Hello and welcome to Business 300.

My name is Philip Kulenshov and this is 300 seconds about business.

We're all a busy people, so I have five minutes or less to get my point across.

No time for details, just the main points.

I've been talking about how all the functions of your business exist to serve the customer and should be aligned with that purpose.

I've addressed what it looks like when strategy, sales, and operations are misfiring.

And now we have administration. If the purpose of a business, of any business, is to deliver value to a customer, each function revolves around that

purpose. Strategy is to create the value, sales is to promote it, operations is to deliver it,

and the administration is to manage it. The administration function exists to manage the value delivery process.

That includes employees, contracts, documents, lists, files.

There are systems and procedures to control.

Whether you're doing it all in your head or you're a legitimate business person with spreadsheets and databases,

the administration function manages all the stuff.

Administration focuses on order and control. Our god is a god of order. We were created to subdue

the earth to tame the wild. Bringing things under control is part of our calling, and so the

administration function plays a necessary role in this undertaking. The more customers, the more

employees, the more products, the more products,

the more administration. Things do need to be organized and managed, and this is the slice

of pie the administrative function gets. But like all things, this gets out of hand. A necessary

red tape and bureaucracy can form pretty quickly. Administration gets out of hand when it forgets

the purpose of the function

and starts to exist for its own sake. Administration is to bring order and control to the business,

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