my employee stole $1.5M

I lost at least $1.5 million from a trusted employee. Hopefully this doesn't ever happen to you because it's a very painful thing. If you have that sixth sense when it comes to people, trust that sixth sense. There's only one person to blame and it's myself. I'm going to tell you a story about how I lost at least $1.5 million from a trusted employee. A while back, we'd acquired 2 agencies and we had one individual who we trusted on the team. Let's just call this person Toni. Toni said that she He had some really urgent family issues to take care of. And we said, we love you, we got you, go take care of that and go take leave for 4 weeks. We're going to pay you for that leave as well. The week after, we had someone that had been with us for about 5 years. This individual said, hey, I'm going to resign. And we said, okay, well, we wish you the best. Where are you going to next? And she said, well, I don't really want to disclose it right now. And the following week, on another Monday, someone else resigned. This person also said, oh, look, you know, moving on. Don't really want to talk about where I'm going next. This kept happening like clockwork every single week. Someone was resigning and we're just like, what is going on? Each week we'd lose like one person, one person, one person. We're like, what is going on? Then we get a call, we get a call from a lawyer from another company and come to find out that Tony had actually pulled these employees and gotten them to go work at another company. And not only that, Tony was then trying to do the same thing to this agency too, pulling people and then pulling the client list. This other company caught him because they had their screen sharing turned on for their time tracking. We could have taken her to court for sure. And there's still an argument that we could take her to court, right? But, you know, at the end of the day, if you're a business owner, you have bigger fish to fry, you have bigger priorities, and you don't want to distract yourself with things like this. To me at the time, there's a lot more issues to fix. It was a key lesson for me to go with my gut feeling because when I met this individual, when I met Tony, I was always very lukewarm. But I knew if you're in business and you have the power to hire people, if you have that sixth sense when it comes to people, trust that sixth sense because That's not something that everyone has. If you have that intuition, that's a very unique ability. Use that ability. Don't squander it. At the end of the day, the only person to blame is yourself as the founder, right? If you're the principal of the company and you're making these decisions, anything that goes wrong in the company is ultimately your fault. Who did the acquisitions in the first place? That was my decision. Who hired this person in the first place? That was my decision. I just was so desperate, desperate to get these things off my plate that I fell in love with the idea of it. There's only one person to blame for these decisions, and it's myself. So You definitely can trust your gut, but if you're gonna move like that, you have to trust but verify. If you're trusting them, you have to be checking in on the work. Hey, how are these KPIs going? Oh, tell me about what you're working on right now. Also, if you're gonna delegate, delegation's very important as a leader, but if you're delegating, you can't abdicate. And that's what I did, I abdicated. I was abdicating because I was working on other stuff and I wasn't focused on this thing. There's a happy ending to all this. Everything turned out okay. I was able to talk to a lot of the employees that moved on afterwards just to make sure they were okay. Hopefully this doesn't ever happen to you, But just keep those lessons in mind. There's a lot in there. Don't forget to check out this video over here, by the way. There's this whole newsletter kick that's going on. That being said, catch you later.