Chong told me that he is washed out and tired after running his engineering consulting business of over ten years. He is still very passionate about his business and thinks that the business he is in has great potentials and can still grow but he is spending far too much time on it, clocking an average of 10-12 hours every day. He goes back home tired and hardly spend enough time with his family, even during the weekends. But now that his child is 4, he feels a desperate need to be with his lovely kid before he grows older too soon too fast.
Chong’s business became his ‘busy-ness”.
I asked him why he does not let go and allow his employees to handle more of his work.
“ No, they cannot be trusted”, he says. “ They always screw up and I have to end up fixing it. Takes up even more of my time.”
I asked him if he has a second man; some one who can be his deputy who can look after things so that he can spend more time with his family.
“ I have employed a few before but they never last long”, he said. Why?
Chong replied, “Well they are seldom up to the standards I require and when I try to teach them to do it the way we want it, they resign.”
Chong’s case is a classic case of not being able to “let go of their business”. Business owners having this problem are common.
I tell people that when a person start a business is it like giving birth to a child. When the child grows up, the parent has a natural tendency to still treat the child like a baby.
A classic case of not being able to let go…………
And even when they do get themselves some help they still want things done their way. Their inability to let go stifles the contributions of the ‘ next generation” and results in them to just wait for instructions and follow them. Young people today does not relate to that well. They want to be given an opportunity to innovate, to try new ideas and to be able to have to freedom to run things on their own.
However business owners like Chong are not able to do that. They therefore find it hard to groom and retain successors.
Their biggest fault when they bring in a second person is to keep this thought lingering in their head: “ Why can’t he be a little bit more like me?”. But they are never going to be.
The same goes with family businesses.
Johan is the second son of a successful business owner. He expresses his frustration to me, telling me that working for his father is really tough. The father wants almost everything done his way. He loves his father dearly and that is the only reason why he is still hanging around to help out. His elder brother did that for a few years and could not “take it”, left and started his own business. His father felt somewhat “betrayed” and now they are hardly talking to each other.
What went wrong here? Can’t just be the father’s fault.
Although this is another case of not being able to let go, it is also possible that the son wants changes done too fast and too soon.
But Johan says, “ No. The ‘old man’ just doesn’t trust us.”
That cannot be entirely true. He might perhaps not agree with the way that the sons want things done because he has had years of experiences and it is “just not done that way”. We need to understand that change is always difficult. We just need to rationalize things slowly for them to accept changes.
I tell a story of a joss stick manufacturer who literally fell off his chair when I suggested that he start a website and take his business online. He told me that is a crazy idea because his customers are all “old school’ and none of his customers go online.
I carefully asked him this question, “ When you want to expand your business, are you looking for customers you don’t yet have or customers that you are presently having?” Naturally his answer is; customers he does not yet have.
So I asked further, “Is it possible that you don’t have these customers yet because they do look for joss stick manufacturers online? And you don’t have a website?”.
He thought for a while and realized that it made sense. True story. He got a website done and within a month he got an enquiry from the U.S. asking for a container load of joss sticks to be sent over.
Here are some suggestions for business owners who has difficulty letting go:
Eventually some of these areas will need to be let go off as well. However if you set up a good monitoring and control system that would keep you informed on a timely basis, you will have less to worry about. In the beginning you may need to have regular communications with you intended successors.
Turn your business into a moneymaking machine and enjoy the fruits of your hard work.
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