Management

Is being too available hampering your growth? When small business owners are too available to customers, salespeople or even their own employees, it ruins their ability to maximize their time. This makes it harder to grow the business because the owner keeps getting distracted or pulled into day-to-day fires that...

In some ways, it may be natural, or even good, when your team comes to you with questions, or to solve problems. You have more experience, and probably knowledge than they do. You know your business inside and out. You may even enjoy being the expert. The problem is that...

Another meeting? Especially right now in the year of virtual meetings we’ve heard a lot about meeting fatigue. Meetings often get a bad reputation. We’ve all sat through meetings that could have been an email. Or meetings that get off track. Or meetings that are hard to stay awake in....

Clients and prospects often ask us how to improve employee performance reviews. How a small business conducts performance reviews varies widely from not doing them at all, to conducting them sporadically, to holding them annually. Regardless of how often they are held, employee reviews should be a productive conversation without...

We have all heard the adage, “Two heads are better than one.” In business, the way to make the most out of two (or more) heads, is by collaborating - having a discussion with your team on their ideas and experiences within your business.  When you collaborate with your...

What if your sales team drastically increased their closing ratio? What if revenue increased 20%? What if sales activity doubled? Is this a real possibility? Yes! It can be a reality when you look at the possibility that you may be expecting too little. People Perform as Expected People perform...

In our last insight, we encouraged you to think about flipping the energy of management upside-down so that information, knowledge, and data flows from your team up to your managers. It starts with changing the way you think about management. But it won't work unless you have key structures in place. This week, we want to discuss one structure that is key to turning management upside down: UpSideDown Manager Meetings.

At Benchmark Business Group, we believe that business is three things: Strategy, Structure & Engagement of People. In well-designed businesses people are engaged to work through well-thought-out structures to achieve the strategy. When this isn't the case, where there is not clear strategy, or the structures are missing, it becomes difficult for owners and managers to productively engage people. Naturally, this leads to business management issues.

This month we've discussed how to design the structures needed to make project management successful in small business. We've looked at defining the mindset, having a project plan, knowing where to start, and dealing with change. We want to end this month's spotlight with a focus on action. It's one thing to have a plan, but no plan is successful without action.