Why wait until you need a choice to start building one?

Choice is something you build over the life of your business.

It is easier to make small improvements along the way than to cram them all in when circumstances change and you need to make a decision.

Why wait until you are on the back foot?

You cannot prepare for everything. But you can build a business that gives you more room to decide what happens next.

One place I would start is repeatability. Having simple systems and processes that make every day work easier.

It might not be the first thing that comes to mind when we talk about choice. But making work easier can give us more time, better information and less dependence on one person knowing how everything works.

“I don’t have time”

I worked with a services business where the owner had brought on a team to reduce the work they were doing themselves.

They felt they were following the advice they had received. Yet the business was not giving them a return that matched their effort. There was nothing left to pay themselves.

The business had several pieces of software, each taking care of a different task. They had been set up independently by specialists, with little information flowing between them.

The owner also maintained a spreadsheet for each job, tracking hours, invoices and costs.

The trouble was that the spreadsheet figures did not match the other records. They did not capture the true costs of doing the work and gave the owner a false sense of comfort.

The business was not charging enough to cover all its costs, but the information the owner relied on did not make that clear.

There was an opportunity to make better use of the existing software and connect parts of the setup. With the right configuration and checks, this could have reduced the separate tracking and provided more reliable information.

But the owner felt the business was too small to warrant the change. They did not have time to work it out.

Meanwhile, they continued spending time on spreadsheets that were not giving them what they needed.

Without reliable information, how could they confidently decide which jobs to accept? What could they afford to pay their team? Would expanding the business leave them better off?

These are choices too. We make them throughout the life of a business.

Systems do not have to be big

I think the word “systems” can make us imagine expensive software or a large procedures manual.

But a system can be quite simple.

Think about going to the gym. Before bed, you leave your clothes and shoes ready and fill your water bottle. In the morning, you get dressed, pick everything up and head out.

You have made it easier to do what you intended to do.

In a business, it might be a routine for responding to enquiries: gathering the details needed, preparing a quote using a standard template and following up.

When those steps are clear, there is less figuring out what to do each time. It is also easier for someone else to take on the work.

Technology may make parts of that process more efficient. But the starting point is understanding how the work needs to flow.

Are we making more work for ourselves?

Sometimes we are so used to doing something that we stop questioning it.

We enter information into a program, then keep a spreadsheet with much of the same information. Or we collect details on paper and type them into a system later.

There may be a good reason for both steps. But have we stopped to ask whether we still need them?

In the services business, the owner felt they did not have time to improve the setup. Yet they were already spending time maintaining spreadsheets that did not give them a reliable picture.

I can understand how that happens. The work in front of us needs to get done. Reviewing how we do it can feel like something that can wait.

But the extra work keeps coming back.

Perhaps there is something similar in your business. It does not have to be a major problem. It might just be one task that takes longer than it should.

Making it simpler may require some time or outside expertise. The question is whether that investment would save more than it costs.

Then we need to use the new process and see whether it works as expected. Is the information reliable? Is the work easier? Does anything need adjusting?

A little room to think

The first benefit may simply be having time to consider what needs attention next.

Even an hour away from daily demands can give us room to think things through. We might use it to improve another process, explore an opportunity or simply take some time for ourselves.

It is often easier to establish simple ways of working while a business is small and the activities are visible. As it grows, those processes can grow with it.

Waiting can leave us with a much more complicated web to untangle.

That is why I see these small improvements as part of building choice. They can make the business easier to run today and give us more options over time.

If we could gain more time, more money or more room to decide, what are we leaving on the table by putting it off?

Is there one thing in your business that you have been meaning to make simpler?

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Towards Growth is a strategic business advisory and mentoring practice.

The ideas, insights and client stories we share come from our own work and practical experience, with AI used for editorial support.

The Revenue-to-Value Model™ is a proprietary framework of Towards Growth.