At the heart of the combustion engine is a simple idea.

Fuel is injected into a piston, it is burnt and the piston turns a wheel. Business has a similar dynamic at its heart. Inject sales revenue into the business, turn the wheels of production.

If we can get this important dynamic working smoothly then we are well on the way to a successful business. For many business owners the trouble comes with keeping these two dynamic elements in balance. If we put too much resource into marketing and sales, production is overwhelmed. If we spend all our time in production, our marketing and sales is starved of resource.

The tendency becomes crisis management, with resource thrown at each side to deal with emerging breakdowns. The only chance of avoiding this comes with planning and foreseeing problems before they arise. Ultimately the business owner/ manager's role is not to do the marketing or the production but to make sure that each is done in a timely fashion. Keeping up this role in your business is a particular breakthrough that many business owners struggle with.

Dig a little deeper and we discover that we do not give time to making this dynamic work. We do not allow ourselves to stand back and get the machinery in place to have both elements working at the same time - sales and marketing rolling along at the same time production continues. Also we often have discipline problems with the bits we dislike. We commit to doing a bit of sales and marketing each week and then ignore our commitment because we don't like doing it. We are recalcitrant employees and there is no-one to give us a written warning.

And so it turns out that one of the key skills of the business owner is managing time - especially for small businesses and start ups. This is one reason that we are running our next seminar on this topic. Of course on the other side of the problem is a breakthrough in having a successful business. If you can set up a reliable system for sales and production at the level of sole trader, there is no reason why this cannot be replicated or augmented and used to expand the business.