I remember the day I found out my boss was earning less than me. It made me sad.
Back in the day I worked in a cute little café. Sadly, it was pretty quiet. We made good food and good coffee, but it never really took off.
Closing the register one day, I realised the rest of the team and I were on a higher hourly wage than the owner.
That didn’t seem right. She was there as long as we were, putting in big hours, and she had the most at risk. Surely she should be paid the most.
But she wasn’t, and she never told us.
Either she hadn’t realised it herself yet, or she didn’t want to share something so private with her staff.
That disappointed me even more. The thought that she couldn’t trust us. Everyone who worked there wanted to do good work. We wanted to see the café succeed, and maybe more importantly, we wanted to see her paid well.
A business that makes no profit is a problem. I wish she’d involved us more in trying to solve it.
Now that I run my own business, I involve my team in our day to day financials. My team knows we need to hit a specific target each week to stay profitable, and when we miss it, we start looking for ways to improve.
Business is daunting, and as a leader you often don’t know which direction to turn. But it seems a business really only has 2 big problems, and they often come hand in hand:
- Not enough money coming in
- Too much money going out
Once you know that, the team can start chipping away at both.
For example, to get more money coming in at Tomlins St, Cal and Patrick actively ask customers to review us on Google. It’s obvious, but almost nobody does it.
The team at Tomlins St work really hard to earn those reviews, and they ask for them so more people find out about us. People can’t love what you do if they don’t know you exist.
We see new faces at the café all the time, and they tell us, “We came here because of the reviews.”
Looking back on that café, I wish my old boss had known this.
I wish she’d sat us down as a team and said, “We’re not winning, and I’m not 100% sure which direction to go.”
If she’d told us the business had 2 problems, not enough money coming in and too much going out, our small team could probably have pointed to 30 things we could be doing differently or better.
We could have made so much money.