Building Business Capacity is a roadmap to help you achieve exponential growth by helping you and/or your leadership team gain clarity into the most essential aspects of business. It is about operating a business using best practices and constant process improvement to help ensure success.
All businesses, large or small, are run by a set of business practices. Consciously or unconsciously, those practices govern day-to-day policies, procedures, and workflows. They become the backdrop to decision making throughout the company. These practices do in fact create the systems used to operate any business of any size.
The book is laid out in a series of essays to make reading easier. Sections are brief but packed with useful information and steps that can be implemented right away. In the first part of the book, readers are asked to define who the business is and why it exists. If you do not own a business yet, it can be helpful to imagine a business you might own one day. Going through the chapters and the exercises with a business in mind makes the information more easily digestible.
Some readers may find it helpful to read the book all the way through. Others may want to read and use each section over time as they build a new business or make changes to one that already exists. Defining Who, Why, What, Where, and How helps educate owners about their own business in ways many find surprising. Where becomes obvious.
People have been doing business for thousands of years. Over the last 100 years, business practices have been widely studied. These studies help provide a systemic roadmap to success. Take this opportunity to take a systemic look at your own business as a group of systems that create an operation that either helps or hinders you in staying on the right track.
What is meant by group of systems? Each business, whether run by a single owner or a leadership team, has a diverse set of operations. These must work smoothly covering all the functions a business must do to successfully make a profit. There are the systems for accounting, marketing and selling, creating your goods or services, and so on. Systems are simply a set of processes used routinely to get some function of your business done on a regular basis.
These systems happen organically over time if no thought is given to your operations. The problem with that is that organic systems are rarely consistent. Organic systems are habits. Habits may include processes that actually harm your business.
Capacity gives entrepreneurs and leadership teams key tactics to build healthy habits allowing for the flexibility to change for the better when necessary. These best practices are more likely to contribute to the ultimate goals of the business. Using the tools, you learn to better manage, change, and grow. You create a better foundation on which to build capacity.