One would assume that most of my time I am spending telling people what to do.
Actually, most of the time I am telling people what not to do.

With growing business I see two main challenges:
i) maintaining quality
ii) managing complexity

How Complexity is Bad For Your Business

Complexity of the business is many times underestimated.
Once I visited a place for moms with kids where they had 9 different kinds of fruit juice in the fridge. Plus 3 kinds of beer, Coke etc. I broke my rule not to give advice when they don’t ask me for one and tried to help.

You only need 2-3 kinds of juice (apple, orange, strawberry – for kids). See, no one would ever turn at the door saying “oh, you don’t have apricot-pineapple juice?”
Why would you have 3 kinds of beers in a place where 95% of customers are moms with kids?

Not only you are off with your offering towards your target audience, but this also means dealing with 3 different suppliers, complex inventory management and lots of paperwork.
All this taking your time and energy from your main business – which is not selling juice. Making your offer much simpler would mean that you will still satisfy your customers but complexity of your business is much much lower. One supplier, one invoice, one order, easy inventory management.

And, don’t forget. It is much easier and convenient for people to choose if you have less choices. Giving people more choices often results in less sales!

This approach you should take in every area of your business.
From organisation structure (as few layers as possible), through operations (minimum manuals, minimum meetings, minimum reports…) to people management (clear goals, clear responsibilities).

Make sure you don’t complicate things for yourself. Free your time, your mind and energy so you can focus on your business instead of being buried in complexity of small things.

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