I’m certain we can all relate the to saying “it’s hard to work both in your business and on your business”.

At some point during a businesses lifetime it becomes important to examine just how well your business is operating. This can be difficult when you are a business owner who is heavily involved in the day to day details of running your business. It can be difficult to find the time to sit back and take a large scale view of your business, but I can’t emphasise enough the importance of doing so.

The 2 questions you need to answer are

1. What are all the moving pieces that together make my business (people, equipment, suppliers, processes etc)

2. How well are they working together.

Why are these questions so important? Well as a business grows you will find that some of the processes that you had in place initially won’t scale well. For example, a manual data entry process may work well whilst your business and sales volumes are small, but as your business gets bigger and the demands on your staff grow you simply won’t have the time for a manual process and will need to look at opportunities to automate the process.