Struggling to find a balance

Being part of a larger firm, we're not a real independent entrepreneurial business, but in starting and growing a small specialist team we do face many of the same challenges.?

This past week (like many other weeks) I've been grappling with that perennial owner-manager struggle of trying to juggle the Important and the Urgent.

It has been particularly hectic because a couple of projects reached critical points at the same time.?I've been working through tax and accounts warranties and disclosures, whilst also wrangling a particularly complicated financial model.?These are both intensive time-consuming activities and being client work, fee earning and urgent, have to top the priority list.?And to be honest, they're the types of challenging work that I enjoy, so I would put them to the top of the priority list for that too.?

But doing interesting client work is not my whole job.?

I also support Kathryn on the projects that she's working on, liaise with other clients (internal and external) and teams on their projects, build a pipeline of future work, keep an eye on the finances, recruit to grow the team, etc. etc.?

It's all very well for business advisers to tell entrepreneurs that they will be more successful if they "work on not in" the business, but the reality is for small businesses or teams, there is no option but to do both.?This either means things drop off the list, or you end up putting in more hours.?Or more likely both.?

One of the ways this problem has tended to manifest has been in a stop-start pattern to our billing.?We're looking at the phasing of our targets for the coming financial year and so have been looking at the monthly history for the past twelve months.?

Basically, the pattern went like this: lots of bills, not many bills, lots of bills, not many bills…

We would get some work, be really busy delivering it and have a good month and beat target. Happy days.?

But in being busy, weren't doing anything about the pipeline.?So next month, less work to do, fewer bills, target missed. Sad times.?

With less work to do, we could put more effort into finding projects and next month be really busy again, happy times.?

Not ideal is it.?

This has improved a lot though, and in the past few months has smoothed out noticeably.?

Most of our work comes from existing clients of the firm and we know that the closer we are to those with the client relationships, the more projects come up.?

As you might be gathering by now, I'm quite unstructured in my approach, so I would talk to people on an ad hoc basis when we could fit it in. That brings a certain amount of success but not enough.?

Fortunately, we are now a team of two and Kathryn is a very different character to me.?

I don't really think in a linear way, I'm more a join-the-dots sort of person.?

This is good for coming up with initiatives, not so good for seeing them through.?

Kathryn is the opposite: she'll get inspired by an idea, and then get really excited about how she can turn it into a process.?

Hence, talking to colleagues when I get a chance has turned into quarterly meetings booked in everyone's diaries well in advance.?

Because things get missed if we talk about only those things that are front of mind, we now have a complete client list for each client handler to record opportunities and ideas against.?

And this more structured approach turns up more projects, more consistently than we were ever able to do in the past.?

There is no doubt that on my own, I would not have managed to do this.?

I've mixed a few themes here, which probably makes for a slightly unsatisfactory read and definitely makes it hard to write a pithy conclusion.

What have we learned?

That running a team or a business does involved juggling competing demands and that you do have to try to make time for all of them. I've always done that by doing more hours, but that only gets you so far, whilst having a process that involves more people can get you further. Complementary skills are a huge benefit and it is interesting that it is our differences rather than our similarities that enhance the effectiveness of the team.?

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