Are You the Bottleneck in Your Business?

As a business owner, you’ve probably acquired many skills and are wearing many hats in your business.  While that’s admirable, your versatility and capability can often lead to slower growth for your company.  This happens when you become the bottleneck.   Here are five areas to check to help you answer the question – Are you the bottleneck in your business?

 

Do You Manage Everything? 

It’s definitely good to keep tabs on everything that’s going on in your company, but once your company grows, you may find yourself inundated with information.  Instead, try managing by exception.

You don’t really need to know everything that’s going on in your company; you really only need to know when things do not go smoothly, or when there are exceptions.  Design a set of management reports that allow you to see these exceptions easily without having to wade through a bunch of information.  This will save you time and help you focus where your expertise and skills are needed most.

Are You the Production Bottleneck?

Probably the most common small business mistake is working in your business instead of on your business.  If you’re still generating billable work or working too much in production, it should be work that no one on your staff can do and work that requires a very high skill set.  Otherwise, it should be delegated to staff.  And if you don’t have staff, then they need to be hired.  The Goal, by Eliyahu Goldratt is  great resource for identifying and eliminating production bottlenecks.

Not Doing Enough Marketing?

As a business owner, you are the key person that will be bringing in business, forging partnerships, and creating new opportunities for revenue.  If you spend your limited time doing other things, marketing often goes undone.  Not marketing enough can dry up the pipeline, cause cash flow problems, and get a company in trouble really fast.

Being the Only One Who Knows How To Do Something

When employees have to wait on you to show them how to do something, you can easily become the bottleneck in the process.  As you train each employee, do it only once by writing procedures for the task as you train.  That way, you never have to train anyone on that task again.  The newly trained employee can show others, and you can be out of the loop, freed up for more important things.

Do You Have to Review and Approve Everything Your Employees Do?

A great employee is one who is empowered to make as many decisions as possible without further layers of supervisions getting involved.  Often, a decision can be “cookbooked” so that the decisions can be pushed down the lower layers of management.  Take a look to see if any of the decisions that you are making can be documented and pushed down so that you don’t have to get involved.  That way, your employees will have the right balance of authority in order to do their jobs.

Results

When you can clear up the bottlenecks in your business, your firm will be able to grow even faster.  How did you measure up on these five high-bottleneck areas?

Share your questions and comments with us!  We’d love to hear from you!