By Rhonda Campbell
The movie Moneyball was a hit at the box office because it showed a sports business leader doing something a lot of people in leadership positions don’t want to do. Moneyball showed the Oakland A’s general manager, Billy Beane, making hard choices, ones designed to take the Oakland A’s from the bottom to the top of the league in a short amount of time.
You’re Going to Have to Make Hard Choices as a Small Business Owner
Based on Michael Lewis’ book, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, the movie starring Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill, gives viewers an inside-look at baseball, how the game is managed. After he’s given a thin budget, Billy Beane connects with statistician and assistant general manager, Jonah Hill, to figure out how to build a winning team with the meager budget. They make unorthodox choices, hard choices based on numbers and not how sorely a player or staff member will feel about their communicated decisions.
Beane lets team members go. He’s quick; gets right to the point. But somehow, he manages to approach each man with respect. It’s not an easy gig. That’s for sure, but his decisions, his leadership skills get him just what he wants, a winning team.
Sooner or later you’re going to have to make hard choices too. You might have to discontinue a relationship with a client you’ve been doing business with for a decade or longer. To save your company from sinking deeper in the red you might have to trim back employee work hours or lay staff off. But perhaps, most of all, somewhere along the way you’re going to have to make hard choices with yourself, choices that impact you most.
Hard Choices That Impact Mostly You, the Small Business Owner
For example, as a small business manager, do you bring on a business partner or continue to operate as a sole proprietor. Do you hire a publicist on a pay-for-performance basis to market and promote your small business products and services or do you continue to burn the midnight oil and do that yourself. You might also have to decide whether to hire a technician, as an employee or independent contractor, to build backend technology systems for your small business or whether to continue paying for external technical services.
There are a slew of questions you’ll face as a creative small business leader. Higher profits won’t keep you from having to make hard choices. It’s a part of the business landscape.
The good news is that, with each hard/smart choice, you make the better you get at decision making. Over time, this can pay off for you in ways you don’t yet see.
Communicating Hard Choices Key to Creative Small Business Success
To succeed as a small business manager you have to develop relationships with employees, contractors, clients and customers. Yet, it’s these very relationships, actually getting to know people on a personal level that can make it difficult to make the best choices for your company, choices that others might be opposed to. It’s a reason some people keep business and personal relationships, including friendships, completely separate. But, that’s not so easy to do, especially if you’re a human with a warm heart. You can make it much easier on yourself if you treat each person you do business with equitably, fairly and with respect.
What you don’t want to do is avoid communicating hard choices when you need to. As a creative small business leader, as you treat customers, employees and business partners with respect, even as you communicate hard choices, you may come to be viewed as a strong leader, as someone people can trust to tell and share the truth with them. It’s that trust that consumers appreciate, which, in turn can express itself in more customer sales and ongoing customer loyalty.
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