Operationally Speaking

Beyond The E-Myth is the entrepreneurial small business owner's clear, precise, and compelling overview of their main job: inventing, building, and launching a company with the power to “scale”–to grow beyond the “Company of One” in a straightforward, eight-step process.

Gerber's goal was make the job of building a small business easy–for every man or woman struggling to get it right. He cuts to the chase: A company is a product to be sold. Build it right, and you will sell it. Build it wrong, and you won’t. Most small business owners won’t.

Conflict is a part of life, no way around it. But conflict is like fire. Fire can heat your house and cook your food. It can also burn your house down. Conflict has two faces: it can be your friend, yet it can also decidedly work against you. Consider this:

1) All relationships involve conflict because there are no two people who agree on everything.

2) The problem is not the conflict itself, but how people relate to one another when they are in conflict.

3) Conflict is good and necessary because it elicits different points of view, clears the air, and makes it possible to resolve extraordinary complex issues.

Conflict becomes counter-productive & destructive when it turns personal. That is, when it begins to tap into the stories each one of us carries deep within our brains. Because of this, we must be vigilant to keep it centered externally on the mission we are trying to accomplish (paint the bathroom a certain color, move the corporation toward its desired future, and so on).

The key to creating a sustainable business is for the owner to take themselves out of the day to day operations of the business. To do this, the business owner must learn how to make themselves a passive owner, meaning they are operationally irrelevant in their business.

To succeed, one must learn how to delegate, create systems that support the company and its operations, and have a dashboard that shows what will be happening in the company in the future. To do this, the business owner must learn how to make themselves a passive owner, meaning they are operationally irrelevant in their business.

To succeed, one must learn how to delegate, create systems that support the company and its operations, and have a dashboard that shows what will be happening in the company in the future.

How you move beyond the role of the solo entrepreneur and into the role of a team leader? How you need to evolve your sales and marketing processes as you transition from 1 employee to 20? How you move from working “in the business” to working “on” the business?

The physical, emotional, spiritual and psychological health of the leaders and the people in your company can be related in part to the stress that is happening within the organization. We will be discussing how the lack of profitability and systems can induce stress and what you can do to reduce that stress.

When we endure chronic stress for extended periods of time, there is a physiological effect on our body. This includes waking up at 2 or 3 am with our minds racing and not being able to get back to sleep. This sleep deprivation leads to a lack of energy which we try to compensate with an increase in calories, sugar, salt and caffeine. The cycle continues with blood sugar issues that affect our moods which in turn lead to increased dysfunction in our work and family environments.

Every business has to be heathy AND smart. But, man, healthy is hard! It's time to learn how to stop chasing symptoms. Instead, we've gotta treat the root cause of dismissed organizational health. Being healthy means getting smarter. You'll be both, just pay attention!

It is unlikely you would build a house without a budget, and equally rare that you wouldn’t track those expenses. So why do we go on the journey to build a business, and not track metrics and performance …. and most importantly communicate these Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) throughout the organization? At Cases By Source we have developed quantitative performance measures which we believe accurately predict future success. They drive behaviors, and in turn results. Numbers are part of our vision, they tell the story of where we are going.

To operate that way, we aggregate many data sources, and convert this data to information that we can make decisions upon. Daily, weekly, and monthly KPI’s are tracked on a rolling 12 month basis to see trends that the business can react and adapt to – and to pivot when necessary. We are a metrics-driven organization; how we use these numbers is a critical element of how we drive Cases By Source into the future.

Sir Richard Branson once said: "No company can train its front-end people to handle every situation, but you can strive to create an environment in which they feel at ease ‘doing as they would be done by’.” Accountability, seamless flow of information and communication of objectives and results are the finance department’s contribution to creating this environment. Operationally speaking, everyone contributes and expects these attributes of their environment, especially in middle-market companies.

I will reveal a few ways for middle-market companies to implement a participatory “operational” finance function to harness employees’ natural expectations of accountability, being informed, having clear objectives and knowing the results. Getting this right helps maintain everybody's pride and sense of ownership, thus strengthening the environment and culture of your firm.

As family businesses move from one generation to the next, they often tumble from a place of beauty & strength to one consumed with family infighting, conflict, blame and unhappiness. A question like our title suggests is a symptom of a deep breakdown in communication, business alignment as well as family harmony. When the evolution has reached this point, the business suffers, the family’s wealth suffers, the family suffers, and each individual suffers.

Why does this happen? How does it happen? And most importantly how can family business leaders make sure this does NOT happen on their watch. What can they do to prepare for a successful transition and business continuation ? What kind of Governance Structures and Succession Planning? How should conflicts be resolved? What critical competencies are most needed?

A bad hire is not just tough on the team —it can also be very costly to the company. The average cost typically falls between 30%-200% of that hire’s first year’s salary! If you add in productivity and lost opportunities, morale implications, turnover and recruiting costs, the price tag keeps going up.

We show a few ways to avoid the costs associated with poor hiring decisions by recognizing the challenges at different steps of the process. I unveil for you the most common pitfalls in the talent acquisition process and their impact on businesses of all sizes. Let’s take the guesswork out of your hiring practices with the strategies by using a few tools and tactics to find, assess, acquire and onboard the most relevant and qualified talent for your team and business needs.