Why business stagnates? (Article 1)

Is it Urgent or Important?
In India, there is a terminology called MSME that stands for Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises. It is interesting that the Indian Government wants this section of the industry to boost & several measures have been taken for the benefit of MSME section. But that is more from the point of ease of doing business or obtaining cheaper & easier finance.

In fact, there is a bigger question the MSME owners need to ask themselves - 'Why are MSME's are stagnating?' There are multiple reasons & many are pointing towards government rules & regulations (for example : The painful way of filing yearly return of your GST), But that's not the point here. We are trying to find the answers to the questions that relate to the MSME owner himself/herself. Here are a few suggestions for the owners :

Get away from Micro Management - You have grown your own business with your own efforts. Wonderful ! But for the next step change, this is not enough. Rather, it's a disadvantage ! Because, in the process of growing your business, you have unknowingly cultivated a habit of doing everything yourself. This habit is the first thing that comes in way of your growth now ! Why should the owner be seen dealing with micro issues, such as leaves taken by employees, number of items produced by the employee (manufacturing) or number of offers made by the employee (sales). I've seen owners who keep an eye on daily emails received & replied by their employees - certainly not the job of an owner !

Urgent v/s Important - You need to indeed prioritize your work to these two quadrants. There are many urgent things, but a few of these may not be important. A simple example - You are in a meeting & the phone rings. It's from an unknown number. It is urgent to pick it up, as you think it might be from a potential customer. When you lift the phone, it happens to be from some call center offering you a personal loan ! Another example, you need to ensure that an offer must reach a customer within 24 hours. It might be an offer worth a few thousand rupees. And you make some proposal engineer's life miserable by rigorously following up. At the same time, a meeting is lined up with a key customer, who is giving presentation on some important aspects of his/her business. You are, however, busy in checking if that offer has gone or not !

Daily dispatches, Daily payment recoveries, Daily sales call reports...all are so called 'Urgent' things.

Training, Strategy meetings, Reading articles relevant to your business, Attending business conferences for networking, Looking for new partners / associates, Developing new products / technologies... all are 'Important' things. Are you finding enough time for these things??

There are some more things you can do as an owner... Read it in the next article.


© Nitin Kirloskar