9

You Will Still Have to Work with People

SOMETIMES, WANTING TO LEAVE YOUR JOB and start a business stems not just from escaping a particular boss or set of co-workers or even from fantasies of being in charge. Sometimes—and this happens more frequently than you might imagine—it is that you don’t like to work with other people in general. You are a loner, or prefer to be a solo artist, but businesses don’t work when only one person is involved.

I can truly appreciate that it is difficult to work with other people. People, especially ones that you are compelled to work with day in and day out, can be really annoying. They can smell funky, talk too loudly, do poor work or hang around your office when you are busy. However, people are part of life, and if you want to earn a living, whether at someone else’s company or your own, people are going to be involved in some way, shape, or form.

I hope that one of the lessons that this book has already impressed upon you is that customers are the single-most-important asset of your business. If you have no paying customers, you cannot have a business. If you have customers, even if you don’t have anything to sell, you can find a way to make money; you can beg for or borrow someone else’s goods and services to sell if you have customers. Having no customers, however, is the worst fate possible. You may have the best services or goods, a great place of business, snappy marketing materials, smart employees, and more, but if you have no paying customers, it makes no difference; you will not make any money, and your business will fail.

The last time I checked, those with the ability to pay for goods and services are classified as people. Even if you work with animals or plants, their humans are the real customers who pay you in the end. Until cats, dogs, and trees step up and get jobs so that they can become paying customers, I see no way around having your customers be people.

Since your customers are people, you by definition as an entrepreneur need to work with people. You need to work with them closely, possibly more closely than you did when you worked in your previous job, because these customers decide whether or not you make money and cash a paycheck. You need to sell these people your goods and services, you need to convince them to hire your firm or continue to patronize your place of business, and lucky you—you have to make sure they pay in full and on time. There is definitely a lot of people contact in the customer realm. Even if the product or service that your business sells isn’t people-oriented (such as writing computer code), someone needs to hire you and your company, and someone needs to pay you; if not, you don’t have a business. Those “someones” are people, and important people at that.

The same goes for other aspects of the business. If you take money from investors, banks, or other lending institutions, those are staffed by people. You will need to work with them to make sure the business is growing and succeeding, and if it isn’t, you are going to be seeing and hearing a lot from those people.

You will likely need employees at some point if you are going to grow, and while there have been some promising developments in robot technology, it isn’t quite optimized yet, so you are going to have to hire—gasp—people!

You will require professional services for your business. You will have a person as your lawyer, another person as your accountant, and you will have to hire people for any other services you require, from technology to marketing to janitorial services. Your landlord is going to be a person. If you sell a product, your vendors or suppliers are going to be people that have people working for them.

So actually, you have probably increased the number of people you have to work with daily exponentially just by making the decision to start your own business. If your main motivation to start a business is to not work with people, or at least minimize the number of people you work with, you are looking in the wrong direction. As I recently told an entrepreneur for whom I performed a FIRED-UP entrepreneur assessment, if you don’t like people that much, there is probably a much easier, more cost-efficient solution to your problem. Go to your current boss and ask for an office with a door you can close to keep people from bothering you at work. Or, see if you can negotiate to telecommute from home one or more days a week so that you have some physical separation from the people. Those quick fixes will be more effective for your problem, with a lot less risk, than going the entrepreneurial route.

Okay, maybe you misspoke. You can handle working with people, but you don’t like to work in teams. If you can’t work in a team, how are you going to manage employees (and foster teamwork amongst them)? Maybe you can work with people if you pick the best employees. Well, you can only pick your employees from amongst those who apply, and if you aren’t paying a primo salary, the best employees are probably not going to apply.

If you do find someone you can tolerate, there is no guarantee that they will like you or your company, or want to work for you for an extended period of time. Whatever people-issue you have in your job, it will become worse and more intense when you’re the boss. Plus, these employees will have a hand in deciding your business’s success or failure, something on which you have a whole lot riding. To minimize the people interaction, go with a job over a business any day.

EXERCISE 5

TARGET FOCUS—MOTIVATIONS:

Working with (or without) Others

Think about what it is you don’t like about your current interactions at work. Write down:

1. The names of the people who cause you issues, and
2. What those specific issues are.

Looking at this list, would these issues improve or be removed if:

• you took on another role at your existing company?
• you took a job at another company?
• you started a business?

Now evaluate:

• if each issue is related specifically to a person or if there really is another issue that is causing your stress or unhappiness;
• if there is a way for you to improve that issue without taking on a lot of risk; and
• if you need to start a business to solve your issue—and if so, evaluate if the risk of starting a business is worth solving that issue.

You may want to ask a trusted source if you need objective feedback.

Oh, and be sure to cross the “I don’t want to work with people” reason off your baseline motivation list if it is there!