Boss Life Quotes

“You may be thinking, Why don’t you call a bank? Don’t they loan money to businesses all the time? Yes, they do. But not after they’ve heard a story like mine, in which a long-established but barely profitable company enters a downward spiral. Banks want one thing: their money back, with interest. They only want to do business with a company that has a good plan to pay them back, and plenty of collateral available if that plan doesn’t work out. They aren’t interested in propping up a company that’s in trouble. And clearly I’m in trouble. Everything is wrong here—the fact that I’ve survived for many years without building up a healthy cash reserve indicates bad management, and our disappearing sales indicate incompetent marketing. Showing up, hat in hand, at a bank, when I may be out of business in a few weeks, would show a serious lack of judgment on my part.”
― Paul Downs, Boss Life: Surviving My Own Small Business

“We review the rest of the crew. Will has abandoned whatever qualms he had about judging his former peers. We have a productive discussion. I wrap up with this thought: “We have these mismatches between what the guys are getting paid and what they should be getting paid. I can’t afford to give the underpaid guys a raise right now, and I hate to just go out and cut someone’s pay. It’s cruel. People build their lives, and particularly their debts, around their income. If I just cut pay because I feel like it, it can cause real trouble. So your challenge is to find a way to make the overpaid guys worth the money we’re paying, and to make the shop profitable so that I can give the underpaid guys a bump. You seem to know how these guys work. Now it’s time to define a standard method of work for each thing we do. You’re going to be spending more time teaching and less time doing your own work. That’s OK. Just do it, and let’s see what happens.” He leaves with a thoughtful expression on his face. I’m very happy about the way this has gone.”
― Paul Downs, Boss Life: Surviving My Own Small Business

“The final lesson: what to do when an active client suddenly stops answering our calls. We used to just give up and move on, but Bob has a better idea. “Give them the ‘No.’ Make them say they are done with you. It’s easy to do: just give them an ultimatum. Send an e-mail, or leave a message, saying that it appears that you, the salesperson, have been unable to come up with a way to move forward. You apologize for this, and then say that you intend to close the file and move on. Just say that, nothing more. If the client wasn’t finished, if they were just toying with you, then they’ll get right back to you. Believe me, this will happen. And if they are truly done and you hear nothing, then you can strike them off your list and move on to greener pastures.” Bob suggests another useful tactic. “Suppose you’re afraid that your client is thinking about going to a competitor, or you’re worried they are going to take your ideas and give them to someone else. Or anything, really, that you think might go wrong. Here’s how you deal with it in a non-threatening way. The technique is called ‘My Biggest Fear.’ You ask the question like this: ‘You know, Mr. Client, my biggest fear is that you are going to . . .’” Bob asks us for a list of ways that a deal can go wrong and starts listing our answers. So many fears: the client might give this job to someone else; might not be able to find enough money for the job; might recommend someone else to the decision makers; and on and on. Bob continues, “Whatever your fear is, that’s what you confess to the client. In a humble way. You aren’t trying to bully them into anything. You are going the other way, making yourself look pathetic. If they are human beings, they’re going to feel some sympathy for you, and you’ll get the difficult issue out in the open so that you can address it.” Brilliant.”
― Paul Downs, Boss Life: Surviving My Own Small Business

“The Zen of a very small business: When the Boss Is Ready, the Solution Will Appear (Sometimes).”
― Paul Downs, Boss Life: Surviving My Own Small Business

