Did you say that you meant well and it wasn’t your fault? That you couldn’t be in 10 places at the same time and that you had no clue it was happening in your company? I doubt people will accept that if you are the CEO. When Amazon bought Zappos, there were only two names I kept hearing that whole day : Jeff Bezos and Tony Hsieh. When NeXT failed, Steve Jobs was all anyone talked about. Infact you probably heard and read ‘Steve Jobs’ more than ‘NeXT’. The owners are always tied to their business, whether they do well or not.
Running a business is like flying a Boeing aircraft, you as the Entrepreneur are in charge of everything and ultimately making sure the ‘object’ – in this case your business gets from point A to B – in this case zero profit to the several million dollars you dream of.
A local bookstore here in Towson, MD closed down yesterday and it had a sign on the the door that read “ Due to certain circumstances beyond me, I have decided to close down the store and not continue with our usual service to you our loyal clients. Thank you…Blah Blah” I patronize this bookstore since it’s the only one around me that has an amazing collection of soccer magazines from around the world and always had my favorites : fourfourtwo and Champions. Initially, I felt terrible for him because he seemed like a great guy and carried on well whenever we spoke. I thought he had closed for personal reasons or financial difficulty, but I later found from one of his employees that he actually just sucked at being a business owner. According to the guy, the bookstore had become a haven for underage kids to come in and consume alcohol, they had missed deadlines for ordering several books and magazines from international distributors on several occasions, books disappeared faster from the shelves than Usain Bolt chasing a crook and he always blamed it on the “lackadaisical attitude and incompetence” of his staff.
One thing I have learned about running a business is this, Regardless of how big your business is or grows out to be, you are still doing the job of everyone on staff, only that you are getting a bit of help from each of them. This is much better and a safer way to work than just assuming everyone does a function and then at the end put it all together! Here’s why:
- If the business fails, it is YOU who has failed.
- It is your money that’s lost and/or that of some investors that definitely won’t let YOU have a good day for the next few years.
- The employees you lay the blame on will only pack up their things, get a job somewhere else and move on. Where does that leave YOU?
What if one of the employees slack off? (and they can, it’s not their business after all) what will you do then? What if you ask an employee to place an order for books that only get shipped once a month from England and this employee forgets? I don’t think the customers will blame the employee, will they? That’s why I said every function and task that must be performed are your duty and if you have to call the employee 10 times and ask to see confirmation of the order before you bring an end to your own day, then that’s what you must do. It’s staying on top of your game like this that sets a “successful entrepreneur” apart from an “entrepreneur”.
Sometimes however, we must admit that things do get out of hand and the circumstances are probably beyond the business owner. I am currently thinking of the Dominos pizza situation, where the workers acted really shamelessly, what could the business owner have done? I heard that the particular store where it happened was closed down by Dominos, what happened to the guy who actually owns that outlet? his business is down the drain? Is there anything that business owner could have done to avoid the situation? Makes we wonder really.
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