Being an owner/manager can be tough on personal life – in fact there doesn’t seem to be a “personal life”. The 24X7 effort needed to win new business, deliver to clients, and keep the books straight, is all consuming.
Trying to describe how this feels is hard – it’s multi-dimensional – so we’ll unashamedly borrow from Chris Brogan’s excellent paper Personal Branding for the Business Professional.
“Inside my head Iʼm the CEO, project manager, and administrative assistant to my own
private company. Employees= 1. With this in mind, I look at every job I take as a project.
I look at every project as an opportunity. I talk to everyone professionally as if theyʼre
someone looking to partner with me and my company. This helps me frame everything I
do.”
Most owner/managers don’t see their roles this clearly, and don’t interpret the challenges into needs for solutions. They choose to manage their business using personal productivity software. Every day they pay for this decision with inefficiency, confusion and stress.
Using spreadsheets, email and documents to “mash” a system instead of choosing software that’s designed for the job is a false economy. There’s no management process, the information is distributed around the hard drive and it’s impossible to share.
What is it that stops critical business matters falling into the cracks between the systems? Where’s the review process? Where’s the co-ordination when circumstances change?
Too often it’s in the owner/manager’s head, fighting with all the other thoughts competing for attention. All of this at a time when the CEO/Project Manager/Admin Assistant is trying to do too many things at the same time already.
No wonder it’s hard work!
Let the one who’s never forgotten a critical response, or missed an opportunity, or forgotten to pay a credit card bill argue with the message.
The rest of us should find a proper system, sooner rather than later, so that we can save time, interest and energy for the rest of our business lives.
For the record, Chris Brogan does not use our software, or have any relationship with our business. He does have a great way of using words to simplify complexity. Thanks Chris.
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