platform,” is specifically designed for entrepreneurs seeking equity capital or who are looking for loans, grants and access to a network of business supporters. Prosper and more recently, Kiva Zip, make it possible for entrepreneurs and small business owners to secure peer-to-peer loans.

Pay-in-advance is another strategy for raising a little capital from a lot of people. Similar to the CSA concept where eaters pay a farmer in the spring for a season of vegetables, Slow Money has created a service called Credibles, specifically designed for small, sustainable food-related businesses, which enables supporters to pre-pay for goods and services.

With all of the crowdfunding sites out there (according to industry estimates there are currently over 500 active crowdfunding platforms!), how do you figure out the right option for you? To start, Inc Magazine has a great flow chart to help you find the best fit among 22 crowdfunding platforms and this Forbes.com blog post gives a quick break-down on the pros and cons of the top six crowdfunding sites.

A crowd-funding campaign is not only about getting the money you need for a small business start-up or expansion, it’s about the opportunity to grow your customer or client base. Through the crowd-funding process you are developing a community of ambassadors for your business—people who like your business or business idea, who support your campaign, and who will spread the word to their friends. The crowd-funding approach can strengthen your business in more ways than just your bottom line.

photo credit: Arkansas Community Foundation (http://www.arcf.org)

Business skills and lessons learned

Do your business skills match your business’ complexity?

Elizabeth Leu
Fiddlesticks