Everyone Sucks

As entrepreneurs, we lose perspective all the time. In our eyes, regardless of their compensation or arrangement, everyone is underperforming. We get frustrated that people won’t read voluminous materials and don’t spend every waking moment living our perspective. We just believe that everyone sucks!

“Success of your business starts with you.” 

Understanding the Reality

Not only do we lack to the capital to pay constituents customary rates, or to pay them at all, we lack the resources to manage them effectively. Combine this with a few other realities:

• First, no one cares as much about the business as we do.
• Second, no one has spent as much time thinking about it as we have.
• Third, these people have lives in which they laugh, relax, sleep, drink for fun and even take things lightly.
• Finally, what we spend all day thinking about is a blip on their radar screen.

With the exception of full-time employees, these resources dip in and out of our world. When a member of your advisory board wakes up in the middle of the night (like we do), he likely did so because he was worried about his sick daughter or his new boss or his mortgage bill or his golf game. Think of it like a pie. Our pie is 99.999 percent our business. Their pie is life, love, family, business, sports, travel and the rest of their normal lives.

It is our responsibility to manage these resources by aligning their skills and time commitment with actions that serve the business, the sooner we will no longer think that everyone sucks.

If we don’t allocate our scarce resources, our company suffers in several ways. We fail to move forward with the tasks at hand. We create misaligned expectations that lead to frustration with the resources we have. In an ideal world, people would manage themselves and perform without fail. On Earth, our resources need to be managed and we if we do this well, we’ll quickly find that the only thing that really sucked was our perspective.