Getting Off the Truck, Part III<\/strong><\/p>\n

After a small business owner hires their first employee and successfully gets them launched, they\u2019re typically faced with getting out of daily administrative tasks (the office \u201ctruck\u201d). This means hiring someone to manage answering the phone, scheduling work, invoicing jobs, interacting with customers, organizing and filing paperwork, and so forth. From time to time this may also include entry-level bookkeeping, but we\u2019re going to save that \u201ctruck\u201d for later in this series.<\/p>\n

As it is with hiring someone to deliver the actual services a small business owner has been providing, hiring someone to perform the administrative tasks is just as daunting. After all, who\u2019s going to handle incoming calls from customers better than the owner would?<\/p>\n

To complicate matters further, few entrepreneurs understand what all is involved in making a business office run efficiently. All they may know is the way they\u2019ve always done things, which is usually not a model of organizational excellence.<\/p>\n

So now the owner is faced with hiring someone to perform tasks they\u2019ve probably never performed well themselves, and they\u2019ll be using skills many owners struggle with recognizing.<\/p>\n

While many owners feel that hiring someone to replace them on the front lines is the most important hiring decision they\u2019ll make, our experience has shown otherwise. It\u2019s usually the office manager position that is the most important. Over and over we have seen where an upward tick in the trajectory of a company\u2019s growth and profitability coincides with the arrival of a competent office manager. Coincidence? Perhaps. But the frequency with which we see it says otherwise. This has to do not only with the candidate\u2019s technical skills but, more importantly, with their willingness to provide coaching and guidance to the owner.<\/p>\n

For a multitude of reasons, we too often see owners make the mistake of basing their hiring decision solely on trust, familiarity, or how nice the office manager candidate is. While these are certainly admirable traits, characteristics such as the candidate\u2019s organizational skills, competence, and courage\u2014their willingness to speak truth to authority (in this case, the owner)\u2014are even more important. This last quality is vital, especially when it involves an owner with an outsized ego who struggles with accepting input from someone whose paycheck they happen to sign.<\/p>\n

The importance of hiring \u201cup\u201d in this position cannot be overstated.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the greatest contribution to the company that this first office manager brings is helping the owner to use their time and talents more effectively. Hiring someone who can make the owner better\u2014more effective with decision making, elevated leadership skills, better organization skills, and follow-through\u2014will make all the difference. Most owners basically need an organized and steady personality to offset their own driven, entrepreneurial, and occasionally erratic behaviors.<\/p>\n

All of this circles back to an owner\u2019s comfort level with any of these \u201csoft skills,\u201d but also with the long-term goals they want to achieve with their company. An owner wanting to grow a five- or six-person company doesn\u2019t need an experienced administration manager to run their office. On the other hand, an experienced administration manager can prove invaluable in helping a young business owner scale their company into a multimillion-dollar enterprise, if that\u2019s their ultimate goal.<\/p>\n

As we wrote about earlier in this series, getting off the truck is essentially an inside game, a mental game. It always starts with the owner\u2019s capacity for change and grows from there. If they only address the technical side of change but ignore the emotional side, then they are setting themselves up for a long, uncomfortable ride.<\/p>\n

Owners might be able to muscle their way through these changes when they\u2019re young or when their companies are smaller. But as their company grows and as their challenges become larger, more complex, and require more mental energy to sustain, they inevitably find themselves questioning their decision to grow.<\/p>\n

Hiring the right person to manage the office can support an owner as they navigate these challenges and give them the mental bandwidth to have the energy to do so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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