← Konnected Minds Podcast with Derrick Abaitey
Konnected Minds Podcast with Derrick Abaitey
Segment: Stop Being The Smartest Person In Your Business - Hire Better Or Stay Small
00:09:51
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Transcript25 lines
- [00:01]
Narrator
Grainger knows. When you're a procurement manager for an office park, you're not managing one building, you're managing all of them. And to stay ahead, you need to see through walls and around corners. Lights about to fail, filters ready to clog. H Vac on its last leg. If you wait until something breaks, you're already behind. Count on Grainger for quality products, easy reordering and 24. 7 support. Call 1-800-GRAINGER click grainger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done.
- [00:30]
Entrepreneur
Because they're trying to ask.
- [00:31]
Interviewer
No, no, actually it's incredible, you know, being successful at both. But if you were to advise a 19 year old, which path do you think will be clearer for them to take? Entrepreneurship or employment?
- [00:42]
Entrepreneur
They are not dissimilar. And I think that's the biggest challenge. I'm a servant in my own business. I serve the employees that work with us.
- [00:53]
Interviewer
Never thought about it like that. Carry on.
- [00:55]
Entrepreneur
Everybody assumes that being an entrepreneur means you're the big boss. I am the one who leaves the office latest. Don't take my offer again. I always say, ask people that work with me. I get to the office. So here's how my day typically works. I don't work from the office on Mondays. I generally avoid it. Since I started my business in 2016, we've never worked from the office on Monday. Like will I tell the team when you join? I'll tell you Monday. Work from home. I have a personal bias to Monday. I feel like people wake up on Sunday, go to church because I used to have a very busy Sunday. You know, go to church, get back from church like five or six. And before I even get time to relax, it's Monday and I didn't like it. It meant that I get into the week and I study psychology, by the way. So it meant that psychologically I get into the week and I'm already disliking my week. Do you understand? I'm already disliking how the week is going because I'm thinking to myself that Monday is the first day of the week and I'm already feeling like this pressure. So you know what I started to do when I started my business? I took out Monday. I said work from home on Monday. So that that way the pressure of starting the week on a good note is higher. So I'm there to get. When I sleep on a Sunday, I'm not pressured. I want to start today, Monday, Monday. I wake up and I just get on my laptop, I start Work. So that's why I started working. That's my first day of the week by Tuesday, which is our first day of the day in the office. We're back in the office now, right now I resume Tuesdays in red because red has a two day work from the office week. So I resume Tuesdays in the morning at red because there's always work to be done at the people company. I will go to company at 4:30 or 4:00'. Clock. I'll be rushing you. You need to see me on a Tuesday getting to the office. You will think somebody's gonna. Because I cannot. I don't tell my team, oh, I'm just coming. You have to wait for me. I'm not that guy. I'll be rushing to get there by 4 or 4:30 just so I can see because, because I've done it since I want to check in. So I'm like, I'm like, guys, there I go. I need this for me. And they leave at 5 o'. Clock. Whatever information they're giving me, I will stay till 7. Most times I don't leave the people company office until 7:38. Most of my staff will have gone home, but I will stay there and deal with all of the updates that requires my impute till 7:38. Now something I carry home. Do you understand? If it is something that requires me to take home, I carry home. Then on Wednesday I resume my people company because red works for me on Wednesday. So I put company, I'm still. And that's assuming that there's no meetings. This is a, there's no outside meeting, no clients meeting. On Wednesday I'm in the people company. So Wednesday if there was work, I carried on Tuesday I resumed doing that people. I'm like, okay, what do you guys, what do you want from me? Yesterday I couldn't do let's get it done. Now I'm doing all of this, I'm checking with direct team and saying do you guys need anything for me that needs to be done? Remember that. And I always say every time the first thing most people understand that the work of a CEO is less to do the work but to ensure that everybody's work gets done. It's like a ship's captain ever saw a ship's captain that is white is not white. A ship's captain is not the one who is down there dredging the sand. The ship captain stands at the end of the boat, holds the wheels and is looking at the map and the graph and saying north. We're going northeast, 30 something latitude and all of those nice callouts. You understand what I'm saying?
- [03:59]
Interviewer
Yeah.
- [04:00]
Entrepreneur
It's not the one who even paints the dial of where the ship turns. Its job is to ensure that we are on track.
- [04:06]
Interviewer
Yeah, yeah.
- [04:07]
Entrepreneur
More direction, less execution. But as an entrepreneur, it's the same model. The mistake a lot of entrepreneurs make is that if you stay in the job of officing, like I said, but when I say chief executive officer, your chief executive officer means you are the chief officer. All your other officers must be officing. If you are not that there, then you need to first do the work of getting your team up to spill. There's something I do. My team knows. I only hire people who can do. I cannot hire you if I'm going to do it for you. Everybody around me, everybody that works me, I don't do their work. I struggle. I get very upset when I have to be the one to do your work for you. If my HR cannot deal with an HR problem, then there's a problem. Why did I hire you? I'm the highest servants because my job is to make sure that all of you are happy. So my job is to look around and say, in fact, when I started my agency, when me and my partner started agency, I was earning the list. We hired a CEO very early in the beginning of our agency, very early. Two years into the agency, we had someone who was going to lead. I was there. But we hired someone who will run the business of doing head of business, of chasing down clients. I could do it, but I already knew very quickly that I would need my time differently. So I had someone who was earning more than me in the company because the goal is not to earn the highest. The goal is to build long term. So I will ensure that. No. Can you do more than me? Yes, you can. I will pay you more. Do it so that I can do other things. Because time is the highest commodity. Time is the real resource. So the more I can keep my time, the more I can do. All I've done all my life is buy myself more time. So when I see a project and I see that I can't do it, I find someone else that can do it. Get it done. Earn from it, but get it done.
