Planning Management Activities

April 13, 2006

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Small business owners have to orchestrate all of the different activities that are needed to make a business work. These activities include providing goods or services to customers. They also include managing any employees you have, as well as performing the back office or administrative duties required to keep the business running. Having a business plan helps to organize and prioritize these activities.

Many large businesses have project managers whose job it is to track and manage internal corporate processes. These managers work from a project plan, which sets forth the timetable for all the events, milestones, deadlines, etc., that make up the project. Frequently, project managers have no other part to play except to ensure that the project stays on track.

You, however, probably won't have the luxury of hiring a project manager. Instead, the difficult task of making sure all the diverse elements of your business come together as they should is left to you. Of course, you are also probably a major player in the process being managed. This dual role is made much easier if you have a comprehensive list of what should occur, and when.

It's easy to overlook management as a major drain on your time and resources, but even a very small business can present some complex logistical issues. Almost every business relies to some extent on outsiders to contribute to the success of the business. Keeping everything on schedule requires you to monitor all of the diverse activities and actively intercede when things aren't going according to plan. If you operate an existing business, you know just how many balls you have to keep in the air at once. If you are just starting out, don't underestimate the demands of managing.

Managing your employees. Managing people is far more time-consuming than you might imagine. Even if the people who work for or with you are talented and self-motivated, some direction must be provided. While you may have a fairly good idea about what needs to be done, the people working for you are less likely to see the entire picture. If some task "falls through the cracks," your entire business can be placed in jeopardy. On the other hand, if two or more workers are duplicating each other's work, your business will be wasting time and money. It's up to you to divide up the work in a reasonable manner and to assign particular tasks to those best equipped to handle them.

Tracking progress is another important element of managing your business. It isn't enough to divide up the work and assign it out. You also have to see that the work proceeds at a reasonable pace. If realistic deadlines were set at the outset, you can keep tabs on whether individual activities will be completed when needed. It is far better to find out half way through a project that some essential element is lagging behind than to be surprised later in the game. You have to be aware of all the pieces of the plan, including your own. Managing your own time can be even more difficult than managing the people who work for you. Don't put pressure on yourself by taking on too much.

Administrative activities. Every business deals with a variety of operational issues that don't relate directly to providing goods or services to customers. These back-office activities are part of the overhead of doing business. Someone has to open the mail, pay the bills, keep the books, remit taxes, provide customer service, handles collections, and do the hundreds of little things that make up running a business. It is a serious mistake to ignore the demands that these activities will place on you and your business.

A good starting point is to make a list of all the activities that someone will have to perform to keep your business operating. A house painter has to do a lot of things that are not directly related to applying a fresh coat of paint to a house. Someone has to purchase the ladders, tarps, paint and brushes, masking tape, and other necessities. Someone also has to bid on jobs, bill customers when jobs are completed, and deal with complaints if a customer isn't happy. And those tarps need periodic washing or replacement. All these things take time.

One way of managing the time spent on administration is to let people outside the business handle certain jobs for you. This can reduce the time spent on back office work, in exchange for a cash outlay. It will not, however, eliminate this work completely.

For example, if you get a payroll service to prepare paychecks, withhold and remit taxes, etc., someone, probably you, will have to provide them with the time data needed to prepare the payroll. You'll probably want to review, and perhaps distribute, the payroll checks personally. The same is true if you engage an accountant to help with your books. Your day-to-day operations generate the income and expense information you need to track, and your books are based directly on the results of your daily operations. While the accountant can handle the consequences of your operational results, you must manage the systems that generate the needed information.