Identify Common Business Problems

Poor Leadership, Business Management Issues, Weak Strategic Planning

Dec 5, 2008 Roger Lever

First identify business problems with poor leadership, weak strategy selection, superficial planning, business management issues and lack of organisation to solve them.

Identifying these as problems may not be as easy as first thought because the problems may be masked by events or external factors or most insidiously “this is how it has always been”. These problems have nothing to do with personality and everything to do with judgment and execution. The final arbiter should be results.

Effective vs. Poor Leadership

Effective leadership ensures the business has selected good business strategies, creates plans with depth to planning analysis, a well designed business organisation, efficiently operated and managed for continuous improvement.

Poor leadership will not do the above and in particular:

  • Gather insufficient external and internal information for strategy and planning
  • Wrong people involved in setting strategies and direction
  • Lack of depth of thinking to generate good strategies and plans

Business Management - Sales

Business management needs to focus on sales and financial control. Marketing and sales ranges from identifying target markets and customers to techniques for closing the sale. Key problems are little or no:

  • Marketing or creating brand awareness
  • Differentiation of marketing channels [web presence, email, brochure, radio, TV, newspaper, magazines…]
  • Consideration of sales channels [web, telephone, in-person, retail, licensing to third-party…]
  • Management measures associated with markets, target customers, contact management, sales, repeat sales
  • Consideration of what demographic information should be captured to identify new customers or channels

Business Management – Financial Control

To make money requires good financial management and to ensure that the business considers the financial impact of decisions. Poor financial management is:

  • Little or no financial forecasting and planning
  • Lack of consideration of expenses in relation to income – spending too much money
  • Insufficient profit margin
  • Little or no consideration of cashflow; when money actually comes in and when money actually goes out
  • Growth is paid for with debt and servicing the debt becomes an excessive burden

Organisation - Policies

Business must comply with all applicable laws including company, health and safety, employment, taxation and have appropriate company policies. Key problems are likely to be no policies and/or contracts for:

  • Customers
  • Suppliers
  • Staff, contractors or temporary staff

Organisation - Staff

If problems exist here then staff management is likely to be haphazard at best and abysmal at worst:

  • Setting either unclear objectives or no objectives; what is expected and by when and inconsistent follow through
  • Setting either unclear or no expectations about the quality of the deliverables and the level of detail required
  • Changing the completion criteria before completion of tasks
  • Micro management of tasks
  • Lack of timely guidance and course correction for complex tasks
  • Inconsistent behaviour, too friendly, too strict, too generous, too mean
  • Perceived or real inequality in treatment of staff, with impulsive or reactive decision-making
  • Unclear or no procedures in place to address recruitment, staff discipline or performance problems
  • Staff specialist knowledge leaves business vulnerable to staff being unavailable [holiday, sick…] or leaving and the business struggling to fill the gap

Other Reasons for Business Problems

The reasons for business problems are not simply restricted to the above list of internal items but also extend to external factors such as:

  • Natural disaster
  • Significant economic downturn
  • Bigger, better or faster competitors
  • New business entrant changing the rules of the game
  • Products or services becoming obsolete

To solve these types of problems needs a structured approach and one way is by Strategies to Improve Your Small Business.

The copyright of the article Identify Common Business Problems in Business Management is owned by Roger Lever. Permission to republish Identify Common Business Problems in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
Identify Common Business Problems , lusi Identify Common Business Problems
   
What do you think about this article?
NOTE: Because you are not a Suite101 member, your comment will be moderated before it is viewable.
post your comment
What is 2+4?