Often an interesting thing happens when women entrepreneurs think about creating a bigger business vision. They freeze. They revert to old behaviors. The urge to control is stronger than ever.
The problem is the belief that as the business grows, the stress will grow, the business owner’s time will be more limited and their work/life balance will be gone forever. If you practice the principles of Holistic Business Management, this can be avoided.
What is Holistic Business Management? It’s a style of management that incorporates the best of current business practices with the best of what women bring to the table as business owners and managers.
In order to run your business holistically, you need to be clear about what’s important in your business. Over the last few weeks I’ve been blogging about money and different ways to look at your income and expenses within your business. It’s obvious that a certain income is important so a business can keep its doors open. However, what other financial aspects are important to you? For instance, gives 1% of its sales to environmental groups and supports the environment in many other ways. The giving is built into its model.
What’s important to you? Why did you build your business in the first place? Define what you want to have happen in your business. Think about financials, how you want your customers to be treated, and the culture and environment you want for your customers. How do you want to source your raw materials? Do you want to insure that only non-toxic products are used to clean your floors?
Be specific. Rather than saying “Prompt delivery of meals to a table,” say, “Delivery of meals to a table in 15 minutes or less.” The more specific you are, the easier it will be to develop metrics to run your business.
We’ll talk about metrics next week.
