Are You Going to Be a Good Business Manager?

When you do business as a solo entrepreneur, you alone are responsible for every aspect of the business.

If there are breakdowns in your product sales, customer relations, or financial management, there’s no one to shake a finger at except the guy in the mirror.  This fact alone weeds out certain people from ever becoming a good business manager.  Some folks just

• Aren’t self starters in any degree and have no sense of responsibility for accomplishment
• Don’t have patience for paying attention to details
• Don’t care to solve problems and challenges – they tend to run from such
• Get lost when it comes to keeping a daily schedule or routine going
• Have no interest in “being in charge” and accepting the role of managing anything
• Aren’t good with numbers, bank accounts, and even calendars

Now in a typical “regular” business, each of the employee managers that handle a department like those mentioned above will be scrutinized and evaluated in their performance.

They gain a reputation for, not necessarily their departmental knowledge, but their actual performance – the ability to turn their knowledge into output that can be tracked and measured.

In a small online niche business, however, there are not separate individual managers responsible for the many different operations that must happen.

If something breaks down, the solo owner has no departmental manager to go to when a solution is sought. In fact, sometimes the business owner has difficulty in recognizing that there may be a problem brewing on the horizon.

He may be so involved in the business, so close to the problem, that he fails to see that he will soon have a significant problem that could have been corrected had it been identified and addressed sooner.

So what is the criteria against which a good solo business manager can be evaluated or judged?

I believe he is judged by the marketplace. He has no way to be an objective judge of himself and his own performance. What good does it do to have the business owner talk to himself about his mistakes and his need to solve some departmental problem?

No, instead, the market will be his judge. If he can keep sales on track, if he can meet his business goals, he can feel satisfied that his performance is adequate. In a solo business, performance is always the bottom line.

A good solo business manager is one that sets optimistic but achievable goals for his business in terms of sales and net income, and then manages the business in whatever way he can to meet his goals.

Solo business owners, particularly those who have no previous private sector business experience, are bound to make some faulty assumptions, poor decisions, and counterproductive strategy moves.

Management is not an exact science and the solo operator can hope to do no better than to overcome his mistakes and still reach his business goals.  As in other complex pursuits in life, business management is really learned while on the job.  Learn by doing, trying, making mistakes and moving on, and by failing and trying again.

To your online business success,

Steve Browne

www.SteveBrowneDirect.com