Employee to owner manager - What i learned (the hard way) first time around.

It was the early 1990's, school was done and university wasn't something that was aspiring. As a muscian living away from home, there was a need to make extra money to pay the bills. An offer to work on the other side of the stage in lighting and then sound production encapsulated my love of music, and not just the music that I was into. After a couple of years working as a sound engineer doing pub gigs, festivals and picking up corporate work, the company i had been working for made some strategic changes to go from live music production into studio recordings. Having received the call of the change, the reality of the situation left an understanding that the job I loved was about to disappear. I grasped the situation further by asker the business owner what they were going to do with all the equipment I had taken care of for two years and the simple answer was, to sell it. The money from the sale was needed to build a new studio.

As a sound engineer, my skill at reproducing live music was pretty good. My efforts had secured several important business relationships and consistent repeat bookings each year. As a 20 year old, driving hundreds of km's, loading a couple of tonnes of equipment up and down stairs, then putting on a show with a band till the wee hours, I then realised, it was something I was really good at, and everyone i worked with thought so too. I didn't have the sort of money needed to buy all the equipment and start my own business, but at that point in life, i felt the need to go all in and find away.

Talking to my father on the phone, the conversation came up about my current work situation which led to a pretty simple maths equation of whether or not, a new business was sustainable. We did the numbers, and a short while later, I had the resources to get a loan through the backing of my dad and the bank. The whole process took about two weeks, and then I was a business owner with a huge loan and I had to prove myself not only to my family, but to myself.

Concert, theatre and lighting companies require people to help put the production together. In my travels previously as an employee, I had worked with several different people along the way, some were mentors, others were direct competition. Age had no barrier in the music industry, nor race or ethnicity, it was a community of people who worked together to put on a show. As a new owner of a business, I was able to continue working with all the venues and bands that were part of my old job. The company I had worked for were 100% supportive and helped me all the way with bookings.

Managing people.

Having the ability to take the reins of running a sound & lighting business, my vision was to help other musicians, the ones that had a dream to be a professional musician, but needed a job to make ends meet. That community of people I had been working with for years were the targets to help run my new business. At the time, there wasn't any sort of manual on how to run a business like this one, apart from the obvious, by getting booked for jobs, I had never considered what being the boss or a manager was really all about.

My role had changed, i was no longer just an employee working with other people, I was now the person making all the calls on how best to produce the best possible outcomes for my clients. At the time, I simply thought of it all as a multi tasking job. Teach everyone how load equipment safely, learn how best to place a microphone, how to unroll and roll up leads, learn how to use the mixing console and work out how to make use of lights that made the show look great.

For me it was always about how my business would be different to others and who was to benefit the most from a quality product and service. I just wanted to produce the absolute best quality of sound production and lighting that I would expect if I was the performer on stage. I was the conductor of an orchestra, helping a team of people learn every angle of sound and lighting that worked for my business. The first thing that came to mind was what happens if yours truly gets sick or injured or if I couldn't be at an event in person, it was probably the single most important part of the process to get my team up to speed to take over if i wasn't able to attend myself.

I had a trusted team of six people, three of which were very much casuals and the other three made what we called making a living working for my business.

Operations - Process Management

To achieve my goal by getting everyone up to speed on how the production system worked, on each job, we had, a rotation system put in place so everyone got to learn lighting, front of house mixing, stage management and equipment quality checks. It seemed a simple solution and worked a treat. On the big events I would take the helm as chief sound engineer particularly with famous musicians and bands to make sure the event was absolutely perfect sound wise. To keep my team energised, i would simply stand back and say "your room" to who ever was on the lighting console and swap jobs with them for a period of time.

I didn't realise it at the time, but i was giving everyone who worked with me on the job training and the opportunity to learn new skills with some incredible Australian bands who were just awesome to work with. when you are at the helm of a 5,000 to 10,000 watt PA system, and know one else in the room knows how to do what you do, it really is a tremendous buzz, and that's the effect my team got from it. Its like a live studio when things are going really well. Importantly, it did give all on our team a chance to understand each others preferred roles and who was better at doing certain roles on the production team. In todays business world, its rare to see a business operate in such a way.

For a small business, we punched well above some of the biggest production companies simply because we were musicians helping musicians. It wasn't just a job, we were all learning more about music every day by working with styles of music from jazz, blues, reggae, rock, alternative and ever opera. Some styles we liked and others not so much, however, we were in an environment that simply breathed music industry and we grew to partner events with other production companies working together to produce concerts that had 10,000 people capacity. Now we were sub hiring staging companies and lighting companies, and for major events, and army of people to organise.

