So I’m sitting in the gate lounge at the Brisbane airport waiting for my (delayed) flight. I’ve got a coffee (acceptably good), finished a bacon & egg roll (borderline dodgy) and to be honest am quite enjoying myself. It’s truly a pleasant experience to be able to sit down, relax a little, and actually be surprisingly productive (it is a work day, after all).

I think one of the greatest challenges any small business owner faces is getting themselves out of the operation. Consider that most small businesses are started by ‘technicians’ (ref: The eMyth). We’re used to getting our hands dirty. That’s the point. No small business would make it past the first week without the founder actually ‘doing the work’, so it can be tough to reach a point when you actually have to stop doing the work, and hand it over to others. It’s a huge leap of faith, but one that absolutely MUST be taken if the business is to ever grow past one or two people.

I have great faith that my team knows what to do, and that our clients will receive excellent attention in my absence (albeit with one less set of hands to do the work). That doesn’t make it any easier to step away. I think that at the end of the day I love what I do, and that creates a certain gravity that pulls me back into the operation. The challenge is that I also love security and stability for myself, my family, my staff and my clients. And that stability will depend on us growing into a larger organisation to better ride out the inevitable dips and bumps of life/business.

Growth for the sake of growth’s sake does not make sense, but given where Grassroots IT is today, growth is the best thing for us. I’ve run the numbers, looked at different scenarios (and indeed constantly continue to do so). The last 12 months has been one of internal growth. Getting our staff up to speed, our systems and processes in place, basically preparing to grow. With our currently structure, I think the ideal size is somewhere around the 10 to 15 person mark. At that point, we would need to look at adapting our internal structure slightly to accommodate the next step up. But right now, I think we’re well positioned and ready for some controlled growth.