Small business management: an in-depth guide

Running a successful business is no walk in the park.

This is especially true today.

In the face of ever-changing business administration tools, marketing tactics, and employee expectations, you’ve got a ton on your plate.

That’s exactly why your management style is so important.

To manage a small business well, you need to not get overwhelmed by the day-to-day hustle and bustle of running a business. Wondering how to achieve that? We have you covered. In this guide to small business management, we’ll look at:

• What “small business management” actually means
• Why doing it right is so important
• The key skills needed to manage a business successfully
• 8 tips for becoming a better small business manager

Whether you’re totally new to small business management or you’re just looking for ways to improve, this post is for you. 

Let’s dig into some small business management tips to help you ace it as successful entrepreneurs.

What is small business management, anyway?

Let’s kick things off by breaking down a small business management definition we can work with:

Small business management is the process of overseeing and coordinating the day-to-day operations of a company (typically in the 0–99 employee range).

Yep, it’s a big job. 

Whether you’re a new business owner or a seasoned manager, you’ll likely have to make real-time decisions related to hiring people, choosing the right tools for your marketing stack, and more—especially if it’s a small business that doesn’t have dedicated departments. 

Basically, you’re in a hybrid leadership role—and you’re the glue that keeps the business together.

So… what exactly does a small business manager do?

Good question! 

The specific duties of a small business manager vary from company to company, but usually include: 

• Hiring, onboarding, and training employees
• Budgeting (for new hires, advertising, and other business initiatives)
• Getting the company’s name out in the market (say, through a brand awareness campaign)
• Managing company inventory and distributors (ex: warehouse optimization)
• Setting goals and business targets (ex: quotas and revenue)
• Finding ways to keep customers happy and keep up a high customer retention rate
• Providing a vision for a business (ex: company culture and morale)
• Evaluating company data (ex: employee performance)

Why small business management matters so much

Sure, you obviously have a hand in the essential functionality of your business. 

But your management style also has big-picture implications on company culture, the lives of your employees, and brand longevity. 

How so? Let’s look at some numbers.

What are the most important skills for managing a small business?

Okay, so what do you need in order to make great business decisions?

Well, the good news is these skills are pretty much universally helpful—regardless of your business or industry:

Clear communication and transparency

No surprises here. This one’s universal whether you’re managing a business in the United States, Europe, or anywhere in the world.

You need to make yourself available to employees while also being honest and explicit about your expectations. 

Regardless of your management style, good business relationships are built by being personable and fostering trust between you and your team.

Attention to detail

From performance data to revenue and beyond, you must be able to dig into data to make decisions. 

What role should you hire for next? Why were profits down last quarter? What’s your strategy for handling huge volumes of inbound calls? The ability to hone in on these details makes it a lot easier when you have to make important decisions later.

Organization

Juggling so many tasks means you need to know how to manage, prioritize, and delegate what needs to be done. This also requires that you stick to a schedule while working effectively as a team and respecting other peoples’ schedules. Time management rules supreme.

Motivation and leadership

From answering questions to asking them, you’re essentially always “on.” When you’re managing a business, you have to motivate employees in addition to yourself, ensuring that morale stays high and everyone’s able to do their jobs to the best of their abilities.

Decision-making

Let’s face it: you’re responsible for making tough choices. This includes everything from major financial investments to letting go of employees.

These choices shouldn’t be taken lightly, but you often aren’t given much time to linger on big decisions. Small business management requires the confidence to make big decisions and to get them right the first time. At the end of the day, you’ve got to do what’s best for the company.

Alright. Now that we’ve looked at all these big, important-sounding traits, here’s how you can actually reflect them in your actions.

Shopping for a team messaging app? (Or just curious about what to look for?) Grab the free checklist to help you choose the right one for your team or business.

8 tips for managing a small business 

Here are eight small business management tips to help you step up your game.

1. Build relationships and a sense of trust with your employees

Becoming a better manager starts with stronger relationships with your workers.

