Managing your business
Designing the business
In the same way the idea is meticulously designed, then the business must also add value and continuity by being ‘designed’ in every aspect too. Designing the business becomes a crucial management task, especially in formative years.
This means not just good looking letterheads, although important, but everything the business ‘is’ and ‘does’ influences the way people perceive it. For the uninitiated, this is an area of marketing theory worth learning a little about.
Operational procedures, logistics, costing systems, pricing systems, accounting processes, product development, marketing and sales methodologies and customer service policies are all contributors to reputation and perception. Typically they define the ‘customer experience’ and ultimately determine if it’s good, bad, fair, reasonable, diligent, caring and worthy of recommendation to another potential customer.
Apart from obvious efficiency benefits, the way your business runs and the style in which you design its systems and policies should lead to just one aim – more customers.
For the creative enterprise there are very few fixed rules, and certainly fewer industry models on which to design your business. Common sense and self-experience are surprisingly reliable policy benchmarks.
Putting this together on a day-to-day basis means that decisions should be measured against an overriding policy objective, or in business terms, a mission statement. Your objective may be something like; ‘create a business that best represents the idea in its holistic form’. If this context is kept clearly in mind much of the stress from conflicting demands on time over creativity and business can be lessened, because they can be one and the same.
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