I’ve been in business 20+ years - starting alone for the first years. Built it up and now have 5 employees. Recently I have been talking to my employees about buying into the company as I am nearing retirement. I gave two of my employees raises one of them a percentage based on his production. after that I got total silence never a thank you or anything so that caused some concern right there. One of the employees was receiving over $1000 a month raise. Recently I got Covid-19’s bad and was out for 2 months. I I have cameras at work so me and my partner were reviewing the cameras and noticed they were talking a lot of shit about me and making plans to start their own business I’m presuming stealing all the high-end clients. The Reality is that is if you put employee in the responsibility of dealing with clients you have to deal with the prospect that he might steal them eventually. less people and less drama and possibly hiring subcontractors to handle the business that I pay these people a lot of the time to stand around and do nothing might be better. We have a established a business location and will probably be fine. previously I’ve been talking with my right hand man about my exit strategy but now I want to talk to him about his exit strategy, one of the employees is poison to the others I can hear him talking shit about me and the business. I’m sure a lot of you experience the same type of situation’s any advice on how you handled it and the outcomes thereof would be appreciated thanks guys
Reality is, all employees think they can do better than the owner, they think they’re smarter and more capable than the owner. 90% of your employees will steal. Whether it’s a product, money or an idea. Your job is to proof your business so they won’t be able to. Given that in 20 years you couldn’t achieve that, that’s on you. People are shit.
A lot of owners overspend, and we found them cheaper ways to do things. We made them rich.
Our owner wasn’t hungry and always wanted to stay small.
Our owner gambled and played cards on his office computer.
We got hired by another owner and they pay us more.
I also looked into a commercial painting company that quoted us $40,000 to paint a large room. We ended up painting it ourselves. Another company said it was way beyond what they would do and didn’t give us an estimate. We did modifications on our space to keep us in business.
We find business all of the time, but the relevant people won’t go out and talk to them. We recommended one customer to our salesperson, and she went out and got business, but they won’t send her out to get more business again and nothing new comes in. They won’t talk to the customers we lost because they won’t service them.