Every Business reaches the point where it pushes beyond the Owner’s comfort zone – the boundary within which the owner feels secure in his / her ability to control the environment. From our earlier blog, The Technician Eyes, the Technician Owner’s boundary is determined by how much he / she can do by themselves.
The Manager’s Eyes, The Manager Owner’s boundary is defined by how many technicians can be supervised effectively or how many subordinates he / she can organize into a productive effort. In our belief every single Business owners starts out running their Business with Technician eyes. When the business increases to the point beyond what they individually can deliver these newly minted Business owners jump right to Manager eyes of hiring more technicians to do the work and Managing them.
This phase of the Owner’s business is where a critical decision sneaks up. The Owner is busy, feels pinched, starts to hire more Technicians to do the work coming in and now the staffing problems, customer support issues, Client dissatisfaction with the “new” guys start, payroll fears, Business development to pay the guys all start to creep in. As the Technician Owner continue to run the business with Technician eyes focusing on the day to day how to solve issues the pressure mounts and the owner wants to do one of three things:
- Go for Broke
- Get Small Again
- Hang on for dear life
Very often the first thought is to hang on for dear life and start to think and act like a Manager trying to get the new hires on board, doing what they should to meet customer expectations. This typically is a problem because all the Owner is doing is shifting focus from individual contributor doing all the work to reverting to learned from past boss’s managerial behavior to be productive. Again this Owner is not thinking business but looking at what has happened in past and how to fix it moving forward. Sounds smart but this ends up only frustrating the Owner who has not built the business foundations, process, methods, culture, policies, practices, etc. to make the business work.
It is this stage of the Business Owner’s life cycle, that Hanging on for dear life happens, then slowly morphs to get small again. Getting small means Technician eyes, comfort zone and control can happen.
Now Business Owner’s can have More Control, More Revenue, More Time for themselves and More profits if during this crunch phase or before they seek guidance on how to set up their Business for success or being as large as they want vs. being what they can handle individually. It is time for the Owner to learn how to run the Business using Entrepreneur eyes with the right balance of using Technician and Managerial eyes.
Next post we will focus on what are those Entrepreneur eyes.