If there’s one thing I’ve learned about building a business it’s that if I’m the smartest person in the room, I’m sitting with the wrong people.
Because if I know more than them, then too much of my business depends on me.
For a long time, I thought being the owner meant I had all the answers. After all, I started the company, I built the customer base, knew our products and every person I hired would look to me to make all the decisions.
The trap is when you have a hierarchy like this, it does nothing but feed the owner’s ego. And some owners love the feeling they get of complete control and in truth it’s hard not to.
But that’s weak leadership and your business suffers because it becomes only as capable as you are.
Growth in these types of companies is usually slow and often flat because everything revolves around the owner, or worse if it’s family owned.
I’ve worked for companies where the owner still showed up for work, but his family ran the day to day, so anytime you needed anything you had to go to one of his sons and then they had to go to dad. It was just a disaster.
But some owners are smart enough to get past this and it’s why I like hiring people who know more than I do.
If I’m hiring for a sales role, I don’t want to teach them everything I know about sales. I want them to bring me new ideas, experience, strategies, energy and the judgment that I don’t have. I want them to show me things I missed, otherwise I’m growing from the inside based only on what I know.
The same is true for operations roles, marketing, finance, engineering, etc. If I hire someone to manage parts of my business, I want that person to grow and master that area and become better than me.
I’ll still manage the employee, but I want to give them autonomy in the role so they can do more with it than I ever could.
This open mindset is harder for some business owners than they’ll admit because hiring someone with the intent of having them take over some of your job duties means you are going to get challenged once in a while. And some owners don’t deal with this scenario very well and will often terminate employees who think they know more.
But after all, you hired them because you want them to push back against the status quo. They will disagree with your ideas. They will tell you that what you’ve been doing doesn’t make sense anymore. They will see problems you missed and suggest better ways of doing things.
They might be right and they might be wrong, but that’s your job as the owner to make that decision. You are steering the ship and it’s your job to determine the overall risk.
That can be an uncomfortable position to be in, but when you hire the right people and grow to trust them, then the decision becomes easier.
I’ve seen business owners say they want strong people, but they end up hiring people who are easy to manage and only tell them things they want to hear, but that does nothing more than feed the owner’s ego.
Hiring only people who agree with you might feel like your life is easier, but you can be almost certain they are not making the business better. If every employee waits for you to tell them what to do, then that’s like carrying your whole company on your back, and you’ll keep carrying it that way until you finally decide something has to change.
That is not what I want for me or you.
I want people who can take over part of the business and run with it. I want them to make decisions that are as good or better than mine. Preferably better. That way I don’t lose control of the business, but add capability to it.
But here’s the thing and it’s an important distinction because hiring people smarter than you doesn’t mean hiring people who sound smart.
I know plenty of highly intelligent people who have an uncanny capability to overcomplicate a simple problem and still not be able to solve it.
When I hire someone, I look for people who genuinely know more than I do and can take a complicated problem and simplify it right in front of me. When they can do that, that tells me they truly understand the problem.
And that’s the part that really matters.
The older I get, the less interested I become in having a desire to be the person with all the answers. I prefer to be the one who knows how to find people who have better answers.
When you hire people who know less than you, you become the ceiling of the business and when that happens you can almost be certain that the biggest problem your business has is you.
Keep playing the long game!
When you start a business, nobody hands you a manual. That’s why I write The Long Game.
Each week, I share stories, insights, and observations from the lessons I’ve learned—and the ones I’m still learning—about building a business, hiring the right people and creating a culture people want to be part of.
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