Top 10 things I’ve learnt after almost 40 years in business

  1. Accept that you can’t do everything and you will never get it all done. You can then choose what gets done and what doesn’t and then pass on the excess to your team.  If they don’t know how to do it show and train them.
  1. As a tradesman myself, I was often hands on and valued working hard, however, if you want the business to work you have to find a way to change your beliefs. Open your mind to what you believe is true and allow outside comments and alternative beliefs into your life.  Test and measure different ways of doing things and just because it didn’t work first time doesn’t mean it has failed.  After all, Thomas Edison discovered over 3000 different ways of successfully not inventing the light bulb before his breakthrough to finding a successful way to do so.
  1. Use your time to do the highest value jobs. Pass on as many of your lower skill tasks to team members who are paid a lower hourly rate than you are.
  1. Employ people who are better than you. Whilst you can be very efficient in various aspects of your work, bring in specialists to focus on specialist jobs and develop yourself as a generalist.  Get to know a lot of general things about the business. Don’t Major in Minor things.
  1. Make sure you have the right kind of people in the right positions. Have a recruitment process that includes formal behavioural profiling so that you are not reliant on just gut instinct & check out references.
  1. Get rid of the bad apple in the cart. If they don’t want to play by your set of cultural rules don’t tolerate them. Help them to find another job.  Recruit slowly and sack quickly.
  1. Be fastidious in training your customers in paying you on time. Do not fear upsetting bad payers as they suck the energy from you, as well as starve the business of its life blood – CASH.
  1. You get the behaviour you tolerate. It’s always easier to talk yourself into keeping someone as the fear of having nobody seems worse.  My experience is the rest of the team usually rejoice and a common comment is ‘I’m amazed you didn’t do it sooner’
  1. Have a rolling 12 month P & L Budget, ensure you have a budget for the profit you intend to make.
  1. Cash is king. Have a minimum of 3 months rolling live cash flow projection and be sure you know where you are with your cash every day.

 

Chris Wharram