But before we can discuss “running the company,” it pays to know what this means. What’s a company? It’s a business organization, however basic:  A set of distinct business operations working together for a purpose, usually to earn a profit.

Businesses do not have a tangible structure, like the frame to a house, but every business has a framework nonetheless. The purpose of management is to keep that framework functioning effectively. Since the framework is conceptual, you can’t see it unless you understand it, it pays to know something about the structure of traditional business management-in other words, the differences between the roll of a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and a company President, the difference between a Comptroller and a bookkeeper, and how these rolls relate even when one person, maybe you, wear all, or at least several of the hats.

Well, maybe none of this relates to you as long as your primarily job is on the jobsite hammering all the nails, but the moment you put down the hammer to bid another job, purchase materials or make a bank deposit, you’re engaged, even if unwittingly, in running the company. And just as you know the rolls of the electrician, plumber, and lead carpenter, you should know the business management trades.

The operating parts of any business fall under eight broad categories of management, which represent, in a nutshell, precisely what you learn to earn an MBA: financial management, marketing management, human resource management, strategic planning management, production management, operations management, service management and, nowadays, information technology management. What makes running your own, small enterprise so deceptively simple is that all of these complex-sounding operational functions manage only three basic resources: money, people, and materials.

But even if you run a handyman operation that employs only you, you still attend to these eight functions:
     1. Financial management: You have to track earnings and expenses, price your jobs accurately, manage your credit, know if you’re earning enough to cover both business and personal expenses, make adjustments to become profitable and remain competitive-in other words, in the black and employed.
     2. Marketing management: You have to market your services, even if through word of mouth. Do you give out cards, or refrigerator magnets? Do you set up a web site, or buy a listing in the Yellow Pages?
     3. Human resource management: You may not think you have human resource management with only one employee-you-unless you suddenly decide you have a life, and you want to start taking personal time into account in setting hours of operation and days off, and then maybe you even want the business to provide your family with health insurance and paid time off for a vacation.
     4. Strategic planning management comes in when you begin thinking about how your business will evolve over time to meet your goals, will you grow to add an employee, or partner with another handyman? Will you venture into a new service area, such as energy upgrades, or subcontract warranty services to another builder? Will you scale your systems for growth, or hunker down and simplify to stay small and profitable?
     5. Production management is the one area most of us trained in simply by learning the trades; most builders know how to manage the job site, although we can always learn more, especially if we begin to hire others to do the work. Production management is all about managing the job site, or multiple jobs sites.
     6. Operations management is another thing, it’s about how your service is delivered, encompassing everything from who answers the phone to how jobs are bid and how proposals are delivered to the customer. Builders often expect this “job site,” the coordination of businesses overall operations, to run themselves without a superintendant. This approach has another name, anarchy, and it generally does not work well. The operations superintendant, or operations manager, is often the comptroller in a small business, sometimes a spouse, or the Chief Operations Officer (COO) in a medium to large company.
     7. Service management is a part of operations, but focused on the customer experience, an area that builders both small and large often manage very poorly. This is where the company vision statement often comes in as a measure of success, are you delivering what you promise? If not, how can you do a better job of satisfying your customers?
     8. Information technology management has to do with computers, yes, but it’s fundamentally about how information, from phone numbers to tool shed inventory, and from to checkbook balances to historical cost data arekept and available for meaningful use. It’s as simple as a rolodex or as complicated as a nationwide computer network. Someone needs to keep track of how you keep track of it all. 

We could, and will, add to these eight business school divisions of management three others, ethics, ecology, and given the recent economic meltdown, crises management.

But to start, understanding the formal subdivisions of business management doesn’t mean you have to make a simple operation complex, the knowledge just helps you think clearly about how and what to get organized–balancing the framework of your business over time into one, smoothly operating whole, in short, a real company.

During the next few months, I intend to bring these bring these eight aspects of management to life through interviews with executives from companies large enough to employ management personnel, and small companies with creative management-juggling strategies, and then to tease out the lessons that apply to any size business, even a company of one.