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Distributor who do you fire next? I know that sounds harsh, but once your team hits five or more people, including yourself, this becomes one of the most important questions you can ask yourself as a leader. Because the truth is not everyone you hire will grow with your company. And if you're avoiding that reality, you're not avoiding pain. You're delaying a disaster. Today I'm going to get into the uncomfortable truth about firing and how it actually is an act of leadership. Welcome Back to the $100 MBA Show. I'm your host Omar Zenholm where I deliver practical business lessons three times a Monday, Wednesday and Friday to help you start, grow and scale your business. We read every single review. Seriously. It's how we know what's helping and what to dive deeper in on the next episode. So if you got 20 seconds, leave a quick review and tell me what you want more of. I'd love to hear from you. The first lesson I want to share with you in over 20 years of building teams is that not everybody's going to grow with you when you're small, when you're starting out, you're hiring based on immediate needs. You hire someone so that they can do a job that you need to do right now. But as your company grows, as your product improves, as your goals expand, as your standards start to rise, you need more from people that you've hired. And the cool thing is that some people rise with you, but some people don't. And it doesn't make them bad people. It doesn't make you a bad leader or a bad person. It just means the journey is taking a turn and they're not prepared for it. The company is growing. I've seen this so many times in my businesses where we're growing, we're changing, we're evolving, but somebody on the team is not. And that's a problem. There's a misalignment here. The next thing I want to share with you is the elephant in the room. I fired a lot of people over the years. Developers, designers, marketers, customer support staff, even people I care deeply about. And it's never easy. It never once was easy. Every single time. It's gut wrenching. At least it was for me. But here's what I learned. Firing someone is often the most responsible thing you can do. Now. We have to remember that you are not an individual anymore. When you start a business, you are the leader of the company. You have a responsibility to the company, to the business, to your customers and your team and the person you're firing. Yes, this is gonna make total sense. And I know that sounds a little bit like HR jargon. No. Keeping someone longer than they should be on the team really does a lot of damage. People that are just not making the cut anymore, they slow down progress. They lower the standards of everything that's happening in your business. They drain energy from you and everybody around them. And worst of all, they drag down the top talent that you love so much. Here's the thing. Exceptional players want to work with exceptional players. This is something that's accredited to Steve Jobs a lot. He said in an interview once, the worst thing you can do to A players is hire C and B players. You want to have only A players as much as possible, because nothing kills culture faster than keeping people who don't match the ambition of the rest of the team. Listen, I know this firsthand from basketball. I've been playing basketball all my life. I play for the Australian team, internationally for the Master Games. And one of the things I tell my team is, hey, we got to show up ready. We got to be competitive. Everybody needs to come prepared and in shape when we go and compete and there's nothing more frustrating than somebody who's prepared and is working hard on themselves and then goes out in the court and gives it their all and puts it all down on the court. And then their teammate is not coming back on defense. They're sluggish. They're not, you know, attentive. They're being lazy. That is so frustrating, because people on your team, they all need to be on the same wavelength of effort, energy, ambition, and care. They got to care enough to work hard. And here's the killer thing that I've learned that will shock you. Sometimes the person you need to fire is the one that's working super hard. The one that is doing long hours, is doing extra shifts. The show up early, they stay late. They do care and they do try. But their work does not equal results. This is just a reality. Sometimes you're not running a charity. You're running a business. And in business, you have to be at your top performance at all times. You are competing with the marketplace, with competitors. Your customers are demanding more. You have to constantly get better and better. And if someone on your team, no matter how dedicated they are, is not producing the results the role requires, they're holding the company back. That's the brutal part of leadership, is that it's your job to make that call. Now, we gotta be fair and we gotta do it right. And we're gonna talk about that in a moment. Everyone's deploying AI agents now. They're automating tasks. They're handling workflows and making decisions. But sometimes they mess up, and then you're stuck trying to fix it for hours. Unless you're using Rubrik Agent Cloud. As you know, AI agents are pretty powerful, but that also means that they can now create 10 times the damage in 1/10 of the time. Rubrik Agent Cloud is the only platform that allows you to