Owning a small business is truly a constant crucible for judging your effectiveness in gaining and maintaining customer satisfaction.  The best small business owners leverage time-tested leadership principles and grow their people to focus on their customer’s needs.  A challenging economic environment makes the value provided to the customer substantially more crucial, as any funding and purchasing will be closely examined and only spent in the most effective manner.  In order to position the company to lead, innovate, and provide unique value in an incredibly competitive marketplace, the small business owner needs to grow and rely on their life-blood – their people.  In my experience, the business owners adopting the following productive, proactive leadership traits and techniques will best position their company for success in any economic situation:

Share the Vision

  Small businesses have a very unique advantage over mid and large scale operations - They generally have an extremely flat organizational structure, and the clarity of the owner’s vision can be passed quickly to every employee.  It simply takes honest and constant communication with your people. 

  This also creates an opportunity to hone your vision for the company’s tone and direction, along with the agility to adjust, add, or augment any ideas gained while sharing it with the people of your company.  As this process of evolution occurs, buy-in is a natural and inherent part of the process.  Through this, your employees have an immediate understanding and stake in the company’s direction at all times.

  With full buy-in and ubiquitous understanding, your people can anticipate both company and client needs.  This is where the innovation occurs.  New ideas directed towards the company and customer’s goal that allows your company to grow from simply providing a service or product, to becoming a thought leader and innovator. This is the extra value that budget-minded customers are looking for in this economy.

Analog Leadership, Digital Management

  The key to sharing your vision is time.  Face to face time with your people, and creating the time to make that happen.  Though they share the same key element to make this possible, the techniques for both activities are very different.

  A handshake, a warm smile, and getting to personally know your people are things that should and can only be done face-to-face.  For geographically separated personnel, video conferencing is a close second and extremely cost effective.  However, the nonverbal cues and personal bonding of live conversation is something that simply can’t be duplicated over the phone, or via e-mail.  To build a cohesive dedicated team this activity is absolutely necessary.  But how do we make the time required to do this?

  The answer lies in the incredible system of management tools available today.  From project management, to expense accounting - The tools to automate or ease the time burden of nearly every planning, organization, and accounting activity are provided by a wide array of vendors.  With the advent of cloud computing, these tools can be networked to transform a previously static, stuttering process into a seamless, instantaneously collaborative one.

  When your processes and tools are tuned and tailored to save the savvy business owner time, that time can be utilized in a small businesses’ life-blood - its people.  When the business’ people are energized and aligned, they will bring more value to your products and the customer.

Create a Culture of Excellence

  Small businesses have the inherent agility to strategically shape their structure to maximize value to the customer, which large companies may have too much bureaucracy to achieve efficiently.  This takes a conscious, focused effort from the business owner, but the result is sustained quality and output.

  Bringing a culture of excellence to your business begins at hiring.  With the incredible range of online recruiting tools available, the savvy small business owner can afford to never settle.  They increase their chances of finding the perfect person for the position, their team, and the company.  Recruiting the best people sends a clear message, and raises esteem in the company itself.

  Encouraging employees to use the processes and tools at hand, but always look for new and emerging techniques.  Encourage and reward the discovery of tools that are best-of-breed, with an eye toward affordability.  Discourage the use of shortcuts, but encourage the use of lean processes which reduce wait time and waste.  Incentivizing value added, reduced waste, and customer satisafaction also sends a strong message of the importance of these activities in your company.   

  When the small business owner focuses on excellence and professional growth in their personnel, it is ultimately the product and customer who greatly benefit.  Once again, the extra value your small business provides translates directly into strengthened, deepened business relationships and makes your company a preferred provider, through reference and referral, when cultivating new business. 

Non-Adversarial Incentivization

  Incentivizing the right lessons, the best product improvements, and customer satisfaction send an unambiguous message as to where your people’s efforts are best focused.  However, care must be taken to not set up competitive incentives which set up and adversarial relationship between personnel - This can destroy morale and ultimately undermine efforts to promote teaming and synergy.  The foundation of competition should be versus stagnation, the status quo, and time/material waste.  Results should be measured in the areas that bring the most benefit to the company - Customer satisfaction, new business, and business development.

  Tangible/Intangible, Public/Private, and solo/team recognition are all viable options of incentivization.  Used effectively, it will strongly illustrate that your people have a true stake in the company - When the company grows its revenue and opportunities, the people responsible for that success appropriately benefit.

  In this economy, where funding is scarce and budgets are tightening to ensure business survival, customers scrutinize every expenditure.  They base their judgment, not just on sheer price, but the value they are getting for the amount they spend.  In a crowded marketplace, it is the small business owner that provides the most value per dollar that not only manages to survive but succeed.  And succeeding in this economic climate will equip your company to generate increasing revenue and opportunities when the economy becomes favorable again.  Effectively utilizing emerging technology to enables the small business owner to provide the vision and leadership necessary to focus their people on the product and the customer.  The extra value provided will be the difference between standing out in the crowd, and standing out in the cold. 

Speaking of communication opportunities, WDFPL has a staff meeting scheduled later this afternoon.  It should be fun.