In the early days of our manufacturing company, my business partner and I used to save our little company every weekend. We'd forget to get a job done during the week, and come in on Saturday and Sunday to complete it. We might have to re-do a job that we had messed up, or to quote some job that we didn't have time to deal with during the week. If we didn't do these things, we were sure our customers would get mad and leave us, and the company would die. We'd have to save the company the next weekend, too, because we'd be so exhausted from working hard the week before we'd make more mistakes the following week and have to rectify them the following weekend. We felt that there was never enough time to do get everything done. We were always under the pressure of the clock.

I don't know what the defining event was that made us stop this cycle of failure. Maybe we just got so sick and tired of not having any personal lives outside the company that we simply said, "If the company can't make it during the week, it deserves to die." In any case, we stopped working so hard in the business. That gave us more time to work on the business. We now had the time to set up cost control systems, to evaluate employees, to fire the ones who made most of the mistakes (except, of course, ourselves), and to praise and reward the good ones. We had time to make a business plan, to set goals, and take actions. We not only wrote a business plan, we stuck to it, too. We now had the time and the inclination to pull our business plan out of the file and act on it.

This gave us a chance to re-evaluate our customers, too. We learned to work hard to keep the good ones and get rid of the bad ones. We had the time to ask our good customers questions about how we could do a better job for them. We learned from our customers' comments and made appropriate changes to better serve them. We stopped over-promising on jobs we took; if customers had unreasonable deadlines, we told them we couldn't meet them. We gave our customers realistic completion dates for work we accepted, and we set up schedule boards to keep jobs on track in order to meet our commitments. We felt better about our business and less frustrated. We had a life outside the business, too, and our families got to know us again.

We hired more people to take care of the things we still didn't have time to do ourselves, figuring this would increase our overhead and, therefore, lower our profits. We were willing to pay that price to keep the business from driving us nuts. Surprisingly, it didn't work out that way. The profits actually increased, because our employees were doing a better job than we ever did. They weren't tired and brought fresh ideas and new viewpoints to our business. We hired even more employees and made even more money. This gave us even more time to work on our business and allowed us to try some new marketing strategies. They worked. The strategies made us more money that we reinvested in talented people, who made us more money, and so on.

When we sold the business, it was 36 times bigger than when we bought it. The company who purchased our business may have thought they were just buying our corporate stock, our inventory, and our customer list. They weren't. They were buying access to the pool of talent whom we had hired and the systems we had established to motivate those talented people. Most of the people and the systems remained in place after the sale, helping the new owners doubled the size of the company in less than 5 years.

What about your company? Are you still trying to save it every weekend? If so, you're doomed to running in place. You won't grow but your problems will until they overwhelm you, or they make you so frustrated and tired you throw in the towel. Don't let this happen! Start working on your business so you can make it a success. Take this weekend off and think about what you want your business to become. Then, next week, start steering it in that direction. Begin by hiring good people to help you make your business grow and succeed. You'll never regret it.