Just as cars need regular maintenance after long use, business owners should also conduct self-checks after being in business for a while.
Is the current situation what you want? Is the current business scale, structure, operational status, stability, and development direction what you want? Has it exceeded your early plans? Or is it basically in line with your ideal plan? Or has it deviated, even to the point where you are dissatisfied?
Is there still joy in the business? Doing business also has its joys: interest in the product or project, confidence in the goals, satisfaction from successful project operations, the joy of receiving performance and profits, the honor of leading peers, the sense of responsibility in fulfilling social obligations, and the achievement of solving customer problems. Do these joys still exist? Or, conversely, have various troubles and problems brought more aversion? Like a marriage, after the sweetness of the honeymoon, have you started to feel disdain and regret?
Are your energy, time, and expertise sufficient? You are not a superman or a jack-of-all-trades. Dealing with business requires a certain amount of time, energy, and corresponding professional skills, and even a certain level of physical strength. Do you possess all of these? Can you handle them all?
If it's enough today, will it be enough tomorrow? Energy, time, and expertise may be sufficient today, and you can still easily handle the business. But from a developmental perspective, will it be enough tomorrow? If things continue to develop, what will be lacking? To what extent? Should you start to strengthen, compensate, or seek other solutions in advance?
Do you want to extricate yourself from specific execution tasks? When a business first starts, the boss has to be a jack-of-all-trades and do everything themselves. However, once the business begins to scale, some routine operational tasks should not be done by the boss alone; they can be delegated to employees. Then there are two questions: first, are there suitable employees to take over these routine operational tasks; second, have corresponding work processes and standards been established?
Balance between business scale and quality of life When doing business, of course, you want to make it big. But what is the ultimate purpose of doing business? On a grand scale, it's to create social value and promote human progress. More realistically, it's to increase financial returns and improve personal quality of life. Quality of life has two dimensions: one is material life—having a house, a car, buying名牌 freely, traveling the world—this is simple and not hard to achieve; the other is spiritual life—being relaxed, fulfilled, and joyful—this might be a bit more difficult. Not to mention life matters, but the various troubles and problems in business constantly damage the boss's spiritual quality of life.
After all, people must first live, then do business. You can't invest all your energy and time in business. You need to take care of your family and have personal hobbies. As you age, it's inevitable to return to family, life, and yourself. However, this may create some conflicts and contradictions with the continuously expanding business scale. So, balancing business scale and quality of life is another issue to consider.
- Employing people Certainly, you need to employ people. The growth of most businesses is based on the growth of the employee team. Even if you don't need employees today, you will in the future. However, the difficulty of employing people far exceeds that of regular business operations. The complexity, concealment, and variability of human nature cannot be solved by a set of management and assessment systems, nor by simply distributing more money.
From a positive perspective, employees help the company create value, replicate the boss's operational work, and, in simple terms, help the boss make money by taking on more execution tasks. However, employees also have another side: they might be there to help the boss spend money, that is, consuming company resources, wasting costs, and driving away customers. In a sense, poor performance and low profits in a company are largely due to employees. The money wasted by employees each year can exceed the boss's profits. Moreover, some employees steal the company's core technology, take away the company's customers, start their own businesses, or jump to competitors and work against the old employer.
Of course, when employees first join the company, they don't intend to harm the boss. They are good at first and want to work hard. But why do so many problems start to appear later? Whether it's unwillingness or inability to work, in the end, the blame likely falls on the boss. So, on the issue of employing people, shouldn't the boss also examine their management thinking and management behavior?
As a private business owner, I have operated a family-owned distribution company for many years, during which I also served as a business manager and trainer in several manufacturing companies. My research focuses on the internal management of small and medium-sized private enterprises, with main topics including personnel management, cost control, management backend setup, and the integration of demobilized military personnel into private enterprises. I have continuously broken down over 400 topics related to internal management of private enterprises and have kept updating materials and solutions.
-END-