“In a tiny company like mine, it’s up to the owner to invent the way the company operates and to design the systems that keep track of what is happening. Fortunately, I find this to be an interesting challenge. If I had wanted to build only furniture, I could have kept myself very busy, but the company would not have grown. Without a rational way to handle information, we would have descended into permanent chaos. Thinking about information is different from ordinary work. The challenge is to find good ways, using data, to describe what’s happening in the real world. It’s aligning the description of the company with the activities of the company. My job as boss is to monitor both of these and to continually modify the description to fit the reality. My employees can’t do it—they each work on their piece of the process. I’m the only one who sees everything. I decide what to keep track of, and how to do it. I have two information systems. First, there’s my subjective impressions of the state of the shop, the mood of the workers, the eagerness of the customers, drawn from my observations and conversations. The second is objective, actual data that lives in separate fiefdoms: the accounting system, in QuickBooks; the contract and productions system, in FileMaker; e-mails and customer folders sit on our server; AdWords data lives in the cloud. So do our shared Google Docs spreadsheets, which act as supplementary databases. There are also a bunch of Excel sheets, dating back to 1997, when I first computerized (twelve years after starting the company). None of these subsystems talk to one another. Information passes between them via the people who use it. I’m the only person in the company who knows how it all fits together.”
― Paul Downs, Boss Life: Surviving My Own Small Business

“And then he asks me a series of questions. How many potential clients are we working with right now? If we sold every one of those jobs, how much money would that bring in? Who are those clients? Can I quantify how many are bosses, or assistants, or low-level people? Have I scored each one for quality, so that we know which ones to concentrate on? Have I started regular sales meetings with Dan and Nick? Am I listening in on all their phone conversations? And what about after the call is done? Are they happy? Are they excited by the new methods, or just following orders?”
― Paul Downs, Boss Life: Surviving My Own Small Business

“He’ll be in a day camp for the first three weeks, then nothing. My mind keeps returning to the Middle East. It’s almost two months since I promised to send printed catalogues. I’ve done nothing. Every time I think about it, my will to invest in those relationships vanishes. My confidence that I can manage a long-term, expensive project has disappeared. And if I devote a lot of hours to designing and printing a catalogue, I’ll be ignoring other, more promising work. I don’t want to waste money on brochures that won’t produce income until some point far in the future. And with what I’ve learned from Bob Waks, I have even more reason to give up. I can’t see how we could interact with Middle Eastern clients in the manner that Bob suggests. It’s going to be very difficult to avoid sending complete proposals, and it will be almost impossible to do Glance sessions. The time difference is too much. I decide to drop the whole thing. I talk myself into this by arguing that I don’t think anyone in Kuwait or Dubai will be terribly upset. They weren’t pining for my presence, and they won’t miss me. In the back of my mind, though, I have nagging doubts. It’s hard for me to walk away from the potential for business, no matter how unpromising.”
― Paul Downs, Boss Life: Surviving My Own Small Business

“First: make sure you know with whom you are dealing. The tactics in this situation are determined by where your customer stands in the organization. Are you dealing directly with a decision maker? A pure “D” on the DiSC profile? If so, give her the information she asks for. If you are dealing with a person in the middle of a large organization, you have a much tougher task. The trick is to tease him, showing just enough to demonstrate that you are the best company for the job without giving away valuable information. You can say anything to a client, you can show all kinds of examples of how you have solved your other clients’ problems, and you can demonstrate your sterling reputation by trotting out a list of the important companies that have been your customers—but you must never, ever hand over a written proposal full of specific solutions to their problems. Never give the mid-level buyer anything he can pass on to others. Once he has that, you’re toast. Bob tells us that we should provide specific solutions only after a commitment. A real, solid, irrevocable decision to proceed. A purchase order or a deposit. Get them hooked, and then give them everything they ask for and more. Over-deliver. Bathe them with your love. Show them that choosing your company was the best decision they ever made, and make sure that this is true. Then you can ask for a letter of recommendation and referrals. These are what will get you past the next mid-level buyer.”
― Paul Downs, Boss Life: Surviving My Own Small Business

“So I steeled myself and fired him. I knew that he would have a hard time getting another job, but I did it anyway. After he left, I broke down myself. Depriving someone of employment is no joke. But the mood of the other employees improved immediately. And that taught me a valuable lesson: bad employees make good employees feel bad. It makes them wonder why they should follow the rules. If the boss doesn’t care, why bother? My workers are craftsmen and have their own standards for behavior: show up, work hard, and try their best to make a good product. Seeing a coworker get away with sloppy work and laziness is a slap in the face. They hate it.”
― Paul Downs, Boss Life: Surviving My Own Small Business

