“I Don’t Have Time To Manage My Staff”
“I never planned to start a business, but after a year of working for myself, I hired my first employee. I now have five people working for me and my business is still growing. We have so much work going on, I don’t have much time to manage my staff. I know I should be encouraging them and helping them evolve, but how do I do that on top of keeping my business running?”
Claudine, Fremantle, WA
Today’s adviser is Pauline Nguyen (above), the owner of Sydney’s acclaimed Red Lantern restaurant. She is also an in-demand speaker and author of The Way of the Spiritual Entrepreneur.
Firstly, congratulations on the growth of your business. I love hearing that you have so much work coming your way. A potent lesson one of my teachers taught me in the early years of entrepreneurship was that every business must have three key people in these three specific roles: the Artist, the Manager and the Entrepreneur. Most businesses start because the owner is an artist – whether it be artistry as a baker, a seamstress, an accountant, a chef, a mechanic, or a piano tuner.
They go into business as the Artist, but then find themselves wearing multiple hats, hats that they are not designed for. This is where the Manager must come in. This personality type can do all the things that the Artist cannot – the tasks that take The Artist out of their genius. The Manager handles the staff, the operations, the clients and customers. The Manager manages so that the Artist can continue to create the art.
Then there is the Entrepreneur. This is the person who can emotionally separate themselves from the business, so that they can do the hard things about the hard things – difficult decisions about staff, the future of the business, partnerships and more. The Entrepreneur is the visionary who can, with less emotion than the Artist or the Manager, either amplify the business or make the firm decision to end it for the good of all.
At Red Lantern, [executive chef] Mark Jensen and [co-owner] Luke [Nguyen] are most definitely the Artists. And while the three of us can manage the back of house and front of house with our eyes closed, we simply don’t enjoy it as much as when we are all sitting in our own areas of genius. This is why we employ managers who love what they do and can do a much better job than us. Me, I am most definitely the Entrepreneur.
Do you have an Artist, a Manager and an Entrepreneur in your business? Life is a lot easier and a lot more fun when you do!
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