Today we continue with part two of the series, “A Small Business Scorecard”. As a reminder, I’m calling this a scorecard, but the goal is not to arrive at a number and think “We got a 14, so we’re doing fine as is.” It’s more of a self-assessment & introspection tool. If a seemingly-negative item on the list doesn’t pertain to you, cross it off. Look at the items you circled / checked as “yep, this is us” as a milestone on the way to a stronger company. Some may need recurring attention. This week, we’ll cover operations, business model, and staffing.
Operations
- It feels like things “fall apart” a little when critical people leave, or are out of the office.
- When the owner or manager are gone for the day, things seem more productive.
- When a team member is gone, it’s easy to deal with their workload because we’ve been cross trained.
- When someone is out of the office, it can be a little tough, but we have written process / procedures documentation to help us get the work done.
- We rarely / never have to contact someone who’s out of the office to ask them how to do something, or to get online and help us deal with this or that.
- When our front desk takes order / job status calls, they have to call back into the shop to get someone to tell them what’s up with an order / job.
- We sometimes run out of the supplies / raw materials we need to do our work.
- It’s common for us to contact someone who’s out of the office because we need help dealing with something they do.
- Customers can tell when a critical employee is on sick, off that day, or vacation.
- When a customer contacts us to find out the status of a job / order, any employee can easily and quickly find the info and pass it to the customer.
- Customers can’t tell when a critical employee is out of the office.
- We never run out of the supplies / raw materials we need to do our work.
- We use a system to track and manage our tasks / work.
Business model
- Our products / services are one-off. We don’t make something once and sell it multiple times.
- Once we make tooling, we can make and sell the same item repeatedly.
- We sell services on a subscription basis.
- The business doesn’t generate income when the owner isn’t working.
- We serve a vertical (narrow) market.
- We sell products and service them, so ongoing reputation is critical to get returning customers.
- If we’re not on the job and billing hours, we’re not generating revenue.
- We serve a horizontal (wide) market.
- Our market has already been disrupted / is difficult to disrupt.
- Once created, our services have a marginal COGS so we can make something and sell it repeatedly.
- Our customers pay us each month. We deliver / replenish consumable products / services.
- Our market could easily be disrupted.
- We provide customers with a service infrastructure.
Staffing
- We’re always understaffed.
- We have trouble keeping people, but they don’t tell us why they leave.
- We have trouble keeping people. They tell us why they leave, but we can’t or won’t do anything about the things they mention.
- Customers can’t tell when an employee is brand new.
- Our people rarely do things together outside of work.
- It takes a long time for us to hire someone because we’re careful to find people who fit our existing team.
- Customers can tell when an employee is brand new.
- We have trouble keeping people. We’re not sure why.
- Few of our first line managers are familiar enough with the line employees’ work to take over for them in a pinch.
- It takes a long time for us to hire someone because candidates are hard to find.
- We’re overstaffed, but our workloads vary wildly so we don’t want to shrink the size of our staff.
- Our team is a family – they frequently do fun / family / activities together outside of work.
- Our first line managers could easily handle the work our line employees do, if they needed to.
- We tend to promote from our existing staff.
- We rarely promote from our existing staff.
- Our team tends to be swamped one week, and might be sitting around with nothing do the next week.
- Most of our team members are easily replaceable.
- We have employees who have been here for many years.
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