No B.S. Ruthless Management of People and Profits: No Holds Barred, Kick Butt, Take-No-Prisoners Guide to Really Getting Rich

by Dan S. Kennedy

Of course you should recognize their birthdays, childbirths, and anniversaries and genuinely care abou...

But don’t con yourself. They will not be visiting you at the assisted living center after the paychecks stop.

They have a family, and you aren’t in it.

They are your em...

“ACCURATE THINKING

If you refuse to think about your real relationship with your employees accurately, rationally, and realistically, you are forever doomed to disappointment, frustration, rage, and financial losses throughout your busi-ness.

If you acknowledge the true relationship and think about it accurately, you will manage your business and the people in it very differently than if you insist on thinking of these people as friends, family, team members, or even colleagues.

I also strongly recommend his last and least famous book, Grow Rich with Peace of Mind.

and just like we project onto our employees the characteristics we want them to have.

#14: My dog swallowed my car keys. #37: It’s my time of month. #41: I got on the wrong bus.

But it’s also symbolic of something that’s not funny at all: accepting unacceptable behavior.

This is how a lot of business owners get cooked in the squat by their employees.

The employees’ behavior worsens gradually over time.

Little by little by little, one bad one pois...

Occasional tardiness becomes frequent tardiness, then constant tardiness. Sloppy appearance goes from rare to occasional to routine. Work left undone, rare, occasional, com...

If you occasionally accept occasional unacceptable behavior, it’s only a matter of time before you are routinely accept...

Most business owners are anything but.

They give chance after chance after chance, tolerate incompetence and insubordination, twist themselves into a pretzel trying not to fire even the worst employee ever to walk the earth.

Most business owners try too hard to be ...

meaning a boss liked by the employees, rather than an effective boss, or one who sets and enforces standards and procedures in orde...

“If I demand she does that, she’ll quit”

They forget you are paying them to work and generate profits.

So, yes, I very deliberately used the word ruthless to grab attention. One person’s ruthless is another person’s sane approach to business.

There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that a manager liked by the employees creates more productivity or more profitability for the company.

Not only is the boss who’s liked by everybody not any more successful than the boss who’s not liked at all, he may even be less successful.

I guess you can’t argue with Google’s success, but everywhere else I’ve seen the “care and feeding of” approach taken, it has ruined productivity and profits.

I am with Jeff Bezos.

When you come to work, you should be in a workplace, and you should work hard, fast, and intensely. You should be laser-beam focused. You should be under pressure of urgency.

Stone reports that despite Bezos’ cheerful public persona, he is capable of the same kind of acerbic outbursts as Steve Jobs—

Bezos is a micromanager who reacts harshly to efforts that don’t meet his rigorous standards.

I can tell you that my most successful clients surround themselves with very self-reliant people, not babies who need to be brought their blankies and warm milk, cooed at, sung calming songs.

So let’s be clear. You can’t have as goals being beloved by your troops,

being the provider of the coolest place to work,

or being envied by your peers for your pr...

like Chevy Chase’s character trying to best his neighbor with the biggest and most elabora...

“I believe in benevolent dictatorships, provided I am the dictator.”

If you don’t have a Program, you can’t very well expect anybody to follow your Program, can you?

I’m talking about clearly stated, illustrated, and taught expectations for how Bill and Betty are supposed to talk, walk, act, do.

If you don’t have a Program, your employees make up their own.

“We can tell our men: Here is a certain amount of money you can realistically set out to make every week because we have a system for doing so—a system that never fails. Without such a system, goals are empty goals.”

They’ll somehow stimulate a surge of new business,

neglect present customers

A lot of small businesses create that trouble with a ...

To be manageable, a business’s marketing, to obtain new customers and to monetize customers on an ongoing basis, has to have a solid foundation of systems.

Similar manageable systems you can diagram are needed for new customer retention and orientation,

You also need a system that predictably and steadily feeds new leads or prospects into your website, workshop, showroom, or store.

A great marketing management system lets you know, within a small and acceptable range of variance, how many new prospects will start with you next week, how many new customers will buy from you next week, how many current customers will purchase next week, even how many referrals you will get next week.

No B.S. Wealth Attraction for Entrepreneurs.

Few people have systems for managing their businesses or their people, and even fewer have such systems tuned to maximum productivity and profit.

The less freelancing by your people, the more order, the more consistency experienced by your customers, and the better your feedback loops are with your people, the better your business can handle growth and the greater your profits will be.