Knowing the 5 parts of business, whether it’s your household, your small business or a million dollar corp, helps you decide how to delegate tasks so you can grow.  Delegating tasks allows you to focus on your strengths and allow someone else to do tasks to help your business grow.  Knowing the functions of your business helps you decide who to hire and how to delegate your tasks.  I invite you to a free live training on the three steps to fill your calendar as a healer so you can support yourself and your family and still have time off, go to: https://www.highpaidhealers.com   

The 5 internal structures of all businesses

Understanding the internal business structures will help you with growing your healing practice.  Your household, your healing practice, and big corporations have the same structures in common.  

Here are the five components of a simple business. Even though these components are present in  giant multimillion dollar corporations, this will be about you as an entrepreneur with a simple healing business.  You  invite healing clients into your practie,  you collect payments from them, and you are doing some sort of advertising, you are doing the “product fulfillment”, etc. 

The CEO is at the top guiding direction and decisions

In the home, it’s the head of household. You make major decisions for what's happening in your household. What kind of new flooring you're going to put in your house, what kind of new car you're going to buy, how you're going to arrange your furniture, the colors that go on your wall, what kind of telephone service you have, etc.  It will include all major decisions that you make for your household.

Likewise, the CEO will decide what web service to use, where to advertise, how much money are you going to spend for any one of your necessities,  who you’re hiring, and what your assistant’s daily tasks are.  These are all CEO functions. 

You also decide on your product offerings, your brand image, core values, your mission statement, and the company structure, like whether you're going to be a sole proprietor, a partnership, an S corp, or a C Corp.

These are all massive decisions that you need to be making for your small business in your role as CEO. 

The next part of business is the financial branch. 

The financial branch head is the financial officer or the CFO. At home, it starts with your checkbook. It includes how you cover your utility bills, your mortgage, your food, your clothing, furniture, your transportation expenses. It also includes the income from all sources, so the inflow and outflow of all of your expenses.

In the financial branch of your business, it includes all the same things just like your home: you're keeping track of your cash flow. In your business, you need to understand what's coming in and what your expenses are. 

In the first year of my business. I didn't do a very good job of it. But you could tell more or less where I was at based on looking at my checking account statements.  Now I actually keep track of where all my expenses go, and what they are and what all my income is. So they’re balanced.

And I also did some financial planning. I wrote out all of the necessary things I need to do to run my business.  You also need to do that whether you need a website, an email service like a customer relationship management system like MailChimp, or use an all-in-one platform like Kajabi, what appointment app you’re using,  and if you’re paying for that service or any other? 

You’ll also need to analyze your strengths to be able to hire others for the things that you can't do (or don’t want to do). 

As a beginning entrepreneur, you usually do all these functions yourself.  As you grow and your income grows, you can afford to hire help to get chores done. 

The third part of business is the marketing department

Whether you do online or offline marketing or a combination, anytime you're telling somebody about your business, you are marketing to them. 

You choose your marketing strategy, marketing copy, including in your talks and presentations. Your message will be consistent this way.  

In marketing, you also are in charge of how your information is disseminated.  Are you inserting it into your social media,  putting it up on YouTube, putting it in your blog posts?  You will coordinate with the financial branch to decide your marketing budget.  It’s normally a percentage of your income.  In the beginning, it'll be a higher percentage of your income. You will then make a bigger profit vs. your marketing dollars. 

In your household, it’s about image too:  how you dress, how you decorate your home,  the car you drive, your personal mission.  You decide how you're going to look. 

Part of marketing is your sales department. 

At home, it will include selling your things, like your car, home, used items you no longer need and still have value. A donation is a sale for $0.  Are you putting ads in papers, are you marketing online, are you using a platform like eBay or Amazon?  

In business, how do you sell?  Is it on a platform? Is it in person? Is it via webinar? Is it phone conversations or at events? Is it through social media or other kinds of talks? This is all part of the sales process. 

As your business grows, you might hire a sales team. The sales team is going to be doing those calls for you. In some businesses, they say you’ll have a conversation with a coach. It's really your sales team.

A fourth business part is your operations.  

This is your day to day running of your home or business.  

In your home, it would be organizing significant events, like weddings, Thanksgiving meals, and bar mitzvahs.  It would be making sure everyone in the family got what they needed, books and computers, arranging internet, utilities, etc.  It is product fulfillment, like helping with homework, cooking at a campout, anything that has to do with operations of the home.

In your business, it would be arranging events, like conferences to bring in new business, product fulfillment, making sure all employees got what they needed, like computers, desks, phones.  Underneath the operations, you could have an event planner that would organize company events, especially if these were used to generate sales and more business.  It could also include product manufacture.

