Many of the business owners I advise are sponges – and I encourage you all to mop up less.

Photo by tonipieleanu

What are you going on about Julia?

What I find myself and other owners of small businesses doing is mopping up after everyone else. Your employees do their thing, and then go home at 5.30, whether they’ve finished their to do list or not. While you stay on, or come in at the weekend to make sure that everything is finished off.

And the spongy business owner does all the things that it’s not clear whose job it is. Mrs Sponge notices when we’re out of post it notes, and picks some up in Sainsbury’s when she does her food shopping. Mr Sponge will also do everyone else’s expenses, empty the bins and sweep the snow away in the car park.

Sound familiar?

Business owners are leaders

Now all of this is just you stepping up and taking responsibility for sorting things out. Getting into action is a sign of a leader; followers expect someone else (maybe a magic elf?) to take care of all of these things.

Which is good. But is doing this stuff actually the best use of your time? Might you be better concentrating on all the things you’re really good at, such as sales, product development, looking after your top customers? You’ll notice that these are the things which will add value to your company. Emptying the bins does not increase turnover.

And of course what you’re probably doing is emptying the bins in the evening in addition to everything else, so you spend too much time at work doing the dull things and not enough time enjoying the fruits of your labours and relaxing.

How to stop being a sponge

Draw up a job description for yourself. What is your role in the company? This is a very revealing exercise, as most of us have started from a position where we had to do everything, and we continue to do everything.

Decide who else should do all those little things which eat up your time. You can spread this round the team, e.g. everyone empties their own bin, Sonia does the expenses and Simon is in charge of stationery ordering. Or you can make one person office manager, on top of their usual role.

One successful entrepreneur I worked with had a no touch policy. He was determined to concentrate on what he was good at (in his case, sales) so he gave absolutely everything he could to everyone else, even if it was just photocopying a sheet of paper. He loved to sell, so he just wanted to get out there and meet potential customers.

While this might seem extreme, and of course, needs a good team around you, there are some lessons for the rest of us. Often we fail to delegate because it seems like too much trouble, or because we don’t like to boss people around. Or because we’re afraid to ask. Or we’re afraid to be seen as the boss at the top of the hierarchy.

My advice here would be to ask people nicely, say thank you, and remember that even if you have a very flat structure, and want to empower everyone around you, you are the boss and people will expect you to tell them what to do. That’s part of being a leader as well.

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Spotting a gap in the market is how we all think about business success. This is to be one of the classic key success factors in business.

Why you need a gap

Most of the businesses I see are very similar to other businesses, and often my starting point is to find out what that business does (or can do) which makes them remarkable.

A business based on a gap in the market should automatically be remarkable. They’ve been able to see something they can provide which no one else does.

They might have found something new to provide; Rubik’s Cube, kids’ scooters, a piece of the moon are all examples of these gap exploiters. You’ll note that many of these gaps are soon filled by cheap me too copy cats pretty quickly. By the time I got a Rubik’s Cube when I was a kid, it was a cheap knock off version from Brownhills market.

A Gap In The Business Model

Or the gap might be providing a product or service in a completely different way. LoveFilm rents DVDs, but they captured the market by sending them through the post, rather than using the videoshop model, adding convenience and a huge list to choose from.

Gumtree provide the classified ads which local papers have made money from for centuries, but they’ve changed the model by making 99% of the ads free and putting it all online. Tom Peters calls this “creative swiping”, where you take an idea from someone else, and give it a good twist to make into something new.

Copying Someone Else

The easiest way to find your gap in the market is to copy someone else. LoveFilm copied Netflix, and Gumtree copied Craigslist and transferred these business models from the US to the UK.

You could research what other people are doing in different countries (or other cities in the UK) and work out what gap you might be able to fill where you are. Ideally, you want to do this before whatever you’re copying has been widely written about, otherwise you’ll find a bunch of other people who are all doing the same thing, all launching at the same time as you.

Trends

You can find some amazing ideas by absorbing yourself in different trends in business thinking and what’s happening in particular markets.

The world is moving pretty rapidly, and technology and economic forces are very fluid. The trick here is to research into certain areas, especially those which are not altogether obvious. If you have some knowledge in a particular area already, that’s good, but you don’t necessarily need to be a programmer to understand what’s happening in online technology – you can always buy programmers later.

In fact, it can be better if you don’t have any industry knowledge as you won’t have any preconceptions and blind spots. One of my recent clients identified a gap in the market for a particular kind of product, and once she was certain that there was a viable business, she bought 2 days per week of consultancy time from someone who was already very established in that industry. That way, she was able to tap into a deep level of knowledge about suppliers, materials, manufacturing processes, without having to learn all this stuff from scratch.

Where To Get Started

You might think about:

Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail and Free to get a grip on new business models.

Jessica Livingston’s Founders at Work to see how others have done things.

Seth Godin’s Purple Cow, and his blog.

New Scientist magazine can help you to think about the world differently, as can reading science fiction.

PFSK have a great blog about lots of weird and wonderful ideas.

And of course…… you can come and see me for a chat about your initial ideas and where you would like to take your business. I can help put you in the right direction, challenge your thinking so far, and most importantly, help you make money from your gap in the market. Buy me a coffee, and I’ll talk you through the initial steps; pay me a regular fee and I’ll help you make it into something real.

How business mentoring and support works

Keep in touch

If you’d like to get more tips and thoughts to help improve your business, let’s stay in touch. You can sign up to my email newsletter to get all the gossip, or get this blog by email or RSS – see the big orange button on the left hand side. And don’t forget to follow me on twitter