Lessons from the Edge of Business Disaster by Thurman Vaughn C

Author:Thurman, Vaughn C.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: businesses, places, events, locales, incidents
Publisher: Freiling Publishing
Published: 2022-06-07T00:00:00+00:00

Great leaders are great quitters!

In many of the presentations that I have given on “lessons from the edge” before writing this book, I would have a PowerPoint slide with a single sticky note and the words “I Quit” written on it, followed by an exclamation point. Most of the entrepreneurs in the room would assume that I was about to talk about knowing when to give up or how to time an exit.

When my director of finance joined the company back in 2006, he was stunned because I set up his email and vacuumed around his desk. It’s not that he didn’t appreciate the effort; it’s that he wondered if he had picked the right leader and if this was a sign that I would have my hand in every little thing in the business. He thought it would be challenging for him to own our finances as our first full-time hire with that title. The truth was that we were running so hard, nobody had time to get him set up, and his fears were warranted.

I was still involved in every little detail of the business. I reviewed every proposal. I checked our invoices before they went out. I conducted most of our sales meetings or at least designed the solutions we sold. I picked the color of paint in everyone’s office. I recorded our outbound greeting on our voicemail. I even felt that I could order pizza better than anybody else in my company! At one point, I had thirty employees in my technology business, and yet I had written every article and document you could find on our website. For all that anyone outside the building could tell, it might as well have still been a company with one employee: Me!

The good news is that when people left, it had no impact at all. After all, I had already been doing their job. While hard work is a good thing, I had not yet broken the awful habit that many entrepreneurs have of doing a job while paying someone else who should be doing that work. This has a negative compounding effect. You are not helping your employee grow. You are doing what that person should be doing. That means your business will rarely move forward, and when it does, it will happen only because you decided to stay up late at night after everyone else went home. At the same time, you muttered under your breath and sent nasty emails out in the middle of the night because you were frustrated about doing all of the work that you never gave your employees the chance to do. And, yes, I did that repeatedly.

The reality is that if you do not allow your team members to help you, then things will go wrong anyway when you are finally sick, exhausted, or dead. Your legacy will not be a room full of people talking about how you helped them grow. And you will have died, as I almost

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