Pursuit editor Hal Humphreys reflects on the mixed blessing of sudden, rapid growth for small business owners.
Last week we hosted our first webinar since last spring. It’s been a long and accidental hiatus, occasioned by things that are, in theory, good: busy times for our various businesses and endeavors. Storyboard EMP, the parent company of PI Education and Pursuit, grew fast in surprising ways. I had more work travel this year than ever before: some conferences and in-person teaching all over the country, from California to the Carolinas. Kim, my wife and Pursuit’s editor, sold a manuscript she’s been working on for almost a decade, which meant a new burst of editing and recipe-testing. All good things, but it left us with the feeling of sprinting to catch a train that was already leaving the station, accelerating fast.
This is a common problem for people running a small business: Your staff and infrastructure are often bare bones — enough to keep things running just fine in normal times, but stressed to the max when emergencies or sudden growth ensue. We found that out last winter and spring, as a surprise regulatory change drove thousands of new buyers to an appraisal course they suddenly needed. Sure, having that course ready to go was perhaps an example of “Luck favors the ready.” But what we weren’t ready for was planning a 12-stop national “roadshow” teaching tour with only a few weeks’ notice. And we struggled to figure out how to seamlessly deliver electronic class materials and CE certificates to new customers, who attended our in-person classes precisely because they don’t like taking courses online. For a very small, bootstrapped company, the deluge of helpline calls and messages from people trying to navigate logins and downloads left us with our lips barely above the surging waters.
This is a common problem for people running a small business: Your staff and infrastructure are often bare bones — enough to keep things running just fine in normal times, but stressed to the max when emergencies or sudden growth ensue.
We needed a better system to manage the frustrated customers who are new to our tech, and the demands of event-planning and logistics.
I thought about this a lot last week during our webinar with Leah Wietholter, a forensic accountant, fraud investigator, and the author of a new book called DATA SLEUTH. Leah’s book is all about applying systems to the work she does. For me, it was a revelation. In the book, Leah wrote candidly about her struggles with hiring and training employees over the years, as her business grew — sometimes faster than she could adapt. One thing in particular struck a chord with me: Too often, when an employee would ask her how to do a thing or solve a problem, she’d say, essentially, “Move over. Let me look at it.”
That sounded familiar. I’ve struggled with that — the need to have my hands on everything. I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in this.
Here’s the problem: To the person we’ve hired for their expertise, micromanaging can feel like a lack of trust. Robbing them of autonomy can undermine their confidence and productivity. And it keeps us, the business owners, from doing our jobs, whatever those happen to be: the big-picture stuff, marketing, business development, etc.
In reading Leah’s book and talking to her, I was impressed to learn about how she struggled with these same issues – and then methodically figured out a plan to fix them. Her DATA SLEUTH method includes systems for tackling complex cases involving mountains of data, and also for hiring and training new employees and delegating responsibilities for each task.
That’s impressive. Taking the time to create and implement systems is a hard thing for most business owners to do. Our colleagues Mark and Wendy Murnan are also great at this. They’ve built a process for hiring employees and contractors that clarifies the Murnans’ expectations and preferred ways of doing things. They’ve written this process down, so it’s easy to replicate.
Keeping up with the growth of a small business is like dealing with a leaky roof: The thing only leaks when it’s raining. When it’s sunny, we sometimes forget to worry about it. For us at Storyboard, the rain came with that regulatory change last winter. We needed that rain. But it also made for lots of leaks between December and April, and there was no time to fix them as the storm pounded down.
Now that the downpour has abated, we’d be wise to not just patch the roof, but perhaps replace it before the next storm comes.
That’s what continuing education is all about: taking the time when things are slow(er) to troubleshoot system failures and prepare our businesses for the Next Big Thing — which could be a feast or a famine. —THH