“didn’t start my company to do any of this. I had no idea, when I decided that I would make furniture in exchange for money, that this was in my future. And the strange universe of administration expands as the company grows. I can push some tasks onto Emma and Pam, our bookkeeper, and we can outsource some payroll functions. The rest is still my responsibility. The company has fifteen employees now, and takes in more than two million dollars annually. If I spread out a year’s worth of administrative tasks evenly, they take about three hours a day. Please keep in mind, as I tell my story, that the narrative has been extracted from a year’s worth of days that were actually a mix of selling and dealing with this other stuff. Not one single day presented itself neatly arranged, like a book or a movie.”
― Paul Downs, Boss Life: Surviving My Own Small Business

“Nobody wants to write about the multitude of challenges that a boss faces every day, in a way that captures the difficulty of dealing with everything at once.”
― Paul Downs, Boss Life: Surviving My Own Small Business

“Pick up a magazine or paper, or read a blog, and you see one story repeated ad nauseam. Success! How this guy got it, how that gal got it, how this huge corporation got it, how you can get it. These stories are long on results and short on techniques, and almost always omit the really interesting details. There’s an overemphasis on software start-ups and way too much emphasis on outliers, like Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg. I’ve read a lot about those two, but never anything that stated the obvious: they were really, really lucky.”
― Paul Downs, Boss Life: Surviving My Own Small Business

“My nature is to try to figure things out on my own, which, in retrospect, has been bad for me. I stumbled on the most basic business problems: Where do I buy materials? How do I keep records? How do I pay taxes for my employees? How do I advertise? It was very hard to find answers. There were books about running a business, but none about my business. I never imagined that anyone would be interested in helping me, so I never asked for help. And I was always so strapped for time that I would implement the first idea I found, even if it was bad practice. I just muddled along for years and years.”
― Paul Downs, Boss Life: Surviving My Own Small Business

“I had hundreds of meetings with clients and developed table, chair, and server designs that addressed their needs. The more clients I worked for, the more designs I developed. The more designs I had, the better the chance that the next buyers would see something they liked. Feedback loop in action.”
― Paul Downs, Boss Life: Surviving My Own Small Business

“You can have profits without positive cash flow: we might make and ship tables and pay for the costs of production, but not get paid by the client. If our costs are lower than the value of delivered product for a given period, we are making a profit, even though we don’t have the money in hand. Without cash on hand to buy materials and pay the workers, operations will eventually stop. Moral of story: get paid. Profits don’t mean much otherwise.”
― Paul Downs, Boss Life: Surviving My Own Small Business

“Every business has a dual nature: the real-life version with its countless imperfections, and the ideal theoretical business the boss imagined when he started, where everything works as it should and money is made. Good money. Steady money. Maybe even outrageous money. Money is the unavoidable scorecard. Any business can be great at making a product, great with its employees, great with the customers, but if it doesn’t make profits, it isn’t considered a success.”
― Paul Downs, Boss Life: Surviving My Own Small Business

“Inventing the processes that enable successful operations is like solving an intricate puzzle. It’s highly satisfying to see your business running well, delivering the product or service that inspired its creation.”
― Paul Downs, Boss Life: Surviving My Own Small Business

“Thinking about information is different from ordinary work. The challenge is to find good ways, using data, to describe what’s happening in the real world. It’s aligning the description of the company with the activities of the company. My job as boss is to monitor both of these and to continually modify the description to fit the reality. My employees can’t do it—they each work on their piece of the process. I’m the only one who sees everything. I decide what to keep track of, and how to do it. I”
― Paul Downs, Boss Life: Surviving My Own Small Business