I fired someone today

The Emperor's Lounge
#1

I fired someone today.

I’m not happy about it, I took no pleasure in it… but it had to be done. I hired someone to do a job, they billed me for many more hours than it ought to have taken, and then I found out today that they hadn’t even started the actual project yet. Not a clue what they’ve been doing for the time I was billed for.

The first time I fired someone, my (former) business partner told me to go eat a cupcake. This was significant because it was coming from a man who had personally declared war on both sugar and gluten… but he said screw it, you deserve it.

That was also a case of someone just not doing the work they were paid for. So was the next time. That’s been the case every time, actually. I’m exceedingly forgiving otherwise.

It has only ever gotten a bit easier; I really dislike confrontation. (in regards to the cupcake, he must have mistaken my paleness and shaking for severely low blood sugar lol)

@Hoppa @Billions and anyone else who runs a business… what are your thoughts on situations like this?

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#2

That’s just nonsense. If it’s gotta be done, it’s gotta be done. It’s not an emotional situation. It’s just business. You’re firing them because they put themselves in that position.

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#3

Thinking back, every single instance boils down to a very simple situation.

I trusted someone to do something, I paid them in good faith to do the work, and I believed that work was not my direct responsibility anymore. When they took the money and did not do the work, not only did I feel betrayed and foolish, now I had extra work back on my plate to boot.

Edit: I don’t mean they tried their best but were unable to complete the task (either on time or at all), I mean… they simply didn’t do it, and took my money anyway.

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#4

I ran into multiple situations like this running my businesses and you did the right thing. I even had to fire a family member(cousin) once who was stealing from me. And it crated conflict within my family which really hurt me mentally. Its part of running a business, you have to cut off the loose ends and liabilities costing you money. Bottom line is alot of people are lazy and want to take advantage of people, and as a business owner you need to look out for this and handle it. You clearly have a very good heart and head on your shoulders as well since despite him doing wrong you still had bad feelings about firing him.

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#5

I’m disputing the charges, but I am being civil and polite about it. lol. I have no desire to hurt this person’s business with a bad review, but I won’t tolerate being taken for a ride… especially not for 4+ figure sums.

I’m ok doing what has to be done, I guess I’m just expressing that I don’t have to like it. :upside_down_face:

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#6

Really good play bro, always best! Try to get back the damage and end it like a gentleman. Yeah its a shitty part of business for sure, i think most business owners can agree on that

#7

You’re not firing someone… you’re stopping the use of a servoce provided by a business because the business sucks.

Absolutely dispute the charges.

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#8

100% Facts

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#9

The only business I run at this time involves selling my own services.

But I see your post as being about the emotional and experiential costs–the human costs–associated with effective setting and enforcement of boundaries.

It’s not just about if you were ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. You are clearly right and justified in your action.

But there’s so much more (beyond simple rightness or wrongness) to be mined and learned from interactions and situations like this. It’s worth some processing and reflection. It’s where we start to get into the world of factors like ‘Discernment’, ‘Acumen’, and ‘Skill’. I think this is actually somewhat ‘Power Can Corrupt’ territory: Clearly understanding the dynamics underlying choice and decision-making.

There were specific choices made by the person you hired. It’s highly likely that the person did not take a great deal of ownership and responsibility for those choices. It’s equally likely that they carried out those exact same choices repeatedly and deliberately. And those choices led directly to the choice that you just made. And your choice was good.

The ‘plausible deniability’ dynamic is pretty common and runs through many interactions and situations.

A: “I’m innocent. I didn’t know!!!”

B: “That may be…but it’s your job to know. It was easier for you to choose to not know.”

A: “…”

I genuinely believe that you will reach a point of understanding this process well enough that you will be able to approach similar interactions in the future with less personal suffering.

I’m working on the same.

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#10

My goal with much of my business projects has been to generate enough cashflow that I can delegate enough things so as to decouple myself from ALL of the external day-to-day operations. I know @Hoppa understands this of course. :slight_smile:

But… I have a nagging worry that it might end up being just another “when I achieve X I’ll be happy” in disguise… for me, at least.

