When drive an ambition stop being the answer.

I have often wondered how to verbalise this issue, it’s something I see everyday with the fantastic, driven, ambitious entrepreneurs that I work with, they are great at getting a business started, they have a huge amount of drive, they work hard they have fantastic ideas and then they get stuck, and then day after day, week after week running the business becomes a long hard slog of fighting fires and dealing with the challenges that come up every day, some simply continue to work hard and lose their passion, some sell up or close it down and start again, only to find the same thing happens, every single time.

I believe that most entrepreneurs are very good at coming up with ideas and getting a business started, in fact that’s almost the definition of being an entrepreneur, they have a vision no matter how fuzzy of something new, different, better, faster or some other improvement on what is currently on offer, they are good at getting this message across, they are good at getting people to buy into their dreams and they are usually good at selling what they do. So, the underlying cause of getting stuck does not seem to lie in their ability to have vision, set goals or get people to buy into what they are doing, in essence leadership, or as Peter Drucker the father of business consulting put it “Choosing the right things to do”.

They are visionaries, they are dreamers, they are passionate and driven, and at the same time they are often not very good at managing processes, systems or people, in essence the actual management of the business and the people and yes in my opinion they are different and no management is not a function of leadership, if may be the same people doing the leadership as it is supposedly doing the management, yet driving a car is very different from maintaining it or making it go faster, it may be the same person but it takes wildly different skill sets, if I lead you follow, if I manage you take action, to me they are different things, subtle I grant you but different all the same, to quote Peter Drucker again “management is about doing things right”.

Being a good leader and only seeing or focusing on this while abdicating the management of the business is what leads them to doing everything or at the very least feeling that they have to oversee everything and this I think is the Entrepreneurial Problem that ultimately leads to there never being enough money to deliver their own personal dreams and often leads to them simply burning out and giving up or feeling trapped by the monster they created.

This is what I am committed to solving, first trying to explain why this is the case, to highlight that the accepted approach spouted by the large slow moving corporate world do not really work in the smaller, fast paced Entrepreneur led businesses and I believe this is why of 80% of them fail, the belief that there are no problems only challenges sounds positive but if you do not fix the underlying problems that cause the never ending day after day repeating challenges you will face them again tomorrow, and the day after and forever until you do fix the underlying problem.

80% of the time leadership is not the problem, in most smaller businesses, sub £10m turnover the lack of any kind of management structure, the lack of documented and followed processes, the lack of systems and the abdication of the management of the business is often the under lying and fixable problem that can be solved.

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