Too Many Hats

Now, let’s expand on this and the problems that arise … and feel free to smile if you see yourself in these situations. Remember, I was once there myself.
Let’s set the stage. You’re new in business. Perhaps you’ve worked for similar company at one time as their sales representative, technician or even manager, and you thought you could do better on your own. Or, the company may have gone out of business, leaving you to rely on your own smarts.
Either way, you’re now a workforce of one; before you can expand your operations, you need work. You register your business, get your license, have your business cards printed, and head out on the road to take on the world.
Scary isn’t it? Well, just remember that “fortune favors the bold.”
Now somewhere between your first sale and your 21st, you’ve pondered: “Should I hire some full-time help?” You’ve forwarded your office phone (the “office” is a bedroom or corner of the den) to your cell phone, and switching between suits and work clothes as the situation arises to keep the business going.
However, it’s not just one question. “Where should I start? If I hire a sales rep, that person couldn’t sell as good as me; if I hire a technician, that person couldn’t do the job as well as I could either.” You reason that you’d rather not pay for the extra expense of an employee, and move on to the next job.
This is where your reasoning becomes a trap ,and you doom yourself to the self-employed mistress. She now is your master; the Vixen of Vocation will continue to seduce you into believing that you, and only you, can do the job.
So, you continue to go down that path of “working just enough to pay the bills,” or you finally tell that voice in your head to heel, roll over, and beg (if you get the analogy) while you start on the road to less headaches and more cash.
Remember this phrase: “No man is an island.” It’s from John Donne (1572-1631) and his Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation XVII; its meaning and context is that human beings don’t thrive when isolated from others.
Your business can’t thrive when isolated from proper human resources. (This is why major corporations have huge HR departments.) It’s also why my one partner, Greg Warren in Canada, always says. “If you want to be a big company, you have to think like a big company” (Side note: he used to work in corporate offices for one of the big multi-billion-dollar Canadian banks.)
“What’s the worst that can happen?” you ask. Consider that, as a sales rep for your company, you have to be “the good guy,” the smiling, positive-minded individual that the customer “buys” and in turn gives you the orders for your company. That good-guy (or gal) image is what earns you repeat business and referrals (the cheapest and best form of advertising).
Now, what happens to that angel-faced reputation if you’re the person who makes a mistake on the job? I know, I know – you don’t make mistakes. But what if you did? Or, what if your customer couldn’t pay you on time and you have to chase them for money? How “good” do you look when you’re the one having to explain that you are going to take them to court?
If you had an office employee to do the dirty work of collection calls, you could still be the good guy because it wasn’t you making the threats; it’s those “jerks in accounting” doing “what they’re supposed to do”. (This is also why big corporations use outside collection agencies, letting them be the bad guys, while the big company maintains their corporate image.) This scenario allows you to sympathize with customers and maintain your friendly image that gets you referrals.
What if you’re the owner/operator who breaks some valuable family heirloom inside the home? What if your equipment broke a window in the customer’s office? Now you (the boss, the image representative of the company) have to apologize for your mistake. Now you look careless and clumsy in the customer’s eyes instead of an employee.
If an employee does it, you still have to apologize and/or replace/fix the damage but (and I say a big but) it’s not necessarily your company’s image that suffers. It softens the blow because anyone who has employees sympathizes that their employees make mistakes too.
If you fix the situation, your company will still get repeat business and/or referrals because you maintained your company’s good-guy image. Now I’m not saying clumsiness is acceptable, but stuff happens; I would rather apologize once for an employee than continually feel bad for my mistake.
However, if you had to get on the customer’s nerves, what do you think your chances of repeat and/or referral business would be? Could this be why you’re still only a small business? If you’re presently running a bigger business, do you think that there is something to the logic here? Corporations pay huge amounts of money to maintain an image. All it takes for the small stone business to be successful is a small investment in human resources from the beginning to roll over into a larger and more-profitable experience down the road.
Who knows; perhaps that office manager, salesperson or technician that you hire actually does a better job than you. (And that’s a much-happier problem).
Until next time, keep your stick on the ice.
Tom McNall is founder and owner of Great Northern Stone Care, a Huron Park, Ontario-based stone-cleaning and -restoration company servicing all of southern Ontario. He also serves as the director of training, technical assistance, and operational support for Stone Restoration Services, a division of Stone Shop International. Tom offers corporate and private consultations, serves as a trainer for the Marble Institute of America, and is also on the organization’s board of directors. He can be reached at stone_rx@earthlink.net.