Effective management is an essential element of all successful businesses. However, high levels of competition and a challenging external environment make it imperative that leaders of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) implement dynamic ways to hone their management techniques.
As an MD or business owner, you need to invest your time and expertise in all aspects of your business, with the ever-present risk of spreading your time and resources too thinly. It isn’t possible to micro-manage every aspect of business operations. Therefore, while striving to improve your leadership skills and knowledge is important, improvements to your business management techniques should be targeted to tightly support your organisation’s goals at critical points. Delegation and upskilling are essential for small businesses, with broad leadership skills disseminated as widely as possible among your management team and supervisors.
In this short article, we will outline how to improve your business management skills in five key ways:
1) Develop a Plan
Recent years have highlighted the risks growing businesses face from external factors outside their control. Political developments, economic turmoil, natural disasters, and operational problems, such as supply chain bottlenecks, can all pose dangers to SMEs. Developing a plan that futureproofs your business by making it more resilient will help it to respond promptly to opportunities and threats posed by the market. However, a plan is of limited value if it is not followed, so turn it into a series of actions that align your business to the market, with target dates and delegated responsibilities that are regularly reviewed to ensure progress.
2) Build a Dependable Management Team
A common mistake SME owners make is to shoulder too much responsibility for the day-to-day running of their business. Instead of leading on strategic development, they focus on operational matters that could easily be delegated to a junior manager, so business improvement stagnates and lucrative growth opportunities are overlooked. Freeing yourself from the burdens of operational management takes self-discipline and time, so create a reliable management team to support you by:
- Identifying the best people for the role and setting clear role-based objectives linked to your strategic business goals.
- Delivering comprehensive training and support to influence how your managers behave and respond to various operational challenges.
- Implementing Management Information (MI) strategies for effective monitoring of your team’s performance, allowing you to set realistic KPIs and identify training needs.
- Through Performance Management, celebrate and praise excellent work and implement actions to tackle underperformance or errors.
3) Understand Your Business Finances.
The health of your business is reflected in your financial results, so it is vital to take the time to analyse your turnover, profitability, and cashflow, to understand how your SME is performing month to month. By studying and interpreting these key metrics, you’ll be able to identify the most and least profitable areas of your business and learn how valuable resources are wasted (as well as opportunities for cost savings and optimisation). Ensure that this information is shared with your team and delegate responsibility to talented managers to improve performance where profitability is low, focusing investment on those areas of your business with the best potential for returns.
4) Hold Regular Board and Management Meetings.
Effective businesses benefit from a collegiate approach to management, even where the SME has evolved as the brainchild of a single individual. Board and management meetings should be held at least monthly, focusing on:
- A review of business performance and finances.
- Target-setting to improve key areas of performance.
- An assessment of progress towards medium to long-term goals.
These meetings enable stakeholders to focus less on operational matters and more on strategic business improvements, including emerging market opportunities and threats.
5) Appoint a Non-Executive Director
A Non-Executive Director (NED) is an independent expert who can provide incisive business management help for your SME. By providing a fresh pair of eyes, the NED can help your organisation to stay ahead of its competitors, ensure you maintain your focus on the mid-long-term strategic direction of your business, and hold your management team to account. The ideal NED should have extensive experience in improving SME businesses in a variety of industries, be someone that you trust and get on with, and will act as an open-minded, unbiased sounding board for your team to share and develop ideas with.
Contact Us To Give Your SME The Lift It Needs
At Secantor, our experienced business consultants will work in partnership with you to implement the management changes needed to strengthen your organisation, increase its competitiveness, and respond to market challenges in a more robust and agile way. To find out more, please book an introductory call with one of our experts.
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