As your business grows, the CEO may be overwhelmed with the amount of work on his or her plate, the COO, or chief operating officer would then become your liaison between the CEO and the rest of the company.  The CEO has the vision and the COO makes sure it gets done.  

But in healing, your product is you.  You are doing the healing in the beginning. Perhaps you can train other healers to become part of your product offerings.  They could also learn to heal and run their own businesses 

The fifth department or part of your business is homan resources

So you as head of a household also use human resources.   You might have somebody that comes in and cleans your home every other week or does your lawn or gardening.  You are paying them and they are your employees.

It could also be your children doing chores, not as employees but as an integral part of the family. 

In a business, it's hiring and firing of employees.  “Hire slow, fire fast” is the usual advice.  Promoting employees, employment enrichment, timecards payroll, and you coordinate speakers for employees. Hint: There are some big companies that have slots for personal development (paid speakers),  topics like leadership,  getting healthy, mindfulness and meditation.  Anything that will help people get along better in companies or become more productive.  They are willing to pay for people with expertise in these areas, $1000, $2500, or $5000 are the usual honoraria, depending on travel and expertise. This is something that's worth looking into. 

And in human resources, you also have to make sure that the labor laws are complied with.  For example, if somebody does a service for you, you have to make sure that they get paid.  You'll also have to comply with labor laws, working hours, overtime, tax law, filing retirement pay, and make sure this gets sent to the correct government agencies, along with all the forms.  H

These last things get to be time consuming and complicated,  which is why so many people hire agents of other companies.  For example, my assistant works for another company and I contract with the company for her to work for me.   This model is chosen often rather than hiring direct employees.  Another advantage to this is that the agent can work part time for more than one company.  

Human Resources coordinates with the financial arm of your business because you have to pay people a salary and it has to fit within the budget.

In your practice in the beginning, you are most likely responsible for all those roles. It's a good idea to be really familiar with all the parts and every operation on some level.

The easiest rule to follow is to hire out the job that you hate the most.  For me, it's doing a lot of rote things over.  Even though I love working online and posting, it is not a very good use of my time. I'm much better off doing something like this where I am creating new fresh content.

And my assistant or anybody else cannot be doing that for now. Right now, I am the only one that could be doing that.

Tips for your business to run more smoothly

Another good rule is to never be out of the financial flow loop. See where your money is coming in and going out. 

This makes it easier to discover any financial leak and you need to make sure that you stop any problems as quickly as possible. It's your money. Don't be afraid of it. 

Fill out an org chart every year.  Review your roles from time to time.   Every six months in the beginning and then quarterly after your business starts to flourish and grow. 

The easiest person to hire is a virtual assistant to take care of the daily tidbits that need doing.  My assistant doesn't take care of all the little tidbits I need but she takes care of a lot of the tidbits that really are helping me out a lot. And she works for me two hours a day. She's an independent contractor. 

I hope this summary was helpful for you. In summary, the CEO, that makes the major creative decisions, what products you’ll have, how you're going to deliver them, company image, brand. You could hire an assistant that could grow into your COO,  Chief Operating Officer.  They make sure everything is running smoothly in your business where you're the big idea person.  In the beginning, you’ll be delivering all of the services. You will be the finance person and you can even have a bookkeeper. 

I had hired a bookkeeper that  went over my purchases and sales quarterly.  You can use some online software for that too.  

Sales and marketing brings in your revenue.  You're going to be that in the beginning. HR  or human resources hires and fires employees, enriches them, and pays them. 

I hope this overview was helpful to show you what you can grow into.  At some point, certain tasks become tedious or aren’t a good use of your time.  These can be hired out.  You’re the idea person, the brand, and the face of your business.  You will be doing a lot of the creating, healing, and thinking of ways to help more people.  No one else can do that for you, at least not yet.

Standout Quotes:

• "Healing is a business as much as it is an art. Treat it as such." 
• "There are five components of a simple, solopreneur business, such as a healing practice, that giant multimillion dollar corporations have in common."
• "Every household has the same 5 components of a business." 
• "The CEO is like a head of household: they make major creative and financial decisions." 
• "If you are a solopreneur, someone with a healing practice, you will be covering all the functions of a business in the beginning."
• "The five parts or departments in a business are: CEO, Financial, Human Resources, Sales and Marketing, and COO (Operations)." 
• "In a household, Human Resources could be deciding who is going to do chores, who you choose as your friends, who you are going to hire as help around the house, and what enrichment your family might need to function better.  This works just like your business."