As an MD, don’t try and be Superman – find your team’s strengths
In 2001 I re-mortgaged my house to buy the majority share in an IT business that I had worked in for 5 or 6 years. As part of the purchase I embarked on the transition from Sales Director to Managing Director but was mindful that I didn’t make too much change too quickly.
Looking back on that decision, and given that there were only 9 or 10 of us, what I ultimately did was carry on with what I had been doing but add another 30 hours to my working week.
I was not completely naive to the situation, and must have been relatively good at sales, because what I did manage to do was hire an excellent Operations Manager who not only bought into the vision I had, but also took a significant pay cut to join the fun.
Like many entrepreneurs, despite being able to delegate a huge amount of the operational elements of the business, I still placed huge (unreasonable) pressures on myself to increase sales revenues and positioned myself as ‘Superman’, despite having x 2 other good sales people.
All in all I do look back on that time with a great sense of achievement in the fact that there was a huge debt involved in buying the business, which I subsequently managed to repay in full within 3 years.
There are however, many painful and highly stressful memories that I look back on that, with the benefit of a little more experience could easily have been avoided, like;
- A trip to the industrial tribunal to deal with a major HR issue
- A potentially catastrophic series of events with a supplier
- Overworking certain staff so much that I nearly lost their loyalty
- Losing a great sales person through too much self-importance
Today I see many SME’s that are run by fantastic people with a huge appetite for challenge and the ‘cut and trust’ of business.
The sad fact is that so many of these people seem totally hell-bent on trying to have a big ‘S’ printed on the front of their shirts that they fail to see what talent is available to helps them achieve their aspirations. On many occasions some of this talent is already sitting on their payroll and some of which can be relatively easily acquired. You never know, they may even bring some of their own magic to the party !!!!