I’m in the process of having some dental work done. It’s the type of work that is usually done in teen-age years or younger, so I’m feeling rather old whenever I have to go in for an appointment. Today the staff were applauding my dental hygiene, and giving the poor 12 year old boy in the next chair a really rough time for his poor dental hygiene. I’m pretty sure when I was 12 that I didn’t care too much about looking after my teeth. It got me to thinking about this question – At what age do we finally understand the importance of taking care of such things as our teeth, our skin, etc? For me there wasn’t a triggering event, it just sort of happened that despite my parents trying to enforce good habits about everything, at some point I started to understand that they were right and it was up to me to do something about it.
And that led me to thinking about the parallels for business owners. It shouldn’t take a catastrophic event for founders to realize that they need to start running the business like a grown-up – putting in robust systems, adopting sound HR policies and practices, investing in marketing, etc. What is the wakeup call that is needed to transition an organization from “back of the envelope” to respectable management? It may just be a realization that it’s exhausting for the owner to have to be involved in everything, or a desire to sell the business one day. Hopefully it doesn’t take loss of a key customer or market share or something even worse to provide the impetus to run the organization more effectively.
