When you first started your business, you probably did just about everything yourself.
You found the customers, did the work, sent the invoices, answered the emails, sorted out the problems and made all the decisions. If something needed doing, you did it. And if you didn't know how, you worked it out.
That's how a lot of small businesses get off the ground. You do whatever needs doing because there isn't anybody else to do it.
But here's the thing.
The way you ran your business when you started isn't necessarily the way you should be running it now.
And yet, I see business owners carrying on with decisions, habits and ways of working that made perfect sense three, five or ten years ago, without stopping to question whether they still make sense today.
The business has changed. The customers have changed. The workload has changed. Sometimes the owner has changed too.
But the way the business operates? Not so much.
Just because it worked doesn't mean it still works
One of the interesting things about running a business is that we tend to hang on to the things that helped us get where we are.
And understandably so. If you've spent years building something that works, you're not going to throw everything out of the window just because somebody tells you there's a better way.
Nor should you.
But there's a difference between protecting something that works and continuing to do something simply because it's what you've always done.
Take a business owner who started out managing everything personally. Every customer enquiry came directly to them. Every decision went through them. Every bit of work needed their involvement.
When the business was small, that probably worked brilliantly. They knew exactly what was happening, customers received a personal service and nothing happened without their knowledge.
Fast-forward a few years. The business is busier, there are more customers, perhaps a couple of people helping out, and the owner is still insisting on being involved in absolutely everything.
Suddenly, the very thing that made the business work so well in the beginning is making it harder to run.
Not because the owner is doing anything wrong, but because the business has outgrown that particular way of working.
And nobody's stopped to change it.
You're not still running the same business
Think about how much your business has changed since you started.
Perhaps you're dealing with different customers now. Maybe your services have evolved, your prices have increased or you've taken on people to help with the workload.
Perhaps you're working on bigger projects, handling more complicated enquiries or dealing with responsibilities you never had when you first set up.
All perfectly normal developments.
But have you changed the way you manage those things?
Or are you still relying on the same informal arrangements, conversations and processes that worked when everything was considerably simpler?
There's nothing wrong with keeping things simple. In fact, I'm a great believer in not making things more complicated than they need to be.
But simple and informal aren't always the same thing.
When there are only a handful of customers and you're the only person doing the work, keeping everything in your head might be manageable.
When you've got twenty different things happening, other people involved and customers relying on you to deliver consistently, keeping everything in your head becomes a rather different proposition.
At some point, what used to be convenient starts becoming a risk.
Being the person who knows everything isn't always a good thing
Let's talk about something that can be quite difficult for business owners to let go of.
Being needed.
When you've built a business from scratch, it's rather satisfying knowing that you're the person who understands how everything works. You know the customers, the history, the little details and all the things that never quite made it into a written process.
And there's nothing wrong with being knowledgeable about your own business.
But if everything depends on you remembering something, answering a question or making a decision, you've potentially created a problem.
What happens when you're away? What happens when you're ill? What happens when you're concentrating on an important piece of work and somebody needs an answer?
Does the business carry on, or does everything wait until you're available?
And before you tell me that nobody else could possibly do things quite the way you do, let me ask you something.
Do they actually need to do it your way?
Or do they need to achieve the right result?
Because those aren't necessarily the same thing.
Sometimes we hold on to responsibilities because we're convinced we're the only person who can do them properly. Sometimes it's because explaining everything to somebody else feels like more work than simply doing it ourselves.
And sometimes, if we're being completely truthful, it's because we've got rather used to being indispensable.
But there's a difference between being valuable to your business and making your business dependent on you for every little thing.
More business doesn't automatically mean more of you
Here's another assumption worth challenging.
As the business grows, the owner's workload often grows alongside it. More customers mean more enquiries, more administration, more decisions and more things demanding attention.
And the automatic response is frequently to work harder, put in longer hours or try to squeeze more into the diary.
But why should growth automatically require more of your personal time?
Sometimes it will, particularly when you're developing something new or going through a period of change.
But if every additional customer, project or opportunity creates another pile of work that only you can deal with, it's worth looking at how the business is operating.
