Most small business owners want two things from their business- a reasonable Profit for all their hard work, and the freedom to enjoy their Personal life (both in the business and outside it).
However, they often neglect the 3 other P’s that will create the Profit and Personal life they want.
To explain this concept, I created a formula:
Plan + Process + People = Profits —> your Personal life
You need to have all 3 P’s in this order:
- Planning— What are the Right Things? [the What]
- Process— What does Done Right look like? [the How]
- People — Do we have the Right People? [the Who]
Without Planning, people don’t know how what they do impacts your goals, so they are busy but not focused.
Without effective Process, you will have wasted effort, headaches and won’t deliver on your promises to customers.
Without the right People, you will be busy dealing with fires and drama, and trapped in daily effort to “manage” your people and customers.
—> You feel overworked, overwhelmed by your wish list of business improvement projects, and you feel guilty working long days instead of spending time with your friends and family.
Once you put the 3 P’s in place at your organization, you can transform into an organization with:
A Plan: when your staff know the “plan” and understand how they impact organizational goals, they work together as a purpose-driven team to improve and grow the business by delighting your customers.
Clear Process: when activities are standardized, clear roles and responsibilities are outlined, and key results are tracked to make informed decisions, this provides “autopilot” systems to run smoothly and scale easily.
Right People: when you have managers who build and coach a team of A-Players, you trust them to run the business and make decisions as you would.
This leads to your ultimate goal as a business owner:
- The level of Profit (financial security) you desire, and
- The Personal work-life balance you want … the freedom to do what you want, when you want to do it.
—————————————————————————–
Discover Which Plan, People and Process elements are Roadblocks in Your Small Business
Take our 3 minute quiz to find out how your firm compares to high-growth and high-profit firms.
Article by Diana Southall
About the author: Diana Southall is the creator of the People Plan. She helps companies that are missing out on opportunities because the owner is personally involved in every sale or client.
