When it comes to successfully managing and running your own small business with pride, it takes more than efficiently managed finances and a healthy cash flow to make sure that things are going smoothly. While your business finances are vitally important to the overall health of your company – and at The Commercial Finance Group, we’re more than happy to help you with those matters – there’s a lot that goes into running your small business. More importantly, you’ll want to make sure that you’re running nothing less than a successful business.
Supporting Small Business Is Our Business
Our factor finance company at The Commercial Finance Group has a rich history of supporting small businesses around the United States and helping each business reach its full potential through our capital lending services. Given our support for countless small businesses and companies all across the nation, it only made sense to dedicate another blog post to some more helpful small business management tips and practices. Except for this time, it’s going to be a little bit different, because we’re actually going to focus on what not to do as a small business owner. After all, you’ve probably heard what you should do just about a million times, but how often are you told what not to do? We promise you that it isn’t opposite day, so be sure not to actually carry out what we go over in today’s blog post.
Don’t forget to learn more about our unique and signature approach to small business lending here at The Commercial Finance Group, and feel free to shoot us any questions before you dive into what not to do as a small business owner. And now, let’s take a good look.
Micromanagement
Try and keep your micromanagement to a minimum, or if possible, completely eliminate it altogether. Micromanagement is a classic manager-to-employee dynamic that tends to drive employees absolutely insane, causing them to grow ill feelings toward their boss. As it turns out, acting like you know what you are doing better than the person you actually hired to do that exact thing can be rather patronizing to your employee, and in certain cases, even degrading.
If you spent all of that precious time extensively interviewing and selectively hiring the best, top talent that you could find, then why throw your efforts down the drain by not trusting them to do their job? Depending on your business vertical and size, the chances are that the person that you hired for a certain position is way more qualified than you are at doing whatever their position entails. Hiring managers requires a lot of trust as well, and it can be hard to ‘hand over the reigns,’ so to speak, and let them take over doing managerial tasks. As a small business owner, your primary fit in this situation would be to delegate work, oversee (from a respectful distance), receive reports and make executive decisions when absolutely necessary. That’s it!
Great talent produces great results – it’s actually pretty simple. In most cases, micromanaging your valuable employees will only kill the process before it even has a chance to realize its full potential.
Failure To Trust Your Team
Related to micromanagement is the ability to trust the people you’ve hired to carry out their jobs and to carry them out well. By hiring an employee, what you’ve automatically communicated to the employee is that you’ve given them your vote of confidence, or trust. In other words, you believe in their abilities, their competence to execute their duties, and you believe that they have what it takes (or even more than what it takes) to be a core component of your valuable team.
The last thing that you want to do is police your workforce around and sabotage conversations between fellow coworkers unless you really want your employees not to like you. If you have a specific reason not to trust someone you’ve hired due to a specific violation, then that’s a different story, but if they’re doing their job well with no reason to believe otherwise, then let them do their job!
Never Praising Your Employees
Trust us; you don’t want to be making this mistake. While you shouldn’t necessarily be giving each of your employees a cookie every time they simply do their job, a simple compliment or a “well done!” here and there can really go a long way. Alongside reward systems – which offer tangible incentives that are assigned a concrete value – sometimes, the most valuable and appreciated rewards among employees can be intangible rewards like praise.
Don’t make the mistake of never expressing your heartfelt appreciation to your employees. Now, we’re also not saying that you should just suck up to them all of the time, either, but well-placed praise when your employees’ actions warrant it will definitely enhance morale and productivity in the workplace. Isn’t that what every business owner really wants, anyway?
Letting Your Ego And Emotions Call The Shots
Don’t lose hold of your rationality, no matter the situation! Thinking that everything is all good with your small business when it’s not can seriously be problematic, and sometimes even detrimental to an otherwise successful or remotely viable business. If you’re known to have a certain kind of temper or you just get easily flustered, keep that in mind, and consider having a third party nearby that can come over and help you rationalize a particular situation.
Focusing Too Much On The Process Instead Of The Results
Remember, as a small business owner, you’re mainly there to oversee the results, not dictate the entire process that your employees undergo in order to obtain said results. Of course, your decisions and suggestions should certainly be communicated with your management team at any given point along the way. Just make sure not to delegate work among your team and then constantly breathe down their necks along every single step of the procedure. Again, trust is a key component to getting great results from your employees and your business overall.
Destroying Your Employee’s Morale
Be kind to your employees and respect them. Basic respect is a given, but can often be overlooked when running a booming small business and looking for that much-needed small business funding. Just as there are many ways to encourage your employees and reward them for doing quality work, there are also even more ways to kill their morale and ultimately make them hate coming into work. Remember that employees are less actually less likely to leave a job and more likely to leave the people at a particular job. Excessive micromanagement and constant criticism are two of the biggest morale-killers that will suck the life out of your workforce.
Discouraging Innovation And Passion
Don’t constantly revert back to your old-school methods, especially if a new process that an employee came up with is more efficient or simply works better. Yet again, it takes time, persistence and commitment to form a solid crew that’s based on a healthy relationship complete with trust, respect, and work ethic. So, if and when you hit a speed bump or small obstacle in your delegation process as a business owner, don’t immediately throw in the towel and just go back to your old way of thinking. Conversely, try and explore what went wrong and see what needs to be changed in order to correct the problem at hand. Learn from the challenge, and take the necessary steps you need to take in order to get back on track.
Never Developing And Evolving As A Leader
Pretty much anyone can start a small business and be a business owner. But are you a business leader? The results of your business mean a lot more than your title. Strive to be a results-driven, critical-thinking motivator who’s not afraid to go back to the drawing board and rethink themselves. Nobody tends to remember the business owners who fail because they themselves are failures when it comes to leading. Another thing to keep in mind: no one ever blames the team for losing – they blame the coach and the administration, or in this case, the business owner. So don’t delude yourself into thinking that you can never improve and get better as a person and as a small business owner. How can you improve?
Expecting A Lot From A Little
Your employees are your most valuable assets, so treat them as such. Stop expecting your employees to constantly grind out the same efficient and stellar results for nothing or next-to-nothing in return. Incentivize them! Getting paid is an important extrinsic motivator, but there’s more that you can do to help motivate your workforce. We’ve covered rewards and incentives pretty extensively in today’s blog post, and for good reason. If you want your products, your staff, and your entire company to stand out and truly perform to the highest degree of excellence, start thinking about integrating a rewards system for your team.
We Can Handle Your Small Business Capital
We’ll leave the business ownership up to you, and you can take the above information with a grain of salt. But for optimizing your cash flow through receivable factoring and cash flow solutions that The Commercial Finance Group specializes in, our factoring company can help your small business get the funding it needs, and fast. Learn more about our business by getting in touch with us!
