A short advisory YouTube segment by Mike Andes about retaining top employees who may want to start their own businesses. Advice centers on training them in business skills (open the books, estimating, project management), letting them practice entrepreneurship inside the firm, and offering financial incentives (profit-sharing, revenue-based bonuses) to give them reasons to stay.
If you're trying to retain your best employee and you think they might go start their own business, it means you might have to actually train them on how to run a business and then let them be an entrepreneur. Open up the books, show them how to do estimates, allow them to do more project management, and ultimately you might be saving them from a failure of a business. If they go out and they don't have other skills that you can teach them inside your business. Share a percentage of the profit, share some bonuses based upon revenue, give them something to work towards and an incentive for staying with the business.
