Leadership | Teik Oh

Growing Your Business With A Strategic Plan

Sep 28 2021

This is the second part of our series on growing your small business once your startup is established.

If you missed our series on how to start your own small business, you can go here to read the first article in that series.

The first part of this series on growing your small business can be found here.

This week, we are going to look at how preparing a long-term Strategic Plan as an overview of your strategic direction (where you want to end up and how you want to get there) can help you keep on track as you grow.

In your growth phase, you will meet many challenges and just as many decisions. Where will you open a store next? Who should you hire? Your supplier is going out of business – how do you choose a replacement? Should you rent your new premises or buy? Should you take on a partner?

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Your Employees: Performance Reviews

Jul 27 2021

What is the biggest asset in your business?

Your employees.

Good employees are valuable in any small business. Even if you don’t employ anyone right now, you will. Employees scale your business, doing what you alone cannot do.

Good employees can mean added productivity. They can mean experience. Good employees can help you grow because they become integral to how your business serves customers. Good employees make your business capable of growth because they do more work than you can, and they can be used to supervise and train even more employees as the need to hire continues with growth.

In time, good employees take over management, and you can finally achieve your dream of running your business – without fixing the nuts and bolts every day!

How do you build a team of good employees?

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Training Your Employees For Your Absence

Jun 08 2021

Unless you own and wish to continue to own a micro-business where you work on your own in your profession or trade, it is more than likely that as a small business owner you wish to expand and grow your business to the extent that you will be employing people as you grow.

Most of us who run and operate small businesses wish to grow in size – as our sales and profits grow, by necessity we need to scale and grow our workforce so that we can produce more, or meet more customers or provide more services. We are constrained by the number of productive hours we, or anyone we employ, can spend on producing goods or services. So we employ more people.

Some of the new people we employ may not be directly customer-facing. Indeed we may need more and more “back-room” hours from new people – keeping the books, managing the stores, manufacturing or working behind the scenes.

The question is, how do you introduce more and more people and continue to control and manage the business as more and more people do the things that you used to do?

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The Right People Make All The Difference

May 18 2021

Whether you’ve only started your small business or have been operating for a while, if you are growth-minded, at some stage you will be thinking about, if not already brought in employees to help you do the work and grow your business.

Sometimes, you strike it lucky and you find people who are the perfect fit.

They work hard, the way you want them to. They are good at whatever you hired them to do. They even get on with you and everyone else in the business, and they get on with the customers.

If you are in that boat, congratulations! All you have to do is make sure they are happy working in your business.

However, most small businesses go through some difficult periods finding the “right” employee or employees. If you’ve ever had the “right” people working for you, then you know that the right people make all the difference.

So, how do you get it right all the time?

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Dealing With Overwhelm In A Small Business

Apr 20 2021

About 3 years ago I read an article in a small business magazine that said over 70% of small business owners were overwhelmed by their work and responsibilities.

Do you think that got better or worse in 2020?

At the best of times, small business owners have multiple responsibilities and have to deal with multiple issues and decisions at any one time. Even the most well organised of us sometimes feel as if they are ten different people in one body!

Stress and small business owners are two things that always come together.

From what I understand, stress actually affects your body on a cellular level. The change it affects on your body makes you physically as well as mentally tired, and it makes you more and more unable to cope with stress. So, the more stressed and overwhelmed you feel….. the more stress and overwhelm you will feel!

And if stress is not good for you, a stressed leader is certainly not good for your business!

So it is more than worthwhile for all small business owners to organise their affairs and workflows to reduce stress and overwhelm.

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Category - Leadership

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Growing Your Business With A Strategic Plan

Your Employees: Performance Reviews

Training Your Employees For Your Absence

The Right People Make All The Difference

Dealing With Overwhelm In A Small Business