Plugging The Gaps

Capitalise on your strengths. Most successful businesses grew out of a small business or just even someone’s idea. The average person does not have the ability to excel in all the important areas or departments of a business. If you’re looking for one main reason for failure in small business today it would be that the business owner lacks a skill or resource in a particular area, fails to realise it and blunders on in the business oblivious to the shortcomings.

As you go through our material you will be alerted to the key drivers of value in a business. At each step of the way you should examine your own strengths and weaknesses in these areas. Recognise the strengths and captaliise on those. As far as your weaknesses are concerned you will need to ask a question “Can I develop those skills and abilities or will I need to introduce a third party or extra resource to help me get there”

Main Areas of a Business

If you look at the different components of a business, you will be able to identify those areas where you have ability and those areas where you do not.

A business can be broken up into its following departments:

• Planning – product or service selection
• Marketing
• Sales
• Management
• Customer service
• Financial Control
• Delivery or Fulfilment
• After Sales

Aligning Your Strengths with Your Business

Your strength or weakness can generally be identified by looking at your personality or preferences. Psychometric testing would identify that your strengths are either left-brain or right brain based. See the table below, which identifies the people who should be in charge of departments according to brain style or preference.

Left-brain can be associated with analytical, processing, and planning skills.

Right brain can be associated with creative, entrepreneurial, and people skills.

Marketing and lead generation is in the middle in the above table. That is because marketing and lead generation needs input from both brain styles. There is a science and art to marketing and lead generation. While this is true of many of the departments of the business as outlined above, I have listed the departments of a business under either left or right brain because that is where I believe the dominance should lie.

The interesting point to make is that most small businesses are started by people with right brain dominance. These are the ideas people. However, you can see that the skills and abilities required to run a successful business are possessed by people with left-brain dominance.

So how did businesses, which were started by people with right brain dominance, survive and even thrive? Because the creators of these businesses saw their deficiency early enough and took steps to remedy the deficiencies or met someone like a partner or employee who complemented their skills by introducing the requisite left brain resources.