Even so, nearly 70% of managers struggle to communicate effectively with their teams. This can happen for many reasons, such as fear of giving negative feedback or having trouble finding time to talk one-to-one with people.

But making that time is crucial to building trust with your team. Relationship building is the essential foundation to any great business plan. 

Conversations and feedback are necessary because they help people understand what they are doing well and where they need to improve. (When you trust your employees, it’s also easier to delegate and hand off tasks to them.)

Think of it as a virtuous cycle: being open and honest builds more trust, which in turn supports a company culture that empowers your employees to be open and honest, which builds more trust… You get the idea. Here are some strategies to build that sense of trust:

• Make a conscious effort to check in with your team (at least once per week, ideally face to face).
• Take advantage of a team messaging tool or mobile app to provide frequent feedback and praise when you can’t meet one-on-one. For example, RingCentral’s handy desktop and mobile app gives you not only messaging, but also video conferencing and a phone app in one place:

• Prioritize accessibility. Make yourself as available as possible (think: reachable via email or instant message, keep your office open) and highlight specific times when your team can meet with you. Using a remote management tool is a great way to make sure you’re always accessible—even if you’re away from the office.

🕹️ Get a hands-on look at how RingCentral works by booking a product tour:

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💰 You can also use this calculator to see roughly how much your business could save by using RingCentral to support your team’s communication with each other, clients, freelancers, and more.

2. When in doubt, set aside extra time in your schedule

Conventional wisdom tells us that to do small business management well, you should be strict and disciplined when it comes to sticking to your calendar.

That said, having your day completely booked, day after day, is a recipe for disaster.

Don’t make your schedule so rigid that a meeting that runs long or some unexpected issue throws your entire day off. 

Instead, allow for some free time sprinkled throughout your schedule to give yourself some breathing room. This makes you more available to your team—and helps you stay sane.

Basically, give your to-do list some maneuverability and try to avoid overbooking your own time.

3. Be flexible and regularly reevaluate your company goals

Piggybacking on the last tip, flexibility is key when you’re managing your own business or startup.

Spoiler alert: your goals and projections aren’t always going to be 100% accurate.

Maybe your revised sales quotas are unrealistic. Perhaps a hiccup in your business finances means holding off on that new hire.

Either way, don’t look at these issues as “failures.” Even the best business managers have to make adjustments to their strategies. Try to assess your data on a regular basis. Keeping an eye on analytics (think: employee performance dashboards, sales numbers) can help you avoid any surprises.

4. Create processes and workflows that can be automated and replicated

Anything you can put on autopilot to save time in your day is a major plus.

The is the key ingredient when it comes to streamlining your business operations. 

Specifically, think about common tasks that require templates (think: emails, invoicing) and processes that are uniform (think: new employee onboarding). 

If you can automate your tasks and workflows, it also makes it easier for your team to get work done when you’re unavailable. (Handing off a task to someone else with a defined process already in place means there’s less of a chance for mistakes.)

Tasks, both big and small, can be put on autopilot thanks to today’s management tools

For example, you might have to sift through data and dashboards every week. Whether you’re dealing with employee or website performance, having reports summarized and ready in your inbox is a huge time-saver. 

Consider how you can set up performance reports that get automatically delivered straight to your inbox in Google Analytics to keep a pulse on your website traffic without leaving your email. Most major tools can provide the same sort of summaries for everything from email data to social media data:

Automation that makes your business more “self-serve” frees up your team’s time and likewise makes it easier for your customers to get in touch.

For example, setting up an auto-attendant and call-routing flow for your phone system makes sure that callers get in touch with the right people faster. (If you’ve ever called a company and then hit different numbers to navigate their phone menu, you’ve already encountered this!) Here’s how it looks in RingCentral’s cloud phone system:

Although a few seconds or minutes here and there might not seem like much, consider how much managers have to deal with on a daily basis. Even the smallest pieces of automation can result in a ton of time and energy saved.

