Building your organisation
If you saw the newsletter last week with opinions from so many entrepreneurs on how important they think it is to have an organised business and how to get there, you might be confused. Not surprising. So many different kinds of structure put forward.
It shouldn’t be this confusing.
Yes, you need to be organised and your business structure needs to be clear.
But beyond that, the way you put the structure together is up to you.
Provided, I believe, you take these things into account.
1. Focus on making your sales and delivery arms the most important parts
It is the sales and delivery people who will bring in the money. Whatever the structure you put forward, every part of the business is there to make sales and delivery successful and capable of bringing in as much revenue as they can.
This means sales and delivery must be completely customer focused.
Which in turn means they know who your best customers are, what is wanted and usually how your product needs to be delivered.
Your organisation needs to heed and support them to do their best.
2. Keep administration sleek and to the point
Don’t let any one of your administration departments rule what it is they do. Yes of course listen to their ideas about the latest and slickest marketing ideas. It is important to be on top of what is changing.
Just make sure the changes are made to ensure the delivery and sales departments and outlets can do their job better and more successfully and ditch the rest.
3. Keep the structure easy to understand
Everyone needs to be able to look at the structure and instantly understand what is involved and who is in charge.
If the structure is not clear, the automatic response will be to ignore it and probably the instructions that come from the admin and management teams too. We don’t have much patience with being organised today unfortunately so make it easy.
4. Because of this – I do believe a hierarchical structure is usually the most effective for the two types of business I work with most often – SMEs and Franchises
The businesses I work with understand this traditional structure and most importantly, so do their staff. The clear departments established around clear tasks sets and people with the training to get those tasks done make sense as does the clear hierarchical flow of command from shop floor manager up through the Department Heads to management and executive.
Flat, circular, matrix and other structures are tricky to get people to adopt and can make training new staff take longer as the flow is explained and then often ignored.
5. The problem is a hierarchical structure is often not great for promoting a good communication flow
As pointed out by the coaches in the Newsletter, the problem is this structure means people are in teams of like people and there is a tendency for each department to keep to itself, building policy and tasks to suit themselves. Not great for supporting the money-making shop floor
6. So, as the leader of your business, focus on creating systems to promote great communication
One of the ways franchises are so successful when they are done properly is because of communication based on the needs of your money-making sales and delivery arms.
There is always (or should be) a good Support Office with support staff who visit the outlets regularly to:
- Build relationships
- Hear from the on the ground staff what is happening
- See how things are going
- Give feedback on how to make changes where required
- Provide training
- Performance management
Associated with this, franchises also usually have a council or committees of good operators who provide advice to management on a range of things from marketing to the next good idea.
The bottom line is, listen and really hear what your staff are saying and take the good ideas on board as well as hearing about what is not working so well. Your success is their success.
7. So what this means is – structure your organisation around people – especially your delivery people
This is what our Optimal Organisation Structure Workshop is all about. We start with a suite of questions…
- Who is your ideal client and what are they looking for
- What is the product your delivery arm will be providing
- MOST IMPORTANTLY – What are the skills and personality of the people who will deliver your amazing product to your clients
- Then you will find there will be gaps – like all of us, the personality of your delivery staff will mean there will be jobs they are not so great at – your amazing massage therapist will not be so amazing at sales – so it pays to get head office to take on this task and so on
Ditch all the other work you do and focus your organisation on where the money is coming from.
The result will be an organisation structure focused on providing your best product to your best clients all delivered by your amazing shop floor staff who are ably supported to do their best by your amazing admin support staff.
