You Need a Lackey

If you’re standing at your front counter at an empty game store reading my blog, then this one is for you.

You need a lackey. Right now. As in, as soon as you can reasonably do so. Ideally they should start training this afternoon.

You can’t be in two places at once, and you can’t reasonably do more than a couple of things at one time. Employees amplify the will of their employer, requiring only modest pay and humane treatment. An individual without employees is just a guy or gal who has a commercial lease. If you punch them in the nose, the business is probably closed for the rest of the day. An individual with good employees is like a person with a superpower. They’re stoppable, but they are orders of magnitude more capable than the lone guy or gal.lackeys

Getting employees is pretty easy, though managing them is a different challenge from the one you’ve traditionally faced. You’ll be pretty bad at it at first. I probably squandered what could have been an excellent first employee by alternately being too generous and too demanding. The second employee stuck around and learned with me.

The first objection is always that the store owner can’t afford an employee. If your goal is to have a profitable business, and you’re netting so little that you can’t afford someone to cover you while you take a day off, then you haven’t bought a business. You haven’t even bought a job. Jobs have days off. It’s a tough reality: There exists a state where the business has entered a death spiral. Without the resources to grow, no growth occurs, and nothing awaits but a miracle, eventual dawning of the realization that it’s a lost cause, or a long, mediocre slog that ends in the welcome release of death. The young man who owned my store before me had a fortune cookie fortune stuck to his monitor that said, “Good things come to those who wait.” It’s not true, so don’t wait for it to come to that. If you’re in this situation, then start making dramatic changes to what you’re doing, or start looking for a way out.

Downsides: Having an employee forces you to articulate to another human being how and why you do the things that you do in your store. This will hurt. It will expose all the lazy things that you allow yourself to get away with when you see an employee doing them and it makes you angry. It will cause you to start seeking easier, simpler ways of doing things, not because you can’t do complex tasks, but because the jobs that need doing must be made teachable. You will have to swallow what pride hasn’t been beaten out of you by the game industry and make the changes. It will be worth it, I promise.

Even at a lower income, your life is almost immeasurably better once you have two or three days off every week. Eventually you’ll pick up a second employee, which will save you from having to work 12 days in a row if someone gets sick. Once you’ve got enough employees that you are liberated from the requirement to be behind the counter, your entire life will change. You get to start doing things like hunting for closeout inventory and fixtures, going to trade shows to learn to build a better store, and maybe seeking opportunities to expand or multiply your business. I have seven employees, I’m sitting at the library typing away in peace, and I’m going to have dinner at home tonight. I’ll be away from the store during Friday Night Magic! It would have been unthinkable four years ago.

When you add employees to the mix, you remove the limits placed on the business by your frail, pathetic meatbag body. The new limits are determined by your ability to create good process, hire excellent people, and keep destructive hubris at bay. Furthermore, there are mental limits that can be circumnavigated with the right employees. If you got good ones, you will start to discover that your lackeys are better than you at all the things you’re bad at. I’m starting to get to the point where even my managers get to work on the business  rather than just in the business some of the time. That is a terrifying development, but if I’ve done my job well, it’ll be amazing for everybody.

You need a lackey. Go get one.

 

One comment on “You Need a Lackey

  1. Pingback: Stop Closing Early (You Must Be Present to Win) | Too Lazy to Fail

Comments are closed.