Thanks for such an interesting perspective. Are you aware that most high achieving managers don’t quite figure how their staff see them?

For some years I’ve been preaching that a CEO’s prime role in a small- medium business is marketing and PR. To achieve this, he or she must cultvate perfect employees who can handle all the day to day routine business perfectly.

The CEO still needs to be involved in strategy. But if they’ve cultivated perfect employees, much of the strategy will be generated by the employees and pushed upwards to the CEO anyway.

Molli, you wont find what I’m suggesting in many textbooks. That means that my idea probably has some worth.

No CEO can successfully manage a small-medium business until they absolutely trust their staff to run the business perfectly on a day to day basis. And the less CEOs are involved in day to day issues, the greater the opportunities for employees to grow and develop professionally.

Everybody wins.

Make sure you have fun.

Regards

Leon

I liked your three stages. I think that a lot of people fail to make it to step three due to a lack of confidence. Some people just don’t have enough confidence to realize that they will not get knocked off the mountain. For those that do have the confidence, they will be the king of the mountain.

Once we develop the immunity, which includes a serious amount of soul searching tied to self-doubt, we create an absolutely maniacal personality that will destroy anything in our path. It’s not an anger thing. It’s a we know where we’re going thing. As a result we offend a lot of people along the way. It’s impossible for anyone to truly understand us and to comprehend our vision. Every single instance is different and it takes a serious skill and amount of bravery to want to hop on board.

While worrying about developing a product and/or service you realize you’re depleting funds. Some are lucky to fund raise. Some have to spend their life’s savings. I’ve had to do both and I have the luxury of combining it with being married, having kids and a mortgage. There is no worse feeling than having to look into your wife’s eyes and say “I’m not getting paid for a while” when she knows how much you are worth on the open market as an employee, but you know that’s a major problem. You go so long as an entrepreneur that the only person who will want to hire you is another entrepreneur or at least that’s the only type of person you can relate to. Most traditional firms don’t see value in paying big salaries to maniacs who have trouble with NO. The only one’s who do are the type that just acquired that person’s company and rolled them into the staff for a while.

All of this comes before you make one dollar. Think about that. It’s insane. We’re insane, but we’re wired differently and we love it. That’s the difference. We LOVE it. Personally I go weeks where I barely get anything close to consistent sleep. It’s not because I’m working, but rather just laying in bed thinking and thinking and thinking and being unable to shut off. It’s not healthy, but in my eyes I’ll make up for it after I succeed.

Lastly, you end up being “married” to the start-up for so long that your motivation goes from “I want to do great things” to “I can’t went to break up with her and I will do anything to get there”. How’s that for attitude? I think every entrepreneur needs to hate their business in order to make it truly succeed, because it has caused so much misery, so much heartache and so much stress that you need the inspiration to go to great lengths to make it happen.

Now who wants to be an entrepreneur?