Recently, a seemingly nondescript customer stopped by my office. Out of genuine interest and to kick up a conversation, I asked what he did for work before retiring. He laced enough wisdom into the next few minutes that I decided to publish our conversation.
I had a shop making parts for other companies. I sold it. Man, I had a good team, though. Some have been with me for years.
Probing for a nugget of success, I asked, “How do you find a good team?”
He answered with this, “You have to be ready to go through the employees. An employee may be talented, smart, and seemingly the right fit, but if he doesn’t share the vision of where you’re heading, let him go. He might be fine right now and can help you idle in the water and stay afloat, but if you want to grow, he’s not going to be able to help.”
A lot of business owners find managing employees to be one of the toughest parts of scaling their businesses. If you fail to train properly, it’s easy to micromanage and deprive them of their autonomy. The employee has no room to develop, and you end up running yourself ragged. That’s good for neither of you nor your business.
The opposite of micromanaging is hands-off. You expect employees to “get it” and then become upset when they don’t. The right balance is tricky. It is easy to hire someone, think the best in them, and then neglect to train diligently.
Letting an underperforming employee go in time can be a difficult call. I would guess that most of us who only hire several employees hire people that we like as a person and maybe become friends with if we aren’t already. And because a lot of us are averse to confrontation, we find it easier to pick up the slack or say nothing as opposed to proper correction. As we get lazy in training, we accept lackluster performance. Also, because a new employee takes quite a few months to turn a profit, we don’t feel like going through the process again with a new employee.
And he talked about vision! What if I don’t have a vision to share with my employees? I simply come to work every day and do my best. What’s better than my best, right?
Next, I asked him how to scale a business. His reply? “The best thing I ever did was hire a consultant to come in and help me make a plan. We decided where we wanted to go and how. Next, the consultant helped teach our vision and direction to our top-level managers. Then, after a year or two, the top-level managers taught it to their guys. An employee may have been good, talented, and seemingly the right fit, but if he didn’t share the vision, we turned him loose. I paid big money for a consultant, but it’s the best thing we ever did. He also helped me make decisions and spend money. A business always has ups and downs; it looks like a heart monitor or the lines on the stock trading. One day, you’re having a good day; the next, everything breaks, and there are problems. You tend to have emotional reactions and make knee-jerk decisions based on those spikes and valleys. By having a plan, you eliminate the rollercoaster of those ups and downs and try to make it steady. Make decisions based on the average of those ups and downs. A bad day won’t affect your overall business or future if you have a plan.”
“Even selling the business,” he said, “was carefully planned out. I had a broker come in and spend every day with me for a year to learn the whole operation. Then, we started methodically going through the buyers we thought would be interested. I lined out exactly what I was looking for in a buyer, and we ended up choosing the buyer instead of going on the market and the buyer choosing us. All the employees are still working for the new company minus one who was driving a long ways to work and decided to retire. I still talk to him.”
By this time, I realized his “shop” was more extensive than his modest statement at first had led me to believe. It turned out they had over 400 employees and, among many other things, built parts for NASA, the Department of Defense, Direct TV, Automotive Manufacturers, and thousands, if not millions, of ice maker parts for refrigerators.
Starting out, he had a day job as a machinist and, in the evenings, worked in his own shop on his lathe and mill. Later, he hired an employee, quit his day job, and started working full-time for himself.
I asked how he was able to land these contracts from working by himself with no sales training or contacts in those companies.
“You have to offer a solution to the problem they have. Once I hired a guy, it left me time to hit the road. I’d stop at every business in a 50-mile radius from the house. When they had a problem that their regular supplier was unable to resolve, as long as I had a solution, they’d give me that project. As time went on, they started coming to me for more of their needs, even when there were no problems. From there, new opportunities arose, and I kept figuring out how to accommodate them. At that point, I’d do a 100-mile radius, and then 150, etc.”
My takeaway? I need to devise a plan that keeps me from making foolish decisions in the high times and from making radical and emotional ones in the bad. Without a plan, I will do both. I make decisions based on my mood! I view the world and the condition of the economy based on my personal economy. If I’ve been despondent about my business, I think we’re in a recession. With that attitude, most of the time, my business is likely to go into its own recession independent of the local economy. If I don’t have the money to spend on my product, I assume my customer doesn’t either, and that bleeds off to the customer, making them feel insecure about their potential purchase with me.
On the other hand, when I’m upbeat, I see hope all around me for the economy and the world at large. I expect people to want to do business with me and have the money to spend! It turns out that my state of affairs directly influences my assumptions about others.
I’ve never understood how to plan, and that’s where I need help. I grew up on a farm, and every day, we did our best, and nearly every day, we had to change our plans to compensate for a breakdown, pests, or other things that were out of our control. We sprayed when there were weeds and harvested when the cotton was ready. Yes, there was preventative maintenance, holding to planting dates, and spraying on schedule. But even doing all of that, at the end of the year, we still had to react to the volatility of the markets and weather. Being flexible and able to pivot is an integral part of a business and a skill we underestimate, but that isn’t the topic for today.
However, I’m in an entirely different business now, and I feel like I am still – just reacting. It’s what I know and what I’m comfortable with. Like on the farm, I’m doing my best every day, and I’m still dealing with things out of my control. Again, how can I do better than my best? There will always be things out of my control, true. If I’m doing my best, then I cannot help that sales are slow, the economy is off, customers are difficult, and my stress is high…..Right? What is left but the need to react at that point?
But, suppose I had a roadmap for my business to help me know where I’m going short-term, mid-term, and long-term. Then, I could build a strategy for a slow month. The daily setbacks, or, in the man’s example, the low lines on the graph, would be part of the whole picture, not as low as they appeared that day. They wouldn’t affect my outlook as severely, and I would know the plan is solid for those times.
Really, I should end with an answer, a recommendation, or a link to a research paper. The problem is, I can’t give you the answer because I don’t yet know what I don’t know! But I can raise the question to you in case questioning your methods yields positive results.
Do you have a plan for your personal workload? For balancing work and family life?
Do you have a plan for when you make a lot of money? Will you invest, save for the bad year, or write a check to your personal account?
Do you have a plan for lean times? Or will you just see what seems best at the time?
Don’t just go to work every day and do your best; Work With A PURPOSE!
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