The Care and Feeding of Your Business

As a business owner, you need to look at your business like a fruit tree--if you feed and water it, and prune it at just the right times, it will grow and blossom and be even more fruitful.  You must think about your business the same way to better enjoy the fruits of your labor.

Our client, Dave started his tech company, 10 years ago.  Now 58, he knows he wants to continue working for at least 7 years and in that time wants to grow the business and start cashing in on what he believes to be its true value.  So far, his growth has been haphazard and he has not had great results in staffing the company to meet his growth objectives.  A few weeks ago he called us in a panic-- "I need your help" he said.  "Can you be here within the hour?"

Dave is not a great manager, he's an idea guy.    He hated the day to day management so he hired a COO, Ron, to take over those responsibilities.  Within a few months, it became clear that Ron was out of his depth.  But Dave let the situation simmer on a slow boil for over two years before he was in enough pain to take fire Ron-2 years! 

When we came on the scene, what we found was amazing, especially for someone in the tech sector.  Customers were calling and complaining about bugs in their software.  This by itself was not a surprise, but because there was no tracking system, some of the complaints were over 9 months old!  And when they fixed a problem for one client, they didn't try to figure out if other clients had the same problem.  It wasn't only because the employees weren't proactive-they had no idea who their other clients were because they didn't have a client list.  And Dave was getting calls from some of his "honest" clients asking why they hadn't been billed in over 6 months.  With Dave wearing all the hats-CIO and developer, sales and bookkeeping, he just couldn't keep it together.

There were also strategic issues to address.  Dave's business was divided into 2 product lines.  He was starting to think that he should drop one of the lines because it was less profitable, but there really wasn't accurate data to back up his assessment.   He couldn't make an informed decision on something this important to his future.

Our charge was clear-we are helping Dave to enjoy his business again by cleaning up his systems and processes and addressing his staffing issues.  But first we had to convince him to begin with the end in mind.  Cleaning up the operations is one thing and was necessary for running the business day to day.  But the strategic issues such as product mix needed to be informed decisions so that company growth was in keeping with Dave's ultimate goals.

People often ask us why a business owner would engage in Exit Planning five or even seven years before they want to retire.  As in Dave's case, a 58 year old might have the top position is a new and growing industry and with help, can turn it into a growing and profitable business.  Dave has genius, a great product and over $5 million in long term contracts on his side.   By applying strong management principles to his operation, he will have a thriving business which will be ready for sale whenever Dave is ready.