The adage goes, “A sane and sincere small beginning can result in a big ending.” Accordingly, a micro/small business can also be the parent to a big business. As per the business experts, a big business has generally been observed having evolved from a micro/small business unit after having graduated from a skeptic family monopoly to the public domain and professionalism.
Since professionalism helps in building quality employees as well as creating skilled man powers that paves a growth-path trajectory, micro businesses, thus, are mothers of bigger businesses. Instances are galore that micro businesses are mostly businesses which have evolved from a family business to a slightly larger business entity with manpower of around 15 to 50 people.
Quite often in a micro business setup, the business head is a family member who practically manages all day to day operational decisions as well the public interface and financial functions.
Typically, micro business becomes synonymous with a single-person-centric venture diminishing the urge to value professionalism. Reason is attributed to the going-out-of-control phobia in the proprietor. Thus, such a scare chokes the growth of high potential individuals and dissuades them from contributing to the growth of the small business. The individual employee not only chases the single-person-centric mindset, but also tries to fulfil the proprietor’s whims and fancies.
Well-heeled micro businesses have a history of having espoused the age-old principle of ‘no risk no gain’ by offering the employees professional freedom. Hence, micro businesses need to be intrepid by assuming advanced-growth-oriented practices eying the threshold of accelerated expansion. Professional development of micro businesses results in quality employment or improvement in quality of employees.
It has been observed that those micro businesses, which could break away from traditional family business and aptly carved a niche in the public domain, have emerged as medium or large scale enterprises over a period of time.
It is possible for small businesses to involve the employees and close business partners in developing their own quality norms which fully meets the typical business needs of such micro businesses.
For instance, if we are considering a family business of a slightly large grocery outlet, the functions of the business can be compartmentalised and distributed among a number of employees so that each one gets his/her share of job depending on qualifications, experience and skills. The proprietor can oversee the job distribution and take an objective view on the compartmentalised functions and offer fairness in job allocation as well as the reward and punishment criteria.
The business can take up quality standard setting through mutual discussions or can take help of a business process expert who can guide the employees in taking up suitable assignments which best suits their delivery capacity.
The process of business development has to be gradual and can be a continuous process. The employee performance versus set standard delivery has to be assessed to identify areas of improvement and take up course correction if required. Regular interactive sessions will= lead to finer aspects of self-evaluation and benchmarking due to interpersonal competitiveness.
The essential division of departments in a grocery set-up can be in the area of material management, energy management, customer management, product display, finance management and accounting, inventory management, business growth strategy and competition assessment etc. As can be seen exposure of employees to such departmentalised quality standards and bench marking and assessment will lead to high level of self-assessment as well as competitive evaluations which will invariably lead to higher level of professionalism in the business organization, however small.
It is, therefore, pertinent that small/micro businesses are made aware about the possible growth potential they have and the possibility of achieving the desired growth through planned, strategic development of the employees either through outside help or through internal interactive meetings.
However, the business head may be required to be oriented to undertake such exercises by going through business development workshops where a group of family business/micro business heads could be made to discuss their business aspirations and problems with fellow participants, guided by business process experts. Such workshops need be organized on business holidays with nominal participation fees and the small industries development bodies of the Government can manage such workshops to encourage and guide micro businesses to aspire for higher growth. Micro finance companies as well as banking institutions also could facilitate such interactive meetings for mutual benefits.
(Dr Rout, a management expert, can be reached at rout.jagdish@gmail.com. M- 09439569999)
