Getting information to manage your business

Most small business owners start out with an idea of a product or service that they want to deliver. Often this business is built on the skills they have, whether they learned them in a job, because of an interest. When those skills are in a trade, you are starting with a focus on physical skills.

As the business grows, the owner must spend less time on the job and more time managing the job. Even though he/she is very skilled at doing the job, these skills become less important, as other people are doing this work. He/she must focus on managing the work. This process is best described in The eMyth Revisted by Michael Gerber. In it, he describes the three roles of an entrepreneur: the technician, the manager and the entrepreneur, and how the owner must transition from the technician to an entrepreneur and how the skills are different.

In this transition, the owner also goes from somebody on the job to someone who must manage work remotely. In today's environment, this can be done with information about the business that is available on our computer systems. This is often complicated, if the owner isn't comfortable with computers. It is further complicated if the software that is in place doesn't capture all of the information that is need to manage the business from the office.

Well defined business processes (the manager role defined by Gerber) are what is needed.

This is the most common problem faced by small companies that implement new software for their business. They have defined their business process, so when they implement the new software, they use it as a tool to do obvious things that their business requires. They don't use it to improve their business process. As a result they miss out on a lot of the information that they need to manage their business. They also lose out on the information that they need to play the role of understanding their business.