There's a well-known expression in business ownership, and it says something along the lines of you should work on your business and not in your business.

Quite simply, that means you want to spend your time on the most high-leverage activities for business growth and optimisation. What you don’t want to be stuck doing is running the day-to-day operational side in the long term. 

This may seem like a lofty ideal. Often business owners fall into the trap of thinking, if I know the business-as-usual activities the best, then it’s the most time efficient for me to continue running operations. While this approach is reasonable, it doesn’t allow you to focus on top-level strategy, the plans to grow your business or improve its functional performance. 

So, what’s the best way to break that cycle? It can be broken down into three parts. 

Before we dive in, keep in mind that I’m not telling you to let business operations slide in quality, but instead to work in your business until you’ve developed a deep understanding of how it functions - then you can write process manuals to pass onto employees as you move higher up the chain. 

Step 1: Arrange

Before you can go ahead and spend more time on your top-level strategy (and hopefully get some time back for yourself) you need to arrange your business in a way where everyone knows what needs to be done, and the correct procedure in which to do it. 

This means ensuring you have solid process manuals for the way your business is currently run. It can be fairly easy to build on these as your business evolves, but for now, they’re the foundation from which you can hand over operational management to your staff. These manuals should be your ‘source of truth’ when it comes to carrying out various functions. 

A good process manual should eliminate two things - any:

• Ambiguity; and

• Loose discretion.

Define roles and responsibilities and how processes run so that they are largely uniform. I’ve even found a more in-depth guide to writing an operations manual should you want to delve into this step further. 

Step 2: Improve

To reiterate, it’s easy to get caught up in business-as-usual, but have you ever stopped to consider whether your processes are as effective as they could be? 

I’ll give you credit that you have at some point, but maybe you never found the time to implement those improvements. 

Give yourself an hour or so to think and strategise (ideally make this part of your weekly schedule), by reflecting on what’s working and what experiments you could try to see if you can improve your operations. 

Here are some questions to get you started:

• Is there anything standing in the way of my customers getting the best experience as possible?

• Have there been any recurring problems in the business that I have yet to address? 

• Can I make X process faster by testing different approaches?

• Can I simplify X process? 

• What business processes should I give more attention to? 

This brainstorming session is crucial to the following step - the implementation and measurement. 

Step 3: Implement & Measure 

As the famous management consultant, Peter Drucker said, “what gets measured, gets managed.”

If you go ahead and implement the improvements you’ve come up without any way to determine whether they’re working or not, it’s like heading off to someone’s house without their address. Great intentions, but not worthwhile. 

What measurement might look like in practice, if you’re, say, retailing in a brick-and-mortar store, is does the total number of sales increase in September after you added another POS machine to reduce customer waiting time, compared to when you only had one in August? 

Luckily for you, there are a range of measurement tools available to the modern business owner, especially if you use online channels. If you use social media as a marketing channel, then you can find a range of performance metrics without even having to leave the platform, from the number of views and clicks your content has to the number of followers you’ve gained over the past 30 days. 

If you built your company website on a no-code platform, such as Shopify, Wix, Squarespace or Webflow, then you can expect to find analytics as part of their offerings, with the ability to connect your social channels. 

Additionally, if you have a website, make sure you have these set up:

• User Behaviour Analysis: Google Analytics

• Organic Search Performance: Google Search Console

Or, even better, I’m always open to running you through the options available to your unique business. Let’s book a time to continue this discussion with a 45-minute discovery call.