A couple of weeks ago, something happened to me that I haven't experienced in almost 20 years. I was hired.
The job was a paid writing gig, arising directly out of the work I have been doing here in ProPrint, and they offered to pay me before I even had the chance to ask for money. It was a very satisfying feeling, and also a very strange one.
The last time I was hired was in 1994 when I finished my economics degree and NAB took me on as part of their graduate program. I hated the job and left after three weeks, coming to sweep the floor at my father’s printing business until I found a new job. I haven’t been to a job interview since.
I had forgotten how it feels to have someone else appreciate you or your work enough to want to pay you for it. I’m the boss – I have no one above me to tell me if I am doing a good job, or tell me if I am stuffing up. I will never get a promotion on merit and I can’t sleep my way to the top. I never have to aspire to the best car parking space or a bigger office. If I want an assistant, I can hire one. And any pay rise (or cut) I get is determined by the performance of my entire business, not my own singular effort.
Of course, I get hired by my customers every day, but that’s different. What my customers want is printing, and on that particular day they happen to buy it from me. They may like me and like dealing with me, but they’re buying print, not hiring me.
If you’re not the boss, you might think all this freedom sounds great. Don’t get me wrong – being king rocks, baby. But it is nice to have someone else judge your work and say, yep, it’s worth something.
In many ways, I would like a boss in my day job as managing director. Running your own shop, you often have no one to bounce ideas off or to ask for advice. There’s no one who can take the ultimate responsibility for your decisions away from you, or even just tell you you’ve done a good day’s work – all things a boss would do.
If you read the literature, a board is the solution. Get a group of experienced and successful people together who can give you everything a boss would. And while I can see the sense and value in it, being a small business means the cost and rigmarole of a board is just out of the question.
So I don’t have a boss – but I do have staff. I periodically ask all my new employees to tell me what I’m doing wrong. Unlike me, they have all worked at other companies and have seen how their bosses are performing. Once they are clear I won’t fire them for giving me a performance assessment, they give me some great tips.
However, the truth is that in the end the most frank assessment you get as the boss is your P&L. If you’re making money, you’re doing fine.
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