Small Business Management: 63 Things to Manage NOW

As an entrepreneurial small business owner or CEO, small business management covers a wide
swath of your responsibilities. Some consider it managing the finances; some consider it managing the people; some consider it managing the strategy; and some consider it a combination of all the management headaches, heartaches, problems and challenges of day to day operations.

For our purposes, let’s re-frame small business management as the management of priorities and focus areas. As a small business owner or CEO, at any given moment in time, your priorities might fall into one of three categories: People problems, Process problems, and Profit problems.

People problems come in all shapes and sizes, but here’s a starter list so you can probe them more intelligently with your team:

1. Recruiting top talent
2. Retention of top talent
3. Employee engagement
4. Recognition and reward
5. Staff utilization
6. Leadership
7. Teamwork
8. Communication
9. Coaching
10. Collaboration
11. Succession
12. Silos and turf wars
13. Gossip, gab and the grapevine
14. Delegation
15. Micromanagement
16. Perfectionism
17. Negativity
18. Entitlement
19. Arrogance
20. Complacency

Process problems show up as inefficiencies, gaps, missed opportunities, too much wasted time or effort, too many steps, too much waste, too much bureaucracy or paperwork or too many layers between customer and company.

There are entire industries built around business process innovation and a handful of fads from the 1950’s to the 1990’s didn’t help – the total quality movement, business process re-engineering, outsourcing, insourcing, rightsizing, you name it.

Let’s cut to the chase and catalog a brief list of potential sources of process problems that you may want to discuss with your team in order to get their attention focused on the desired OUTCOME of improving your bottom line.

1. Accounting
2. Billing
3. Call Centers
4. Contracting
5. Customer Service
6. Delivery
7. Distribution
8. Engineering
9. Facility management
10. Finance
11. Information Systems
12. Innovation
13. Inventory management
14. Manufacturing
15. Marketing
16. Operations
17. Payroll
18. Product development
19. Regulatory compliance
20. Research and development
21. Sales
22. Strategic planning
23. Workforce diversity

Profit problems come in many shapes and sizes. Often placed at the end of a chain reaction of internal and external variables (where your people and processes come into play), when you talk about solving your profitability problems, the outcomes almost always end up with YOU using the following “so that” phrases:

1. So that we sell more…
2. So that we sell more often…
3. So that we sell at full price…
4. So that we avoid discounting…
5. So that we open new markets…
6. So that we expand our product line…
7. So that we cut costs…
8. So that we manufacture and distribute more efficiently…
9. So that we speed up time to market…
10. So that we cross-sell…
11. So that we up-sell…
12. So that we open new channels…
13. So that we raise prices…
14. So that we boost our margins…
15. So that our per unit cost goes down…
16. So that we franchise…
17. So that we license…
18. So our stock price goes up…
19. So our revenues increase…
20. So we conserve more cash…

Use these 63 checkpoints and you’ll instantly be better able to isolate your small business management issues – and you’re also much more likely to be able to identify the “problem behind the problem” and get to the root cause of your current challenge more quickly and easily.

Do THAT and your business will become both easier to manage in the short term and much more profitable in the long term

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