Now as much as this small business was all about every aspect of music, I look back on several key approaches that at the time just seemed completely obvious. When you're in your early twenties, you live under the banner of

"oh, you're a musician, that's cool"

or if talking to parent aged people, it was,

"when are you going to get a real job".

The world as we knew it labeled us "roadies" yet, no other person at the event, apart from the crew, could do what we did. Anyone who is healthy and fit can lug tonnes of gear around, but not everyone could be a sound engineer or understand the difference in frequency's between 20 herts and 20,000 herts, or where that blistering high pitched feedback came from. We were a professional sound and lighting production hire company helping hundreds of thousands of people have a great day or night enjoying their favourite bands and entertainers.

Management.

So why the long story about a small business and the music industry? I started this blog about moving in to management to remember my own growth from employee to manager and leader at the very start of my working career. In my case it was owner/manager and I was the person organising, operating, paying wages, invoicing and collecting money. The secondary part was working with people who helped me provide a service to my clients. Without the people who worked for me, my business would never have grown to become a full time business. The fact is, without the people who were employed to do the job, the business was not possible to operate without them.

The key to small business was it's people.

Back in the early 1990's, there was plenty of work for both musicians, bands and production companies, the industry was strong and there were plenty of companies to work for. After five years, everyone who had worked for my business we're still on board in one way or another. They all had the ability to take the reins and do a show without my presence.

In 1995 I employed a new person to take on my business for me as I had sustained an injury that made lifting heavy equipment out of bounds for me. I simply could not bring myself to stand around and watch everyone do all the work, it was time to take a step back and hand the baton over. I made the decision to look into another line of work for myself while the business and the people who worked for me, were able to continue on with the day to day. I became a non executive director of the company.

No matter what title an employee has,

if you as the owner trust them,

Listen !

And this is where I made my first major mistake, instead of trusting the team of people I had worked with for the past five years, i passed the baton onto an outsider, someone who had not been a part of the process and development of my employees, my team or the building of my business. I didn't share my thoughts with my team, and went ahead with an unknown engineer to take my place.

Within a short amount of time, my team mates were calling in sick, something that had never happened before. Even when they were sick, i would work it out so they could stay home and recover, but if there was no one else, they would insist to not let the team down and come to work. Ultimately, not turning up risked cancelling and event and the resulting damage of not providing the service was pure damage control for the business.

The "new guy" as it were had all the credentials, he had been a practicing sound engineer for a few years longer than myself, he had a wife and a new baby, he needed to make a living to support his family. On paper, he looked like a good fit.

The phone rang a few weeks later after I put the new guy on, it was my lighting engineer and trusted friend,

"Paul, the new guy is not right, i've tried to tell hime we don't do things the way he does, but he is not doing the right thing, he's treating everyone like slaves, yells at us and argues with everyone including the venue operators and the musicians. He's also doing drugs in the car park before every show"

The conversation went on and painted a significantly different picture than what I had hoped for. At the time I was a little shocked and not sure what to do, i finished the phone call with a promise to have the conversation the next day when everyone was back home.

The next day I rang to discuss with "Malcolm aka the new guy" about the events of the night and give some advice on working as a team, and that he was not the boss. His role was to oversee and be responsible for the production and crew. I ring, No answer, I tried a few more times over the next hour and still not answer, it was 1pm, a time consistent with hitting the road with the team to go to the next show, again I call and still no answer. I ring my trusted lighting guru and he hasn't heard from Malcolm either. The deadline for leaving to head off to the show pass's and my new employee Malcolm is nowhere to be found. Worried, i shoot over to his place only to discover, he doesn't live here anymore, the place is empty. A neighbour tells me the wife an child left here a month ago and the man "Malcom" hasn't been here for weeks.

Now, my first problem is there is a show booked in Toowoomba, about two hours from where i am, the second is that "Malcom has about 1 tonne of all the important equipment and most expensive equipment, without that equipment the show can't happen.

Three, I have another member of the team loaded up with his truck waiting to hear my response. At this point, i'm well aware that everything I had worked for, my business, my reputation and the equipment, that was the centre piece of the business, was now very likely in serious trouble.

The new guy had skipped town and back to Sydney, with my truck, my equipment and about $15,000 in cash from shows he had done with the team in the previous days. In those days, cash payment was standard after any show other than governemnet events. This guy had approx $100k worth of equipment, my truck and the teams wages. And that there was the end of my small business. I trusted someone with something so important to me, and paid the ultimate price, and so the team of people, my friends that worked with me, we're now out of a job. All future bookings terminated and the business was instantly disabled.

So what went so wrong?

