MBA2100 Q&A Wednesday: Am I too nice to be an entrepreneur?

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Hey oh welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA Show. Because a better business begins with you. That's why we deliver daily 10 minute lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company. I started my co founder back in 2014 and today's episode is Q and A Wednesday. On Q and A Wednesdays we answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you've got a question you want to ask, just go ahead and email me over at Omar100- MBA net today we have a question from Rachel and she asks am I too nice to be an entrepreneur? Omar I've been a listener of the podcast for some time and I have a very particular am I too nice to be an entrepreneur? I feel like my team members, my employees sometimes take advantage of me. I have one on ones, I give warnings, but deep down I feel like they don't take me seriously because I'm kind and I deliver my message with kindness. Sometimes I feel maybe my personality is not ruthless enough to be good at business. What do you think? Am I right? Am I wrong? What should I do? Rachel, thank you so much for writing in and asking this question and being vulnerable enough to say, hey, I'm having doubts here. I'm not sure how to deal with people walking all over me. Do I need to change who I am? Do I need to be a meanie? And I totally get it. I actually can really resonate with what she's saying because I've been there. But the good news is is that there is a solution, right? You don't need to change who you are. You don't need to be a villain. But you do need to ask yourself a few questions to improve in this area. There's a few mindset shifts you're going to need to do to solve this problem and I'm going to share them with you. I'm going to give you some strategies so that you don't get walked all over, but at the same time you feel like you're being fair and kind and most importantly, being your authentic self. I think many of you who are listening can relate to this at some level, and that's why I thought it was really important for us to cover in today's lesson. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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So Rachel writes in and asks if she's too nice to be an entrepreneur, if business is not right for her because she feels like maybe people walk all over her because she is patient and she's kind. She and she's not ruthless. So let's dig in. The first thing I want to talk about is your mindset when it comes to your business and this topic. There might be several reasons why people are treating you this way. I'm a big believer that you teach people how to treat you and somewhere along the line, if this is a consistent thing, people are getting the message that this is okay, this is acceptable, to treat you this way, to walk all over you. Now I'm going to say if this happens once or twice in a long career of business, this is probably an exception. Some people just try to do anything, regardless of what messages they're getting, and that has no reflection on what you're doing. But for the most part, if there's a pattern, then there is something that you need to change. That's the only way this is going to change. Changing your employees is not going to make a difference. Changing your business or changing what you do. You actually need to change what you do. Now notice I said what you do, not who you are. You don't need to change who you are, but you need to change some of the actions you take and the way you deal with situations with your team members. Now let's get into the mindset of your business. You got to think about what is the most important person in your business, who's the person you need to protect at all costs. And in my book, it's your customer. Your customer is what makes everything happen. Your customer buys the product and therefore gives you revenue and makes the whole machine Work, right? So you can pay people, so you can invest in your business. You can, you know, grow with marketing. The point here is that your business does not exist without your customer. So you need to protect your customer at all costs. You got to do what's best for the customer at all costs. Now, I'm not saying to sacrifice your values or sacrifice your integrity or your standards, but when we talk about who do we really serve in our business, it's the customer. And you got to almost kind of see them like a child of yours. If somebody hurt your child, your own flesh and blood, whether it was verbal abuse or even physical abuse, how would you react? You would be upset, right? You would say, no, that's unacceptable. That can never happen again. Similarly, your team members, your employees, if they're not doing your job, they're hurting your customer. That should be unacceptable. And when I started to have this mindset, it helped me tremendously because I would just relate it back to the customer. So when I would talk to my employee, I would say, we can't have this because our customers are relying on us. We need to deliver excellent service. This is not excellent service. And I just basically say, hey, if we don't do this, if we don't serve our customer properly, if you don't do your job, so therefore the customer gets what they're paying for, we're all in trouble. And I'm not going to let you jeopardize all of our careers. So now it's not about them, it's not about me. It's about the whole system. It's about the whole business. So that's the first mental shift. The second one is understanding human nature. I learned this when I was a teacher in high school, in the university level, my first 13 years of professional career. This was like the biggest lesson. Doesn't matter how old you are, doesn't matter how young you are, doesn't matter your experience. If you're rich, you're poor, culturally, where you're from, people do what they can get away with. That's just human nature. We just have to accept that. An example of this in my teaching days was, there's a quiz going on in my classroom, and I have a rule that says no talking during a quiz. And let's say we're having a quiz and somebody talks during the quiz, somebody talks to their neighbor, whispers something, and I do nothing. If I don't do anything, the real rule is that you can talk during the quiz because I just did it and nothing happened. Reality is the rule reality is the standard. This is why it's so important to do just in time correction or just in time training in your team. As humans, we believe in consequences, okay, good and bad. We believe that if we do something there is a consequence. And again, as human beings, we try to avoid pain and we try to seek pleasure to feel good about ourself. So I'm going to go back to the business world in my team and I'm recording this knowing a lot of my team members are going to hear this, but they know this already about me. But if a team member does something wrong, doesn't do their job properly, makes a mistake of any sort of big or small, they know, they know that it's just not going to slide. I'm going to talk to them, I'm going to send them a message. They're going to have to face some consequences. They're going to have to deal with some uncomfortability. They're going to feel uncomfortable for a period of time because I don't want this to be okay. Because it's not okay. And usually it's a very simple talk. It doesn't have to be mean or shouty, but it's just very straightforward. It's just say, hey, XYZ happened. XYZ cannot happen. This is unacceptable because this, in the future, you need to do this. How are we going to make sure that this doesn't happen again? I got to put the responsibility back in their plate. It's their job to make sure they do their job, not my job. My job is not to nag them and look over their shoulder. My job is to say, hey, when something's not right, it's not right and tell them what