It’s a great achievement to take a business idea and to turn it into a saleable product or service. To then build a sustainable business is another amazing feat. And when you reach sustainability, when survival is no longer the prime objective, all eyes turn to growth; and that, against all expectations, is when the SME business and its owners face their greatest challenge!
Growth means size and size means complexity. No longer can you do everything, some things need to be delegated and that means you need staff, who tend to bring with them a whole bundle of trouble. The human dimension introduces health and safety issues, employment law and a responsibility to make sure there are enough toilet rolls in the lavatory!
Of course your employees need proper tools to do the job; so you have to buy and maintain all kinds of equipment from mobile phones to laptops, coffee machines to angle grinders. That newly acquired equipment needs to work properly, otherwise your investment in people is lost to inefficiency and downtime. How much work does your office do when the e-mail goes down?
Even with the staff and the equipment you get to the point where you simply can’t do everything in house with your own team. You need help and help means suppliers and subcontractors. With the introduction of outside suppliers you begin to lose control over what happens in your own business. Instead you start to depend on people outside your own four walls.
Over time you hand over more and more of your business needs to others so that your supply chain, once your domain, slowly becomes less yours as the months creep by. But if one of your critical external suppliers fails, by definition, so does your ability to service your customers; something of a worry, especially if your suppliers are 5,000 miles away in India or China!
The reality is that many SME owners are experiencing the same problems. Customers demand more for less and the operating challenges for the SME continue to increase. Margins are being squeezed and all the while you’re expected to gear up and up to service a customer’s every need.
But what can you do? There must be some people out there, who have a reasonable and genuine interest in your business; who at the end of the day want you to do well. Yes, of course there are and they are called STAKEHOLDERS, and there are plenty of them. But sometimes even they seem like a double edged sword.
Investors, bankers and shareholders love your business, but they want profits, interest payments and dividends; and no bumps in the road. The government wants you to be bold and brave, to do well for the good of the country. Who can blame them when 97% of UK businesses have less than 50 employees? SME rules for UK plc! Oh, but you don’t mind clambering over half a tonne of red tape whilst you’re being bold and brave do you?
Professional advisers (you know who you are) want fees, fees and fees. They get what they can and quietly call it ‘value billing’ (in other words they bill what they think they can get away with). Some of them even charge for time on the loo as ‘thinking time’!
And of course beneath all of this confusion lies you, the SME business owner, fighting to get on and make progress. The original buzz of the idea, the Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’ battle in the marketplace, has been replaced by the hassles and issues of a growing SME.
You know you need to improve efficiency because that way your profits increase and you get the return you deserve. A business strategy would be good too, especially when it comes to really driving that business growth and developing plans that might let you exit your business on the terms you deserve. And you would like to do all this without taking too much risk. You don’t want to see all your effort disappear through a disastrous fire, damage to your reputation, litigation, inadequate insurance, poor investment decisions or something equally unhealthy.
But is it possible to improve efficiency, develop strategy and improve risk management in an SME business?
Almost certainly yes; but it requires the ability to take a step back and survey your business, how it operates, its environment and its aspirations. You could for example, search the market, gather together the finest experts, pay the finest fees and receive the finest lengthy reports on all aspects of your business performance. Then, after a few weeks of disclaimer reading and complex report analysis, you should have some kind of handle of what you need to do when it comes to efficiency, strategy and risk. But just putting all the jigsaw pieces together and picking out the really juicy bits might be a bit tricky.
That’s why we formed Value Generation and our SME-assist service. We recognise that growing SME businesses value sound advice, by people with experience and at a price that is affordable.
SME-assist has been brought together by people who really understand and empathise with SME businesses. We are driven by two aims:
- to give each SME business the efficiency, strategy and risk management help it needs to achieve its objectives
- to earn a fair living providing top notch SME support at a fair price
Call us, email us or write to us. We treat all our customers as friends and business partners. You will be amazed at our passion for your business.
And you will be impressed at the opportunity the SME-assist service will provide. |