“Promote yourself to CEO!” I’m always exhorting Business Group members. Too many of us run our companies from a manager’s or supervisor’s perspective. We’re there in the trenches, directing our people, doing lots of little jobs ourselves. We work long hours — sometimes evenings and weekends. We work this hard because we’re growing our businesses, and we know we have to put in the sweat equity.
But this gets old! “I have to wear a nametag so my kids will recognize me!” complained one business owner. We see ourselves heading toward burnout; we can’t possibly work this way indefinitely.
You miss opportunities. With your head down, running the day-to-day operation, you’re not paying attention to the big picture. You miss windows of opportunity opening, strategic alliances beckoning, and threats peeking over the horizon. Your company has no chief executive. Your company’s growth and profitability are held back because you neglect being presidential.
But you can’t promote yourself to president unless you have a strong manager in place. Managing the day-to-day operation cannot be ignored. If you don’t have someone in place, you must do it yourself.
Good managers are expensive—and overhead! Whether you call it general manager, operation manager, or whatever, this person can cost you 80k to 100k to 150k per year. And as everyone in a professional service firm knows, top managers aren’t billable to clients. Their pay is overhead. This fact alone keeps many small business owners from hiring a general manager. You just can’t stand to hire this “non-productive” person. You forget, of course, that this pulls you—whose time is even more valuable—into the top manager’s position and away from being president.
How can you justify spending $100k? Sure you need this person, but where does this $100k come from? Here’s a story: a growing professional service firm will soon have ten highly paid technicians in the field working with customers. With every new technician hired, the owner’s scheduling and oversight responsibility increases, He’s tearing his hair out, and the job isn’t getting done well.
I asked him, would a good operations manager be able to improve productivity by an average of $10,000 per technician per year? Heck yes! was his answer. By better scheduling, better job selection, billing for all the work done, handling change orders properly, upselling the customers, training to improve skills, etc. All of a sudden, the $100k didn’t sound so daunting.
You get to become president. Most important, this manager frees you up to focus on business development, handling the most challenging projects, watching overall performance.
You deserve not to work so hard. Your new manager also allows you to take more time off. More time for family, more vacations, more time for your avocation, hobbies, or community service. More time for watching the waves and clouds!
More time or more money? As your business grows and profits, you can choose to pay yourself more and more. Or you can buy time off by hiring really good help who can run the business sin your absence. Your goal: hire people good enough—perhaps even better than you—and charge them with taking care of your business, so that you have free time AND a growing, more profitable business.
Bigger vision. If you are like me, you’ll use some of this free time to envision ways to make your business more exciting and add more value to your customers. Your employees—including your managers—will appreciate you because your visions transform into a more exciting and secure business track for them as well.
This is the glory and joy of running a successful small business—with Growth, Profitability, and Ease.
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If you are thinking, “Yeah, that sounds good but it wouldn’t work for me,” I challenge you to call me.
Mike Van Horn
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