What Happens When You Put Your Team's Needs Before Your Own
Jim Johnson left a job over a broken bonus promise and built a company to $22M in two years. Then his bookkeeper embezzled $585,000 and a trusted colleague helped her do it. That betrayal pushed him to stop chasing his own wins and start building leaders instead, which actually worked better.
Chapters
This is a part of my story that's a little bit tough to share sometimes, but it's important because it was another one of those things where I had this massive mind shift about how people work and how we lead for them, not for us. And I got screwed, for lack of a better term. I did my job. I did what was expected of me, surpassed my goals by miles because I started to shift the way that I help people achieve what they were after. And came down to the end of a season, we had signed a contract that if I did a certain thing, I would be paid a certain bonus. Well, the company I was working for decided they didn't want to pay the bonus. They wanted to use my bonus to get me some help. Because I was working a lot of hours. I went, wait a minute, I already did this with a lot of hours. I earned that bonus. If we want to renegotiate, we can certainly do that. They said, no, we're going to use it. And so, long story short, what ended up happening is, hey, I can't work for you because you broke your word. So I'm going to go start my own company. And this is a story that you see a lot in a lot of industries. And so, word to the wise and big warning on mind shifts about how you treat people and how you give your word to people. If you don't give your word and keep it, you're going to run into situations where you're going to create your competition. And that's exactly what happened in this case. My whole burning desire was to go beat them as fast as I possibly could. And so now I had this thing driving me that, hey, I got screwed. I'm going to go start my own thing. And not only am I going to do well in that I'm going to beat you at it. And so I was focused on that. And because I was focused on that, I went about hiring a group of guys. I didn't go after any of their guys. I hired my own guys, went after my own thing. And the goal was to do 5 million in the first year. And we did no problem. Then we didn't beat them, but we had a great start to our first year. Then it was time to go ahead and go get them. And so I decided to go into hiring phase, training phase, bringing on all these people, thinking of that math equation that's important of each person means a certain amount of dollars. And sure enough, we blew away all of our goals. We did 22 million that second year because we hired the right amount of people that averaged the right numbers, set proper expectations, gave good training, and we achieved the goals that we were after. Again, this achievement of goals and things like that. And that went pretty well for quite some time. About four years. Everything was running smooth, going amazing. And I walked in on January 3rd of the year and my partner was with me. We didn't have anything going on. It was middle of the winter in Minneapolis. Most of our offices were pretty low key at that point in the year. And we had walked in and we were going to do some planning session and we grabbed the mail. And inside the mail was a bank statement. We had never looked at it before. We'd never looked at one in almost five years. And we decided to open it. And as we opened it, we saw the first couple checks, and there was a check for $5,000 to our bookkeeper's husband. I'm like, that's weird. What was that for? Did we approve that? I was like, what's this for? I knew they were moving, so maybe we had agreed to this moving stipend or something. Then we went a few more checks and there was another one for $5,000. And then the bells, you know, the spidey senses went off and we started to look into it. Make a long story short, over about a three month time span, we figured out that the bookkeeper had pilfered about $585,000, which was significant. We didn't have the money we thought we had, and she had done it in a variety of different ways. And. And it wasn't the money that made me so angry. It was the why. Like, I took you from being a bookkeeper making $50,000 a year to being a small partner in our business making 250,000. Why would you do this to me? Why would you do that? The next step of that was calling her on the carpet. Yes, there was a problem. And so she was leaving. And. And it caused a huge fracture in my company. A guy that I looked at as like my little brother decided to go into business with her, which completely broke me. I mean, it just absolutely shattered everything. I'm like, what in the world is happening? How can this person steal this kind of money for me after everything I've done? How can this guy that I took from delivering pizzas to making $100,000 plus a year do this to me? How could all these people do. Do this stuff to me? And they weren't the first two. There were several circumstances like that over that previous year where there was me Asking, how could they be doing this to me? And so when something repetitive like that happens, I tend to go, why? I start asking those questions and how do I. How do I solve this? And as I dug into it more and started to ask why a lot, I started to realize it was actually me. And this was a massive mind shift for me, this thing that everything that we had been doing to achieve the numbers that we were after was about glorifying me. And I didn't realize it until a guy that I looked at as my little brother wanted to be in business with a thief instead of working with me. That meant I was worse than a thief, that I was a human being that wasn't about other human beings, but more about myself. So it changed me that day. It was literally transformational. I went from being selfish and all about me to selfless and all about we. How can I serve you better? Whenever I change to that, how could I serve you better? The first thing that happened was everybody looked at me like I was insane because I literally, like, transformed overnight from being the most, what are you doing for me? How many sales are you making? How much work did you get done? Did you get everything done so we can hit these numbers? Everything was about me and where I wanted to see us get to. When I went in and started saying, how do I help you get to where you need to be? What can I do to make your job easier? We literally changed the purpose statement of our business to we make it easy, and not just for our customers or the insurance companies or our vendors, but also for everybody that worked for us. And nobody believed me at first because it wasn't who they knew and it wasn't the culture they were used to seeing. They literally looked at me like I had horns growing out of my head or something. But through some consistency and being very like, hey, well, I want to help you. I want to serve you. What can I do to help you get to where you want to be in life? I started to get some belief in it, and people started going, hey, he really is this new person now. Along the way, a lot of people left because they were used to this other culture, and now it was something different that didn't feel right to them for where they were. But the new people that came in as I was more and more consistent, the more they wanted to work for us, the more they wanted to be a part of what we were doing, because we were doing something as much for them as we were for our clients, as we were doing for the business. We had this concept that we were a team doing something together that benefited all instead of benefiting an individual or the pride of a human being. Whenever that shift happened, our numbers went through the roof. It was insane what we were able to accomplish together as a team. Our turnover went down. We were able to retain people longer, we grew better leaders, we were able to open new offices. We were able to do things that I had never been able to do before because I made it about them instead of me. And what's the best thing about all that? This is 20 years later. Now I see these people that after I shifted to being selfless instead of selfish, achieving great things, achieving things that they never thought was possible, hitting potential that they didn't even know that they could do. That is my proudest moment as a human being, is to see others doing well because I decided to start serving them instead of them serving, serving me. I promise you, if you start to make it about your people, your people will make it about your clients and your clients will make it about your business. It's not the people making it about your business. It's your people making about your clients, creating an experience that they get to have in your business because you put them first. They start putting your clients first, which will put your business first. Don't forget that one. It's a massive mind shift that when we are able to achieve that as business owners, the fulfillment and joy of what you do and the lifestyle that you get to live because of it becomes so much more fulfilling. There becomes a purpose to what it is that you do in this life, that every day you have impact on somebody that helps them be a little bit better. You cause this ripple effect not only with them, but everybody they ever come and contact with that it's not about you and your legacy or your legend or any of that kind of stuff. It's about your impact that's going to impact other people to be better human beings and do right by others. It's an amazing feeling. I hope you get to feel it too.
