Codie Sanchez shares three lessons from running a company: expect to be miserable half the time and keep a happy list to recover, you'll end up doing menial tasks like being the janitor, and hire people smarter than you to grow past your limits.
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I'm tired of everyone telling me how easy it is to be a CEO or buy a company or start one. I think those people are just a bunch of gurus that essentially have never really run anything. Here's the three things I wish I knew when I was first starting out running my business. The very first thing is, you're going to be miserable. Half of the time. I keep something called a happy list, which is basically a list of a bunch of things I can do really quickly to make me happy again, because it's kind of miserable when you're on top. Number two, if you are the CEO, you are actually the janitor. If the janitor doesn't show up, that means you're going to be the one cleaning toilets. In fact, last week I had to do exactly this. I spent all night cleaning up expense reports, and nobody told me that I would have to do that when I had that big shiny CEO title on it. The third thing that nobody told me up front. If you only hire people who are at your level or as smart as you, you'll never win. You need people with more experience than you, and you need people who are smarter than you. If you don't get those two things, then your business is only going to ever do this.
