The Good, The Bad, The Ugly: Part III
Your employee is your best friend, and your entire family loves her to death. The only problem is, you've got a business to run. For some reason, you refuse to give up hope.
You're reading Part Three in a series. For clarity and flow, start at the beggining. Names in this article have been changed.
Our best friends know so much about us, and not just what we love and detest. They could be, by far, the best at manipulating not only our actions, but our entire thought process. And when they are going through rough times, we want to do everything we can to help.
Sue knew all this about me, so when I look back now, I'm not surprised that common mistakes and her supposed lack of knowledge regarding how to keep the back-end of the business running smoothly became a pattern. I was always the one who mis-instructed, or failed to provide any instruction at all. She had, with perfect timing, fessed up to her own forgetfulness or misnomers, but they were few and far between.
Now, I'm not a perfect boss. I'm certain that I've put too much faith in the people around me to know exactly what I want. It's backfired on me before, where I've expected one thing and received something entirely different. And once my own mistake is pointed out, I step back, and feel like an idiot. Then I press forward.
While Sue's time with the company extended, so did my family's appreciation of her as a person. She was often included at various family gatherings (holiday parties, birthdays, memorial services, etc.); she had, in every possible way she could, become a part of the family. Our friendship also grew, as we both continued to share our secrets and felt so fortunate we had someone to lean on during our times of need.
But back to business. While not necessarily a rare circumstance, there are things for which I provide no direction at all - and I actually shouldn't have needed to do so.
When it comes to bookkeeping, all I know is logging charges and payments, appropriately categorizing them for obvious reasons. I have no clue as to what fees are tax deductible or how sales tax needs to be filed. I don't want to know these things, which is why I've always paid someone else to maintain such records.
You can imagine my shock, after several years, when Sue said she didn't understand how to log certain payables and receivables into Quickbooks. After all, she maintained the books in her previous job, and that alone was one of the main reasons I hired her. When we were preparing for a potential audit, I flew to New York, only to find most records stuffed tightly into file boxes, having never been logged. Cash receipts were scattered throughout several folders or envelopes. This explained why, when I asked for a total expenditure on a specific project, she provided me with a figure that was merely a tenth of what was actually spent. Since payment entries weren't categorized to logical accounts, we had no way of knowing, for example, what airline ticket payments were attributed to which client or for what purpose.
What should have taken a weekend took months to figure out - I wound up packing half the records in suitcases and flying them back to Florida. (Please save me the lectures, I know it was a bad decision and have already forgiven myself for doing someone else's job.)
When I tried to address these types of problems, I was again met with excuses about lack of knowledge or lack of direction, and I did all I could to bite my tongue. Nudges for her to use help menus or search engines to find out the best approach was a waste of breath. And yet, I kept trying to move forward.
As time passed, the books got worse, and I felt the brunt of it when partners and vendors called me directly to inquire why they had not received payments. Learning from the past mistakes, I bypassed Sue and went directly to the online statements, only to find that bills were being paid with no regard as to due dates and priorities. In any business, there are people who get paid post haste, while other bills - like utilities - commonly float closer to the actual due date. There were bills paid without even being audited, and I found several companies were being overpaid because of overbilling that was never addressed. This explained some of the issues regarding the company's lack of funds and why we were surviving week to week.
Worse yet, a number of clients' statements were several months in arrears, with no notations of them having been called or attempts made to collect the funds. This was another task Sue effortlessly dumped back into my lap. And what could I do? We needed the money collected.
For some reason, one I would not figure out until some time later, I needed Sue by my side. She, more than anyone, knew that this is what I believed. I was so adamant about making things work that I began to lose sight of the entire reason I had opted to run my own business - I did not want to work for the government or corporate America (been there, done that) and wanted to go to bed each night knowing that I put in a hard day's work and gained respect from those around me. But my nights began to pass quickly, while I lie awake in bed wondering if tomorrow I'd still be able to pull things off. My determination was immense, but was that enough?
