The Boss Trap

Recently my wife, Lisa, and I helped organize vegan restaurant week in our town. We had to talk to a lot of restaurant owners and in the process we became more familiar with their business operations. One restaurant owner, Billy, was struggling to get everything together for us. Like many small business owners, he was operating short-staffed and he was wearing many hats.

Billy hadn’t thought through the payment/reservation process for the event. He wanted people to make reservations and pay for his special dinner on his Facebook page, but there were a lot of variables that had to be factored in. For example, the special dinner was running on multiple days and for long periods of time that weren’t necessarily the same time length on each day.

I had suggested just taking the reservations and credit card payment over the phone, but he didn’t want to do that.  So, Billy, with very limited experience on Facebook, went ahead with setting up payment and scheduling on Facebook. When he finished, his Facebook page looked like a car with way too many bumper stickers on it, and his checkout wouldn’t allow someone to make more than one seat reservation.

Okay, now would he be willing to take reservations over the phone?

Yes, but his business answering machine didn’t work anymore. Customers had told him that before, but he never fixed it.

Okay, could he fix the answering machine?

Actually, no, he was on vacation and wouldn’t be able to address that issue for a couple of days.

His solution: It will wait until I get back.

Wait ‘til the boss hears about that!

Yeah, about that boss….

Welcome to the boss trap. When you work for you yourself, you are the final decision maker and you’re not accountable to anyone else except yourself.

From a “how you want to live your life” standpoint, that’s great. You don’t have anyone breathing done your neck. You can live life on your terms and mitigate your stress. On the flipside, if you’re only listening to yourself, don’t complain if your business is not all you want it to be or you feel stuck.

By the way, I am the poster child for the boss trap.

A small explosion goes off in my head every time I’m involved in a group project and I have to listen to other peoples’ opinions. To be honest, I don’t think it’s about me wanting to boss other people around. In fact, I want them to go away. It’s more about me not having the final say and not wanting to be told what to do.

“I am the boss of me” is my boss trap.

Regardless, the boss trap has hampered my business progress throughout my life. Here’s a simple example: The scheduling system that we were using was glitch-y and wouldn’t let us adjust the time in between clients for each massage therapist.

We needed to look for a new system. So, initially, boss Mark…

(a) started a spreadsheet where he compared scheduling systems

(b) called scheduling systems when he had questions about their features

(c) Both a and b.

(d) avoided the decision by finding something else to do.

Yep, it was “d”. As soon as I saw that the process of picking a new scheduling system was going to be a big, hairy deal, I was out. And who was going to stop me or say anything. That would be nobody since I was the boss.

Here are other times in my massage career where I got caught in the boss trap:

• It took me over a year to put up our marquee sign at our one office. I was afraid I was going to mess it up and have to pay for a new one, so I avoided putting it up. The sign brought in about one client per week. That’s a $3000 to $5000 missed opportunity.
• I had a friend do our business website in exchange for massage. That took about a year to get done because she was busy and I didn’t want to bother her. Not sure how to measure that lost revenue.
• Before that I had a client build my neuromuscular massage website in exchange for massage. That was a two year project that never got done because I avoided confrontation. I measure that one not in terms of financial loss but in terms of hair pulled out.

But things changed for me when we hired a great massage therapist, Sarah. Sarah had worked in the corporate world for 10 years, and it quickly became apparent that she had business skills that could be utilized in our business. So it was a no-brainer to get Sarah involved with the operations of the business. When she did, we started to get more traction.

Why did we get more traction?

Let’s circle back to the scheduler. I had brought Sarah in on the scheduler project. So, initially with the scheduler, I did my typical boss trap behavior and avoided rolling up my sleeves to reach a decision. But it didn’t take me too long to realize that I would soon have to explain to Sarah why I’m not moving forward on a decision. Both Sarah and I were invested in this process. Now I had some accountability.

F***.

So, the next thing I did was to…

(a) avoid Sarah

(b) take a vacation

(c) bitch and moan

(d) put on my big boy pants and work towards a decision

Okay, so it was “c” and “d”, but the point is that I knew it needed to be done and that I was the hold up. Sarah was testing out the systems I was asking her to test out, but I wasn’t putting everything together and narrowing the field.

I jumped back in and we now have a scheduling system that meets the business’s needs.

It’s really hard to get out of the boss trap because it’s complicated. You’re a boss of yourself for a lot of reasons. And in Billy’s case, it’s mainly about creating a business that is basically about him. I don’t think he wants to get out of the boss trap—and that’s fine—but when shit blows up in his face, he shouldn’t look surprised. And since we now know that we’re dealing with someone in the boss trap, at next year’s event, we will limit Billy’s involvement to what we know he can manage.

So are you in the boss trap?

You can get out.

Start by leaving a comment below or shooting me an email:-)