Tired Of Always Dealing With Business Problems?

Dealing with business problems can be stressful. Listen to the video to learn how Jonathan has come to embrace it…

If you’re anything like me, you probably get really tired of dealing with problems. You get tired of dealing with the same thing, over and over again, whether it’s an employee problem, or you’re fed up with dealing with some stupid mistake that somebody out in the field made, and now you’ve got to deal with the client. You’ve got to apologize for the twenty-fifth million time.

It gets really old. It gets really frustrating. Or, maybe you’ve got to deal with money problems, or you’ve got to deal with figuring out how you’re going to coordinate a project. It goes on and on. It’s like everyday, what’s going to hit you now, what’s going to be today’s problem? It just never ends, and so the hope is that, one of these days magically everything will be perfect, or maybe one of these days I’ll have somebody run the company for me, and I’ll never have to deal with these problems again.

I’ve definitely felt that way, and I’ve gone through years of feeling that way. It’s like, “Gees, this frickin business. I mean, when are we going to get our stuff together here, and get our problems solved, and quit screwing up? When is all the different crap that we deal with, marketing that’s not working good enough, money that’s not coming in fast enough, hating some of the work we do, and we can’t find any employees, when is that going to get better? When am I going to have to stop dealing with it?”

There was a point, I don’t know when, but it was a while back, that it sort of dawned on me. It’s like, man this is what I get paid to do. It doesn’t mean that it won’t get better, it doesn’t mean that it won’t ever get fixed, it doesn’t mean the company will mature, and grow up, and things will smooth out, but this is what I get paid to do. I mean, if I were to go get a job working for somebody else, and I want to make a lot of money, this is what I’d be doing for them, and that’s the point.

What I did, and maybe it’s of help to you, is I finally mentally adjusted to the fact that, you know what, this is what I get paid to do. This is why I make the big money, or back in the day, this is why I hope someday I’ll make the big money, because I deal with the problems. I make stuff happen, and if you’re on my team and you make a lot of money, it’s because your the person that helps fix problems, and deal with all the crap that goes on with running a company. The guys that make all the money make all the hard decisions, have to apologize and deal with all the problems. They work the longer hours, figure it out, go through stress of all of that.

Everybody, in fact if your a CEO of a big company, it’s not smooth sailing. You’re dealing with one problem after another. One person after another is coming to you, you’re helping solve the problem. You’re dealing with the problems of dealing with the right team. You’re dealing with the problem of when your best person leaves your company. You’re dealing with the problem of, there’s a cash crunch. That is why you get paid the big money, and when you hire more people to be on your team, and those individuals within your company want to make a lot of money, the only way they make a lot of money is to solve big problems for you.

You don’t just pay somebody tons of money within your organization to do the easy job, to not have to deal with the problems. Those team members never make the big money. Even a really exceptional sales person, who makes the big money, has to deal with all kinds of crap, all kinds of stuff. They have to negotiate things. You get the idea, it’s not easy. The guys that make a lot of money selling, work really hard and they do hard stuff, and they deal with hard problems, and they’re constantly having to apologize. Somethings going wrong with the sale, somethings going wrong with the project. They’re fixing it, that’s what we do, that’s what people that make money do. There’s no business that exists that’s smooth sailing without problems.

A great company knows how to minimize those problems, and a great company knows how to quickly deal with those problems when they occur, and after a couple of the same problems happen, they know how to fix them so that they stop happening. But, then that company gets to the next level of it’s business and all of it’s systems, and all it’s procedures, everything starts to break, because it’s becoming a whole new organization. It has to go fix the next set of things, so that it can get to the next level in business, and then that stuff starts to break and you’ve got to fix it again. Every time the company reaches some new plateau of gross revenue, and employee count, lots of stuff starts to fall apart, and break, and problems start to happen.

It’s your job to fix those. It’s your highest paid employees’ jobs to fix those things. So, the point here is that life will never be perfectly smooth sailing until you cash out. But, then on a side note, with your money you now have to figure out how to manage it, and protect it and grow it. That will just be a different set of problems. The point here is, that if you mentally adjust to, this is what I’m getting paid for, I’m a problem solver, I’m a fantastic problem solver, I’ll take the problems, I’ll fix them, and we’ll be a better company. When you get there, life will be just a little bit less stressful. I finally adjusted to that years back and I have to remind myself of that quite frequently.