The Big Picture - May 2014 - (Page 14)

business ++ management business management Breaking News: You're No Longer a Small Shop By Marty McGhie A s small businesses grow larger, a kind of internal struggle occurs. They find themselves battling to manage the day-to-day challenges that, in the past, may have been relatively easy to handle. In looking back at my own company, for example, I recall a time about 15 years ago when a few of us were trying to do it all - from sales and production to accounting, equipment, and more. We quickly realized, however, that we were getting burned out and our business was experiencing issues we had never seen before. At that point, we realized we were no longer a small business; we could no longer effectively manage everything ourselves. So we began to methodically promote/hire additional people with specific skills to help manage our growing business. Is your company at a point at which you need to change from a small-shop mentality to a big-business approach? If so, let's examine some of the indicators that you might experience as you're making this transition, and identify some ideas to help along the way. Has your company changed on you? First, let's define what "small shop" or "small business" means for our purposes. It doesn't really fit the government's definition of a small business. Rather, within our context, a small business is a company where one or two managers/owners manage the whole company. These folks are extensively involved in every aspect of the shop - they're making sales; they're on the production floor and shepherding jobs throughout the shop workflow; they're hiring, training, and firing; they're doing the billing MaRTy MCGHIE is VP finance/operations of Ferrari Color, a digital-imaging center with Salt Lake City, San Francisco, and Sacramento locations. He is a partner and director of Signs.com. marty@ferraricolor.com 14 THE BIG PICTURE may 2014 and the books; they're maintaining the plant and equipment, etc. They have extensive knowledge of just about every job produced. Virtually all decisions are made by that same manager or owner. In a small shop, everyone knows everything about what is going on. That is, until one day, when you realize that you actually don't - and can't - know everything. So how do you know when your company is no longer a small business? There are probably two different scenarios here. The first could be described as a "reactive" situation. You begin to see problems cropping up in your business that you never saw before. These might be quality issues with products. Maybe it's a problem with shipments missing deadlines or even personnel issues that you never seemed to have before. Even more dramatic might be losing a great customer to a competitor - and it takes you completely by surprise. In other words, you realize that your company has changed on you, and you're only now realizing that you haven't changed with it. A better situation would be a "proactive" one, which entails you initiating a forward-thinking plan of action. You devise a strategy that requires you to examine the areas of the business that will suffer as your business continues to grow. For example, if you are strong in managing the sales side of your company, then it's likely that the production side will struggle. Perhaps you realize that virtually every decision at every level is being passed up to you? Or if you find yourself out on the floor most of the day managing production, then you might not be paying enough attention to sales as your customer base grows. The idea here is an obvious one: Try to determine the areas where you need help before major problems occur. Managing your growth Once you come to the conclusion that you do indeed need additional resources to manage your growth, you'll then need to focus upon two areas: processes and people. From a process standpoint, as you grow you'll absolutely need to develop more processes to manage the jobs and the workflow in your shop, whatever your product may >35 http://www.Signs.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of The Big Picture - May 2014

The Big Picture - May 2014
Contents
InSight
Wide Angle
Up Front
Inside Output
Business + Management
Capturing Fine-Art Success
Think Ink
At the ‘Floor Front’
R+D
Explorer

The Big Picture - May 2014