In business, flexibility is often the thing that makes the difference. A smaller business can usually find this easier than those much larger organisations with lots of different departments, teams, and stakeholders who need to be consulted.
In our current times, speed can be the thing that wins the sale. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been faced with just this situation in my own business. In addition to my coaching and consultancy business, I run a couple of projects. The one that’s in the limelight at the moment is the East Midlands Women’s Awards (EMWA). We’re two weeks away from the event now and, fingers crossed, things are settling into place. But three weeks ago, this was not the case.
No matter how much planning you do, there are times when for no fault of your own or that of your business, one change in a contractor’s circumstances can throw your plans completely out. That’s what I was facing.
My admin support advised me just three weeks ago that she could not help me as we’d planned. It was so close to our award deadlines that it would have taken far too much time and effort to train up someone else. Plus, if I’m honest, I just didn’t trust that it could all be pulled in by the looming deadlines.
So, probably like many owner-managers, after I’d come down off the ceiling, and stayed my emotional panic, I pulled my sleeves up and got started.
We always hear, and I’ve told many of my own clients, to delegate or contract out those areas of your work that you either don’t do well or don’t like doing. Well, admin is that area for me. I started out in admin, I’ve been a legal secretary and held many other administrative roles over my career, but these days it’s not my strong point at all. I would now add to my advice about outsourcing those tasks, always have a plan B. Or another contractor who can step in seamlessly if needed.
I am grateful that I have a wide network of supportive businesses that I could call in to help when I was pulling my hair out. Because many of them are small, they were able to pull in things like the graphic design for the brochures and additional printing that I thought was going elsewhere. We have two different brochures one of which I personally designed over the past two years. Having to take back all the administration tasks for the event, I couldn’t see I could get is all done.
And there was the liaising with the venue, and other contractors, keeping a record of ticket purchases, dietary requirements, and many other minor but important tasks that if not done correctly could scupper the positive experience that the guests have on the night.
You might say that this is nothing really, but when you have dyslexia all of these little things add up to a mountain of stress.
As I reflect on the flurry of activities of the past three weeks: working long into the night and Saturday and Sunday to ensure everything was pulled in, I am grateful that for those things I could not do myself, the flexibility of smaller businesses like my own came to my aid.
The second point of gratitude for me is that relationships engender trust and trust has benefits that mean that when you find yourself in a tight spot, you are not being taken advantage of by high costs.
According to the FSB small businesses accounted for 99.3% of all private sector businesses at the start of 2018 and 99.9% were small or medium-sized (SMEs). The combined annual turnover of SMEs was £2.0 trillion, 52% of all private sector turnover.
There will be times in every business when circumstances threaten to push us to distraction. But even in this we know we must keep our commitments to our customers and to ourselves. At these times we may wonder why we’re doing it. We may ask ourselves, why are we running this business. At these times it’s easy to forget that we, in our small business, in our small corner of the commercial arena, are making a difference to the UK economy. And the flexibility and agility that being small allows; among many other things, has a big impact near and far, by keeping other businesses, and the UK economy alive.
Yes, I’d say it’s all worth it.
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