Getting your business under control when you're busy

By Thomas Taylor, Director, Middle Office

How to get your business under control when you’re always busy

Hands up anyone that thinks they have too much spare time? The market is hot right now. How do you make sure you make the most of the good times? Do you have a nagging feeling that things might be getting out of control? Let’s stop and think for a minute. Maybe make a list?

People make lists because we can’t keep everything in our heads.

In 1956 George A. Miller published “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information” . This has occasionally been referred to as Miller’s law.

Whole forests have been cut down to churn out self-help books on how to best deal with this problem. Two of the best are “Getting things Done” by David Allen and “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen Covey.

If you struggle to stay on top of everything in your business, the best thing to do is to get the really big issues out of your head and onto a piece of paper. Then work out what steps you might take for each one. The thing to be careful of, based on our humble experience, is to not reinvent the wheel each time you come across a problem.

There are very few problems in the world that have not been faced by someone, somewhere else.

Most people would feel uncomfortable describing themselves as wise, but wise people are fundamentally just people that have faced a problem in the past, found a way through and learned more from it each time. Hopefully they shared that wisdom with the rest of us. You just need talk to a good tradie to really see this in action. Of course, it does not mean anyone is wise about all things, but we are all specialists in our own way. Us oldies at Middle Office feel we have gathered most of our wisdom from being able to see inside lots of different businesses, from the very good to the not-sogood, and we get a kick out of our clients getting the benefit of those years.

So, if you are stuck wondering what to do, make sure you take some time out from the crazy busy hours and ask a few battlehardened people some questions. They usually love reminiscing now that they have more time on their hands.

One of the ways we help agencies is by producing a diagnostic report. It’s a deep dive, from a financial perspective, at the things in their business that can have the biggest impact on shareholder valuation.