You have probably heard the “If you want something done right – you do it yourself” adagio times and times again. You agree and when you hire help you tend to tell in every little detail how stuff should be done, because that’s exactly how you would do it. You did it thousands of times, so it should be perfect, right? Wrong!
There’s hardly any other way of management as ineffective and destructive as micromanagement. Sometimes a complete absence of management would do better. Imagine you micromanage a group of 3 people, whom you tend to micromanage. That’s basically doing their jobs together with them. So if each one of them has a standard 40 hour work week that alone is going to 120 hours a week. Add your own responsibilities which should add up to another 40 hours per week and you arrive at 160 hours per week. Which leaves you precisely 8 hours per week to sleep, eat and have a life. The math is amazing, isn’t it?
Aside from this obvious exaggeration there are more issues with micromanagement than you might think. Once you’re comfortably sure none of your employees can make a single step without consulting with you, you can be sure you will get nagged every 5 minutes with requests to validate everyone’s output and the inevitable “Done, now what?”. That is, of course, if your employees won’t “forget” to ask than to have a few precious minutes without that authoritarian “What are you working on now?” questioning.
This constant nagging leaves you no chance to concentrate on your own work that you do as their manager or supervisor – acquiring new tasks, planning, measuring risks and so on, every single moment of your time will be devoted to distributing tasks, controlling the process and validating the output. This will also lead to huge waste, justified by “He didn’t tell me what to do, so I’m doing nothing”. True, why do anything at all if all you hear back is “Did I tell you to do that?”
Micromanagement creates no incentive to work efficiently, given the amount of waste obvious to any one with a bit of common sense. It creates a stressful work environment for both the employer and employee. It hurts productivity from multiple angles and creates an almost Orwellian state of mind as you are being watched and told what to do almost every minute. Yet, many of small business owners tend to implement this kind of management style, because they just know how to do it right. They did it a thousand times over, so they should know better. Right?
The Good
This is a diverse category because you can drop pretty much every single major issue with your web site – from non-working contact form to eye-scratching design from 1980s to web sites that never finish to load because your friend’s son who put it together didn’t realize that cute kitten picture on a front page is 15MB BMP file. But rather than talk about these, easily addressable issues, I’d point to a really major one – not having any kind of web site. Imagine – there are businesses out there who decidedly go without web site at all. There are usually two main justifications – “we don’t need one” and “we don’t have money for it”. It’s almost like wishing for a win in a lotto without buying a single ticket. Aside from the fact that people prefer to shop from the convenience of their homes (less clients for you), there are more choices online that you will ever have in your inventory (again – less clients for you), you are also limiting yourself by not pitching to those who actually are interested in what you want to sell to them. With the average rent on any decent store around tens of thousands of dollars per month a 
One of the worst things you can do to your web site is keep relaunching it every few months on a new domain names. It’s not a secret anymore that your domain name equals your brand – twice true for small businesses. Of course, you can launch a new web site on a new domain name if you used to be GreatWidgetsOnline.com and you have just bought GreatWidgets.com – it’s not a major major change, but rather a welcome convenience. However, if you keep relaunching the site from GreatWidgetsWeSellHere.com to ThingamabobsOnlineRightHere.com to WhatchamacallitSalesForYou.com – it’s not really clear how you are going to attract the customers and keep them around. Even if there were some issues associated with your domain before – it’s easier to fix them than rebuild the whole thing from the scratch. Besides, even if there was some bad press – you can always use it to your advantage.