You probably got to be a business owner or senior manager because you have (or had) a marketable skill or talent, and a lot of enthusiasm and hope.  With luck and persistence, you’ve become part of an elite group of people that have made it to the top.  But something feels wrong.  Your organization’s sales may be flat or declining.  Profits may be down.  It’s tough getting started each day.  What’s going on?

You may have hit that “glass ceiling”.  You may have pushed yourself or your business as far as you, single-handedly, can push it.  Even a very talented person can only do so many things required in a growing business.  It’s one thing to have a particular skill—whether in Marketing, Sales, Operations, Finance or Administration—but it’s quite another thing to manage each of these functions equally competently and with equal interest.

The result is that your business moves forward, only to be snapped back by an invisible rubber band—those areas in which you (and your co-owners or managers, if applicable) have lower competence or interest.  Your business gets just so large and then stops growing, or at the very least, the growth rate slows down considerably.

Like other business owners or senior managers, you may end up being run by your organization, instead of the other way around.  In the name of saving money, face or ego, you find yourself working on your company’s products or services instead of understanding that your business itself should be your product.  If you do this a lot, you’re probably paying yourself too much for the work you’re doing.  Since you’re likely your organization’s most valuable resource, you’re mostly responsible for the glass ceiling which begins to form.

To break through this barrier:

It’s probably been a while since you’ve taken time, or made time, to step away from your business long enough—and honestly enough—to assess what’s going on.  The financial security of your organization depends on your focus.  If it’s buried in the trees (or worse, the branches), who’s looking out for the forest?

But say you do analyze and come to understand the glass ceiling issue.  What then?  Well, you’ve got to break through it.  There comes a time in your organization’s development when a balanced mix of people in the three major functional areas is required:  Business Development, Operations, and Support.  As a business owner or senior manager, you will usually fill one or more of these functional slots, while the others get handled on a second-level priority.

It’s possible to bring in several different types of temporary or interim managers without jeopardizing the organization’s bankroll.  If done appropriately, this investment in outside expertise can be a most productive use of your financial resources.

Some interim managers work on a project basis, while others work on a retainer contract.  In terms of cost, some of these resources will work for a fixed fee (project or retainer), while others will work on a shared-risk-shared-reward basis—reducing the fee and sharing in the gains achieved by partnering.

Whomever you choose, the key is to complement the strengths you, the business owner or senior manager, bring to your organization.

Consider what you have to do to get your business to run without you.  How can you get to where you manage your business, instead of your business managing you?

Starting today, your goal should be to reduce most of the jobs in your organization to relatively repeatable functions.  This will reduce your dependence on highly-skilled, high-priced labor, improve consistency and quality of your products and services, and allow more interchangeability of your workforce.  You and your staff of people can then focus on managing the 20% of your organization’s operations that require direct hands-on work (eg, customer relations).