Focus on your strengths

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Yesterday I read an interesting article about talent management. It states that the traditional management system encourages mediocrity in everything and excellence at nothing.
For example, if you focus on an employee’s weakness and ask them to improve in this area, you will distract them from what they actually do well – from their real talent. The result: they will make a big effort to improve their weaknesses, while they could just spend their energy on getting superior results doing what they do better (and like most).

The author advises to change the way management looks at employees’ performance. Take the case of “Johnny.” Johnny is a superstar sales guy, but struggles with working on spreadsheets to report his sales. In this case, rather than asking him to spend more time trying to be more precise in his spreadsheets, figure out a solution whereby someone else can do that aspect of the job, and have Johnny concentrate on his sales. If this is not possible, then help him improve just enough so that it doesn't get in the way of his strength. An organization should be a platform for unique talent: letting people be weak in areas in which they are average and developing their strengths further enables to get maximum output everyone.

I think that we should apply this idea also to small business.
You probably started your own business because you are very good at something and you enjoy doing it. But running a business requires working on many things that may not be core to your business, so you have to strive to do everything above average.

What if you could concentrate on the core and forget about the rest? You would probably be more profitable, and even happier. I am afraid it is not possible for every activity, but there are some functions of your business that can be handled by others easily and profitably.

Keeping track of your books is one such example. For many business owners accounting and bookkeeping is a tedious job, but important enough for their business and they can’t just forget about it. You can commit the same mistake of managers asking their staff to be good at everything: they will spend time and energy to manage their accounting just sufficiently, while they could ask someone whose strength is accounting to do it on their behalf and focus on their own strengths.

Outsourcing accounting  is a way to make your company more profitable and to spend more time developing your business’ particular “talent”.