Adam Sand explains when hiring family members works: they bring discretionary effort and shared goals. But without clear systems and consistent accountability, favoritism tanks culture. He outlines a structured performance-management process for underperformers: diagnose the problem, train, then follow progressive discipline if needed.
Some of the best hires I've made are family members of employees. I've had lots of good experiences with it. The thing that happens is when the business is surviving on love and trust and there's no systems or accountability, then what happens is you let things go too long and then there's problems. If everybody's treated the same, right, and you have that, you know, the 7 C's of sales management, if you're consistent and you're not favoring her because she's a sister-in-law or anything like that, so you're not going the other way where you're picking favorites or giving them special privileges, then it shouldn't kill the culture you have and You shouldn't have to worry about letting this person go if they don't succeed. But the benefit I found when there's family is that when you hire family, you get a bit of discretionary shower time. That sounds like a weird way to say it, but you get teammates who think about the business during their discretionary off time. You get discretionary effort because, like, I know that Gary and Dave will go for a bike ride and they'll probably talk a little bit about RBP sometimes. They have something in common. They have a common goal. Results come from effort, knowledge, and skills. So you measure the effort, Make sure they get the knowledge, turn those knowledge into skills, and then they either have it or they don't. And then when they aren't succeeding, it's, you know, it's either because they don't know, they don't care, they haven't been trained. So then you figure out which one it is, and if they're not meeting expectations, you give them a verbal warning, you give them a written warning, you give them a performance improvement plan, and you let them go. So the only negatives are things that you, for the most part, isolated out of your business.
