Businesses start and grow but don’t always keep up with where they should be in terms of systems and infrastructure. Let's look at this as 'systems maturity'.
Systems MUST be put in place to create a machine that will be able to grow without being constrained by the owners time and effort.
Are you spending 60%+ of your time on sales and marketing? If not you are probably spending too much time working IN your business not ON your business.
The concept of a 'Maturity Grid' was first used by Crosby ("Quality is Free" 1980) to describe phases of quality management system evolution and later modified by Paulk et al (download) to describe the evolution of software development methodologies.
The above concept of assessing your level of 'maturity' in terms of management systems I find valuable as it makes tangible something that for most people is very hard to see.
The idea of 'Maturity Models' has been around for a while now and the specifics have changed over time but the concept remains the same and can be applied anywhere systems are required. You can ask yourself "how evolved is my business?"
I really love the description of level 1 as “undocumented chaos” because that is just what it is. No rules, some rules poorly understood or a different interpretation foreach employee (my personal favourite).
If you keep having to repeat yourself, do work because you feel you can’t trust your staff to do it and find yourself continually too drained to work on growing your business you need to look at improving the maturity of your systems.
How? Simply make a start by;
- writing down how you want your business to run
- save it somewhere
- share it with your team regularly
Make this a regular habit and you will be amazed at the improvement you can make over time.
You want a business that you run instead of it running you? Time to grow up.