monitor, govern, and rewind AI agent actions. One platform to help you unleash more agents faster without the risk. It's running in the background the whole time, watching what's happening, making sure that things stay on track. You get full visibility, and you can set guardrails so agents don't go rogue. And if something breaks, you just roll it back. It's the only way to get real control without slowing down innovation. If your business relies on AI agents, you need the ability to monitor, govern, and rewind their actions. Right now, my listeners get exclusive early access to Rubrik Agent cloud. Head to rubrik.com that's R U B R-I K.com if your to do list is longer than your workday, congrats. You've officially hit the point where I've got this turns into I Need help Fast. Smart business leaders know when it's time to bring in reinforcements before their team burns out. If you're overextended and understaffed, upwork Business plus helps you bring in top quality freelancers fast. Get instant access to the top 1% of talent on Upwork in marketing, design, AI and a whole lot more people ready to jump in and take work off your plate. Instead of spending weeks sorting through resumes and CVs, Upwork Business plus sends a curated shortlist of expert talent to your inbox in hours. Trusted top rated freelancers vetted for skills and the reliability that you need and rehired by businesses just like yours. I'm speaking out of experience. I've been using Upwork for over 15 years to find some of the best people that have worked in my company. It's one of the easiest, fastest, most reliable ways to find somebody to do what you need right now. When you spend $1,000 on Upwork Business plus, you'll get $500 in credit. Go to Upwork.comsave now and claim the offer before December 31, 2025. Again, that's Upwork.comsave scale smarter with top talent and $500 in credit, terms and conditions apply. I really need to stress this point. Your best players, the ones who are talented, dependable, creative, resourceful. The people that get you results. These people notice everything. They notice who's carrying the load. They notice who's slowing down things. They notice when standards slip. They notice when someone is protected even though they're underperforming. Some of you are listening to the words I'm saying right now and nodding your heads and saying, yep, I've been there. Yep, I've been a high performer in a company before or in my job and I've noticed these things. Nothing demotivates A players faster than B players and C players being rewarded with job security they didn't earn. If your team doesn't feel like excellence is the standard, they won't give you excellence. It's just that simple. If they could see that other people are getting away with subpar performance, they're going to give you subpar performance. Why would they do that? Why would they give their 100% and give you their best work when substandard work is acceptable? So firing is not just about removing weak players, it's about protecting the strong ones and protecting your business standards. You're saying to the whole company that, hey, this is not acceptable. We need to make sure that we're giving 100% and we are delivering 100%. Because if you don't do it, the leader of the company, who will? Nobody but you. No one's going to come and save the day and set those standards but yourself. So how do you know when to fire somebody? How do you know it's time to have that conversation? Well, think of it like a sports team. Before the season starts, the coach and the management of the team, they ask some tough questions. They ask themselves things like, who are my star players? Who has the potential to be a star but needs a bit of training and guidance? And who is slowing down the team and jeopardizing us from winning. As difficult as it is, you need to do the same. It's tough. I know. And just side note, this is why people get jobs. This is why people just, you know, go into the corporate world and move up the ladder and don't start a business because they rarely have to do this type of stuff. Yeah, they might have to manage people, but HR usually does that for them. You are a small business and if you hire them, you got to fire them. Right. You have to take responsibility. And even if somebody's on your team who's a manager that's going to be firing, you got to coach them through that, make sure they do. Then hold the standards of the company high. So you need to ask yourself, does this person consistently meet the standards of their role? Do they hit their KPIs on a regular basis? Are they improving? Are they getting better and better? Because the company is getting better and better, Are they aligned with the future of this company? Where do you want to go in the next year to five years? Do you see this person being aligned to those goals? Being aligned to that future? Would you enthusiastically rehire them today? This is a great question. One of the best thought experiments you can do is ask yourself, if you were forced to fire everybody on your team, you had to fire them, no questions asked, who would you rehire? You know, 10 days later, that thought experiment is going to tell you a lot about who your A players are and who are your not so great players. So just to recap your questions are, does this person consistently meet the standards of the role? Are they improving? Are they aligned with the future of the company? And would you enthusiastically