Looking back, i did a lot of things really well as a twenty something. The onus and responsibility to take a risk, get a loan, grow the business and put that altogether with a dedicated team of people to help us all achieve a common goal. The goal was to provide a great experience for clients, and put food on the table each and every week and to build our careers as professionals in the music industry.

I had embraced a beginner mindset, and was curious and imaginative about what was really important for the business, it was the people who were the most important from day one right to the day I lost everything.

As a owner/manager, and an inexperienced one at that, it was my core values that I stuck with when dealing with people. Being honest was something that I have always had drilled into me from my parents (baby boombers), it aligned with integrity, if you say you are going to do something, don't just do it, do it right and be respectful.

As a management consultant today, the one thing that has always framed myself in business is being honest and having integrity, but to me, these are who i am as a person.

The important part of this story is the relationships and human skills needed to have success in any situation or in this case, a business. What seemed to me to be the right thing to do with my then small business wasn't something i was taught from business, it was something my parents installed in me as a young boy.

The people i worked with were part of a team, just like my football teams and cricket teams, this music industry business was my team, and i was the captain, the leader and definately not the boss. I worked beside these guys everyday for 5 years, we travelled together, we drove stupid distances, at stupid hours of the night, we ate together, we celebrated together and we shared blood sweat and tears together. We trusted each other and could always count on each other.

Our working relationships was always

built on we, it was never me.

When things changed for myself personally, a back injury, i changed the entire dynamics of the business, all i had to do was step aside, and let the team do what they knew how to do. All I had to do was assign a leadership role to one person in the team. Nothing would have changed, I still looked after the bookings and administration and had every intention of growing the business another step. By looking outside the business, I had inadvertently allowed a very different dynamic into the team, and I wasn't there to guide, mentor or lay down the values I expected when in the heat of the operations aspect. I didn't really know what a boss mentality was, but Malcolm certainly did. He had obviously come from another business where all the workers were slaves to their boss. He was obviously treated poorly himself as a worker in his previous job, and brought that mentality with him now that he was in charge. The new guy operated at a poor level of engagement with clients and treated the team with complete disrespect.

The second mistake was talking to my team about giving Malcolm a chance to get his mojo, find his way, being flexible to what the new captain might want to do. I basically gave the new guy a long rope and told my team to go with it. Clearly, that was wrong, the team were well oiled, they had a great working relationship and sore every job as a team of equals.

My decision to ask them to put that on hold was in hindsight, a big mistake, I made a judgement error that not only effected the team, but it also stopped them from communicating to me on day one, that there was indeed a problem.

Fourteen days down the track, not only is the new guy a problem I'm finding out about, but if I had of known after day one, chances are the team would have told me to move him on. It was only at the point that they couldn't take it anymore, that i got the call. Maybe, just maybe, i might not have lost my business, if I had just followed my own values and trusted my team to do what they did best.

I believe the importance of human skills, building relationships and understanding people, is one of the most important skills in business. If you have great people in your business, whether average or excellent at their roles within the organisation, you already have the most essential skill needed for success. Great people share some common traits, they are caring, kind and they are helpful, they usually have empathy as well.

Why in todays world do we see organisations

bring in people to take over important roles

based on resumes and skill sets,

yet, we don't look at their human skills, their values,

or understand how to effectively measure their emotional intelligence.

Clearly, every business is different, you have to bring people in to grow the organisation, it's how growth evolves. My point here is, when you earn trust by leading as a team mate, not a boss, you can make your employees time significantly better when at work. Position, title, or leadership roles happen within teams, even for managers. My first role as a manager was pretty significant as far as financial risk goes, but to the twenty something young adult i was, it was my years in team sport that led the way in how to work with people. If you have a great relationship with your team, you tick the organisation culture box, and its a big one to tick. It engages you and gives workers purpose.

My first business adventure was based on people and the skills that I had to learn to keep the ship upright, to stay focused on the vision, how we did things and by who we served. The same rules apply today, be good, be kind and work with people. Role your sleeves up and put your energy into the people who work with you, not for you. Building trust and strong relationships are the key to management, don't think its all about task and KPI's, without people on the same page, you won't get there anyway.

I'll finish with this last paragraph about people who don't want to engage with the team or play by the rules, you know the toxic people who just won't play nicely with others. It's a simple one, if people in your business don't share your values and they are in a position of leadership, management or supervisor, then you need to replace them with people that do, irrespective of their technical skill set for the job, its your business and you made it what it is. Don't make the same mistake this twenty something made and deviate from your vision and values. Be open to collective thoughts and conversations and look after your workforce experience. If they feel good about the work environment, success will follow. Just develop human skills and move on the toxic ones.