Founder dependence is a common challenge faced by small businesses in the US. Here are some steps that small businesses can take to overcome founder dependence:

1. Train your employees: One of the first steps to overcoming founder dependence is to train your employees to do everything you do. If you keep everything close to your chest, they will never have the opportunity to take over essential business operations. When you train your employees, you can delegate tasks to them and free up your time to focus on other aspects of the business.

2. Get customer feedback: When you are around, and particularly when you are not, make sure to get customer feedback. If you are not present and your employees are treating customers poorly or wasting time on your dollars, you want to know about it. To take it a step further, you can send in a secret shopper to give you extra feedback on your employees and their level of customer service.

3. Hire quality talent: Hiring talented people is another challenge for small businesses. Small businesses often succeed or fail based on the quality of their team. Naturally, one of the challenges businesses face is finding the right team members and recruiting the best talent. Without much name recognition or the ability to pay high salaries, small businesses may struggle to attract top talent. However, hiring quality talent is essential to overcoming founder dependence.

4. Build working systems: The next step to overcoming founder dependence is to build working systems that exclude your daily input to execute. As a business owner, you need to learn to exclude yourself from daily business tasks, especially if you have capable hands on your team. You should structure standard working operations that show each employee what to do, when, and how to do them. You should also have performance appraisal systems in placeto ensure that your employees are meeting your expectations.

5. Document all the operations in your business: Document all the operations in your business, and hand the relevant document over to every concerned person in your team. Allow them to come back with questions and suggestions. This way, you can ensure that everyone is on the same page and that your business can continue to operate smoothly even if you are not around.

Small businesses can overcome founder dependence by training their employees, getting customer feedback, hiring quality talent, building working systems, and documenting all the operations in their business.By taking these steps, small businesses can ensure that they can continue to operate smoothly even if the founder is not around.

July 29, 2024

Photo by Максим Степаненко on Unsplash