As an entrepreneur, you may have a mind blowing idea or innovation which you trust is going to change your community, your country, or maybe even the world at large. And you’ll probably make a good sum of money along the way. That’s allowed, and there’s nothing wrong with it, provided you don't cause harm to others, the environment, or breach the law.

Go ahead, be successful, be a billionaire! But before you can ever get there, you’ll have to build an efficient business organization, employing lots of people, because no one can do these things alone.

In this new series, I’m going to be discussing on what I call, "The hardest thing to do in business: building an efficient organization."

WHAT YOU SHOULD EXPECT
You'll face several challenges as an entrepreneur, but the most challenging of all is _

As an entrepreneur, you may have a mind blowing idea or innovation which you trust is going to change your community, your country, or maybe even the world at large. And you’ll probably make a good sum of money along the way. That’s allowed, and there’s nothing wrong with it, provided you don't cause harm to others, the environment, or breach the law.

Go ahead, be successful, be a billionaire! But before you can ever get there, you’ll have to build an efficient business organization, employing lots of people, because no one can do these things alone.

In this new series, I’m going to be discussing on what I call, "The hardest thing to do in business: building an efficient organization."

WHAT YOU SHOULD EXPECT
You'll face several challenges as an entrepreneur, but the most challenging of all is building an efficient organization. What do I mean by efficient? Let me start with a formal definition: “Achieving maximum productivity with minimum wasted effort or expenses.”

Most people fail woefully in this area. It’s the most difficult and most complex thing that any entrepreneur ever has to do. In this series, we’ll talk about many issues including registering a business, recruiting and hiring your team, and organizational structure.

This is business "MBA stuff" and if you just want to run a little bottle store, it might be tough for you, but if you think you can open more than one bottle store, hang around and see. As they say in my wonderful country Nigeria, "It's for the senior class."

_BE CAREFUL! _
You won’t be the next Dangote or Zuckerberg if you don't know how to set up an efficient business organization.

To lay the foundations for this series, here’s another definition: The Cambridge dictionary describes “organization” as “a group whose members work together for a shared interest in a continuous way.”

The verb “organize” is also important here! It means, “to make the necessary plans for something to happen; arrange.”

Do I really need to write much more…? If only it were as easy and straightforward as it sounds and seems!

Building an organization has many different phases. Can you tell me the importance of nearly each and every word in these three definitions?

ORGANISATION
Organizations can be almost any size, but the ones I’ll be talking about here are the ones that involve a hierarchy of authority and delegation: executive leadership, mid-level management, technical experts, frontline supervisors and employees in different sectors, most with different operational functions.

IN A NUTSHELL

This means a complex array of people with identical abilities and skills, like those successful people you see around. Maybe different parts and gifts, but the key non-negotiable ingredients? Integrity, shared vision, mutual respect, accountability.

SUMMARY

I won’t dwell on problems so much as solutions in this series, but to get started, here’s a list from a McKinsey report on some of the biggest challenges faced by companies (young and old) trying to build organizational capability:

Organizational resistance to change.

Lack of resources.

Lack of credible metrics.

(Lack of) identification of who is accountable for execution.

Inability to gain attention and buy-in from line managers.

Lack of senior management support.

(Lack of) clear vision or objectives.

Ineffective training approaches.

Inconsistent application of methods, processes.

Now you see why I’ve said building an efficient organization is the hardest thing to do in business. But with great people on your team, all is possible!

To be continued. . .

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