If you have cavities, do you fill your own teeth? Or do you let the dentist fill them? Seems like a dumb question, doesn’t it. Of course you don’t fill you own teeth.
Here’s another one. Do you do your own bookkeeping? Or do you employ a bookkeeper or accountant to do it for you?
Not quite as dumb this time. But I know of small a business owner that keeps his own books. It seems to me he could better spend their time promoting or managing his business. (And he does a poor job of bookkeeping.)
Another question. Do you develop your own software, or buy already developed packages?
More broadly speaking, are you one of those people who thinks you will save money by doing it yourself, rather than turning to an expert, or buying the product off the shelf?
A long time ago I owned a machine shop. My employees, highly skilled production machinists, wanted to build our own equipment. “Save cost”, they said. “Faster”, they said.
So they built some special machines for us. I let them.
Slowly, over a period of years, and after they had built several machines, I learned that in most cases their work gave us machines that didn’t work as well as those available on the market, cost us much more money in the long term, (both in actual cost and in poor performance) and took longer to get up and running than if we had purchased them.
The reason? We were production machinists, producing a variety of parts for a variety of customers. We were not one-of-a-kind custom machine designers and fabricators. We were experts in what we do, but not in what they do.
The lesson -- hire the experts or buy their machines.
One friend wants to establish a Web site. To do so he’s teaching himself html, the language of Web site formatting. It will take him hours to learn it, more hours to design and lay out the site, more still to encode it, and even more to upload, edit and revise the material. All this to save $600 -- the cost of having an expert do it. So he saves $600, while taking 20 or more hours away from what he does well: being the rainmaker for his firm. How much new business could he have generated for the firm if he paid the $600 for the Web site, and used the 20 hours he saved for networking, marketing and selling?
Here’s another, even worse, example.
A client has spent two years developing a software package for operating her retail stores. Perhaps she saved some cash by developing it rather than buying an off-the-shelf package.
The question is, though, how much did she lose by having only a mediocre program? How much has revenue suffered because the inventory is poorly managed? How much extra interest has she paid as a result of being forced to finance the excess inventory? How much of her time has she spent guiding the software project instead of doing what she does best -- buying and selling apparel?
Think about it.
What do you do best?
Probably it’s working as an expert in your business and your industry. Recognize that. Focus on it.
Stay away from the odd jobs. Let the experts do them.
Charles R. Schaul, Partner of SixPillars Research Group, focuses on increasing business profits by resolving the problem of customer attrition. Aligning companies with their customers; generating and implementing strategic initiatives; and promoting employees’ customer focus through commitment, responsibility and accountability combine to achieve the result.
Copyright 2008 by Charles R. Schaul Boulder, Colorado. All rights reserved.
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