124. A Brutally Honest Truth About Firing Employees As A Fractional CFO

Foreign.

If somebody hired me to be a neurosurgeon, I'm not a doctor. I have no experience with neurosurgery. But for whatever reason, this hospital said Mike King should be our next neurosurgeon. Should they leave me in that role? One of the toughest questions that any business owner ever has to face is determining when is it the right time to fire somebody? Where is that line that you have to draw that you say, hey, we've now crossed this line. There's no point of return. I've got to fire this person? And there's a couple of sub questions that you have to ask before, before you really kind of get to that point. One of them is, was there a core values violation? Did somebody do something like egregious? Did they lie? Did they cheat? Did they steal? Did they do something malicious? The answer is, if they did one of those things, then it's immediate determination, no questions asked. One of the pitfalls that, that business owners can get themselves into. I, I've, I've fallen victim to this before, too, is we say, well, gosh, well, we can't fire them right away because. And, and there's this story of how important they are or how many clients they have or how many sales they bring in that, yeah, gosh, they, they, they made this egregious lie. They, they totally sacrificed their, their integrity. But, man, we really need Gary. You know, without Gary, the whole thing falls apart. And the truth is you're probably going to have some speed bumps and some scars along the way, but the business will work just fine without Gary. What's more true is that other people on the team know or likely have a really solid suspicion that Gary's up to no good. And, and they all see that Gary's been kept around too long. And it's a culture cancer. It's a culture destroyer. It erodes trust, it erodes culture, erodes all the things that you've spent years and years building. When people see you keep somebody around that lied, they cheated, they stole, or were pretty sure that they did. So don't convince yourself that you got to keep Gary around. If Gary does one of those things, then you got to let Gary go. Now, what about those cases that are probably a lot more common than lying or cheating or stealing? When you have to let somebody go, the first thing to think about is it should never be a surprise when somebody finds out you're firing them. So the first thing I would say is if you're trying to decide if it's time to fire somebody. Do they know that it's coming? Have you been like, super clear and overt with them? Hey, Gary, you're not meeting expectations. We've talked before about X, Y, Z. You're not know, you're, you're not getting the sales in or your customer satisfaction isn't where it should be. Or gosh, you, you just don't even show up for work on time. Like, does Gary know that he's not meeting expectations? And have you given Gary that, hey, this has to be fixed by, by this date or else you can't work here anymore? And so the. I, I'll go back to that. Like, if, if you've been like super overtly clear with Gary or whoever it is that they've crossed the line, they have consistently not delivered on whatever thing it is that you're frustrated about. And then have you given them the tools to succeed? Like, almost like a, a collaborative approach of, hey, man, you're, you're consistently not meeting your, your sales numbers. I want to sit down and figure out together why that is, what, what's going on that, that you're not doing it and having that open mind to say, well, Gary's like, well, I'm not getting enough qualified leads and so I'm not closing. Or I, I have, yeah, I know that I've got to have five new clients a month and I could do that. But you probably have also forgotten that you've tasked me with these other seven things. You know, I've got to do these weekly team building things and I've also got to update the CRM and now I've also got to update the website copy. And you also want me to write so many blogs and I just don't have time to close five clients a month with all those things. Well, now you've got those opportunities to work through it. And so when it's not a clear violation of like, core values, I would say that it's time to fire somebody. When you've identified why it is that they're not meeting expectations, you've realistic, cleared all the hurdles. Realistically, that would be in the way of that. And you've given them very clear communication that they're not doing their job. They need to fix their output by a specific date. And like, once you've checked all those boxes and you can look yourself in the mirror and say, hey, I've done everything that I can do to make that person successful, then it's time to go. Now I'll give you A bit of a nuanced answer towards that. This should be the exception, not the norm, where you recognize that somebody is just flat out the, the wrong fit for a particular role. And normally this is in more of a leadership role where you look and you say, you know what, we've got the wrong person in the wrong seat. And it was probably a hiring misstep in the first place. We should have probably never promoted them or hired them for this role. But you realize that you screwed up by hiring them in the first place and they should have never been put in that role. And there is a fairly reasonable chance that they're not going to be able to get there because of experience or competency or, or the job description. It was a bad hire, a bad decision in the first place, and you know that you're just prolonging the inevitable by leaving them there. So as an example, if somebody hired me to be a neurosurgeon, I'm not a doctor, I have no experience with neurosurgery. But for whatever reason, this hospital said Mike King should be our next neurosurgeon. Should they leave me in that role? Like, should they try to train me and give me all these opportunities? Well, no, that would be foolish. And so when you recognize wrong person, wrong seat in their not going to get there. I, I think you've got to have the humility as the business owner to, to say, hey, look, this was not a good fit. We shouldn't have put you in there. We're going to give you a, a really generous severance, the best that we can do, and then just move on from, from that role. The that that does happen from time to time. You will screw up and hire somebody that you shouldn't have hired in the first place. They're, they're a great person, they're a great culture, fit all the checks in the box, but they're just the wrong person for that seat. You don't have another seat for them on the bus. And you've got a fiduciary responsibility to your company to invest the payroll dollars where they, they should be made. And you dragging that out for six months while you try to convert a nuclear engineer, turn fractional CFO into a neurosurgeon. All that's going to do is, is do a disservice to your clients. It's doing a disservice to the business's model. It's doing a disservice to the team. It's doing a disservice to that employee. You've got to just rip that band aid off when you recognize wrong person, wrong seat, and there's no reasonable realistic chance of them getting there. All right, my friends, I hope you found this episode helpful. If you did, it would mean the world to me if you would leave a five star review on Apple Podcasts, Google podcasts, Spotify, wherever you're listening to this episode. In the meantime, I can't wait to see you back right here next week. I'll see you then.