- [05:47]
Interviewer
I think you are about to make a statement about the mistake that most entrepreneurs make.
- [05:51]
Entrepreneur
Yes. They want to be the ones to do it all.
- [05:55]
Interviewer
Right.
- [05:55]
Entrepreneur
I've seen a lot of my friends, a lot of people who do businesses who don't scale because they are in the work of doing It a good general is not the one who carries guns and go to the front of the line. That was how they used to fight the war in the 80s in the era of Alexander the Great and all those guys where you would lead from the front with this sword and all of those things. They killed the general. The war is ended. Everybody knows this. Once they take out the general, there's no war. Who's going to plot the strategy in
- [06:27]
Interviewer
this case, the entrepreneur is the general.
- [06:29]
Entrepreneur
It's general. You cannot be the one who is the the game of chess, who do we protect? The king and the queen. As a matter of fact, the queen is sacrificed to keep the king alive.
- [06:39]
Interviewer
Yeah.
- [06:40]
Entrepreneur
So your job is to ensure that everybody else in front of you useful. The pawns are stronger. You look at the generals of the king. The king is the weakest piece on the board. The weakest. He can only move one step in every direction. If you know the game of chess, it's just one step in every direction. The queen who is the second in command is the most powerful. So I always make sure that people who work with me are the more powerful. I have a great resource on the red team Bruk. She's such a dynamite. Like I would go to sleep knowing she's got it. So I ensure that I have those kinds of people around me. What's the point? I'm not going to be the if I'm the strongest person on my team, I failed. The pawns can become a queen. I've ever seen a pawn that becomes a king? No. A pawn can become a queen meaning they can go as fast and the future and become the greatest. But you know what? You cannot be. You cannot be me. So there's got to be only one me A ton of queens.
- [07:32]
Interviewer
As an entrepreneur, if you become the strongest person on the team, you failed. That's a statement you just made. Yes. So is that the reason why a lot of you know our businesses keep failing?
- [07:43]
Entrepreneur
A ton of reason why. In fact, the primary reason why a lot of businesses within the African ecosystem don't scale is because the leader is the smartest person in the room or wants to be smart person not might not be smart but wants to be wants to be smart person in the room. The leader wants to be buil as the greatest Usually then you become the more reason become the reason why your business that business will fail. The greatest businesses you always find out that they are generals actually smarter. For every stage job there was a Paul Allen and all those guys who were who were doing the work, yes. You have to have the vision. The vision must come from the leader. But the actual execution, the brain beneficiation, has to be somebody else who gets it. I was again, to use football analogy, this season, everybody's talking about how great Pep and how great Pep season has been. What they are not seeing is that Pep hired a new assistant this year. Pep, his name is also Pep, too. Lindas used to work with Klopp. He joined Pepsi, and they've been talking about how innovative he is, how he's added more tactical news and all of those. I'm thinking to myself, go and look at Pep's assistants. They are all supposedly greats now. Which means Pep was not the only genius on his team. Ateta was his assistant. Maresca was his assistant. These were all his assistants.
- [09:05]
Interviewer
Right.
- [09:06]
Entrepreneur
Meaning he also surrounds people who were smart. Because if you think about the work Atata has done with Asma, it's incredible. Imagine if he was working with Pep. Imagine the two of them together. Do you know what that team would. And we saw what they did when they were all together. They won trophies. So what we are experiencing is a combination of greatness. And that's what most entrepreneurs don't do. You have to be able to marry your greatness with somebody else's own, because that's how you become greater.
- [09:32]
Interviewer
Well, the problem is that this part of the world, you start a business, die hard, you know, for that business, you bring somebody on and the person quickly want to compete with you.
- [09:41]
Entrepreneur
And that's something that I realized. That happens a lot. Yeah. And it's true. In fact, I was speaking at an event the other day, and this. This thing came up. You hire someone, you train them because you found something, you saw something. Them. Yes. And then you train them, and then they want to automatically become you. I think it's a. It's something to be proud of. I don't even get upset. I worry very hard when I have people on my team who don't think that they can do it without me. There's something they say. There's a saying that imitation is the highest form of flattery. If people see your work, come to you and say, you know what? Connected Minds Podcast
- [10:21]
Narrator
Grainger knows. When you're a procurement manager for an office park, you're not managing one building, you're managing all of them. And to stay ahead, you need to see through walls and around corners. Lights about to fail, filters ready to clog H Vac on its last leg. If you wait until something breaks, you're already behind. Count on Grainger for quality products, easy reordering and 24. 7 support. Call 1-800-GRAINGER click grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.