Devoted to Managers and those that seek to improve their management skills

So the story continues of how to destroy a business.

Now it wasn’t long after the brother was hired that he began to give his input into how the business should be run. Guess who that involved and affected?

Now to tell you the truth, from the minute he was hired I knew that was coming, so it didn’t catch me off guard. As a matter of fact, if he wanted to continue to improve on what I had build for those years, it probably wouldn’t have bothered me at all.

Well, anyhow, I’m sure you know what happened next, I was no longer the manager but the assistant manager. Now I’m not saying all of this because I was all that bothered. Again, the problem was that now we had a command-and-control guy taking over a culture that had been developed over three years and being abruptly ground to a halt.

Now here is the big problem that developed. The husband and co-owner was more like me in the sense of how the store was managed and his wife and her brother were the command-and-control types.

Eventually I was laid off because the brother was commanding such a high salary plus the brand new truck and its maintenance costs, that the store couldn’t support my salary and his.

It wasn’t too long after all of this that I found out that one of the owners could not agree with the brother, so they pretty much lost the business (they sold it at a give-away price) because they couldn’t agree on how to run the business and brother and sister wanted it their way or no way.

Unfortunately, not long after, it even cost them their marriage.

It is very difficult to make a working relationship with close relatives work. Before you even think of hiring one, you need to ask yourself if you have the strength to get rid of them if it doesn’t work out. If you don’t think you do, then don’t hire them in the first place. You have to realize that if you hire and then have to get rid of them, you could be ostracizing yourself from others in your immediate family for the rest of your life.

But in this situation, in a thriving, growing business, to change management and switch to a totally opposite style of leadership and focus, was the greatest mistake they made. Not only did it cost them the business, but also their marriage.

Every decision that was made was made for the wrong reason. Business isn’t a charity and can’t be run as one; the provision of company funds for excesses that the business couldn’t afford, were the beginning of the end. I hope there are a few things you can get out of this true story that can save you from these painful mistakes.