Running a business can be an isolating experience: it removes you from the natural cameradie of colleagues and co-workers and when you’re at the top, you have to make important decisions alone. Even in large businesses with a well chosen c-suite, the buck ultimately stops at the top.
Over time this can put a significant strain on the mental health and effectiveness of business owners. It’s a major factor in CEO burnout, which is a very real phenomenon and well worth proactive planning to avoid.
One important way to relieve the isolation of high level decision making is to find professional support for your business: whether it reassures you with data so your decision-making is founded on a foundation of fact, provides expert insight you don’t have access to, or simply a trusted sounding board to discuss difficult decisions with. Today we’re taking a look at some of these support options.
Management Consults
Management consultancy is often thought of as essentially a luxury for high end businesses, but they provide a valuable service and smaller agencies and individual consultants can make it an attainable service even for small businesses. If you’re looking for boutique management consulting firms London is host to many, but you’ll find options in most cities in the UK.
The strength of management consultants is that they are expert generalists: talking with a consultant like this is a great place to come to when you have ambitions but don’t know how to make them happen, or even aren’t sure what your ambitions ought to be! A management consultant makes a great sounding board for the difficulties of running a business, and a discussion with them can help cut the Gordian Knot of complex decision making.
Business Lawyers
A good business lawyer is one of the most valuable assets a small business has, as they can help you ensure your business is correctly set up and registered, and to do that they need to work with you to come to a full and complete understanding of what you want your business to be, and what you want from it. A good lawyer doesn’t just make sure you’re set up in accordance with the law, they ensure you have, built in from day one, the necessary opportunities to grow in the way you want.
HR Consultants
For many new businesses, start ups especially, HR is an afterthought. When you have a tight team of highly committed specialists, all excited to be in at the beginning of the next big thing, HR systems seem unnecessary and time wasting – and certainly not worth the resources to hire full time employees to handle!
This is a fallacy, and falling for it can lead to big problems. While hiring full time HR staff might indeed not be justified in the early days when you have few employees, HR systems are absolutely vital and consultancy can be a real help! This gives you access to an expert well above the level you’d be able to hire as an employee who can ground you in the basics and set up the systems you need to get the most from your team and avoid serious problems until you have the scale to justify your own HR department.
Finding smart ways to reduce the potential for disputes like this can seriously lower the burden on the CEO, instil a better relationship with your employees and make sure you’re saving your effort for the most important issues your business has to face.