In managing relationships!
It’s perhaps the single biggest thing you didn’t expect and weren’t prepared for.
When there’s only you in your business there are no internal relationships to manage. When your first employee comes on board, there’s two of you and a single two-way relationship to manage.
Pretty straightforward, doesn’t take too much time, you can sort out any misunderstandings quickly and effectively.
Another person joins your team and suddenly there are 3 relationships to deal with. You with each of them and their relationship with each other.
You know that to scale and service your business, clients and suppliers you need a bigger team. Your business grows to 10 people.
Now it’s starting to hit home, because now you’re overseeing 45 relationships.
No wonder you seem to be running around being busy but unable to get the things on your list finished each day.
To understand how this escalates, at what feels like an exponential rate, apply the number of people in your business to this formula, where N is the number of people and then divide by 2, because you need 2 people to have a relationship!
(N * N – 1) / 2
If you have 26 people in your business that’s 26 * 25 = 650 then divide by 2 and that’s 325 relationships. And at some point you’re going to become involved in all of them.
When you started your business and growth plans what was your level of understanding that to leverage your skills, be effective and efficient you’d have to be great at managing people? Or at the very least how to manage others to manage your teams?
So often, what holds a business back is not lack of opportunity of finances, it’s being able to recruit, retain, develop and lead great people.
The first step in turning that around is becoming aware of how to manage relationships that work for you rather than slow you down.
