Category: Business

Your Company’s Structure and How to Establish the Best Organization

Defining the right structure for your company is one of the most important areas in which you can invest your time as an entrepreneur. It is a significant undertaking, especially if the company is already operating under an existing configuration. Nevertheless, your organizational structure will determine how everyone operates within your company. How well it fits the company’s tasks and internal dynamics as well as the external context that it inhabits can make a significant difference in the company’s performance of up 24% [i].

As entrepreneurs, we usually start selling a product or a service. When we begin to have more demand for that product or service, we then decide to build a team and a company. Usually, we start with a simple configuration. Very soon, if we are lucky, we have more work than we can manage so we need to hire more people.

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This is What Happens When You Manage the Balance of Organization and Freedom in Your Business

There is an inherent tension in how a company is structured. Too much bureaucracy and creativity and dynamism are thwarted. Too much flexibility and carte blanche and mistakes start to accumulate. Processes are the answer to ensuring that a certain level of quality is consistently maintained, but too many procedures and we start becoming more like machines. Allowing self-organization and inventiveness to emerge within a business can promote the occurrence of breakthroughs that would have otherwise been impossible, but too loose a structure can invite chaos and angry customers.

The tension is inherent, yet unique to each company. The combination of structure, emergence, and flexibility that best suits an organization resides along a multi-dimensional continuum. Some companies may thrive on a higher dose of freedom, while others require a more balanced mixture. You may create the right blend based on the company’s goals, how its teams work together, and what it produces.

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When Something Goes Wrong, Try to Get Something Good Out of It

We’ve all had to deal with situations that we would not have chosen. Failures or bad turns of events are uncomfortable, and the easiest thing to do is to solve them and then move on. However, there is always gold hidden inside these events, even if it is just a sliver. Whether we are responsible for the circumstances or not, if something unfavorable happens, we can always learn from it and improve our world in ways we may have not appreciated before.

The more uncomfortable the circumstance is, the more beneficial it is to try to find the silver lining. It can give the event meaning and can help you move forward more easily than you would have otherwise. Sometimes finding a positive outcome from a disagreeable circumstance can be a struggle because some things are simply unpleasant or even sad, but again, there is always something to be learned.

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How Your Company Can Keep Up in a Complex World

One of the first business management consultants was Frederick Taylor. Taylor was an industrial-era management thinker who worked with factories to ensure maximum efficiency in their production processes. By assigning highly-specialized tasks to the employees in the factory, he managed to shave off significant amounts of time from overall production.

Taylor applied scientific principles to his observations about the production process. From those observations, he then wrote The Principles of Scientific Management, published in 1911. In the process, his ideas helped shape current management theory.

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Implementing a Management Team Meeting and How to Make it Work

As a company grows, its day-to-day operations become more and more complex. Even when a company has the right structure in place to handle all the company’s transactions, communication within the company may not be flowing optimally. The interactions within the structure could be placing an undue burden on a person or a team within the company. A practice we recently developed, which is standard practice in many companies, is the creation of a management team to discuss ongoing management issues. A management team can help your company make communication across departments more fluid and effective.

I am the CEO in my company, Celaque and have been from day one, starting when our team numbered a total of just three people. The dynamics were of course very different then – managing communications and the workload in a small team was fairly easy. With time, however, we grew, and now we are in the final phases of selling/leasing and managing one building, the construction of another, and the development of a third project. Now, with many more transactions and interactions within the company, my role has shifted.

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Achieving Better Clarity for Your Business in the Middle of the Chaos

The demands we face today can feel overwhelming. Our to-do lists are never-ending, and the pace of technological changes continues to accelerate. It may seem as though as soon as we have adapted to a new technology, we must learn something new. Although there are certain basic, underlying principles that never change, the noise around us is constant.

Before the Internet, all that we had access to was the information physically available around us, like newspapers, books, television, or even conversations with colleagues and friends. Today, many barriers to information have been removed, and this, combined with the creation of content by previously silent communicators, makes it difficult to sift through what matters and what is simply clutter.

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This is the Time to Hire and Grow Your Company

It’s not always easy to decide to hire someone new. There are many things to consider in the interview and onboarding process, and some of these things may be of concern. What if the person doesn’t adapt? What if the new employee will create more work? What if we can’t find the right person? All these concerns are scary. Finding the right mix of people takes time and effort. At the same time, expanding your team is the only way to grow as an organization.

Therefore, it’s important to get started. The process of onboarding isn’t always straightforward, and it takes time. The sooner you begin, the sooner you will find candidates you like and the sooner you can hire and train the new team member. When you go through all these steps, you will be able to delegate those tasks you are ready to give to someone else and move on with improving your company.

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Bring It All Together: How to Implement Processes in a Nutshell – Part 2

If you are thinking about implementing processes at your company, the task of doing so can feel daunting. Additionally, getting the infrastructure off the ground is a lot of work, but it’s also a great investment of time and effort.

Processes are a group of tasks that are performed to obtain a desired objective within a company. Outlining the main processes and implementing them for you and your team will result in greater efficiency, adaptability, and peace of mind. In Part 1 of this post (add link), I outlined the initial steps for implementing processes at a firm.

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Bring It All Together: How to Implement Processes in a Nutshell – Part 1

Once a business grows to a certain level of success, it becomes an absolute necessity to organize daily tasks to avoid mistakes. Errors happen all the time, and inconsistencies can result in unhappy customers, tense employees, and unbudgeted costs.

The best way to organize these daily duties is to create and implement business processes. A process is a group of tasks that are performed within a business to obtain a specific objective—it is like a chain of events that guides a project from start to finish. By clearly outlining for yourself and your company what the main processes in your company are and how, ideally, they should work, you will gain greater efficiency.

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Invest in Your Professional Development and Education

It is time to invest in your education and development. There may be a course you have been meaning to take or a conference you have wanted to attend. Do not wait any longer, as you are your most precious asset, and you should invest in yourself fully.  

You and your growth are all you can truly control after all. Even your professional projects are vulnerable to an element of uncertainty. Why not, then, invest in your education and growth? Sometimes the cost is a hurdle, but finding and making the time in a busy schedule is usually the hardest obstacle.

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