Why your business is the way it is

Your business is a result of all the things you have and haven't done and it's a result of your strengths and your weaknesses. If you aren't entirely happy with where your business is, that can feel hard to hear. Let go of the notion that your worth is tied to the success, or otherwise, of your business. You are responsible for where you are but you're not to blame. Running any business is challenging and running a food or hospitality business would test anyone's mettle. It isn't easy and most of us are mostly doing it without direction or guidance and learning as we go.

Running a food or hospitality business is a jack of all trades situation. There is the main task of producing whatever it is that you produce and then there is marketing, human resources, operations, ordering, business strategy, bookkeeping, accounting, statutory compliance, the list goes on. There are probably some bits of this that you are very good at, some bits that you outsource and some bits that you are not very good at but have to muddle through anyway. You probably spend more time and energy on the things that come naturally to you and neglect the bits that don’t. If there are tasks that you are not good at and don’t enjoy doing there is nothing wrong with delegating those things, in fact, you probably should. You will, however, still need to understand what it is that you are delegating and what the result is that you want. Your numbers are a prime example of this. If you dislike financial management, you may well use a bookkeeper and/or an accountant, but your numbers are about a lot more than just filling out a form once a year to send to HMRC. You need to understand what your numbers are telling you about how your business is, and isn’t, working financially. Someone else can do the labour of getting those numbers into an understandable format but you need to understand them, otherwise you are operating blind.

If you are feeling stuck in your business, you need to look at where your time and energy is going. Are there areas of the business that you are ignoring because they feel hard or uncomfortable? If you are finding things challenging financially, and there's a reasonable chance that you are, because this food and hospitality and that's a common state of affairs, then do you understand what is causing that and what you can do about it? If you do what you have always done, and I hate to break this to you, you will get what you have always got. If what you have been getting is too many hours and not enough money, then you need to make some changes and that starts with really digging in to where you are now.