Business 300

Your job isn't to be your employees' therapist. It's to lead them toward delivering value to customers. And sometimes the most caring thing you can do is tell them the truth they need to hear, not the comfort they want to feel.

Stop letting emotions become tyranny. Start leading with truth. True love. True care.

Watch out for the tyranny of empathy.  

Christian business owners carry a guilt complex. You make money, and immediately feel like you need to explain it away. "Well, we're giving 10% to missions." "We're trying to be good stewards." "It's not about the money." 

But here's what you're actually saying: "Making profit feels wrong, so let me show that I'm one of the good ones."

If you feel guilty about making money, then you've accepted the premise that profit is morally suspect. That success needs justification. That if you're doing well, you must be doing something wrong—or at least, something morally neutral that needs to be redeemed by doing something _actually_ good with it.

Serve your customers. Make good products. Create good jobs. And thank the Lord as you steward 

your business under God's provisional blessing. Stop apologizing for success.

What areas of your business are requiring you, or another manager, to manually make happen? Which balls are being caught by tribal knowledge instead of systems and training?

Get better before you get bigger. Systematize for your scale. Build for repeatability, not just reach.

Bigger isn't better.

Are you the Visionary leaving wreckage behind you? Or are you the Operator killing the dream?

The best businesses run on tension, but not opposition. You need both sides. Build the future, and build the systems that will get you there. You need the Visionary and the Operator.

If you hired someone tomorrow, do you know what their first 10 days would actually look like? If not, you have work to do.

Do you have a clear onboarding plan, or is your plan to just throw them into the deep end and see if they can swim? One is better than the other.

Hire slower. Onboard sharper. Be prepared and prepare your people. You have work to do when onboarding new hires.

The people you hire aren't you. That's why you're the one doing the hiring, and they're the ones being hired. That is to say, business owner's shouldn't expect their employees to think like them, and show the sort of initiative required to be, well, an owner. If they did, they'd be an owner. But the person you're hiring is not an owner. It's unfair to them, and unrealistic for you, to have that sort of expectation of them. All it does is breeds frustration for everybody involved.

Your onboarding strategy needs to be more than, "Shadow me for a day, and good luck." And then get exasperated with them 3 months in for still not performing up to your expectations. If you don't show them how to win, don't be surprised when they lose.

Whatever you want to call it - 5P Strategy Framework or something else - the point is to do the work of discovering your perspective, defining your position, developing your ploy, drafting your plan, and disciplining your pattern.

Don't wait for success or failure to happen to you. Instead, you craft your business strategy.

Without being led astray by the impracticalities of business textbooks, there is good benefit to being more thoughtful in your approach to winning at business. A business owner is set up to always be one step behind if he's constantly reacting to what the market and his competitors throw at him. This is a formula for failure. Hope is not a strategy. Vibes aren’t strategy. Guessing is not a growth plan. Strategy is a set of decisions built on reality. It's making things happen, instead of waiting for them to. An owner should approach his business with intention and focused execution. That's what a more comprehensive strategy outlook provides. It sets you up better for the win.

Here's the thing. Being discouraged is real. But leading out of it is your job. You're not always going to be on fire, but you are responsible for the temperature in the room. If your team has to carry their workload and your emotional baggage, they’ll burn out before you bounce back.

Business managers can have the tendency to mistake documentation for discipline. Just because you have things written down, doesn't mean that you - for that matter, your team - is following the process.

Founders, owners, and managers can get excited about clarity and control as they write polished SOPs, draw neat workflows, and lay out nifty diagrams. But that's the easy part. And the easy part is almost never the part that brings the results you're after.

Everyone “agrees” on the defined system — and then does whatever they want. You continue trying to manage the chaos, instead of actually creating order.