I just realized why I don’t feel good about employing people
Thanks to Naval Riskant
I’ve been following Naval on Twitter for a little bit, though it was his recent podcast with Joe Rogan that absolutely blew my mind and got me digging in to what he’s put out there. I listened to his recent talk diving deep into his viral “How to Get Rich (without getting lucky):” tweet storm (on 1.5x and trimmed while cleaning the basement, it’s very long…)
He machine guns wisdom bombs, and I will definitely return to listen to individual sections as well as reading through the transcript on occasion. My life has improved by listening to each of these podcasts, and it’s clear they’ll get better with time and acquaintance. Do yourself a favor: if you haven’t been introduced to his material before, take some time to poke around.
One quote hit me hard today:
At some level every founder has to lie to every employee of the company that they have. Where they have to convince them that it’s better for you to work for me than it is to do what I did and go work for yourself. So I’ve always had a hard time with that.
This explains so much about the way I’ve run my small businesses. Fundamentally, I know that it is better to work for yourself. Every job I’ve ever had (there have been many) even “stable” ones with good “benefits” were a way to eat, and ideally learn some skills, on the way to working for myself. When I feel so strongly about this, it would be disingenuous for me to rent someone’s times and tell them, “this is a great opportunity, spend your life here!”
One expression of this is when bringing on couriers for Food Pedaler, I’ve always expressed one of the best parts about the gig is getting to do our own thing, being independent. This is actually why I built this quirky little restaurant delivery service in the first place — I love riding bikes, hate being stuck in one place, and if not riding I want to be able to learn code, build businesses, or whatever. So, that’s what I did.
It turned out to work very well, and we had a period of substantial growth. I began to hire managers and grow with the flow, which resulted in self-conflict an unhappiness. I decided to scale down, and even pass off a neighborhood as a franchise to a go-getter rider. Going forward, I decided that any expansion would be new franchisees. This may run counter to Naval’s “pick an hourly rate” because, at least at this stage in the game, the rewards are much lower just getting as big as possible myself. But, I intrinsically love that I can offer a business opportunity for someone else to own and build.
This lesson was naturally carried into the next enterprise that my wife and I started, Perennial City Composting. It’s tempting sometimes, with all the requests we receive to expand our area and provide commercial service, to simply hire more and more people and do as much as we can. There’s money on the table! Instead, we decided early on to empower others to operate their own residential composting services and urban farms. Turning piles, watering and watching starts, dumping buckets, and going out late at night to make sure the chickens are safe; hourly rates simply don’t justify this degree of care. But when it is your soil, and you’re building your business, community, and food web, these acts gain a whole new significance, and we’re excited to pass it on.
I’m hungry for more of these self-realizations! Naval is long on meditation, one of the ways he describes it in the Rogan talk is “basically watching your own thoughts.” I’d already been motivated to get back into a meditation practice listening to him share about it, and this is now reinforced as I consider a benefit from this may be exposing more of these inner workings.