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#11

Most people aren’t conscientious. It goes both ways. People either want money for nothing or they want you to do work for them for free. It’s better to pay them half upfront if you have to pay them to begin doing the work. Then pay them the other half after they finish. There should also be something in writing, and always good to check if they’re even licensed.

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#12

It sucks. That’s why I “outsourced” that too :wink:

Since you seem to have a repeating problem with this, I think you need to check your process for hiring/ follow up on the project. In general, it’s a problem with your processes, not personal.

As a business owner it’s your responsibility to develop the systems. Do not even give them a chance to behave like that.

Do you require reporting on how the project is advancing?

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#13

Do you enjoy the day-to-day stuff? If you do, then do it yourself and systemize the boring tasks.

I systemize everything I find boring. No need to waste my time on tasks I hate doing.

I also happen to enjoy building systems. At least for the time being. I’m sure I will push that to someone else too, once it turns into a job for me.

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#14

This agreement was very locked down, or so I thought, but there’s a chance that merely having the related documents/files open on the screen for the automated screenshots is enough for the platform to consider the person “working on” the tasks, regardless of whether they did anything with it or not.

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#15

I frequently outsource parts I don’t know well enough to do myself, and one hazard of that is taking the freelancer at their word when they say they’re making progress as I don’t know enough to know for sure.

I’ll see how this particular situatuation plays out, but based on the stated policies, I think I’m probably done with this specific platform for a while at least. I already see how I could have structured the project better, though it would have made everything far more complicated as each new part or scope would have been a different agreement.

I do. But as I said above, if I’m in the dark as to what’s real progress and what’s BS, all the reports in the world won’t do me any good.

I enjoy the technical parts of it, most of it at least… Where I shine is designing the overall concept and a system to make it work. Then, my approach was to hire a technician (another engineer, specifically) to finish the last few detail parts of the design so I could focus on other matters.

Unfortunately, I seem to be rather bad at hiring good workers.

You’ve said a more poetic version of this once before, I have it saved in a text file somewhere… I should make an art print out of it and frame it over my desk. Seriously. :nerd_face:

Same. I’ve read about so many entrepreneurs that build systems well enough that others can take over even the new systems creation, and then they can exit day-to-day operations to go do whatever else they want.

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#16

I think I’m just having a bad week in general; no changes to my stack so I don’t think it’s necessarily sub recon… but whatever the cause, I think I’ll try to refrain from making any more big decisions this week.

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#17

Are you running Fenrir? This module would greatly help you in that situation

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#18

Not at the moment, last time I updated my stack it was Emperor, QL3, and Sanguine.

#19

I wonder if we could figure out how to make your process better…

For me it’s easy. I haven’t had to hire anyone to do something that I haven’t figured out yet myself. And I don’t need any deeper knowledge usually. Figuring out FB and marketing processes is simple.

We actually had our first strategy meeting with an agency that is going to take over our FB marketing today. Been searching for a good candidate for a long time. I know there are great agencies abroad, but here they need to operate in Finnish.

Interesting to see how it goes.

In your case it’s more complicated. I assume based on what we have talked earlier, that it isn’t feasible for you to get deep enough knowledge in this project.

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#20

In this case, it’s a precision engineering task, requiring more specialized knowledge than I have, or have been able to learn (so far).

Best of luck with that! Years ago I’d hired an agency that was very highly recommended, and they came with a rather high price tag for what we needed… but I figured if we can hit our sales targets, it’d be worth it. They ended up completely flaking on us, and burned our reputation with a prominent influencer who had trusted us enough to give us advertising access to their FB page by running pure spam ads FROM THE INFLUENCER’S ACCOUNT. That stunt got both the influencer’s ad account and our ad account shut down. :face_with_symbols_over_mouth:

I can learn, it’s just taking time away from my other duties and projects.

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