A good plan today is worth more than a perfect plan next week

Gen. Patton

If you are a small business owner, you would be well advised to read all the management books you can on techniques to manage your business. In the end, you will probably find that the greatest challenge is the one that you least expected.

You probably expected to just be able to exercise your trade, provide your services, without necessarily considering all the other roles you would have to take on – the accounting, customer relations, service development, marketing and administration – and still find time to clean your premises, answer the phone, pay yourself and for holidays.

Balanced life

If you don’t fancy working 75 hours a week and want to keep your business in proportion with the rest of your life, then you will need to be organised.

This site is designed to introduce some techniques and tools for managing your business. We aim to discuss organising your time and priorities, how to stand back from and analyse your own activities, how to set objectives and plan to work towards them.

If you like the idea of not only managing your business but seeing it evolve, change and adapt to your environment, then you will, I hope, find some material of interest here.

Many thinking hats

The greatest challenge in management, we found, is to address the multitude of roles within the business, to distinguish and define them, and yet get all these functions working to fulfil current orders, generate future business and move the business forward.

Much of this is about organising priorities and activities to meet objectives. We believe that the best way to do this is to use software to lay down current and future tasks and determine what are the best areas on which to focus.

We discuss techniques for analysing your situation, your system, the way in which your business operates, how to distil a plan, how to establish tasks and how to track, monitor and evaluate performance.

Management techniques

We will discuss techniques such as mind-mapping, brainstorming, systems analysis, task organisation tools and a range of approaches such as Getting Things Done, Purpose, PDCA, SWOT and Quality.

The overall objective is how you, as a business owner can apply some of the techniques from industrial businesses to productionise, make profit and sustain business development.

We hope that you will find what you are looking for and hope to get some feedback on applying the techniques suggested. Do not hesitate to make comments on any of the pages that you find here.

Business consultancy

We are a small business consultancy with experience in large and medium-size businesses, primarily from an information systems perspective.