Cloning the small business owner

Now that scientists have successfully cloned a sheep and a monkey, what's next? While cloning a human being may be fraught with ethical and biological constraints, there is one group that would welcome it - small business owners.

Often, it is the small business owner that wears many hats - accountant, sales rep, legal advisor, and human resources manager come to mind. As a result, many of them try to do too much themselves instead of letting others handle some of the responsibilities. This is what frequently keeps a small business from growing.

What many small business owners need are ways they can effectively duplicate themselves in order to grow their businesses, which is why the term cloning has a relevant meaning here. And while biological cloning of the business owner is not yet possible, here are some ways that a business owner could achieve the same results.

Look to delegate

Look for opportunities to delegate some of your authority. This doesn't necessarily mean you have to give someone direct access to your bank accounts or other confidential information. You can delegate simple functions that need to get done by someone on a regular basis. The key is that they are functions by which you can assign clear responsibility for, and not intermittent tasks that are randomly given to employees.

Delegation is a trust issue. Many business owners have a very hands-on approach to operating their companies and feel the need to be involved in every minute detail. In order for delegation to work, they need to be willing to trust their employees with handling responsibility. In addition, you need to ensure that the employee understands their responsibility, what is expected of them, and how you will monitor their results.

Contracting out

Other areas small business owners should examine for cloning themselves are those that might best be left to experts, such as accounting, financial planning, computer programming, human resources, legal services, or marketing. While the business owner may be very capable in these areas, it still might make sense to contract out for some of these services.

Why? Because time is money. If you are an owner-operator of a company that bills your time out at $150 an hour, and you are spending 20 hours a week handling bills and other paperwork, it makes sense to hire a bookkeeper for $20 an hour so you can bill out more of your time.

Another reason to contract out many of these services is that the firms you hire assumedly will have much more experience, and be able to perform the necessary tasks more efficiently, productively, and professionally than you could.

Evolving from doer to manager

As a small business grows, the owner's role changes from that of a doer to a manager. As you learn to delegate authority and contract out appropriate responsibilities, a different set of skills are required - the ability to organize and manage people.

Chances are, these skills are different from the ones the owner used to get the business this far:

• The ability to communicate with, motivate, and discipline employees.

• The ability to organize critical business functions and assign them to the right people.

• The ability to monitor those functions and ensure they are being properly performed.

A smart business owner will look objectively at their management skills and determine whether they can handle this evolution from doer to manager. If they can't, they should hire someone for this important role.

Lots of businesses fail to reach their potential because the owners were unwilling to loosen the reins of control and refused to delegate any responsibility. Too bad they couldn't figure out how to clone themselves.