Your Business - Everything has Changed - Part One

The Big Business Mentality
 
   
Some thirty years ago I had been in business with another man for a year or so when we were expanding our service business and needed to hire additional help. We interviewed a number of applicants when we came across Charlie. He was a likable, energetic, capable man who we hired into our cleaning business. I was a partner and co-owner with the man who had taught me the business. We needed someone to manage the installation side of the business and we agreed after interviewing a number of applicants that Charlie was the one best suited for the position.
 
 
At first, things seemed to be going quite well. Charlie’s enthusiasm and well-rounded knowledge, coupled with the specific abilities he had acquired in his previous work experiences, were producing favorable results. But after about a month we were seeing another side of Charlie that had nothing to do with his ability to get the job done. It was an attitude he brought with him from the “other side” - the world of corporate thinking.
 
 
He became very demanding towards the company for tools, supplies, and requested additional workers to whom he wanted to delegate much of his own job. Delegation is, of course, a principle of any business or organizational activity that must be valued and implemented as the need arises. Actually, none of these demands that Charlie was making on the company were too unreasonable as a stand-alone need. However, the attitude that Charlie was exhibiting was one of me vs. them. He expected our small company to immediately place him in the position of a full-fledged manager. He would then hire whomever he needed and he would no longer be involved in the working manager position for which he was hired.
 
 
Not Me!
 
You might say, “But this will never happen to me, I am the owner of my new business and I’ll not spend any money that I don’t have. It is ridiculous to think that I might be guilty of sabotaging my own company.” Certainly you would not, at least not in the same way Charlie did. But you are capable of bringing to the new business, a mindset that is a carryover from the big business mentality that is totally incompatible with building a new small business.
 
 
Everything you do now is different than what may have been done before. The reasons for which you will be doing what you do day in and day out will be different. You will find that you may become easily discouraged when you previously had access to resources that are now unavailable. It may not be that you will expect that you can operate as you did before-writing a purchase order for something needed, hiring a new employee to take up some of the slack, taking a vacation when you need to be around -- but you might be easily discouraged because you can’t do what you know needs to be done!
 
Delusions
 
When my little business reached a million dollars of gross sales back in the early seventies I deluded myself into thinking that I could operate like a big company. And I had never even lived in the corporate world! I’ve always operated on the small business side. But I was serving the corporate world and just by rubbing up against it I was infected. The cash was flowing and sales were increasing and things seemed to be going so well. “Why can’t I have what the big boys have? The bank will give you whatever you want so that you can get it. This can and likely will happen if you are not committed to a whole new perspective of operating differently than your big business counterpart.
 
 
 Everything Has Changed--So Get With The Program - see part two