Читать книгу Small business. Big game онлайн

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The smaller a company, the less earning power it has. But what is interesting is that managers and employees of small companies have more problems than those of large companies. This is easy enough to understand. In a small company, most people are jacks-of-all-trades, performing a wide variety of functions. Thus quite often in a small trading company, a single employee takes orders from customers, works with suppliers, arranges deliveries, resolves conflicts, and collects receivables. A department head in a small company performs even more functions. It is therefore difficult to hire people to work in small companies, as a person must be prepared from the outset to perform a multitude of functions. Managing such employees in small businesses is even more difficult because when a manager requires one thing, an employee can always say that he is busy doing some other very important thing. It is also difficult to raise the level of professionalism of such people because there are too many different areas of activity, and it is even hard to know what training to send them to – computer courses or a seminar on advertising. It is hard to make an employee more productive when he or she has been doing too many different things; there has been no clear job definition for such an employer, so it is difficult to decide how to make that person more productive and focused through in-service training in computer courses or a seminar on advertising. And the most vexing thing of all is that, with all these difficulties, a small company does not bring in a large income, and this means that it cannot properly take care of its employees or make a substantial profit for its owners.