Is Your Business On An Island?

It’s a great feeling to own your own business. When you’re just starting out, it feels amazing to know that you’re finally your own boss. Sometimes being your own boss prevents you from making effective business decisions. Find out what being “on an island” means and what you and your business can do to prevent it.

What It Means to “Be On An Island”

In business, an “island,” also known as an information silo, is an isolated information system. This information system is basically a group of people and computers that operate on their own, without interaction from other parts of the same business. For the average small business, day-to-day tasks can operate smoothly “on the island,” but larger businesses can run into some trouble. The problems associated with being “on the island” don’t tend to come up until after your business begins to grow and conduct business on a larger scale.

A rapidly growing business is a great “problem” to have. If you own a business, being one of the very few successful entrepreneurs is an honor in itself. As your business grows, you want to ensure that everything continues to operate smoothly. Making sure you and your business stay off the island and continue to earn a profit becomes an important task to take care of.

A growing business usually continues to add departments and staff as the demand for their products or services increase. Amidst all of the madness, most business owners tend to create a piecemeal, unorganized business structure that is very inefficient in the way it communicates important information. The different departments within the business begin to develop their own goals and each one begins to pull the business in a different direction. If this sounds even slightly like your business, welcome to the island.

The Problem With The Island

Inefficient methods of communication can kill an expanding company just as fast, or faster, than it took to actually create the business. Imagine the types of problems companies like eBay or Amazon would encounter if they were satisfied with operating on an island. If each of their internal departments operated on their own, they might cause items to get shipped to wrong addresses, their billing systems might charge unusable credit cards and their customers might start to become dissatisfied with the speed at which these companies conduct their business. Large businesses like these would be unable to operate efficiently if they didn’t have effective communication systems.

Much like being on separate islands, each department within a growing business that fails to communicate information effectively starts to develop its own goals that directly benefit their individual bottom line. The accounting department within a company might end up having entirely different goals than the marketing department. As a business grows and each department continues to pursue its own goals the business as a whole begins to tear itself apart from the inside. This is the problem with operating your business “on the island.”

Your Raft Off the Island

The key to preventing ineffective communication systems is to plan ahead. Many times these problems can be avoided with proper foresight and preparation. If you consider yourself already on the island, proper planning could be your only ticket off. Carefully think of designing and implementing effective information systems before your business begins to expand faster than you can manage. Planning ahead will give you the time you need to slowly develop an efficient system that works for you and your business. The extra time to plan gives you the ability to research and evaluate the different software and hardware options you have available to you before the need for them actually arises. This enables you to continue to operate your business free of worry and stress. A quick Internet search for customer relationship management or enterprise resource planning could be the difference between a flourishing business and a closed business.

As always, a calm, prepared business owner is able to run a business much better than a disorganized, stress-ridden business owner. Use the time you have now to plan ahead and build the life raft that will be your ticket off the island. If you’re lucky and you take these words to heart, the need for that life raft may never come, your business will continue to make you boatloads of money and you’ll gently ease yourself into comfortable retirement. Then, maybe relaxing on an island wouldn’t be so bad after all. Perhaps with a million-dollar luxurious retirement home and a delicious frozen margarita in your hands while you relax on the beach?