Back in 2022, when I applied for a Women in Innovation grant, one of the comments on my submission was along these lines:
“The pressing need us to help the management structure for micro businesses. It has been studied that once a business approach 30 people, management structures need to be in place. Therefore, it is argued if this is necessary for micro-SMEs that employ less than 10 people?”
This was my response:
First of all, in this day and age, simply considering employee numbers is misleading. Many micro-business owners ‘manage’ more people than they employ – sub-contractors, outsourced providers, volunteers.
Second, to get anywhere near 30 employees, the founder needs to get beyond the 6 or 7 people they are able to supervise directly. Most struggle to achieve this without doing damage to themselves or their family life.
Traditional ‘management structures’ (supervisors, managers, co-directors) impose a cost overhead that many struggle to afford at this stage. Owners must take a hit to profitability, that may or may not generate a return, and will at least take time to do so.
More importantly these traditional structures do a different kind of damage to the business, in that it changes its character in a way that many owners reject. They never wanted to become ‘corporate’.
This means that many micros never get to 10 people, never mind the 30 mentioned.
BIS research carried out in 2013 clearly showed that one of the barriers to growth for micros is ‘management skills’.
My experience is that most of these business owners set up to become their own boss, not a boss of other people. They don’t want to become ‘managers’.
What they want is an alternative way to instil ‘leadership’ into their business that is simple to do, doesn’t add overhead, or distort their carefully handcrafted customer experience into less than the original vision. That then enables them to scale in exactly the same way.
That’s what I aim to give them. By defining the desired customer experience, automating drudgery, and enabling everyone to be ‘the boss’ of their own part of the business, scaling becomes a simple matter of adding more bosses.
A little bit of Discipline early on, makes a lot of Daring possible later.