One of the most important things to decide early on in your business life is what you want out of going into business and working for yourself.

If your first and only answer is “lifestyle”, then I call bullshit. You just don’t want some prick of a boss telling you what to do, especially when you think you know more than they do…

There are a few things that you might be able to obtain out of running your own business, and to get to any of these, there is going to be some heartache along the way.

Most businesses kick off with the owner wearing many hats:

• Technician (doing the work)
• Business Development Manager – marketing and sales
• Accounts Receivable and Payable
• All admin functions
• Business strategist
• Customer Service
• Human Resources…and the list goes on…

Money

If your main driver is money, then great, go for gold, but bear in mind that you are probably going to have to work like a mongrel and / or take on a fair amount of risk to make this happen.

At first, you are likely to be taking on many of the roles mentioned above. It is going to be important to map out an ideal organisation chart – as if you had all the resources you could possibly need. Break them up into the various functions, so that as funding and scale allows, you will be able to quickly identify what jobs can be removed from your portfolio by a particular hire. Work out what is causing your day the most grief, and this is the preferred next hire.

If you want to take on some risk by buying an already operating business (a going concern), or pumping money into a startup and looking to scale fairly quickly, the above task should still be undertaken. Map out the functions within the business, setting out whose responsibility they currently are, and whose responsibility they should ultimately be.

Key priorities when taking over management of a business are:

• Identify bottlenecks within the business, who has too much on their plate
• Identify where there is no redundancy for a particular task, and immediately look to train someone else in the area if possible. If not possible, highlight this on your map and consider who this might be in the future
• Identify key employees, whose local knowledge means that if they were to leave or get hit by a bus then this would cause the most harm to the business. Have another employee get in their head ASAP to share the knowledge
• Make checklists and procedures reducing to writing as many key tasks as possible

While money is not everything, you are the one whose house is on the line every day. You are going to employ (more) people, you are going to provide goods and services to others at risk to yourself. If you are not making a living that meets your requirements, then go and get a job. It is going to be far less stressful.

Being your own boss

If the main driver of your decision to buy / start a small business is due to a bastard at work that you cannot get away from, just stop and think – should I just get another job??? This might be closer to a real solution to your problem.

As they say – the loneliest person in any business is the CEO – that applies whether the company is a large organisation, or an SME.

Being your own boss has some wonderful benefits relating to feelings of achievement, potential financial gains, employing Australians, but it is not all beer and skittles. Don’t think for a moment that you are going to have it all your way. Remember that you are the last person in the organisation to get paid, and all the jobs set out above are yours, unless you are paying someone else to do them.

Lifestyle considerations

It has a wonderful ring to it, doesn’t it – any way you put it – “CEO”, “Managing Director”, “General Manager”, all that great stuff, but it just isn’t that glamorous most of the time. You will be required to wear many different hats, particularly when kicking off, most of them not involving rolling in at 10.30, rolling out at 3pm and diving through piles of money Scrooge McDuck-style between those hours. There are going to be many times when you are going to be first in, last out, and doing whatever needs to be done to
make it happen.

Dreams of running the business from a 60 foot yacht in the Whitsundays are probably a ways off. You are more likely to be nicking away for a long weekend at best, taking your phone and laptop with you in case a customer thinks the world is going to end, and only you can magic up a solution.

If you work hard at ensuring there are redundancies within the business, that checklists and procedures are in place for all meaningful tasks, then you are on the right track to the possibility of achieving some lifestyle benefit. Having a centralised database of customers, suppliers, and all other relevant contacts can also assist. This does not need to be the most elaborate software program, a well set out spreadsheet or within your bookkeeping software will suffice for most SME’s until scale and cash flow
allows.

The other big thing is making sure you do communicate your movements to your customers and suppliers. If you take Wednesday afternoons off for your favourite pottery class, or take the whole month of January off to spend it with your kids, most people can deal with this, because for most of us we are not in an industry where someone will die if they do not get hold of you – however urgent the customer
might think their problem is. Just let everyone know in advance that you won’t be around, and where they should direct their enquiries, or what the cut off date is if they want an order / some work completed around that time.

Lifestyle benefits can definitely be achieved, but it is going to take hard work and discipline to get them.

So call me Jiminy Cricket!

If you find that your business is not making the money you expected, and you were making the same or better money as an employee without the hassles, then set yourself a time limit. Do everything in your power to improve the success of the business – push the marketing, make a tough decision on a long term staff member, cut costs where possible, engage an external party to appraise the business from the outside and ask them to provide firm but fair advice, shake things up – whatever you can think of. But set
a timeframe, and set a dollar budget or loss amount, and if it does not work out within the timeframe or budget, then call it in, do not keep flogging that dead horse. Take this advice and your family will thank me for it, and so will you in a year’s time.

In business, the tough decisions need to be made. Understand this and apply it in all areas of the business, including your own capabilities. A decision to exit your SME is not admitting defeat, although it might feel like it at the time. You had the balls to have a crack, too many others sit on the sidelines and talk shit about what they don’t know. Many people are wonderful, hard working, caring employees who are fantastic technicians, but bringing it all together and running an SME is just not for them. Return to the workforce all the better for the experience.