I'm expecting. You know, it's only fair that you tell your team members how to win. This is what you should be doing. And that's really what happens there. Now I don't need to be mean about it, but there is a consequence. There has to be something that happens next. A great way to implement all of this is just to have rules and to stick to these rules. As long as these rules and these procedures are clear to everybody. If everybody's playing within the same rules, you can't blame the rules. We agreed on these rules. We're going into this game or we're going into this relationship or this business or this transaction together. And I learned this from playing sport growing up. I played basketball growing up and I never blamed the rules of basketball when something didn't go my way for example, if I fouled out of a game, which in basketball it's six personal fouls. So if I got my six personal foul, I'm not going to blame the rule book. These are stupid rules. I can't believe, believe it. I'm not going to even blame the person I fouled. Like, oh, that wasn't a foul. Maybe I'll get a little upset at the referee for a moment, but ultimately, when I have to go sit down, I know it's my fault. I'm the one who got the sixth foul. I know the rules. I know what happens when you get six fouls. I should have been more careful. That's why I think that if you feel like you're being walked over, a set of rules can really help something that you can agree upon with all your team members. And most people won't even need these rules, they won't even refer to them. But at the times you do need to refer to them, they're going to be a lifesaver. And it could be something simple like if you make a non critical mistake, you're just going to have a chat and that's okay. We're going to commit to not doing it again. If you make a mistake that costs the business money, we're going to consider that in your formal evaluation and you can come up with a system where it's like, hey, if you have to discuss something critical that costs your business money more than three times or five times or whatever you decide, then it's going to cost them their job. I know that sounds like, hey, is that fair? Go back to the customer. Is it fair for the customer not to get what they paid for? No. By the way, when somebody pays for something and they don't get it, it's called fraud. So you need to protect your business, you need to protect your customer. And again, if you lay out the rules and they're fair and you agree upon them, no one is going to blame the rules. Ultimately, they will blame themselves if they're a rational human being. But the key is you need to follow the rules. If you don't uphold the standards and the rules of your business, you're asking for trouble. And that doesn't require you to be mean. It just requires you to be consistent, to be true to your rules and do what's best for your customer.

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So, Rachel and everybody who's listening, I hope this advice is resonating with you. It's helpful. You're writing some things down and thinking, hey, I need to apply this in my own business. But you might be thinking, this is still kind of hard because I got to deliver this news. I got to deliver these rules. I got to reprimand people. That's not fun. That's not in my nature. Here's a little secret. Most people, it's not in their nature. They do it anyway, though. And here's a way to kind of make it a little easy on yourself. Deliver the news, deliver the instruction, deliver the reprimand with positivity. I learned this from a manager I had back when I was a teacher. Whenever he delivered bad news, whenever he was even firing somebody, he did it in a way that was respectful, that was kind but firm. And when I asked him about this technique, he coined this term facts with a smile. And he says, I just deliver the facts with a smile. I remember one time he did this right in front of me in his office when he fired a teacher because she was deliberately calling in sick and every Monday, causing a lot of pain and burden on the other teachers to fill in for her. She was given warnings. She'd been told, and it was so often it couldn't have been a medical thing. And she even admitted it. And this is exactly what happened. He sat her down and said, sarah, when we hired you, we were excited to work with you. You got great skills. The students love you. When you're in the classroom, you really do a great job. Unfortunately, though, you don't show up to work when we need you. And this puts a burden on our other teachers. Again, just stating the facts starts with some positive facts, starts then talking about why this person is about to get fired. And then he makes it clear that her actions is what caused her to get fired. Nothing else says, hey, because you've been absent 18 times and consistently on a Monday, putting a burden on our team for no valid reason, we are going to have to end our working relationship. As much as I don't want to say goodbye to you, I have the duty to do this, to protect the school, the students, and our fellow teachers. I wish you all the best. That's it. And he did it with a smile. And he just stated the facts. He didn't go on and on about, we're sorry and I wish I could have you and all that stuff and. And grovel. None of that. This is why we hired you. You're not doing what we're asking you to do. These are the things that you did that has caused me to have to let you go. And I never forgot that lesson since. And then he also shared with me one piece of advice I never forgot, and I want to pass it on to you. And that's if you never fire anybody, that means your team is the worst team in the industry. You are taking all the people that nobody want. And I was like, really? He was like, yes. Because it's impossible for you to know, to have a superstar from the moment you hire them. If you just hold on to people because you want to avoid confrontation, that means you have no standards and you're keeping the people that nobody wants and you're only as strong as your team. That really resonated with me. That really hit me home in the heart. And I realized I got to make sure I keep my standards up for the sake of my customers, for the sake of my business, for the sake of the future of the business. Thanks so much for listening to the 100 MBA show. Rebecca. Thank you so much for asking today's Q and A Wednesday's question. If you're listening and you got a question you want to ask here on the show, go ahead and email me over at omar@100mba.net. I'll make sure to answer it right here on Q and A Wednesday. Of course, we keep it anonymous so that you feel comfortable to open up really quick. If you're listening on your phone or any device with a podcast app, make sure you hit follow or subscribe right now. By doing so, you get access to over 2,000 episodes in our archives. You get our next episodes as soon as they drop automatically. It's also a great way to support the show. Thanks so much in advance for doing that. Before you go, I want to leave you with this. If you describe yourself as a kind person, somebody that's not a mean person, here's something to think about. You're not being kind and you're being mean to your other teammates, to your customers, to your business. If you don't let go of people and reprimand people when they need it. It's not fair to everybody else that they have to put up with poor performance or lack of care. If you need to train somebody great, train them. But when somebody being careless and repeating mistakes, that means they're not focused, they're not committed, they don't deserve the opportunity. People want to work at a place with high standards where people do what they say and say what they mean. That's being kind to your business. That's being kind to other people. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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