building a business that works better for everyone (especially you)
Text by Kirsten GIbbs, layout and illustrations by Rob Key.
For you, business is personal.
You've built your successful business by making promises and keeping them.
Your challenge now is how to keep it personal as you grow, without killing yourself or your success in the process.
The solution is to turn your business into a system. Not a machine. A system.
A system run by and for people. A system for keeping things personal. A system for making and keeping promises that's run by all the people in your business, as if they were you, the founder.
But to do this, you need to change the game, and think differently about how you share the work.
Pocket-sized, graphical and easy to dip in and out of, I wrote this book to help business owners like you to think about how that might happen.
Short and packed with business wisdom
concise prompts to get you to stop, pause and think about your own business
transform the way you look at your business
mandatory reading for every business that has reached its first plateau
Ideal to go back to again and again
You work the hardest, care the most and get paid last. Sometimes it feels like you are working for your team rather than the other way around. Sometimes you wish you could go back to when it was just you.
You're not alone, a BIS survey carried out in 2012 found that a quarter (26 per cent) of businesses with no employees in 2012 had (at some point since start-up) previously employed staff within that business. (BIS Research 2012)
Why?
Because keeping your promise to clients through other people is hard, and most small business owners have never learned how to do it effectively - certainly not from the corporates they escaped from.
If you want to build your business without killing yourself or your team in the process, you need to scale, rather than simply get bigger.
Scaling means focusing everything that happens inside your business on making and keeping promises to clients or customers. No more, no less.
Scaling means making and delivering on those promises profitably, efficiently and repeatably.
Scaling means doing all this through other people, letting the business personality shine through without stifling theirs.
Scaling means thinking completely differently about how your business works.
But when you get it right, you build a business you can step up with or step away from whenever you like. And everyone can enjoy the process.