5. Learn to prioritize your day-to-day tasks

When you’re managing a small business, you should be able to quickly decipher between what needs to be done ASAP versus what can be put off for later.

Think of project management as one big prioritization strategy. For example, some managers might use a version of an Eisenhower Matrix to figure out which tasks are most pressing.

Essentially, this strategy helps you assess duties that are both urgent and important:

When building your schedule, it’s smart to define what needs to be done above all else—and what isn’t actually urgent. This will also help you reduce stress as you always have a pulse on “what’s next.”

6. Invest in tools and resources to save time

The average day for a small business manager can be daunting—there are literally hundreds of things to do. 

As we mentioned earlier, third-party tools can help do the heavy lifting when it comes to tedious or time-consuming tasks. 

Integrating technology across your team can help everyone communicate and collaborate more efficiently with one another. (You don’t have to try fancy new technology either; sometimes upgrading something as basic as your phone system could help you save money and time in the long run.)

For example, these tools are staples of small business management and are important to invest in if you need to work smarter:

• • Project management platforms (e.g., Trello, Asana), which highlight employees’ to-do lists, tasks, and ongoing progress 

• • File sharing tools (e.g., Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Drive), which allow everyone to work together and easily share documents

Google Docs enables teams to work within the same documents in real time, eliminating needless back-and-forths and email chains.

• • Communication and collaboration tools (e.g., RingCentral), which allow for frequent check-ins, status updates, and meetings—especially important if your team is scattered around the world. Why have separate apps for calling, video conferencing, and messaging when you can have them all in one place?

7. Focus on what you’re good at first

The role of a small business manager is often a sort of jack of all trades.

But as the old saying goes, “jack of all trades, master of none.”

Realistically, you can’t be a superstar at everything that you do. You’ll naturally excel at some aspects of running a business and struggle with others.

That’s okay. Just focus on your strengths, and figure out what you need to be successful.

For example, you might be a rockstar at motivating employees and delegating tasks. On the flip slide, you absolutely loathe accounting, pricing, and managing the company credit card.

That means you can either shift those responsibilities elsewhere or get an accounting tool to make your schedule more manageable.

You don’t have to put a round peg in a square hole when it comes to your skill set.

8. Invest in your ongoing education

It might sound cliche, but nothing in the business world stays the same for long. 

Office and workplace trends change. Your teams’ expectations are evolving, too. 

Successful entrepreneurship is about continuous learning. You need to be open to new ideas and opportunities to constantly learn more about small business management. Doing so ensures that you’re up to date on best practices without running the risk of getting stuck in your ways.

For example, why not brush up on your human resources or product development knowledge by joining an in-person or digital business seminar through platforms like Skillpath and AMA? You can also ask people in your network which courses or events they recommend personally.

If you want an immediate crash course in management, look no further than the library (or Amazon). To do even more homework, here are some small business management book recommendations that we’ve found interesting:

• Rework
• The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It
• The Lean Startup 
• Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
• Boss Life: Surviving My Own Small Business

“Do I need a small business management degree?”

Of course, a degree in business is helpful toward reaching your full potential in running a small business.

You probably, however, also don’t have the time for a full-blown traditional degree program right now. That’s okay. You still have options.

For example, there are platforms like Coursera that offer college-level coursework and materials from actual degree programs in business management. 

There are tons of learning opportunities out there that fit different schedules, budgets, and workloads. Look for ways to introduce your team (and yourself!) to new ideas and perspectives.

Ready to step up your small business management skills?

Whether it’s just you and your cofounder running a startup out of your garage, or you’ve got an established small business team, small business management has a lot of moving pieces.

That said, you can do even little things to get more customers, run more efficiently, and help your business thrive.

The good news is, there’s no “right” approach or style you should adopt—you just need to learn what works for you and your business—and these small business management notes can help you figure that out.

Originally published Jan 10, 2021, updated Dec 06, 2021