Operations Manager Hired!

Big Deal Small Business, Issue #103

Operations Manager Hired!

Big Deal Small Business, Issue #103

It’s been about a month since I posted the job listing for an Operations Manager (you can read the background on the role here).

Well, I found an amazing candidate. They accepted an offer to become our first Operations Manager, and they start next week!

In next week’s edition of Guesswork Unveiled, I plan to talk about successful onboarding of important hires, given I am researching and implementing that right now. Originally, I was going to write this post about that.

I’m doing something different today, so I’m making this post a free post for my full readership.

A personal area of growth for me is celebrating wins — in making this hire, my brain goes straight to “this is only a win if the hire turns out to be a successful hire.”

I’m not sure if this is common for entrepreneurially-minded or ambitious folks, or if I’m just particularly incapable of celebrating wins.

I have a vivid recollection of my high school graduation — one of my friend’s dads came up to me and congratulated me, and asked how it felt to be graduating high school. I responded honestly — I went to a private high school and had a relatively privileged upbringing. It wasn’t clear to me where the actual accomplishment was…like, of course I graduated from high school! It’d be a major disappointment if I hadn’t.

At the time, my friend’s dad praised my sense of perspective.

But then I felt similarly upon graduating from college and finding a good full-time job. Clearly there are lots of folks with great family support and access to resources who don’t accomplish that. (There’s also plenty of valid reasons to not go to or complete college to be clear — but in the world I grew up in, it was basically a given that I would attend college.) But it still struck me as vaguely uninteresting — it didn’t feel like a particular accomplishment, it just felt like the natural next step in my life.

I can rinse & repeat variations of that story through my private equity career as well — I enjoyed closing deals in terms of having a sense of satisfaction. But I rarely experienced a feeling of true accomplishment that warranted celebration.

For context, I was a part of a 5-person deal team that closed two multi-billion-dollar deals in two years. By most metrics, that should count as a major win — and even then, I struggled to see a cause for celebration, as ultimately the deals were only a success if they turned out to be good investments.

Given the long hold periods in private equity, I never got to take a deal from underwriting to closing to execution to sale, so maybe I would have felt different had I experienced the full life cycle of a deal? Hard to know. The successful exits I worked on were for deals that had been closed before I joined the firm.

Enter small business ownership — a slow, painstaking marathon of minor victories and gut-punching defeats. If I struggled to celebrate closing a massive PE deal, I struggle even harder to celebrate small business wins, which can be more like “none of our trucks broke down today.”

Chase Murdock (who writes great content about small business building at Local Legends) advised me several months ago that I need to fall in love with the process of building a small business. I was too endpoint-oriented — the cliche “it’s not the destination, it’s the journey” applies.

Initially, I pushed back — I’m not focused on hitting a specific EBITDA target or IRR number for my investors to define success. In my mind, success had a few parameters, along these lines:

• Our company is a good place to work for our staff

• Our company provides a good service to our clients

• Our company generates good financial returns to me & my investors

• I enjoy my life running the business

These goals felt like “enjoy the journey” goals or “state of being” goals, not destination-focused goals.

However, Chase pushed back at me — while they are not deterministic metrics like “hit $5 million net worth,” I still have to arrive at those states of being in my business. They are still a destination. They are not reflective of my day-to-day life today, which is the actual journey element of building a small business.

So how do I enjoy the journey? If I define success in the way I tried above, I’ll run out of steam far before those endpoints.

This post doesn’t end with an answer — it’s statement of intent. In the coming years, I intend to enjoy the process of building a small business more than I have over the past 2+ years.

To do that, I need to fall in love with the process of building a small business — I can see that happening, as I have felt the satisfaction of implementing a great new system or process. It’s a new one for me, but it’s real.

But to create room for me to focus on that, I needed to hire an Operations Manager. To use another cliche, if I’m going to “work on the business” more, I need someone else to “work in the business” and make it run efficiently.

And yes, what I said initially is still true — this hire is only a success if I actually get to the endpoint of working “on” the business as a larger percentage of my time.

But for today — I’m celebrating that I have taken a step in that direction. This is a crucial step towards my truly enjoying the journey of building a small business, and taking the step is worth celebrating.

Thank you for your support along the journey, and you can check out Guesswork Unveiled for my weekly posts that will detail the journey.

In the meantime, I hope all of you find something to celebrate today and have an excellent long weekend! I’m excited to attack onboarding the Operations Manager next week.

Best,

Guesswork Investing