Stay Small If You Can

Big businesses are nightmares. Think about it. The bigger your business is the more it’s prone to failure not because of anything that you do but rather because of other factors. When you’re a solopreneur sure you might not be making millions every year but you live and die by your own will, fight, and resourcefulness. Your profits are yours to make (or not make) and your business success is in your hands. I’d rather make a modest six figure income every year and be free to spend my time enjoying myself then make ten times that but spend all of my time dealing with employees and all of the other headaches big businesses attract.

Employees are not you. If they were you then they’d either be competing with you or be hired as contractors and not full time employees. Employees have a certain mindset that is prone to pettiness, laziness, and being unproductive. Employees at the lowest end spend just as much time thinking about how to not work on the job and get away with it then they do about doing a good job. Then add in stupid employee politics, fighting, emotions, and all of that other nonsense that takes up the time of the average person. Which brings me to…

You Don’t Want Employees

That is if you can help it (and you often can more than you think). Employees mean headaches, lost time, and being mired in crap that you’d rather not deal with. And that’s the good employees much less the ones that bad mouth you, steal from you, and ruin your business on your own dime. Look if your employee was a go-getter then they’d be an entrepreneur and you’d hire them for projects they wouldn’t be looking to work under someone else’s umbrella. They’d be out on their own going after it. Not saying that there aren’t any good employees out there it’s just that the very nature of being an employee makes it hard to find good ones.

Now let’s say you’ve found that diamond in the rough, the one good employee of the one hundred. And let’s say for the sake of showing you how important saying small is, is that he was the first one you hired. Most likely you’d spend time and money going through ten but we’re going to pretend like you found the right guy right off the bat. Now you still have to deal with taxes, pay roll, benefits, retirement, and whatever other nonsense employees have come to expect. Another headache. If you thought doing something in your business was a headache try dealing with everything that an employee brings in and you’ll be thinking about firing him and doing it yourself within a week typically.

Needle In A Haystack

With that being said sometimes there is no other option and you need to hire an employee. At the very best consider it a necessary evil. Not that you should treat your employee like a necessary evil but the fact that you have to have employees at all. Like I said above employees are well average people (and below average) above average people generally work for themselves (above average in a business sense regarding business and money knowledge). They see the foolishness of wasting their time and effort building someone else’s dream to then be dropped suddenly for no reason.

So they go out on their own and realize that their growth mindset which was pretty much useless in the corporate world is an asset in being an entrepreneur. Good luck finding someone like that in the average person sending in a resume. Matter of fact ditch the resume their bullshit, if you want good employees have them jump through some hopes to apply and then do some testing and interrogating to see what they’re made of. Resumes and job interviews are for pussies who don’t want to achieve anything. They don’t tell you anything, anything at all. Except the person can mindlessly nod their head, agree with you, give you pat answers, ask you questions with no meaning but know you like, and fill out a lifeless form. Does that sound like something that spells business success for you? (Hint: it shouldn’t).

Balance Weaknesses

Here is one area where I think it’s good to have an employee. If you’re doing work of some sort say copywriting, marketing, fundraising, or something like that where there is high profits, margins, and it’s pretty much just you running the show then to have one virtual assistant or secretary to handle the inane bullshit for you. You’re probably a take charge go getter so having someone who doesn’t mind being a follower and doing the shit no one else wants to do would make a good fit for that position and help you out so you can focus on the big things that matter the most.

And even then that might be something you want to contract out. Point is only get employees if your back is against the wall and a knife is to your throat and you have absolutely no other option. They’re a pain in the ass no matter what. They slow you down and keep you from being agile and mobile like a good entrepreneur should be. The biggest factor I would look for in an employee is that they are willing to learn, grow, and have a growth mindset even if this means they eventually outgrow you and go on their own.

Summary

So to recap. You don’t want employees if you can help it. You don’t want drama, bullshit, stupidity, and everything else getting in the way of your business and life. What good is it to make all kinds of money if you spend all your time putting out fires that others started and have no time to enjoy that money. Business and entrepreneurship loses its point if the business is running you instead of you running it. What’s the point if you’re living to work instead of working to live. A business should give you freedom not golden handcuffs and slavery. If your chains of made of gold keeping you tied to the plantation does that make you any better off then the person whose chains are made of bronze? No, it doesn’t. Stay small, you’ll thank me later.

If you have any questions you would like to see answered in a future post send them to me at charlessledge001 (at) gmail (dot) com. If you found value in this post then I would encourage you to share this site with someone who may need it as well as check out my books here. I appreciate it. You can follow me on Twitter here.

-Charles Sledge