Ep #9: 5 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Treat Your Business Like a Family

Hey everyone, I'm Chris Plackey and this is how to Lead for female entrepreneurs and founders. Because the best way to grow a business is to grow the person who's running it. Let's go ahead and get started.

Hey there. Welcome. I'm Chris Plackey. We're going to talk about the fact that you really should not be running your business like you do your family. Now, it's an. I think it sounds a little counterintuitive. A lot of people like to say, oh, I run my business like my family. We're a family around here. We, you know, we like to treat people like family, all of that. And as my girlfriend says, yeah, but in a family, someone always ends up living in the basement.

And we don't have any freeloaders here. And so I want to talk to you about how the mentality of an entrepreneur and wanting to create that environment for their employees and their team is well meaning, but how it really can trip you up. So I'm going to talk to you about the five reasons why you should not be treating your business like a family. And we'll explore each one and what the potential ramifications of those are. So the first thing that comes to mind that I really want you to think about here is, is you launched a business to do something, right? You have a service, you have a product, you have a niche in the world that you need to serve. And so that's the reason why your business started in the first place. But along the way, your business grew and you started to hire people, right? And those people have to be paid money and then they might need benefits or all the other accoutrements that come with becoming an employer of employees. But here's what I'm willing to bet money on. You did not wake up and think, oh, I can't wait to be an employer, right? I'm going to start a company so that I can be an employer. Most of us don't think about our business that way. We end up being employers because our product and our service need support. And so we add people to help us with that. But unless you have made the decision to be an employer on purpose, and that's the sole goal, that's the singular goal that you have, is to be an employer and not run a business, then you have to think about your business first, right? When we are thinking about our business as a family, we're putting the employees above the business. We start to think about what the employees need before the business. And for any of you who have followed my work. You have to know I love and care for people just tremendously. So this has nothing to do with that, but it has to do with everything. Reminding yourself that you are in business for a reason. And I'm willing to bet that business is not to be an employer. That business is in place for you to make money, to serve a client base, to put something out into the world. The first reason that you absolutely cannot treat your business like a family is that your business is there to make money and serve a purpose. It is not there to be an employer. Okay? The second thing is we have to remember is that we put all these people together, and when we think about a family, there's functional and dysfunctional relationships always. I would love to know if you are in a family that doesn't have any dysfunctional relationships, please tell me now, what do we do with a dysfunctional relationship in a family?

What do we do? Right? How do we handle that? So any number of responses, I can imagine you saying in your brain, right? We ignore them, we avoid them, we don't invite them to Thanksgiving, or we tolerate them. We just handle it and deal with it, right? Well, that's because in a family, that dynamic is very different, right? If it's your great uncle Joe or your great aunt Susie or your mom or your dad or your cousin or your brother, there's a very different dynamic that's happening in a family when there is dysfunction. But in a business, we don't want dysfunction. We don't need dysfunction. We don't need to tolerate dysfunction because the business's goals are what are priorities, not the needs of the people in the business. Okay? So when we have a business that we're running as a family, we start to not only tolerate, but we indulge dysfunction. And dysfunction will cripple the business. So as a business leader, you have to be willing to see beyond these dysfunctions and be willing to move through them and eliminate them because they're affecting your ability to run a successful business and for the business itself to thrive. So the second thing we have to remember is that work is work. We're not here to suffer and indulge dysfunction like we do in a family. We're here to get the work done and to serve the purpose of the business. The third thing I want to talk to you about is how we treat expectations in a family. Now, if any of you are listening to this, you've been a parent or you've obviously been a child, but we're in families. We have expectations of how people work. And most families are very, very ineffective at communicating and holding expectations of one another for more reasons than are ever going to be explained on this recording. Because I'm not a psychologist, right? But we have expectations of people and we don't communicate them. And then there's all sorts of stuff that happens within a family when people don't meet expectations. Most people in families don't even really communicate expectations very well, right? They hold people to certain expectations, but they don't often tell people what they expect of one another. The opposite is true and should be true in a business. If you're the business leader in a business, you should absolutely be clear of what you expect of everybody who works in your business. And not only should you be clear, you should be communicating it. And not only should you be communicating it, you should be holding people accountable to it. Whatever those expectations are, they should be clear, they should be communicated, and people should be held accountable. The third reason we don't want to run our business like a family is we have to have clearly defined expectations and we have to hold people to them. And unlike in a family where most of us have lots of expectations but we don't talk about it. Right. The fourth reason that we don't want to run our business like a family is accountability.

