Small Business Owners: When Should You Be Taking Professionals Help ?

Research has concluded that being reluctant to hire or utilize professionals to help your business, results in business failure [1].

That is quite obvious but we all know hiring or getting help from professionals costs too much in terms of monetary and non monetary benefits. 

That is why when it comes to hiring or getting help from professionals, Small (including Medium Large) business owners should make sure that they are hiring or taking help from the right Professionals at the right time for the right job to get the job done the right way!

And that my friend is called doing things “efficiently & effectively”!

And this articles deals exactly with that!

• When should you employ or take help from Professionals?
• What kind of Professionals you should hire?
• What job in your business would require Professionals?

   

I believe instead of having professionals from the beginning till the end while you just sit and watch and paying them huge sums and most of the time you are clueless about your business, yeah clueless, I will explain that in a minute, keep reading!

It’s better to have them in a different way, I am suggesting an approach that would not only help you understand your business thoroughly .

But will also help you in deciding what type or kind of experts, professionals you need to hire or take help from and why should you hire or take help of professionals in a given set of tasks aka job.

Basically there are three possible situations or phases where you might need help of a professional.

Business Professional Help: Three Situations!

1. When You are New to the whole Business Thing!
2. When You Know Quite A Bit About Your Business
3. When Growth Kicks In!

Let’s talk about each phase one by one, shall we ?!

When You are New to the Whole Business Thing!

This is phase is actually pre business launch phase of 4-12 months, this is what I mean by being “clueless” about your business!

You need professionals!

Because you don’t know how to run a business The Right Way!

You immensely fear running business on your own but you won’t admit that in open, I know!

When you don’t know how to run a business & have fears, obviously that means there is high likelihood that you will fail in your business thus losing all your money in the process, left hell of depression!

  

The Big Question!

  

Now the big question is “How to avoid that ?”

The answer is simple!

Make relationship or some kind of formal arrangement (internship, training etc) with an Expert, Professional, where he/she trains you until you get full grip on how to run a business, such a training, capacity building would require four to 12 months, depending on your ability to not only learn the trick but the whole trade, depending on nature of business model etc

So if in case you are totally new to this whole business thingy I would suggest you to get in touch with Experts, Professionals and get through training or skill development for necessary amount of time.

Going through this will not only give confidence but that essential business acumen necessary for efficient and effective management of a business!

Things to Remember in this phase:

• Avoid information overload, learn bit by bit, don’t go crazy while learning things, don’t think about learning everything overnight rather keep it easy.
• No question is stupid, ask questions whenever you think you are not sufficiently clear about certain thing, make sure you are absolutely clear about all the nitty-gritty, nuggets of each and every aspect of the business.
• Do audio recordings of the help you get from the expert/professional, listen to it whenever you get free time, make sure you practically apply all the learned things over and over in the business environment.
• Don’t just waste your time by sitting around doing nothing (like thinking about getting job instead of starting business), apply those things and report back whenever necessary to the expert/professional. We are living in smart era, just use that iphone whenever you have questions, need help!

Now let’s talk about the second phase

When You Know Quite A Bit about Your Business

This is the second phase for those who come through the first phase. It is more likely that most of my readers, bottom of the pyramid belong to this phase.

This is a phase, where you start your own business!

Knowing quite a bit mean you have skill capacity similar to that of someone who has effectively cleared phase one, in that case you know how the whole business works, what are its critical and important tasks, aspects and what is it that you can handle and what is that professionals should handle.

You know how to achieve growth and you know where profits are, what market needs and demands are, in a nutshell you know a quite a bit of everything about your business.

And for that reason you will know when you should hire or take help from professionals and when, where you should have just mediocre type of professionals, normal guys to get the job done. 

This helps you in much better way in organizing your whole business, by employing right guys at the right time for the right jobs thus minimizing extra costs, human resource deficiencies,  mismanagement that hampers growth, goals and objective achievement so on and so forth.

All of that consequently leads to growth (this might take good amount of time tho!), increase in net profits, business expansion, increase in market demand etc

That brings us to the last phase!

When Growth Kicks In!

You need professionals, to expand further, to keep up the momentum, I mean you need guys at least equal to you in terms of essential skills required to run, to expand business efficiently & effectively and that’s where professionals comes into the equation.

And if you want your business go otherwise, just take a six month off, get on world tour, enjoy the hard earned money and forget about all the worries related to your business because there won’t be any business to worry about! ;p

Over to you guys! (winks)

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References:

1.      Sean Ennis, (1999),"Growth and the small firm: using causal mapping to assess the decision-making process- a case study", Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal, Vol. 2 Iss: 2 pp. 147 - 160