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CHAPTER 4 BUILDING A BUSINESS THAT WORKS... WITHOUT YOU

functional roles make a greater impact to the company's profits
and market value. So, the more time you spend on in the
higher boxes, the faster your company will grow and the more
profits you will make.

Who Is Doing What?

Once you know what needs to be done, the next question you
must answer is, 'who is now doing what?' and 'are the essential
jobs getting done?' To answer this question, I want you to fill
in the names of the people in your business who are performing
each of these functions/ sub-functions. If you are a one-man
operation or have just a few staff, it is not uncommon to see
one person handling multiple functions.

The next thing you have to do is to keep a record of how you
are spending your time everyday. How much time are you
allocating to each of the functional roles?

When I ask my participants to do this exercise, many of them
are shocked to realize that there are many essential functions
that are not getting done in their business. One guy, Richard
who runs a hair salon realized that he spent all of his time
cutting hair (part of operations) and customer service but little
or no time on advertising/promotions, customer retention and
sales (part of marketing). This was precisely why his sales
revenue was inconsistent, he had few walk in customers and
low repeat business.

He also hardly spent time recruiting & training new stylists
(part of human resource). Again, I explained that it was
he never expanded, despite his being in business for five
years. The few stylists he did hire over the years could not
deliver the same quality service, were not motivated and quit
after awhile. This was a byproduct of the fact that he did not

SECRETS OF BUILDING MULTI-MILLION DOLLAR BUSINESSES 117