Perhaps you need a clearer process. Perhaps somebody else could handle part of the work. Perhaps you're still offering something in a way that made sense when you had fewer customers but is becoming increasingly difficult to deliver.
Or perhaps you've got a habit of saying yes to things without properly considering what they involve.
That last one can be particularly interesting.
An opportunity comes along, and because it's a good opportunity, you assume you should take it.
But being capable of doing something doesn't automatically mean it's a sensible thing to add to your business right now.
Sometimes the best decision is to get what you've already got working properly before you add another layer to it.
Have you updated the rules?
Every business operates according to a collection of decisions.
Some are obvious. Your prices, working hours, payment terms, services and responsibilities.
Others are less obvious. How quickly you respond to customers, who makes which decisions, what happens when something goes wrong and how much of your time people can expect to have.
The interesting thing is that many of those decisions were made when the business looked very different.
Perhaps you agreed to respond to customers in the evening because, when you started, you were trying to establish yourself and wanted to provide exceptional service.
Perhaps you offered a particular service at a certain price because it was straightforward to deliver when you only had a few customers.
Or perhaps you started handling a particular responsibility because there genuinely wasn't anybody else who could do it.
All perfectly reasonable decisions at the time.
But are they still reasonable now?
You don't have to wait until something becomes a major problem before you change it.
You can review your working arrangements, update your processes, change your prices or redistribute responsibilities simply because the business has reached a stage where a different approach makes more sense.
And you don't need to apologise for that.
Don't confuse changing things with making things complicated
Now, I can almost hear somebody thinking, "Oh God, she's going to tell me I need systems and procedures for everything."
No, I'm not.
The last thing most small business owners need is another enormous project involving software, spreadsheets, flowcharts and seventeen different procedures that nobody will ever look at again.
Sometimes the change is incredibly straightforward.
A regular meeting instead of twenty separate conversations throughout the week. A clear agreement about who handles what. A checklist that stops something important being forgotten. A different way of arranging appointments so you're not spending half your working day travelling unnecessarily.
None of those things is particularly revolutionary.
But they can make a considerable difference when they address something that's repeatedly causing problems.
The trick is to look at what's actually happening before deciding what needs changing.
If the same problem keeps cropping up, ask why. If you're continually being interrupted, look at what people need from you and whether they could get it another way.
If you're constantly running out of time, don't immediately assume you need to become more productive. Look at what you're spending that time doing.
You might discover that the problem isn't how much you've got to do.
It's how you've organised the business around doing it.
What got you here might not get you where you're going
There's another reason this matters.
Your business might be working reasonably well today, but what happens if you want it to do something different tomorrow?
Perhaps you want to take on bigger projects, work with a different type of customer or increase your turnover.
Perhaps you'd like to reduce your hours, step away from some of the day-to-day work or eventually retire.
Those are very different ambitions, but they have something in common.
They may require the business to operate differently.
If you're planning to grow, you need to know whether the way things currently work can cope with that growth.
If you're planning to step back, you need to know what happens when you're no longer personally handling everything.
And if you're hoping to sell or hand over the business one day, it might be worth considering how much of its value currently depends on you being there.
These aren't questions you need to leave until the change is imminent.
In fact, the earlier you start thinking about them, the more options you're likely to have.
Take another look at the business you've actually got
So here's what I'd suggest.
Forget, for a moment, all the things you think you ought to be doing to improve your business.
Instead, look at how it currently operates.
What keeps landing back on your desk? Which problems keep repeating themselves? What are you still doing because you've always done it? Where are you personally involved when you don't really need to be?
And which arrangements made sense when you started but are now causing unnecessary work, frustration or complications?
You don't need to overhaul everything.
In fact, please don't.
Pick one thing that's no longer working particularly well and decide what needs to change.
It might be a process, a responsibility, a customer arrangement or simply a conversation you've been putting off.
Make that change, see what difference it makes and then look at the next thing.
Because the answer to a business that's becoming harder to manage isn't always more people, more technology, more hours or another clever strategy.
Sometimes it's recognising that you've been running today's business according to decisions you made for a business that no longer exists.
Those decisions got you this far. That doesn't mean they get to run the show forever.