Aaron Hoos

Growing businesses face a variety of challenges, from scaling distribution to hiring and training competent staff.

A knowledge center can help to minimize the pain that comes with growth.

A knowledge center is an offline or online area in your business where you capture and store all of your best practices, procedures, processes, and more. It is a single repository of information to enable effective operations.

It’s a place where your staff can go to find the latest and most relevant information and resources to help them do their job. Instead of running here for one thing and over there for another, you can keep it all together in a single knowledge center.

Your knowledge center might start quite humbly, with just a document or two, but as your business grows, your knowledge center can grow with it.

Hiring a technical writer to help you create and/or improve and/or moderate your knowledge center may seem like an investment in a non-core asset. However, with the right structure and attention, your knowledge center can deliver the following benefits:

• Less time wasted as staff go searching for an answer.
• Faster redeployment time when you change a process and need to change the instructions, guidelines, and policies that accompany that process.
• Lower training costs — knowledge centers support training and sometimes even replace it. Moreover, HR can rely on knowledge centers as a starting point for training that they perform.
• Improved managing: Management moves out of “how-to-do-it” training mindset into a “how-to-do-it-better” mentoring mindset.
• Processes become streamlined for an improved customer experience and potentially lower costs throughout the organization.

Here are some tips to build and maintain a useful knowledge center:

• Don’t start from scratch. You probably already have user manuals and job descriptions you can add
• Keep it simple: Create a blog but make it private (require a sign-in).
• Train your staff to refer to the knowledge center first, before they go up the chain of command.
• Record every question you are asked and add it to the knowledge center.
• Assign on person to be in charge of your knowledge center. Task them with the responsibility maintaining and regularly updating the information.
• Get your staff to record the procedures they perform and add them to the knowledge center.
• As your company grows, start dividing your knowledge centers up and give each department their own knowledge center to maintain.
• Over time, review the content and remove or modify obsolete information.

Life as a child is carefree. You play and run and eat candy… and everything seems right with the world. Then mom and/or dad have “the talk” and suddenly the world seems like a different place. It’s weirder and more complex. You notice things you didn’t notice before. You know things you wish you didn’t know. You can never fully go back to those carefree days.

If you’re running a start-up or relatively new small business, consider this post “the talk”. Your years of playing and running and eating candy are over.

YOU’RE GOING TO EXPERIENCE CHANGES
The transition from child-business to grown-up-business is somewhat awkward and not always a distinct event. Your customers change, your products and service evolve, and your efficiencies improve.

One of the things you can expect to change is your financials. As a new business, you might have kept fairly haphazard books. But now that you’re growing up, your financials need to be cleaner and clearer. (And, I would even go so far as to say that you’ll grow faster and more effectively if you take the first step of putting your financials in order… instead of waiting for your business to grow first before doing something about your financials).

HERE ARE THE BASICS
Want to grow? Start with the basics:

• Implement a good bookkeeping system. I like and use IAC-EZ (disclosure: A friend of mine owns it). I’ve also checked out some other bookkeeping systems that I like, including Clarity Accounting (which recently changed its name to Kashoo).
• Separate out your bank account, credit cards, etc. Even if you’re a sole proprietor (which technically means that your personal and business financials are one and the same, to be filed on a single tax return) you’ll find it to be so much easier to manage your business when your business financials are separated out.
• Get compliant with tax laws!!! Pay your taxes. Keep good records. Expect to be audited and celebrate every year that you aren’t audited. But be ready.
• Get an accountant… a good business accountant; not the guy who also does your grandma’s taxes out of his basement.

NOW TAKE IT TO THE NEXT LEVEL
Once you have the above financial “infrastructure” in place, make sure you practice good financial habits. I define “good financial habits” as accurate, consistently-entered numbers entered in the right places and used to build your business.

“… accurate” will help you to trust your numbers. Grown up businesses rely on their financials to guide their decisions.

“… consistently entered” numbers will mean less time spent entering numbers and more time using those numbers for business growth. There’s also a lower margin of error when you enter your data consistently.

“… entered in the right places”. Get to know the difference between balance sheets, income statements, and cash flow statements. I confess: I resisted for a long time and as soon as I took the time to learn the stuff, it was like a magic key that unlocked a world of business growth.

“… used to build your business.” This part is key. Financials are not just something you keep so that tax time is made easier. Rather, your financials are a tool you can use all year long to accelerate your business performance.

• Your financials are the benchmark you’ll use to conduct ongoing measurement of your business’ health. When your expenses are lower than last year, and your income is higher, that’s a good thing! (Okay, you know that part… but it can get far more complex than that).
• Your financials are the indicators you’ll use to know where exactly to take action. (On that note, here is an excellent article by Ken Kaufman called “20 Indicators Your Financials are Wrong” which I believe is a must-read for every business… and ESPECIALLY for businesses that are making the transition from child to adult). Financials are the easiest way to quickly identify what your next strategic steps should be and what exactly you need to do to be better in that area.

THE VALUE OF FINANCIALS
While clients served or inventory turnover are nice numbers to have, the only numbers that truly matter are found in your financials. Those numbers will determine whether you can open up shop tomorrow and whether you’ll retire early or die trying.

The problem is, financials seem like hard work to navigate. (They’re not, they just seem that way). So new business owners who want to grow their businesses but don’t want the challenge of dealing with numbers will spend a lot of money on many of the latest tools and programs that are offered… when all they really need to do is give some attention to their business’ numbers.

Managing financials is what grown-up businesses do. If you want your business to enter adulthood, are you implementing good financial practices today?

I’m glad we had this little talk.

I recently heard someone mention that a consultant’s job is to get fired. Although that sounds drastic, what they meant was that a consultant is hired to provide a service that, once delivered, should render the consultant redundant.

For example, a company with an efficiency problem might hire an efficiency consultant who will get the company to the point where they are so efficient that they don’t need the consultant any more.

TYPICAL CONSULTING BUSINESS STRATEGY
This type of strategy is situational and based on a problem/solution mentality. A business identifies a problem and hires a consultant to guide the business to a resolution. While it is very practical, it doesn’t always make sense. It’s reactionary and it relies on the business to first recognize the problem and then accurately diagnose what kind of “repair” is necessary. Problems that aren’t noticed or aren’t properly diagnosed can lead to missed opportunities and a poorly run business.

AN ALTERNATE VIEW
An alternate view is for consultants to become proactive value adders. They can do this by creating products and services that meet key needs for businesses, which may not be in problem areas but which should be in hot button areas. It requires a different kind of mentality, a different kind of marketing, and a different kind of delivery to be successful.

To be successful, consultants need to approach businesses with a clear proposal that demonstrates how well they know the business and that reveals the opportunity for the business to be more successful with the consultant’s help.

Consultants won’t want to do this because it requires proactive selling and measurables (neither of which are things that many consultants enjoy doing) and businesses won’t want this because they tend towards a gap-plugging mentality instead of a success-optimizing mentality.

In final installment, Learn.com explores the critical link between training, HR, and strategy.

In this eighth of nine installments, Learn.com explores the critical link between training, HR, and strategy.