Now, most people who run businesses who don't get any development in terms of management and leadership run their business like they run their family. That's the truth. So however they handle people not doing what they're supposed to do at home, they tend to do that at home, at work. And that means that we can have any kind of style of leader that we work for, Especially in an entrepreneurial business. We can have leaders who completely ignore employees who don't do anything because that's what they do at home. When people don't do what they want, we can have leaders who just spin off the rails and yell and scream and throw shoes because that's what they do at home when people don't do what they want. And we can have leaders who completely just shut down and just bury themselves when people don't do what they want. So. And anything in between, right? We can also have leaders who talk a lot and need to explain everything, because that's what they do at home, right? So when we don't learn effective leadership technique, what we do is we just do what we've always learned, which inevitably we learned from a parent or somebody who we modeled from, okay? But accountability is. Is the backbone of organizations performance you can't have an expectation, you can't have goals for the business if you don't have accountability. Because then the two, nothing matters, right? If you don't have accountability, it doesn't matter what I ask people to do. If there's no consequence, if there's no structure to whether they do it or not, then what's the point? So how you do one thing is how you do everything, right? And so you cannot run a business like a family because it affects the way you hold people accountable. Relationships are incredibly important. And in any other work that you'll find from me, I'm going to talk to you about trust and the importance of building people up and inspiring and being motivating and really understanding and getting buy in and creating ownership. All of that matters.

But where I see the biggest breakdown is when leaders want to treat people like a family, they don't hold them accountable. And remember, we are there to get the job done. We are not there to all be employed by your business. Unless, of course, that's what you've decided. My goal, I would imagine your goal in my business is the same as yours, which is to make money thrive and serve as many clients and customers as I can.

Right? You have to have accountability to do that. But if you're treating everybody like your great aunt Susie, it's not likely that you have accountability in your organization. And the last thing I want to talk to you about is growth. And this is especially important when we're talking about entrepreneurs. Many, many, many of the entrepreneurs that I work with have people that have worked with them and for them for quite some time. And when you're first getting started, this makes perfect sense. You have a cluster of people that you find that are really supportive, really, really engaged, they want to help you, they love what you're doing, and so they jump on board and they work with you. They might be a friend, they might be a former colleague from where you used to work, they might be somebody's aunt, or they might be your neighbor, or they might be somebody you met at a networking event. And then you start working together. And as the business grows, you have these people now who work for you, who have worked for you for two, four, six, seven years. But the business is growing and the business has different needs than when it was 2 years old compared to 5 years old. Which also means you need different skills from the people who work for you. And one of the most difficult things that happens when companies grow and start to scale is people's skill sets become Revealed. And we have people that we started working with two years ago who can't scale with the business. Not because they don't want to, not because they're not great people, but because they don't have the skill that's necessary to help the business grow. And if we treat people like a family, what we end up doing is we look at this person in our organization and we say, well, gosh, you know, Rhonda or George, they've been here for five years. They're so great, they're so committed, they're so loyal. You know, they do anything for us. They're just not really good at this marketing thing anymore because marketing has changed so much over the last five years. So what can we do with George or Rhonda? What can we put them? And what we do is we start defining the roles that people have around the person instead of around the business need. And these are the most difficult decisions for my clients to make is when they have folks on the team who have been with them, but it's just becoming glaringly obvious that they are not equipped to support the business in the way that they can now. Right. And so in a family, we don't throw people out of the family. They get to just move into the basement. Right? But if in a business, we sometimes have to move people out of the business because they are no longer aligned with what the business needs. And too many of my clients who are founders, who are entrepreneurs, literally are dragging people with them because they feel guilty out of loyalty. They just feel like it's the right thing, or they don't know how to tell that person that they shouldn't be and cannot be part of their business anymore. And so they keep them. And so if that's where you are, this is another important decision that you're going to have to make. As a business owner is really looking at your team objectively, not as a family, like, not as people who you love and care about, but really at engines that are helping your business run little parts of the engine right there, all these parts. And in order to make that business run as efficiently and as effectively and as successfully as possible, we've got to look at the skill sets that you need now versus the skill sets that you needed before and make some decisions. So when we think about running a business, these are the five elements I want you to remember. You are not in business to be an employer. You are there to get work done, right? The work is there to get the work done. That's why we all Go into your building, into your office, into your virtual space every day. We need to have clearly defined, communicated and accountable to expectations. We have to have accountability for outcomes that people are expected to contribute to. And we have to factor in how growth affects the team that we have now versus the team that we hired before. You know, I say to my clients all the time, who got you here will not get you there. And it is one of the most difficult things for my clients to go through is to do sort of an audit of our current staff, people we care about deeply, people who matter to us but may no longer be integral to the success of our business and in some cases could be hurting our ability to be successful. I meet with entrepreneurs like you to do this kind of an audit, to look at where are those opportunities in your business for you to trim and then for you to expand so that you can achieve the scale and the growth that you want for your business. I'm going to include a link for you to schedule a time where we can have a consultation because if this is a challenge that you're facing, it's a legitimate problem and will affect your ability to grow. If you can't move out of this kind of family loyalty, I employ people and drag people along mentality. Once you punch through that and you really start to look at your business differently, it makes all the difference in the world. So if that appeals to you, I'd invite you to schedule some time with me. Let's connect and see how I can help you take your business and the management and leadership skills that you need to integrate into what you already do to the next level so we can up level your business and up level your success. Thanks for tuning in today.

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