Trust but verify or die

In the Air Force I learned that you can delegate authority but you cannot delegate responsibility. 

What that means is that you own the outcome of the mission, whether it’s attacking an enemy target or launching a new website or taking a new product to market.

Contractors and even employees will rarely if ever have the passion and conviction you have for your business, but you need good people to help you grow.

However, it’s better to work longer hours or delay the launch than to bring on the wrong people in haste.

Hire slow.Fire fast.Always be recruiting.

Give everyone you think is a solid candidate a personality assessment. When you bring them on, do so on a trial basis and let them know you have high expectations. 

Give them the assignment with deadlines and trust they can hit those deadlines…but verify they are hitting them early and often. 

Few in this world are as optimistic, determined, and focused as you on getting things done. If they were, they would’ve started their own business. 

So realize you are hiring a semi-focused, distracted, doer-of-the task-that-needs doing who must be lead, supervised, coached, mentored, and sometimes prodded to complete the mission on time, under budget, correctly, and without errors.

If you are not a people person, this will be hard. 

If you simply turn them loose on your business, it will be even harder because people need to be lead. 

Learn to be a tough but fair leader if you are to succeed in bringing your dream to life. 

Now go sell something.