small business advice

I recently had a pleasing enquiry about a book of mine. According to the writer, this book had 'provided the basis of my approach to running my own business which over the last decade has grown from a £1 million to a £15 million turnover'. It turned out to be The Business of Winning, published in 1980, when the reader's firm must have been relatively tiny. He couldn't remember the title, but had recalled the acronym derived from the first letters of the book's dozen key principles: IT BECAME FAST.

That true story proves a vital point. The book was aimed at people in large companies and used mostly big business examples, yet it had furnished a small business with the basics of expansion. People who run smaller businesses are prone to believe that their world has little to do with management magazines, business schools and high-powered seminars. That's the Premier League. Small business is barely in the same game - or so I've been repeatedly, and wrongly, assured for years. In all that time I've never found a powerful management principle in big business that isn't applicable to small, and vice versa.

So what were the Clean Dozen?

1. Improve basic efficiency - all the time.
2. Think as simply and directly as possible about what you're doing and why.
3. Behave towards others as you would wish them to behave towards you.
4. Evaluate each business and business opportunity with all the objective facts and logic you can muster.
5. Concentrate on what you do well.
6. Ask questions ceaselessly about your performance, your markets, your objectives.
7. Make money: because, if you don't, you can't do anything else.
8. Economise, because doing the most with the least is the name of the game.
9. Flatten the company, so authority is spread over many people.
10. Admit to your failings and shortcomings, because only then will you be able to improve on them.
11. Share the benefits of success widely among those who helped to achieve it.
12. Tighten up the organisation whenever you can - because success tends to breed slackness.

Re-reading that brought one rude awakening. Much of the new management theory preached from fashionable pulpits is contained in those hundred or so words written some 15 years ago. That isn't because of any special prescience on my part. It's because the basics of successful management are rooted in human nature, which is the same within ICI as in a mini-market. The major difference is that largeness imposes unnatural behaviour on natural people, with the usual counter-productive results.

Small business can breed bureaucracy, stultifying procedures and internal politics just as efficiently (or rather inefficiently) as big. But the failings are much easier to identify and to cure - though no business of any size is ever fault-free. Continuous progress towards IT BECAME FAST perfection, however, will provide the foundations for passing the make-or-break test, when the small firm's success begins to make it big, That's when it must combine solidity with the flexible, fast virtues of smallness.

Those virtues are now generally recognised. Even giants try to think small; splitting organisations into smaller units, each commanded by a single boss with the authority (in theory) of the owner-manager. Within hundred-million pound businesses, you can find self-managed manufacturing cells where half-a-dozen workers operate as flexible teams under one-man or one-woman leadership - knowing their products, knowing their customers, knowing their results.

The principle the giants are attempting to obey should come naturally to smaller firms, and applies equally: related activities should be grouped together under the clear direction of leaders who work closely with other members of a focused team. Many small businesses fall far short of that prescription, which doesn't make it irrelevant. As with the IT BECAME FAST precepts (other things, such as serving the right market, being equal), the closer you come to the ideal, the higher profits and growth will be.

The fifteen-fold, ten-year growth of that reader's business is one indication of the potential. But what was it that 'became fast'? The acronym referred to an obscure, middling-sized British engineering company lifted from obscurity to world-class scale and fame by applying the Clean Dozen principles. Its name is BTR.