What follows are seven lessons I learned the hard way. These are the lessons I remember best. I’m hoping you can learn something from my experiences.
1. Don’t hire your brother. It was great and it was terrible. He served as our operations guy and did a super job. But, family dynamics impact the work relationship and it’s not pretty. EVERYBODY told me not to do it and I did it anyway (which is, unfortunately, largely the way I roll). Thankfully it ended on good terms and he moved on to another position at a great company earning more money.
2. Check the restrictive covenants before you build a $2,200 tree house. We had to tear it down. It was horrible. Plus – to add insult to injury – my wife was able to say “I told you so.”
3. Don’t scream that your employees “are f***ing idiots” if they are within earshot. I thought I was on hold – I wasn’t. She quit. We ended up in an unemployment compensation hearing at the Employment Security Commission. I lost.
4. Don’t get yellow upholstery for your office guest chair bottoms. They stain really easily.
5. Don’t buy a British car. I bought at Range Rover. I was so cool except when pieces of the car fell off. After 18 months I couldn’t stand it anymore and sold it. I lost a ton of money.
6. Don’t let people come in and use the phone. He knocked at the door, said his car was broken down and asked to use the phone. I let him in, he pulled a gun and held us at gunpoint for half an hour. Now I simply offer to place the call for the person.
7. Don’t use proprietary document imaging storage solutions. The vendors all say you can easily move your documents from their system to something new. Of course, you can’t. They want to keep you as a customer forever. Keep your images in the most open place possible so you can move to a new system when you need to make a change. More than a decade later we are still dealing with problems that came from our use of a document storage system called Keyfile.
I could easily add an eight, nine and ten but I can only handle so much at one time.
