As first published in The Q Review Summer 2021/22 Magazine. Follow the link to Subscribe and receive your FREE copy each quarter!
I was recently reminded of Ryan Halliday’s book “The Obstacle is the Way”.
The title pretty well summarises the premise… that the biggest difficulty you presently face (the obstacle) is the matter you must now focus on (the way) in order to achieve your goal.
Managing your people, and managing them well, will always be one of the very biggest obstacles to business success, but doing so is invariably the only way to achieve that lofty goal.
We often hear of business owners who at some point in their journey started to build their business, and therefore their Team, only for a period of contraction to follow as they discover they were not equipped to manage the people they had employed.
Sometimes, the contraction is deliberate, and those business owners are to be commended for recognising their limitations and making a change before disaster strikes.
For others, they learn the hard way.
But in both cases the result is an unfulfilled goal of real business success and the lost opportunity to secure the End Game of a multi-million dollar pay day.
Business By Design
So before undertaking your expansion, it is worthwhile considering how you will approach the management of your growing Team.
As a business owner you will (hopefully) have two competing emotions when it comes to your people.
For most business owners, a big part of you will wish to show loyalty and gratitude for everything they do.
As a business owner you will (hopefully) have two competing emotions when it comes to your people.
However, at the same time, there will be an underlying self-interest, whereby you remain committed that you and your business’ wellbeing will always come first, over the interests of your staff.
These are difficult feelings to reconcile, but the fact is you must experience both.
The importance of each overlaps to quite an extent.
Getting the balance right is crucial, because too much of either will, in our view, ultimately prove fatal.
Balance is Key
If you are entirely self-interested and are merely looking to exploit your staff to the fullest extent, they will soon work this out and do the same to you. And you will never work together as a Team, instead your competing interests will permeate every aspect of your business.
Further, you will never come to trust them, meaning you will never be able to delegate to the extent you should, nor ever empower them to produce their best.
We see this mistake made far too often.
One of the four Ultimate Alternative Assets that make up CapitalQ’s “End Game” Business Investment Formula (first introduced to The Q Review readers in the 2019 Autumn Edition) is “People”, which includes your Team.
So, you will have heard that in our view, it is not you the employer, doing your employees a favour by giving them a job.
Instead, it is your employees who are doing you a favour by giving their all to help you achieve your goals. And the CapitalQ Community Members who get this have businesses that have a solid foundation, that don’t solely rely on the owner and that are on track to achieving real business success.
Having said that, you must also recognise that a business can only be successful if the staff produce more for the business owner than they cost.
So, there is no point being in business if you can’t come to grips with the fact that the employment relationship exists for the employer to exploit (in the best possible sense of the word) the employee and receive more value from them than is given, to some extent.
Therefore, you must know what your Team ‘truly’ cost you and then you must hold them to account and ensure they are producing more value for your business than this true cost.
Read more in Part 2 in coming weeks…