Business 300

A business can be compared to a tree in that it also consumes to produce. The entire point of a business is to deliver value to others - to do good to people. And that delivery of good is to be reliable and trustworthy. Customers need a business to be able to persevere and thrive under pressure. 

Lost throughput opportunity is the silent and permanent cash killer. It's silent because it's hard to notice. You can see payroll. You can see churn. But you can’t see the products that never shipped, or the hour you can’t recover. And it's permanent because you can't ever get that cash opportunity back. A lost shipping opportunity is gone, forever. Idle time doesn’t show up on your P&L while still bleeding you dry.

There are some business people who have a hard time getting over their self-impressed pretense. Maybe they got their online MBA, and now think they have what it takes. Maybe they've watched too many YouTube business gurus instead of doing the work. Whatever it is, there definitely is a CEO-LARP culture.

I want to give a few pointers of how to fire faster, and do so effectively. There are bad ways to get the job done, and then there are less bad ways. I'm for the latter.

What I'm talking about here is the actual conversation. There are things you should be doing and saying leading up to the firing conversation. I've talked about that here before. But when it comes to pulling the trigger, what approach should you take?

You might tell yourself that you're being kind and patient. But keeping the wrong person because you don’t want to have a hard conversation is leadership malpractice. Your team doesn’t want a perfect boss. They want a courageous one.

Sure, there are consequences to firing someone. But there are many more consequences to tolerating the employee who should have been fired. And if you keep him, you are the one responsible for those consequences. It's not that employee's responsibility that customers don't trust your business, your business has stalled, people are frustrated, top performers are leaving, and nobody trust you. You brought that upon yourself by tolerating that which shouldn't have been tolerated. Are you willing to make that trade-off?

In business (and probably most of life, but this is Business 300, not Life 300).. in business, waiting is often more dangerous than moving. A key difference between founders and flounders is movement. Those who make it are moving - maybe it's too fast, maybe it's ugly, maybe it's imperfect, but it's forward.

Your customers are people who are trying to make their lives better. They buy from you because they believe what you're offering will improve their life in some capacity. So then, before making business decisions, why wouldn't you ask, “Does this help the customer win faster, better, or with less friction? How will this improve my customer's life?”

Profit is feedback from the market. Don't ignore it. It's not just a number. It's a conversation. You need to understand what is being said, and respond accordingly. If you can't speak the language, and want to be in the business of business, you'll have to learn to interpret.

That's because profit is communication.

There may come a point in your business when it seems like your growth potential has hit a ceiling, but you'd like it to keep growing. You'd like to reach new customers, but your current market is tapped out. There are different things that you can try, some good and some, not so good.

There are ways you can expand your reach without rebuilding your business.