When you start a new business, chances are you’ll be bombarded with something unpleasant…
Unsolicited advice.
Friends and family – well-meaning the lot of them – like to make suggestions. Ways you could find new customers, products you could develop, or even how you should be marketing your business.
The best entrepreneurs have a fine-tuned instinct and drive. This helps them get their business off the ground and to keep moving forwards in turbulent times.
And whilst well-intentioned unsolicited advice can be hard to escape, the business owners I work with know when it’s useful to have a professional around. They know which parts of the business they can run themselves, and where they might need a guiding hand.
At different stages in your business journey, you may also find yourself needing this kind of support, depending on the specific nature of the challenges you face.
Why Might I Need Business Support Services?
There’s no getting around it: running a small or medium-sized business can be a lonely place. Whilst days are typically filled with a myriad of decisions to make and tasks to complete – across many different ‘disciplines’ – most owners don’t have anyone to share that burden with.
When you add in the long hours and rare time off that are also common features, it can quickly be a recipe for burnout. And with burnout, increasingly questionable decision making.
So let’s look at the bigger picture. Fundamentally, you have two primary resources in your arsenal:
- Time
- Brainpower
When they get tight, these are what get squeezed, and as a result, things can start to break down. Out of time? Tasks get dropped, customers get unhappy, and your business doesn’t follow the path you’d like. Out of brainpower? You might start to delay key decision-making, or fail to innovate around problems.
Identifying which you’re running short of – and finding appropriate support – is one of the secrets to business success that I see time and again.
So, how should you go about looking for support?
Out of time? Look for task-based support
When your time is tight – and recruitment isn’t an option – one solution is to find practical business support services to share the load.
These might include:
- Accountancy services
- Legal support
- IT technicians
- Design and branding expertise
- Marketing agencies
- Logistics organisations
- Customer or order management software
- And many more
Any and all of these types of services may help you deliver your core business operations, and also crucially take time-intensive tasks off your hands.
When it comes to IT support, for example, I know that a professional will be far more effective – and faster – than I would ever be. So for my own business calculation, that’s a hugely valuable way of me buying back a large chunk of my time.
It’s also worth mentioning that practical support might come in a smaller way: it might be that you can establish processes that maximise your use of time. Or, you might find you can concentrate on the important tasks, as well as the urgent, as you rebalance your use of this precious resource.
Out of brainpower? Look for a sparring partner
When your ability to make decisions or see the wood from the trees deteriorates, there’s usually one response: “just tell me what to do!”
Now in certain circumstances that can be helpful, but no one knows your business like you do.
And that means that no one is as well placed as you are to identify problems and ways of improving how you operate.
That said, for most, those ideas are best uncovered in a collaborative conversation. In my case, I work with my clients to help them make better decisions that get them from where they are now to where they want to be.
That might involve streamlining business operations, workshopping new ideas, or zooming out to the bigger picture and forming a clearer strategy with achievable goals.
Either way, employing an experienced business coach, mentor or guide can re-energise many an entrepreneur, helping them find headspace to work on their business as well as just in it.
What Business Support Should I Avoid?
Finally, I have a few personal bugbears when it comes to support for running a business. (Unsolicited advice is just one of them).
In my experience, there are a few types of support to avoid:
- One-size-fits-all advice
- Support that cannot scale with you
- Support that neither increases your stock of time or brainpower
These are easy traps to fall in, as we all get tempted by adverts promising to solve all your problems.
But without a clear understanding of your unique circumstances and the demands of your specific enterprise – on which you are the world’s number one expert – most advice will simply fall flat.
Equally, it’s easy to waste time committing to a service which merely overcomplicates things, and doesn’t allow you to reclaim any of that valuable time or brainpower.
Business Support Services: There When You Need Them
Ultimately, choosing the right business support service comes down to which of your resources are most under threat: time or brainpower.
Although delegating can be tricky, these services are best viewed as a way of building a stronger team around you that can help you identify and then reach your goals.
If a chat with an experienced business coach who’s familiar with those shoes feels like a good way of starting that journey, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
Kind Regards,
Chris