The romanticized life of the entrepreneur! From the outside in that is, then you get into it and hope the drive and passion are enough to pull you through the stress and despair. Guests, suppliers, pandemics, floods, taxes, regulation, and last but definitely not least, coworkers!
Employees are your engine, your team, your main source of headache too. We love them all, appreciate their effort, but at the end of the day if a business owner is honest with you, this topic will rank among the most challenging for a small business. Who’s fault is it? Like everything else in the small business world, the buck stops with you. The majority of your employee issues can be solved at the interview table. Resumes do not tell the entire story, they are a black and white set of letters on a paper that sum up a persons past. Resumes are marketing material that gets them in the door, but don’t think that they are there to sell you on them. Take every opportunity to sell your vision to them. Through conversation you can try to see what drives them, what inspires them, their work ethic, their goals and their values.
It might take a couple of visits. It might take a fully paid observation day to see how they interact with your team. It might take a personality test. Whatever system you fall into it will take trial and error. It will take growth on your part. It will take growth in the complexity of your company. A little bit of luck never hurts. Hire attitude and teach the rest. Your crew is a direct reflection of you. They are your mirror and whatever deficiencies they have at their job are your responsibility. Ask yourself, do I want this person being my representative? If not then teach them and train them to be that. Give them clear attainable goals and expectations. A roadmap to success and every opportunity and tool they need to achieve it. Advice them and mentor them, and if this all fails be honest when its time to let them go. Use this difficult moment as your last teaching moment and tell them all of their great qualities and what they need to improve on to grow to the next level.
Employees are the engine, they are what drives our business, and we need to make sure we do the best at the moment of selection. Make sure they are aligned with your culture. They don’t have to make a career out of your business. I tell them that their job is to grow and learn so much that they become unaffordable and go on to bigger and better things. Our job as business owners is to grow our business so much that those bigger and better things are offered in our ever growing company. If both entities think this way, whatever happens, both will be better for it.