How Does Your Garden Grow?
Tending to the Health of Your Business
If you’ve read my previous post: Planting Seeds for a Better Tomorrow, you’re doing the work to plant seeds for your business’s future. Your ideas are starting to germinate and take root, and your business is growing along nicely. Now it’s time to tend to your garden and make sure everything continues to flourish. Here’s how to have your garden grow:
Fertilize
It’s crucial to conduct regular evaluations for employees. How else will you know who’s ready to grow? What would some extra investment in them do? Perhaps it’s just what they need to blossom.
Prune
Regular evaluations also reveal who’s at risk of leaving. Is one of your employees constantly unhappy? Not performing well? Determine whether they need a little extra nurturing or if it’s time to let them go.
Propagate
When someone leaves, you need to regrow that part of the business, so be prepared.
- Do you have a recruitment pipeline?
- A successor plan?
- Do you have someone earmarked?
- Are they internal or external?
- Are you training and preparing them?
Make sure you’re delegating regularly, so you’re ready to propagate.
Inspect for Pests
Even if things are going well, evaluate your team for risk potential.
- Are there a few bugs in the system that have the potential to do damage down the road?
- Do your employees have a hit-by-a-bus manual?
- What is the effect on the company if someone goes on vacation?
- What do they know that nobody else does?
- Who could do that job?
- How easy is the handover?
- Did they document the processes?
- Will they ever? Consider hiring a technical writer/consultant to do it for them.
Enjoy
While it’s always important to stretch and grow, and there’s always something more to be done, we have to appreciate the work we’ve accomplished. Don’t forget to stop and smell the roses.
If you haven’t yet, consider reading the companion post to this article: Planting Seeds for a Better Tomorrow: Growing Your Business Like a Garden.
Ready to grow your business? Check out my coaching packages. Also, don’t forget to visit my podcast and my YouTube channel!
