Signs My Business Needs Help
Instructions: Consider each statement, and answer Yes or No. Follow the links at right for clues about what your answers mean.
1. My employees and I have different ideas about what they are supposed to be doing.
As much as I complain, things still don’t get done my way.
2. I try to do myself everything that’s important. But I'm doing way too much. I don’t know
the right techniques for delegating and monitoring.
3. My key people and I are working so much that we’re not looking at broader
opportunities that are probably right under our noses.
4. Because I’m so busy with the day-to-day challenges, knowing where my business
stands financially is continually getting pushed to the edge of the desk.
5. I’ve grown enough as a leader to know I can’t just depend on my heart and passions to
run this business anymore; I have to rely on proven techniques.
6. Everyone does a bit of everything around here, and that’s great, but no one person is
accountable for getting each major objective done in the right way.
7. I don’t know what part of my company is making me money and what part is losing
money.
8. Life is passing me by. My family is growing, and I’m not there to see it. The business
takes all of my time.
9. I’m an entrepreneur, and I had planned for this business someday to run itself. But it’s
many years later now, and every decision still depends on me.
10. I can look at my financial statements and know where the company has gone, but I don’t
have the numbers to indicate where we are going.
11. I believe this business could solve its financial problems if we could just sell more, but
I’m frustrated about making that happen quickly enough.
12. My company has a great story to tell, but I don’t know how to get the word out.
13. I think I’ve got way too much money tied up in inventory, but I’m afraid that if I try to order
merchandise in other way than I do, I won’t have what my customers need when they
are going to need it.
For manufacturers only
1. I don’t know how to cut enough costs to as competitive as I'd like. Cutting out the cost
of rework would be a great place to start, ideally. But some level of rework is
inevitable, right?
2. I don't have time to tinker with the manufacturing workflow. Plus whenever I fix an
inefficiency, it just becomes unfixed as soon as I turn my back.
For contractors only
1. I know how my company’s projects should run to make money and make customers
happy, but I don’t have time to oversee each project.
2. As long as I estimate every job myself, we stand a chance. But when somebody else
bids projects, we either don’t win them or we do and wish we hadn’t because we don’t
make money.
