Small business? Big business? What’s the exact business?

Don’t let the adjectives fool you—business is just business. The thing is, we can often get caught up in the sound of things that we tend to forget that at the heart of a business’ operation is a simple set of core principles.

Personally working for and examining the nature of small and big businesses as a contractor, entrepreneur, and full-time employee now, the truth of the matter is that they’re all basically operating the exact same way. The only difference is: there are more moving parts in a larger organization as compared to a smaller one.

It’s called scalability.

Think about it this way:

When starting out as a small business, HR/Marketing/Business Administration/Accounting all fell under one person. However, as the business began to expand and you required more hands on deck, you inevitability began hiring to fill out these various roles. Maybe you hired an HR manager; a Marketing manager; or even an on-site Store manager to take care of the day-to-day tasks for you. The thing is, the people you’ve hired can often get caught up in their own titles and their own objectives that the organization as a whole forgets one simple fact—that each person who is hired is a part of a business, working towards a common goal—and that goal is often: making money.

When you started out as a business-of-one, what did you typically have in mind? Probably your one primary objective (whatever that business objective might have been at the time). Though, a funny thing starts to happen as a business grows and expands; employees in various positions tend to forget the overarching organizational objective and try to insert their own egoic-agendas in place of the main, strategic one (or worse, the people you’ve hired are not skilled enough to perform the function that they were hired for in the first place, so they try to coast by; doing as little as possible).

This is where the danger of “growing too quickly” from a human perspective comes into play. When thinking of the issue of growing too quickly (a commonly sought-after goal fraught with pitfalls unbeknownst to the layman), we often forget to examine the impact of human-error in that equation. Put simply, we forget that too many Cooks in the Kitchen can often over or under-flavour a stew. The key here is: hiring the right people for the right job, and only expanding as necessary—not as you think is necessary.

Perhaps the solution for growing a business is not in hiring more staff in hopes of expanding, but hiring less staff with an emphasis on hiring persons with more demonstrate-able skills. The more egos that get added, the more agendas that get added as well. And with more egos and more agendas comes less time for actually getting any real work done… muse on it.

That being said—stop reading this and get back to work!

-your current or future employer will thank me.