“My fondest hope is for world peace.” This is what all beauty queens say. Including Sandra Bullock. And “my people are my biggest asset” is what all businesses are fond of saying, often just before firing 15 percent of said biggest asset.
But any person running a small business needs to work from another rule book. Our role ensures that we will only ever hire staff who don’t fit well, and then look after them in a way that ensures that we will get the worst from them that they can offer.
I might be generalising, but after working with more than 30,000 SMMEs over the past 20 years, I can count on the fingers of my left foot the number of ventures with great staff, doing great work, and having real fun.
I was thinking about this after reading Mike Schüssler’s economic report about the sad lot of entrepreneurs in South Africa. Who would have thought that you and I, on average, earn less than the 22-year-old sweeping the floors of a govt toilet block. And that’s not allowing time off to toyi-toyi about greedy rich capitalists like you and me.
As I see it, the reason we battle with staff issues is simple. A big company knows the risk when it employs a new person. So it does it with extreme care. It defines the role, detailing the exact skills needed. It then takes as much time as is needed to find the right person, with an expert team to meet each hopeful new staff member. This means that they cull from the list the axe murderers, light-fingered accounting staff, and those people whose Ph.D. is not really from Oxford in the UK, but rather from the Oxford Online University in Ulan Bator.
Before the new staff member joins, he/she then signs an employment contract that gives the company all legal rights possible, and the staff member none. (This is the reward for being a “our biggest asset” staff member.)
One must contrast this with Mike Microbusiness. He knows that he needs help only when he starts working 25/8 instead his usual 24/7. He doesn’t employ a person with some expert skills that he doesn’t have, a person who can add more value than Mike is paying. He employs a person to share the pain. Instead of focusing on the right things to do, he adds an overhead to try and finish all the things he should not be doing.
It’s simple to qualify for employment at Mike’s. You need to be breathing, with at least one leg. The leg, of course, is optional as long as you can start next week.
Mike doesn’t have the knowledge, reserves, or cash to do any real evaluation, and often employs the first person to arrive that doesn’t look like his grandmother.
Then Mike throws as much of his load at her as he can. This is, I’m afraid to say, not a well thought out process. The employment contract, if it exists at all, is verbal. (“Gosh darn, I know I should have got that signed when she joined,” is one of the refrains I see on business Forums everyday.)
According to Mike Schussler, most Mikes earn less than most of their employees, for taking all of the risk. And when things go wrong – and 96 percent of the time they go wrong in the first 10 years – Mike’s staff will still hate him for letting them down.
I am a little embarrassed to say that that is why I now live the life that I do. When my business closed, I lost everything. My staff each had to find new work, and hated me for that. I had to find R2million to cover the debts incurred in not firing them much, much sooner.
Now, I don’t employ staff. I didn’t used to have an office, but my children drove me to drink too early in the day, so I now rent office space month by month. No surety. I have a partner, but he lives two countries away, which is far enough away for both of us to be happy. I automate as much as I can. And each thing that I can’t automate I humanate. (This is handing the work to online freelancers in India or some other warm place where people don’t earn a lot of money.)
I don’t drive a smart car because I don’t have to impress clients. I don’t wear a suit because I don’t even have to see clients.
All of which means I don’t need nearly as much money to survive as I used to. And I don’t run nearly as many risks as I used to. And maybe, just maybe, I will finally get to retire in the next five years, which has been my dream for the past 30 years, a little like a carrot in front of this donkey.