Business Mentor: Sooner or later you'll have to trust others

Q. I'm so busy I don't have time to expand my business. How can I find reliable staff to help me?

A. Howard Chaffey, from BridgesOne, replies:

Entrusting the health and growth of your business to anyone is often one of the most challenging tasks you will ever have to face.

After all, this is your baby, and only a very lucky minority have not had to fight tooth and nail at times to keep the dream going.

There is no way around the fact that in today's business environment almost everyone has too much to do and not enough resources.

The paradox for most entrepreneurs is that the very need for self-destiny and the desire to build the best mousetrap - whatever that may be - require determination, energy, focus, vision and control.

This control you now have to delegate to your staff, maybe even to those you don't feel are reliable.

But even those who don't seem reliable may respond to a different approach, especially if you can really give them the freedom to make some mistakes and to spend some of your hard-earned money running the part of the business they help you with.

After all, a little time and energy spent on someone you already employ will in most cases be a lot less expensive and time-consuming than trying to find someone better who will then need to get to know you and your ways.

The key to the problem is to try something different and involve the people it will affect in the process.

Two examples for you to consider include using the Business Mentor Programme from Business in the Community, or if you can afford it, employ a business coach (All Black coach John Mitchell has one).

The coach/mentor approach may help you to see yourself in a different light and most who use it highly recommend the approach.

Another approach could be Sir Richard Branson's philosophy: "Dare to be daft".

The one thing Branson and entrepreneurs such as Herb Kelleher, founder of Southwest Airlines, often have in common is a sense of foolishness.

Not just in the modern sense of 'daftness' as Branson puts it, but going back to the origins of the word: a need to provoke, challenge convention with a sideways point of view, a sense of fun and an originality of thinking that subverts hierarchy.

So you could try appointing someone as your right-hand person, either new to the organisation or perhaps from within it.

The corporate fool has the right to say all the things in meetings that no one in the system says: "Customers will hate that", "How boring will that make us look", "You must be joking - how old-fashioned is that", and all the non-political things needed to challenge the vested interest and risk-aversion that can creep into an organisation. They also have the ear of you, the owner.

You could even try a part-time person. It can be a powerful tool to break out of "business as usual" and help people to see that the customer is their new boss and, in the famous words of Jack Welch (paraphrased): If you spend too much time trying to please the boss, "you end up looking upward all the time, and that leaves you with your ass facing the customer" - or something like that.

* Email Howard Chaffey


* Send Mentor questions to: ellen_read@nzherald.co.nz Answers will be provided by Business in the Community's Business Mentor Programme.