Entrepreneurship

When you start a business, you invariably end up doing a little bit of everything: sales, accounting, delivery, marketing, HR, even IT. But as you get bigger, you start dividing all this up and hiring different people to do it – partly because you don’t have enough hours in the day to do it yourself, but also, ideally, because you want to end up with someone who’s actually better at the job than you are.

Except it’s not quite that simple, is it? I know that it’s important for entrepreneurs to let go. I know it’s important to hire good people, and trust in their ability to do the job. I know that it’s important not to get bogged down in the day-to-day nitty-gritty. But the thing is, there’s still a little part of me that thinks I can do all these jobs better than anyone else (well, apart from IT, perhaps – that’s in every sense of the word a black box). I can’t help it. I created these jobs, I did them first, and I know my company better than anyone else. So my ego refuses to accept that anyone could do them better.

Fortunately, I keep this to myself most of the time. Otherwise I’d spend my whole time looking over people’s shoulders telling them what they should be doing, which (I know from bitter experience) is just about as annoying as management gets. However this week, an opportunity arose to test my theory. As part of my anti-credit crunch drive, we’re on a new business push at the moment. the theory being that we probably need to have a bigger pipeline to convert the same number of leads. For salespeople, of course, this isn’t much fun – nobody really likes cold-calling, not even the gung-ho ones (and we’ve got a few of them).

So I came up with an idea: to challenge my top salesman (better known as Mammon) to a meeting-booking contest. I did this for three reasons: one, so we sell more stuff; two, because if everyone else sees me getting my hands dirty, they’ll have no excuse; and three, because I want to beat him at what he does best. This is partly just me being insanely competitive (as every self-respecting entrepreneur should be, I would argue). But it’s also because I think it will help with our (still ongoing) salary negotiation if I win – it might persuade him that he’s not quite as irreplaceable as he currently thinks he is. And I reckon the pressure’s all on him: it’s his day job, so everyone will expect him to win.

Naturally, however, he’s not going to. As I’ve explained, I’m actually better at his job than he is...