“It takes 5 minutes longer to do it right the first time”– My Dad
No one enjoys giving their parents credit for the things they used to hammer into our heads as kids, but I still need to give credit where credit is due. This is one of the things that just stuck. Maybe from all of the life lessons learned where I did a sloppy job then had to go back and redo everything and it took 3x as long and my dad would come in and remind me “It would’ve taken you 5 minutes longer to do it right the first time, then you could be out playing with your friends instead of redoing what you already did”. I get it Dad, you were right (about that).
The positive about that annoying reminder that I heard most of my childhood, is that it applies to literally everything. Think about it for a second. Everything. This may be why I am meticulously organized and need to make a list to function. I also need to have the steps laid out before I start working on a project. I get a bit of anxiety if I can’t see the process and all of the steps so I can visualize it and make sure nothing is missing because I’ll be damned if I am going to go back and do it over again in my adulthood!
So many people come to me after being in business for a couple of years and they are just drowning. They cannot get ahead of the paperwork, the bills, or the people management, they are just so overwhelmed and don’t know where to start. Thankfully, I specialize in process & procedure. However, experience has taught me that regardless of how small your business is, if your goal is to ever get to a point where you will hire any sort of help, or eventually sell, then it is NEVER too early to just set it up correctly from the beginning.
It is very easy to forget to look at the big picture when it is just you in the frame at the moment, but you should always be prepared for that accidental overnight insane growth. I like to refer to it as the ‘Oprah’s Favorite Things’ impact. You may have a perfectly functioning and profitable business model, and then one day a famous influencer will come across your product/service and your business will quadruple overnight, and you were not ready for it. If you had documented processes, set procedures, and just an outlined way of doing things, then you can easily add in some temporary help to get you through this rush. But if you don’t, then you will not even make it through the hiring process and all of those customers will be upset since you could not complete their orders timely and at an acceptable quality. They will leave you reviews left and right and essentially sink your business. All because you had an amazing product or service that you were not prepared to scale. There are ways to avoid this all around, but again, you need to think ahead and be prepared so you are never in this position.
Some entrepreneurs are GREAT at the vision of their product/service but not so much at the operations and back office. That is OK because there are oodles of companies out there that you can outsource this part too. Most of it is a one-time setup that you can maintain, then as you grow you can easily hire someone to handle it internally or once again, outsource. Outsourcing is your best bet when it comes to a large portion of running a small business. It allows you to operate with just the necessities and then scale as you grow. Employees can also make or break a company and PT/hourly employees are not always the most strategic solution. The only PT/Hourly employees we will hire are interns that want to learn. Someone that we are well aware we are teaching and we can hand off lower-level tasks to. We always pay our interns, so we tend to get ones that stick around. When you outsource to a legitimate company, you are dealing with another business owner that wants to keep their revenue stream growing and also has a reputation on the line. I bring this up because if you are looking to sell your company, employees are never for sale. They do not have to go with the new company. If you have a product or service that depends on a specific person, you will have a hard time selling it, so always remember that as you scale.
My advice to you is; before you take the time to set anything up or make a decision that will affect the company, ask yourself “Does this Scale”? “Will this still be the process when I have 10 employees”? If the answer is no, you need to rethink what you are doing before you end up having to go back and do it all over again.
