Chad Silverstein ran a collection agency with no managers for 12 to 15 years, but the model broke down around 40 to 50 employees. He kept the culture by adding leadership roles and paying people on commission so they felt like owners, not just workers.
Chapters
So day 222 caught me a little off guard because for probably the first 15 years of running my company, my goal was to build a self managed company where I did not have management. So you've heard my story before. Probably I had a collection agency, I had up to about 100 employees. And for the first, probably 12 to 15 years, we had no management at all. We put leaders and team leaders, but they weren't really in charge. They were there more to lead by example and to be a go to for people, but they weren't in charge. And we tried to build the self managed system because every other collection agency that was out there had call centers with managers running around telling people what to do. And everybody hated that. So I tried to build the opposite and it worked really well. So I don't know if it's impossible, but I know that it gets much harder as your company grows and there's more people. And that definitely, that definitely happened to us. We got pinched when we hit probably 40, 50 people and that self managed kind of, you know, setup didn't work as well. We needed to put people in positional leadership roles to sort of be in charge. And I, I had to kind of balance that with not losing this culture that I had built. And so one of the ways I did that, and I think as a leader, if you're in charge of building culture and of running your teams, there's lots of ways you can do it. I tried to make everyone feel like an owner. So we had a commission environment and I gave everybody a certain amount of business and then we paid them based on the revenue that they generated from their work. And so, you know, typically if you worked your tail off and you did great, you got a percentage of that. If you worked harder and you generated more, you're going to get a bigger percentage that made people feel like an owner. And so we gave a lot of flexibility. Of course with the flexibility we had to have a lot of accountability. But you know, there's a lot to be said about managing the managers in your system, making sure that you're not putting people in charge or in an authority position that have never done the job and all they do is make people feel uncomfortable. There is definitely a healthy place for managers in companies. It's the person and you hope that they want to be a leader because there is a big difference between a manager and a leader. And I think you get the most out of everybody around you by making them feel like an owner. And so anything you can do for yourself, if you're an employee or for your team, if you're a leader, to make people feel like they own it and that they can have something to do with the results and then be compensated properly for that. That's cool. And I think people appreciate that, and they want to work for a leader who recognizes that that's what people want. And all you really have to do, if you think about it, is if you're in charge of other people, would you want to work on your team? The policies, the procedures, the things that you put in place, what if you are the one being held accountable to those things? So that's definitely something that you could kind of use as a litmus test for yourself. I never wanted to do anything that I wouldn't want to be done for me myself. I never wanted to build a company that I wouldn't want to work in. So every decision I made always aligned with what I thought would be fair if I was the one being held accountable to it. And I think that that is something that all leaders should really take into consideration before they change things, put things in place, and hold people accountable to things that, you know, they wouldn't necessarily want to be accountable to. So I think that's just where a lot of sabotage comes into play, because people have to make decisions and they rationalize. They don't think about that, and then people are unhappy and they're pissed off. And that's why you have a lot of people quietly quitting and not wanting to work for a lot of leaders who are in charge right now. So think about that and ask yourself that question. Would you want to work for yourself?
