The Many Hats of Small Business Owners
July 28th, 2006 by Matt InglotSmall business owners come from various fields with many different skillsets, but in this role they are all tasked with wearing far more hats than it’s reasonable to expect expertise in. Unfortunately the amount of time spent wearing each hat tends to be proportional to the amount of experience a particular business owner has in that area. Thus some small businesses have amazing tech, some have impecceable books, and others have brilliant marketing. Just as true is that some don’t take advantage of technology, some use napkins for bookkeeping, and others were built “expecting walk-in traffic”.
It’s not reasonable to expect to be able to ignore the facets of business that you don’t know much about and hope to compensate with a really great product or strong marketing. A great business succeeds in many areas because the owner(s) have taken the time to learn the additional skills or find great people who have them. It may seem like a daunting learning curve to start picking up accounting and marketing, but this is actually your opportunity to repeatedly increase profits, save time, and eliminate many levels of stress.
I was in high school when I first became interested in owning a business. I knew a lot about computers. I could fix them, build them, and make them do my evil bidding. Unfortunately I knew nothing about running a business so my computer sales & repair venture didn’t go very far. I progressed onto other ventures and after aquiring my fair share of lumps I developed more respect and seriousness for the business side of business. I started reading about marketing, business management, and more marketing. I expanded my horizons gradually to improving my sales skills, networking, and accounting. I can only say that each time I wished I had learned sooner and faster as the techniques I’ve picked-up have doubled and tripled my profits over and over again. Certainly worth the time and the learning materials cost, both of which are trivial compared to the rewards of knowing what you are doing.
As Tilted Pixel’s plans to grow into an office and fulltime staff begin to come to fruition I will now be shifting more time to learning how to be a great boss and revisiting the strategies of How to Bag an Elephant. With every stage in the life of a business there are new and exciting things to be learned and mastered.
When starting your business, regardless of what background you come from, take the time to fill in your skills gaps. One of the advantages of starting a business with somebody rather than hacking it alone is that you can find a partner or team whose skillsets are very different from yours. In fact if you are looking for serious VC funding you are going to have well-balanced management team whose competencies sum up to a great business mind. If this is a solo venture then don’t allow yourself to be intimidated by new areas. I always dreaded learning accounting, but now I can do my bookkeeping on my own and could even survive without accounting software doing the calculations for me. These skillsets can be picked-up in various ways. I’ve learned a lot from university courses, speakers, online resources, and books. They all have their place in the learning process so I wouldn’t recommend limiting yourself to one resource.
Some of the books that I’ve found particularly useful are:
- Bag the Elephant: How to Win and Keep Big Customers
- Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got
- Getting Things Done
- Selling 2.0
Got something to say? Leave a response to this post.
del.icio.us
digg
Reddit
Get the latest updates by subscribing to the feed.
Semi-Related Posts
July 28th, 2006 at 12:12 pm
Matt, you are so right. The trick is to follow the right advice…there’s so much that is misleading, especially for small business owners. As you obviously know, it’s easy to go down a path and find out that you wasted your learning time, after the results come in. One thing I do is start with the end in mind, and work backwards. I take this approach to marketing and selling–reverse-engineering the customer’s buying process so you make it easy for them to buy. Takes a lot of the mystery out of marketing and selling, which is a total gamble when you look at it from the seller’s perspective instead of the buyer’s perspective.
July 28th, 2006 at 1:14 pm
[…] The Many Hats of Small Business Owners […]
August 2nd, 2006 at 8:36 pm
Today is my 10th year anniversary as an entrepreneur and I wrote a post, somewhat reflective, of those things that I never forget from my experience. One of those is “wearing many hats.”
It’s a commonly used phrase, but I think what’s important, as you’re pointing out is that you need to wear them, even those you don’t like or don’t want to wear. The hats that are too tight, torn or just plain ugly. If you’re running your own business, you’ll have to wear all of them, learn a ton, and hopefully turn them into nicer hats.
July 6th, 2007 at 10:55 pm
My one piece of advice is on partnerships. A wise man once said the only ship that won’t sail is a partnership. If you are planning on going into business with others, make sure it is an extremely compatible relationship. If you are a minority owner, you will soon find you’d be better off not owning anything.