A business is as successful as the people who work for you. If you have a mediocre team, you will have mediocre results.
With the current economic situation in Kenya, most businesses, especially small-medium enterprises (SMEs) have been performing dismally with many being faced off the business.
In a country where close to 500,000 SMEs are dying annually, with 80 percent of those dying facing their demise in their first year of establishment, a lot needs to be done to keep SMSs into the game.
Personally, I think most SMEs have been dying on the grounds of a lack of managerial skills. Most people who venture into SMEs in Kenya do so only with the hope of making money and making it first without first considering what makes a business successful.
The fate of your business is often determined and sealed the moment you choose a team to work with. Your team (employees), is the face of your business and will either pull it up or pin it down on the ground.
For many years, people have been choosing employees according to their academic prowess. But things have since changed. It is possible, nowadays, to find a doctor who can do very well as a writer and a journalist who can work so well as a consultant or a marketer.
What matters is how your team takes in and follows instructions. If you have a team of skilled employees but one that ignores instructions, then you are as good as having no team at all. It is actually better to have someone who is unskilled but good at following instructions and ready to learn than having someone experienced, skilled but never follows instructions.
A team that follows instructions is ready to learn, open to change, and ready to embrace positive changes to the business.
So, before you start complaining about your business, look among members of your team, what kind of a team do you have?
