As a business Owner, your personal managerial skills and knowledge are going to become a limiting factor in the ability of your business to reach its chosen Goal or Destination.
Just as with any other limiting factor, you can improve your professional managerial skill set to keep progress continuing.
We cover a way to do this here. Blue Belt
Table of Contents
Speed up Business Growth by Optimising your Managerial Skills
12Faces believes there are 12 aspects to your Business and Personal Skills that govern the repeatable success of your business.
It follows that not all of these are equally important. Just 1 or 2 aspects, at any point in time, will contribute most to achieving your Repeatable Business Success Goals.
We have grouped our training assets under these 12 categories. To quickly find answers to your questions, just click on the most relevant links in this list.
12 Critical Success Elements!
As our 12Faces brand suggests, we cover the necessary 12 categories of business skills
Reaching and maintaining a balance in all 12 aspects of your business is our formula for success
Six relate to the business
- Revenue creation like sales, marketing, pricing, product range
- Operations like workflow, variable costs, inventory
- Overheads like office costs and R&D
- Systems like IT and accounting
- People issues like motivation, hiring and
- Plan & measure, finances, planning and monitoring
Six relate to you as Owner and your Team
- Decision making skills
- Self management like time management, working efficiently
- Leadership of and by staff
- Planning to maximize sustainable business success
- Performance measurement to identify weak spots
- Workflow efficiencies like wasted work, production co-ordination
What are My Priorities?
You are unlikely to progress very fast if you try to work on improving every one of these 12 Faces at the same time.
Multitasking mean you are going to work very inefficiently! See Why Multitasking is Not Your Friend
Also, not every Face is equally important in business growth. See: Learn from 80/20 Rule
And, you will already be better at some Faces than others so you might want to work on your weakest till you have a well-rounded grasp of all the managerial skills required to run a successful business.
Just like setting priorities for your business GamePlan, you can use exactly the same methods for prioritising what you should study next.
Our central resource for tips on prioritizing between Candidate tasks is on this link.
You might find you have two groups of candidates for prioritisation;
- skills relating to the current GamePlan. If, for example, you are going to employ a new person, you might prioritise learning about these skills.
- looking ahead for new required skills. For example, managing a business with a number of staff needs quite different leadership skills to managing a business with just one staff member. By looking ahead, you start to better understand how to plan for staff growth rather than just respond as (stressful) things happen that you have to scramble to fix.
3 Step Rapid Self-evaluation
If you are keen to see how you self-score your business and yourself on the 12 Faces, try this rapid evaluation method in under 15 minutes.
- before you begin, write down the top three Faces you think you should prioritise to work on
- give a Health Score from 1-10 to each of the 12 Faces. This indicates how healthy you think that Face is. Tip: start with the most healthy and give it 10 then score the others in relation to this most healthy one. For example, your Revenue is poor and scores 3 out of 10. On the other hand, you are happy with your Planning process so it gets a 9 out of 10. The opportunity for improvement in Revenue is (10-3=) 7 and for Planning is (10-9=) 1
- give an Impact Score from 1-10 to each of the 12 Faces. This score relates to how much impact improvements to this Face might make to your business. Let’s say Revenue gets a 10 because it has a very big impact but Planning has a lower impact, we give it a 4.
- Multiply the Opportunity and the Impact to give a value for each Face. So Revenue scores 7*10 =70 and Planning scores 1*4=4. Clearly, you are better to put time into Revenue because the benefit (70) to the business is almost 20 times more than spending time on Planning (4)!
- Compare the choice of what you thought important to work on before and now after this simple Weights & Score technique. Were the choices much different? Did you learn anything about the benefit of Prioritising from this simple example?
Over time, the relative Opportunity for each of your 12 Dodeca faces will change. You take this into account by doing the process again.
We encourage you to do this quarterly in line with the GamePlan Cycle.
This article was provided by Scott Williams AO FAIDC. It describes the way best practice in many management areas has been brought together in the 12Faces GamePlan System. The Goal is to provide an easy to use and repeatable “flywheel” to improve small business owners’ outcomes. Scott is the Founder of NFP small business support services 12Faces and MentorSME and has a Philanthropic Foundation supporting students in education. Scott’s business Petals Network was National Small Business of the Year and 4 times in the Top 100 Fastest Growing Australian Businesses LinkedIn