How do you staff a business? Unless youre an entertainer or a sports figure, youll need to hire people in your business. In fact, you will want to hire people. If you properly manage a business, you should be making a profit on each employee you have. With that model, the more employees you have, the more money you make. And profits are the raison d’tere of going into business.
Mind you, you need to make sure that each employee you hire will actually increase your profits. You should also be ready to fire new employees if they dont work out. The longer you wait to fire someone, the harder it is.
We all like to thing we are great judges of character. I would recommend that you swallow your pride on that point and quickly admit when a new hire has gone wrong. On just a pure probabilistic basis, your chances of making a successful hire on any one hire are probably well under 30%.
You should set firm guidelines on what you expect of employees and act quickly, when they dont measure up. The quicker you take corrective action, the quicker you can either better direct the person or decide they are unsalvageable.
Also, beware of hiring thieves. I once installed a new accounting package at a client site. About three months after the initial install and before the implementation was complete, the head bookkeeper quit.
Im used to bookkeepers being upset with me, as any new system is a real pain in the neck to their procedures. So I have a pretty thick skin and when I heard the news, just shrugged.
A couple of weeks later, when back on site, my contact said they had just found out the head bookkeeper had been embezzling. They estimated that this person had stolen nearly $1 million over a ten-year period.
My client had brought their CPA in every quarter to review the books over all those years and the accountants never uncovered the thief. Needless to say, my client was NOT a happy camper.
This is not to say that all employees are bad or hopeless, but it is a dangerous world out there and you need to be alert.
I have an attorney in a networking group that I belong to. He has assembled a checklist of what to do BEFORE you fire someone so you arent sued. If you want to download a copy, heres a link to do that.
Good luck and good selling!
Seun Osewa on November 20th, 2004 at 2:52 pm
The problem I have with this article is that it does not even consider the moral angle of ‘firing’.
The phrase “A checklist of what to do before firing so you don’t get sued” has the idea of employees as mere cogs in a wheel written all over it. These are human beings, not some pesky robots with the annoying habit of suing you when they are fired indiscriminately.
I find that attitude offensive. I am not sure why I seem to feel more strongly about this than many other people.