rehire them today? If the answer is no to any of those questions, you have your answer. Like I say, when there's doubt, there's no doubt. Now, before you fire anyone, you owe them some clarity. This is where a lot of leaders fail. They feel guilty, they avoid the whole conversation. They wait until it gets unbearable and they just fire people out of the blue. That's not the right way to do it. Instead, you should sit them down and have a honest conversation. You tell them, here is where you're falling short. Here's where you're doing things well. Here's a path for the next 90 days. Here's your plan to improve. Here's the support I'm going to give you, and here's what's going to happen if you don't improve. I'm going to have to let you go. We're going to have to part ways. You gotta be fair. You gotta give them some information about how they're doing. You gotta give them a warning that, hey, if things don't improve, then we're gonna have to say goodbye to each other. That's clear. Now they have a chance. The ball's in their court. You're not blindsiding them. You're giving them the opportunity to rise to the challenge. Now, some will rise beautifully to the challenge and some won't. I've done this countless times. I found that 9 out of 10 times, nothing changes and you're going to have to fire them. But one out of 10 times, they do surprise you. They turn things around, they improve, and they change with the company. So it's worth it just for that 10%. And of course, you want to do what's right and give people a chance. Also, you invested so much into this team member, you might as well give it one last shot, right? Give them one last hurrah. 90 days to move up and get better and invest in themselves. Your job as the owner, as the business leader, is not to keep everyone happy. Your job is plain and simple, to raise standards, to protect the culture of your company, to serve the customer. Because without the customer, there is no company and there's no team and there's no payroll and there's nothing. You need to ensure excellence and you need to build a winning team. This is a skill set that you need to cultivate as a leader where you understand that I'm the orchestrator of this team. I need to build an incredible orchestra with great musicians, and I need to lead them to create great music for my customer. And that requires making hard decisions. You are responsible for the health of the company, not the comfort of one person on the team. That's not doing what's best for the company. If someone no longer helps you move forward, it's your responsibility to help them move on. And that's a responsibility that you took on when you started a business. That's just the reality. You need to do that and you need to be honest about what's best for your business. If this episode helped you get some clarity, send it to a fellow founder, a fellow business owner who needs to hear it. Just share it using the Share feature on the app you're using right now to listen or watch this podcast. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Your business will never outgrow the quality of your team. Your team is your competitive advantage in the marketplace. You can't scale quality with the wrong people. You can't scale the culture with the wrong people. The people who got you here are not always the same people who will take you to that next level. It's not betrayal, it's an evolution. Listen, I'm telling you the honest truth from my heart. Firing somebody is painful. It should be. Because you invested so much in this person. You got to know them. They're part of your relationship life every day. It means you care. It's not a weakness, but it's also a sign of maturity. It means you're ready to lead. It means you are prioritizing excellence. It means you respect your customers and your team enough to do the hard thing. And sometimes firing someone is actually the kindest gift you can give them because it frees them to go somewhere they can thrive. I remember I had to fire somebody on our team at Webinar Ninja was really high level person on our team and I was really delaying it because of all these feelings. And I knew I had to have this conversation. I had the 90 day conversation. Nothing really changed. It was a real, real tough time. And then when I finally told them, hey, we're going to have to let you go, I'm sorry, this is not going to work out, they sighed so loudly. They were so relieved. They were like, oh, thank you so much. I honestly do feel like I need a change and I need to move on. And that has happened more than once. And I got to tell you that they can feel it. It's not just you that feels that misalignment. It feels like there's something that's not working anymore. So instead of the struggle, just face it head on and do what's best for you, the company and your customers. If you found today's episode helpful and you want more practical business lessons to help you start, grow and scale your business. The best thing you could do is subscribe to this podcast, hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app, the one that you're using right now, whether it's whether it's Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. By hitting subscribe, you get our next episode automatically and it's the best way to support the show. It's absolutely free and it's a way for you to commit to growing your business. And now that you've subscribed, I'll check you in the next episode.