The Most Effective Tool for Small Business Growth

Solomoto has been in the business of helping small businesses grow for 2 years now across three markets. The Solomoto team itself is vastly diverse while not being necessarily the most vast team in terms of quantity of employees.

During these two years over 120,000 businesses, small and medium sized, have been helped with social media marketing, google and social media advertising, web design, e-commerce and more.

All of these tools are essential in today’s marketplace for any business to exist and thrive. However, there is one tool that Solomoto does not offer and it is the most important tool for any business looking to grow and succeed.

Not only does Solomoto not offer this tool, but no company does. Yet you and every other working citizen of every country has it. The best tool for small businesses (all businesses really) is communication.

When an entrepreneur ventures out into his/her business by her/himself or with a founding core of employees, the goals are straightforward, the company identity is crystal clear and the tasks are divided accordingly. What about growth? What happens when your business begins to grow and new people are coming in, new visions are being developed, you’ve pivoted to acclimate to market changes and so on.

What happens to the crystal clear company identity and effortless convergence on action items that keep the company afloat? In most cases for most businesses, there are growing pains. With growth comes dilution of the founding values, founding energy and founding ideas that the company was initially built on.

The way to nip these growing pains in the bud and get back to being successful is a two-way stream of communication between the top and bottom strata of an enterprise. First, let’s start with why.

Why Before The How

In any given business there are a number of tasks that get allocated further down the employee totem pole. Naturally the further a given task is pushed down the hierarchy of a company the less likely it is that the person doing the task has the same clear idea about the goal of the task as the person who initially thought of it.

This can lead to a few negative results in terms of productivity, motivation and ultimate execution. To give a clear example of this imagine yourself, a successful business owner with loads of experience. Now you want to write a blog to rake in the SEO benefits, free advertising potential and gain some authority for your business.

You hire a part-time student to write your articles for you. At the beginning things roll pretty smoothly, the blog is fresh and you give the student guidance and a clear indicator of what each blog post should accomplish. As you progress your business and venture into new marketing avenues in the hopes of generating revenue you continue to delegate tasks along the line down to the lower-level employees.

Eventually the student stops writing blog posts, tasks are done slowly and you can’t understand what happened.

What happened is that tasks started to become “How-oriented” rather than “Why-oriented”. The difference between why and how is as follows. If I ask someone to use a juicer to pummel some oranges. I will likely end up with orange juice, but if the juicer is broken I won’t. That’s where it starts and ends. However, if I ask someone to make orange juice by using my juicer because we need orange juice for a big meeting with investors on the 8th of January, I will have my orange juice. Why?

Because by telling the lucky team member with the delegated task why he or she is doing it with full transparency two very important things happen.

1. The employee gets engaged with the task at hand because the employee can see the ultimate effect an otherwise seemingly mundane task powers the business towards its future goals.

2. Understanding the ultimate goal means that if there is a problem with the “how” of the task (i.e the broken juicer), the employees understands the “why” and can problem solve for themselves because it’s no longer about using a juicer, it’s about making orange juice for the 8th of November to impress investors.

Answering the why before commanding the how is an effective method of making sure you and your full team of employees are on the same page moving forward. This will secure peace of mind for top tier executives and give purpose to those who’ve assigned seemingly mundane task.

How To Communicate Effectively

I could fill up space here with several things you probably already know, but I would rather go over one activity that I think is essential to effective communication within a business. My friend Avi Cabessa of BH Labs introduced me to the concept of brain dumping.

He explained to me that a brain dump is the process of unloading every thought related to any task you may have onto a paper. Any and every possible relevant thought, then sorting it into priorities and deadlines. This function is highly dependent on the “why” to effectively mark the right tasks as priority. This works very well for him in his own busy life, but how does this translate to a team?

A weekly brain-dump sessions by an entire team (top to bottom and everything in between) will get every task on the table in an environment where anyone and everyone can establish the why of a task, converge on goals, ideas, set priorities and deadlines to avoid confusion, disengagement and unfinished work further down the line.

Please let us know what you do to help communicate with employees and thanks for reading!