It’s hard not to get wrapped up in the complexities of what our businesses demand of us each and every day.  The sheer magnitude of “stuff” that happens during our day makes the business seem complicated.  Then when you throw in the unexpected, it can feel overwhelming.  An employee quits, a customer has a complaint, a shipment doesn’t arrive or your main computer server has a meltdown.  You fall in bed at the end of a long day and get up in the morning and do it all over again.  Who said being an entrepreneur was empowering and exhilarating?

Recently, I conducted a seminar on marketing in which we discussed the easy-to-overlook need to think about what your target customer really looks like.  Of course that seems obvious, so much so that one of the attendees commented, “It sounds like we just have to get back to basics”.  Actually that is precisely the answer to most small business challenges, including dealing with the complexities and magnitude of our daily challenges.

AdviCoach research breaks down typical business challenges into five basic categories, and in my coaching career, I find that one or more of these five areas nearly always serve to explain what is going wrong in a business.  So going back to basics by thinking about, and dealing with, each of these dangers can often set a business back on track.  And if the business owner can’t quite seem to course-correct the challenges on their own, a competent business coach can help make the process more understandable and get the changes in place faster.

Here are the Five Business Dangers that you should consider as your “back to basics” template:

  • Inefficient Marketing – You aren’t getting the sales (or even the leads) that you need, but you haven’t re-calibrated your marketing plan since the internet was invented.  How will prospects learn about you if your marketing messages never hit their intended target?
  • Under-Performing Sales – Where do we learn to sell in this country?  It isn’t from university business programs where it is nearly impossible to get a degree in Sales.  Rather it is usually from “tribal knowledge”, or sales experiences that have provided hints as to how we are supposed to go about selling.  Since these are usually flawed, getting help to learn modern, collaborative selling techniques for ourselves and our sales team is a basic that must be addressed.
  • Financial Mismanagement – If you aren’t paying attention to the numbers, you might as well drive your car without a dashboard.  It’s just not possible to consistently make good business decisions without some type of scoreboard of your results.  This is one of those basics that AT LEAST half of all small business owners need to improve upon.
  • Lack of Human Capital Management – If you find yourself saying “I can’t find good workers anymore” or “young people nowadays just don’t have the work ethic we did” or similar blame-type comments, I have to politely suggest to you that the problem may actually be you.  For most small businesses today, the biggest expense we have is cost of labor, yet we spend little time nurturing our people, caring for their well-being, investing in their training and skills and in general helping them perform at their peak.
  • Poor Leadership – This may be the grand-daddy of all the Five Dangers because the others seem to stem from it.  But in essence it shows up in a business owner who has no plan or vision of where the business is going and fails to embrace the kind of systems that could help keep it on track.  Business owners who do the technical work of the business fall prey to poor leadership because as the business grows they fail to change how they work, missing opportunities to put other people and systems in place to permit real growth in profits and equity value.

When things aren’t going as well as you’d like, or if you are simply looking for new ideas and strategies to bring your business to the proverbial “next level”, perhaps a coach can provide some fresh perspective by helping you discover the basics you may be missing.