Business Owners, Work on your business not in it!

As a CFO Consultant one of the things I advocate and help my clients achieve is for the business owner to work on their business and not in their business. Business owners who adopt this philosophy not only increase profits, but also make their businesses more valuable to a potential buyer.
The philosophy of working on your business instead of in your business is achieved as follows:

• Having the right people in place to assume the administrative and operational responsibilities and if you do not have the right people you must work to get them
• The business owner must be the face and the ambassador of the company
• The business owner must be responsible for bringing business into the company and working toward that end
• The business owner must continuously communicate with existing customers in order to maintain those relationships
• The business owner cannot have any administrative or operational responsibilities nor can they allow themselves to get immersed and bogged down in those responsibilities.

I was speaking with a potential client and he kind of snickered when I brought up the concept of working on your business instead of in your business. I asked him why he was snickering and he said because he knew some business owners who did this and when the 2008 recession hit they had to layoff their key people and now they are back to working in their business.

I told this potential client that if I were consulting those business owners there is no way I would have suggested to lay off their key people and abandon the concept of working on their business instead of in their business. First of all, what is needed in a recession are sales and to take the person responsible for bringing business into the company (the business owner) and putting them into the administrative and/or operational trenches is a terrible mistake and will drastically reduce the top line. Secondly, in a recession you do not layoff key top performers you layoff "B","C", "D" and "F" performers.

Part of a good strategic plan is working towards this concept of working on your business instead of in your business. A good Part Time CFO should have a good working knowledge of this concept and its implementation as part of their CFO Services.