About me
People begin their business journey in many different ways.
You may have always known you'd own a business. Maybe you were the kid playing shops, selling things at the caravan park, washing cars for cash, or always coming up with some little way to make money. Or you might have started out like me - a sole trader who somehow ended up running a much bigger business than I'd ever intended.
What I had always done was lead. No matter what job I took, I seemed to end up in leadership roles. Over the years I've worked across organisations with as few as 10 staff through to more than 100, leading change, managing people and budgets, developing systems and processes, and navigating plenty of policy and red tape along the way.
I started as a sole practitioner. Then there was another practitioner. Then another. More referrals came in, more people joined the team and suddenly I wasn't just doing the work anymore. I was running the business around the work as well.
When my first daughter was born, it wasn't uncommon for me to be in the office with my three-week-old daughter being passed around the team while I ran a whole-staff meetings or completed performance reviews. I was keeping my head above water, but I knew I didn't want to run the business like that forever.
By the time my second daughter came along, just under two years later, things looked very different.
We had systems. We had processes. We had policies and procedures that people actually knew how to follow. We had a management structure and good back-end support. I wasn't the person who needed to be in the middle of everything anymore. In less than two years, we'd gone from a business that relied heavily on me to one that had the structure and people around it to support itself.
Did we get there overnight? Nope. And did I get everything right the first time? Definitely not.
I've changed staffing models, redesigned roles, trialed systems and replaced them when they no longer fit. I've recruited and developed teams, built leadership structures, worked hard to create a business people wanted to stay in, prepared for audits, managed budgets and margins, and learned when the answer was another person and when we actually just needed a more efficient system. I've also learnt that growing the business isn't always the hard part. Sometimes it's working out why the numbers aren't stacking up. Why good staff aren't staying. Why referrals have slowed down. Why a system that used to work suddenly doesn't. Or why the business is growing, but somehow feels harder to run than it did before.
Since then, my business world has grown well beyond the one I started as a sole practitioner. Today I run and have interests across several businesses, while also spending time alongside other business owners working through their own numbers, staffing, systems, leadership and growth.
And if there's one thing I've learnt, it's that I don't think every business should run or look the same. Some owners want a big team. Some don't want staff at all. Some want to grow quickly, while others want a smaller business that gives them a great income and plenty of time away from work. Some want to be right in the middle of their business every day, and others are working towards not being needed there very much at all.
None of those are the wrong way to do business.
The question is whether the business you've built is working the way you want it to.
That's a big part of why I developed KV Business Design.
The business you build needs to work for your goals, but it also needs to work for the life you want outside of it.
