If you owned a Ferrari, wouldn't you take it out for a spin? Team Shanahan know RGIII isn't ready to run a pro style offense. They don't trust him to throw down the field. They trust the third string guy, Kirk Cousins, but they don't trust their Ferrari. Yes, I know Cousins is playing against guys who next week will be asking if we want fries with our Big Mac. But Cousins is playing WITH these guys as well.
One of the resident idiots on sports radio station ESPN980 said that the Skins haven't shown anything from the offense they intend to run in the regular season. That's great. I'll bet the Bears didn't show anything on defense they intend to run in the regular season either. The Skins apparently intend a run and shoot college style offense. How many run and shoot teams have won a Super Bowl? That number is a whole number somewhere between one and negative one – zero. The Skins paid for a Ferrari but they may have bought a Yugo. I hope I'm wrong.
I've been searching for the perfect way to describe the difference between the employee mind and the business owner mind. Here it goes..... Employees expect reward to precede performance. Business owners expect the reverse.
Those of you who are long time business owners, or have managed employees for a long period of time, have heard some variant of the following from an employee. “If you give me (insert some type of a reward), I will give you (insert some version of his best effort).” Reward precedes performance. Of course that's just not how the human mind works when it comes to motivation. When the reward precedes the performance, the performance never appears.
A couple days ago, one of our admin employees gave her two weeks notice. Her notice came in the form of an e-mail message to Paul and me ending with the phrase, “Good luck”. She sent this message before heading out the door in the afternoon after a meeting she had with Paul. Paul asked her to begin arriving on time in the morning as opposed to regularly being fifteen minutes late. He also asked her to stay until the end of the day.
According to her, she wasn't being paid enough to show up on time and stay for the full day. She needed a raise to do that. Isn't that just a variant of the “Reward me now and I promise to perform better” attitude I noted above? It is really just a version of Popeye's friend Whimpy's refrain, “I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.”
The “Good luck” phrase at the end of her resignation signaled her belief in the demise of our firm with her departure. After seven months, she was indispensable. Never mind that we were around for twenty-two years before she was hired. Somehow we muddled along before her. There's a line from a Sonny and Cher song from the sixties that goes, “and the beat goes on....” It surely will - in her absence.
If you read my post from a week or so ago titled, “Get Your Priorities Hijacked II”, you read the story of Danette, one of my ex-employees who believed my accounting department at Sky Courier would disintegrate when she left. The department improved the day she vamoosed. And the beat goes on.....
I had another prize employee at Sky Courier named, Debbie. Just as I didn't change Danette's name for that post, I'm not changing Debbie's name for this one either. If you cause me as much grief as they did, I'm calling you out – by your real name. Get thee away from me, Satan.
Debbie's job was to reconcile our bank accounts monthly. At Sky Courier, we were always broke. So there wasn't much to reconcile. That's not really fair. When you're regularly bouncing checks and arguing with the bank about overdraft charges, bank reconciliation is accounting hell.
Debbie lived somewhere near Winchester, Virginia and commuted to the office in Reston, Virginia. Winchester is not near Reston. They are nearly fifty miles apart. She decided that she would start her workday at 7:30 AM to avoid traffic and leave at 4PM each day. That would have been fine if she had ever actually arrived at 7:30AM. I know she wasn't on time since I was in by 7:15AM each morning. I'm a bit of a morning person.
Debbie was about six months behind in reconciling our main bank account. I removed all of the other accounts from her and gave them to others so that she could concentrate entirely on our main account. After a few months, she still had not even caught up by one month. I began to suspect that as long as Debbie was around, the account would never get reconciled. In her case, the problem wasn't money. She surmised, correctly I might add, that if she ever got caught up, I wouldn't need to put up with her performance and would fire her.
On one of our rare Virginia snowy days, Debbie went out to lunch and then called me to say that she wasn't coming back for the rest of the day due to the snow. She was going to have no problem driving the fifty miles back to Winchester, but she couldn't drive two miles back to work. The next morning, I fired her. Another employee reconciled the main bank account completely and was up to date in a couple of weeks. And the beat goes on....
When you buy a book on the Amazon.com web site, they give you some additional purchasing suggestions with the phrase, “People who bought (your book) also purchased...” If you're buying the importance of indispensable employees, you're also probably also buying the idea of Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and Freddy Krueger. Of those, Freddy Krueger is the most relevant. If you are relying on employees and not good business systems, you are living a business nightmare.
Fire your Danette's, Debbie's, and Freddy Krueger's. They are dispensable if you have good systems. If you don't have good systems, fire them anyway, and implement good systems. Your Danette's and Debbie's will fight to the death against the good systems that will make them replaceable. As comedian Ron White joked, “You can't fix stupid.”
<This paragraph was censored by the Stitely family Politburo>
I had a funny story planned for this paragraph that Vladimir Putin, aka Laura Stitely, forced me to delete or face exile to Siberia, aka the basement. I stand in solidarity with Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and the Russian punk rock band, Pussy Riot (no, I didn't make up that name) for freedom of expression.
The “Free Frank Stitely Rally” is being held September 5th at the Lost Rhino brewery (www.lostrhino.com). Join other advocates of freedom in drink and song. We'll not sing “We Shall Overcome.” We'll sing “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap.”
Fight oppression with a good lager or IPA. Save our first amendment rights by getting drunk. There is no higher or more patriotic calling. Forget the Tea Party. Join the Beer Party. We are a nonpartisan political group devoted to nothing in particular but having fun.
Thanks for reading! For real tax and accounting advice, visit our main S&K web site at www.skcpas.com. See you at Lost Rhino.
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