Being The Boss

Emily Winch

If you are already the boss of your own business or a team of people, you probably don't need to read this, or you know more about it than me and you can improve the article! If not, read on...

Running a business is very different from studying or having a job. It is different, because you are the boss.

Someone Else's Fault

In a normal kind of job, if someone else messes up, it's their fault. Even if you mess up, perhaps your boss didn't give you the right instructions, or someone left a tool badly maintained and it broke. Maybe you couldn't do something in time because the supplier didn't show up, or your team mate pulled a sickie, maybe the dog really actually ate your homework.

When you're running a business, YOU are responsible. You have to make sure the instructions are sensible, the tools are maintained, the suppliers show up and you have a photocopy of the homework in the filing cabinet. On a project this size, the odds are that a fairly large number of things will not go to plan. You can be on top of everything, adapting to the situation as it changes, or you can notice a terrible mistake on the first day of the convention and have to turn around to your customers and say "I'm sorry something has gone horribly wrong, but it was someone else's fault!"

A large part of your job is about thinking of these things that might go wrong (even if they are not your fault) and actively trying hard to make sure they don't go wrong. Or, if they do go wrong, that you can fix the problem. This is why you will spend a lot of time writing contracts, checking that the suppliers are coming, checking that the guy in charge of the show has everyone under contract, and ordering t-shirts early enough that if they come back upside down, you have time to get another batch printed.

It's useful to actually write down a big list of things that might go wrong, and then write down what you plan to do about each item. Sometimes you can do something to make it less likely to happen. Sometimes all you can do is make sure you will know quickly if it has happened and have a plan in place to deal with it.

Donald Rumsfeld said "There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we do not know we don’t know". Expect the unexpected and leave enough time in your schedule to deal with any problems that might arise.

Not doing what you are told

In a normal kind of job, you normally expect to do what you are told. Your boss says, "please can you sort this out before you go home", and most of the time you probably say "Yes Boss" and sort it out.

When you are the boss, people will still try and tell you what to do. Your suppliers, the council (if you are dealing with them) and your venue will all have ideas about what you should do, and they may tell you about them as if all these things are written in stone. Sometimes people just assume that this is the way it is; sometimes they're doing this deliberately in order to get their own way.

This is when you need to NOT do as you are told. Your job in this situation is to work out what it is they really need, what it is you need, and think laterally to find a way to get both of these things. You don't want to ride roughshod over your suppliers - they're unlikely to stand for a relationship like that - but equally you don't want them to ride roughshod over you.

You are the boss. Stand up for yourself. Remember, it's not rude to ask for a discount. It's not rude to remind someone that you expect what you have paid for. It's not rude to negotiate a better deal. It's not rude to take the contract your venue gives you and say "Well, this is a great starting point". If you find yourself backed into a corner, try "I'll have to go away and consult the team before we make a decision on that one".

Making Decisions

If you're the boss, a lot of people will be looking to you to make decisions. Sometimes you won't know what to do. In this case, there are several options:

• If (for example), the decision is about the show, and the person organising your show is in a better position to make the decision than you are.... leave it to them.

• If you don't have enough information to make the decision, work out what you need to know and how to find out. Phone people and call in favours until you have more information.

• Will more information be available later? If it will, and there's no real reason to decide right now, then the best thing to do is to leave it for a while... just make sure you don't forget about it!

• If it's a matter of opinion (which colour t-shirts should we have?) you can ask people's opinions.

• Can you find out by making an experiment? For example: if you are deciding the price for your merchandise, try selling it at the higher price, then if it doesn't sell well, reduce it to the lower price.

• Is the decision really that important? If your entire team has spent half a day arguing over the colour for the balloons over the entrance, just stop talking and make any old decision. Your team's time and energy is more important than balloons.

In any case, once it comes to time to make the decision, YOU should make the best decision you can with the information you have available. This is scary but important. If you procrastinate for long enough, eventually the decision will make itself and you will have no choice. Losing opportunities because you couldn't make your mind up, is far worse than making a decision that turns out with hindsight to be wrong.

Once you have made the decision, stick with it. If other people don't like your decision, then tough. You are the boss. You are the one clearing up the mess if it doesn't work out. If the consequences of being wrong are particularly bad, think through what you can do now to mitigate that possibility.

Then document your decision somewhere that everyone can find it.

On a project this size, unless you are omniscient, several of your decisions will turn out to have been wrong. If this happens, all you can do is fix the problem, learn from your mistake, and then put it behind you and move on.

Sometimes other people will be upset. You can't do something as big as a BJC without upsetting some people about something. It's nice if everyone's happy, but try not to tie yourself in knots over it. If one group of people want a loud party at 6am and one group want to sleep, you'll be hard pressed to avoid annoying some of them. That's life. They will probably forgive you eventually.

Management Judo

As the boss, you need to somehow get other people to do things for you. You probably can't pay them. Mostly you can't even offer them free tickets.

Pretty much the only motivating factor around is enthusiasm. You just need to find a way to marshall people's enthusiasms towards a defined end result.

If someone on your team is really not excited about a job that needs to be done, your best bet is to find someone else who is excited about it. Conversely, if someone is raving about something that's really not the most important thing right now, sometimes you can just run with it. Enthusiastic team members are happy team members. Nothing will make someone quit your team faster than responding to their ideas with "That doesn't sound very realistic, and remember, we need to get this paperwork done or we won't even have a venue for your stupid unicorn boxing match".

Useful phrases include

• That sounds interesting. Could you write out a proposal for that, showing what exactly would be involved and how much it would cost?
• I really like the idea of X and Y. But we don't have that big a budget and the fire marshals won't let us set the unicorns on fire. Is there some other way you could make this happen?

Another situation that can arise, is that someone who's not on the team suggests a new idea (good or bad) related to some personal interest of theirs. "Can we have a juggling competition between university societies" came up recently. At this point, you have just located the ONE PERSON who is most enthusiastic about this idea, and probably has more relevant knowledge and contacts than you. If you can convince them to take the idea and run with it, this will be an excellent act of management judo.

If it's a really good idea, and they come up with a realistic plan, you might consider giving them a budget. If it's a terrible idea, it may still be worth asking them to run with it, for two reasons:

1. You may well be wrong

2. Even if you turn out to be right, they will learn a lot more by finding this out for themselves. Afterwards, you may still have a committed volunteer rather than a huffy member of the public.

However, if your volunteer has spent months preparing for their unicorn boxing match, and then they show up a week before the convention...

"Now I'll just be needing £1500 for the hire of the boxing ring, and £300 for unicorn hair decorations, and ten comped tickets for the unicorn handlers."

This is why you need to be very very clear up front (in writing) about exactly what you are able to contribute to a side project, in terms of time, money, comps, and space, before anyone has a chance to run up any bills.

Being nice is great, but being effective is important too

For a lot of people, being "nice", or well liked, or conciliatory, is an incredibly important goal in their lives, up there with getting a promotion, fitting into smaller trousers and raising genius children.

This is especially something drummed into many women, for whom even asking directly for something rather than hinting about it can be seen as aggressive.

When you are the boss, of course it's important to maintain positive relationships, both within the team and with the suppliers and customers. But it's also important to stand up for the team and for the event. It's important that if people are making mistakes they are told about it clearly and firmly. It's important to get a good deal with suppliers and to make sure they provide the level of service you are expecting. It's important, if you discover that a team member is not coming through and doing the job you asked of them, that you are able to reassign the job quickly enough to make sure it's still done on time.

Inevitably, sometimes it will seem that the only choices are being trodden on, or not being very nice. Usually, some lateral thinking will produce a solution. The best option is finding a way to get both parties what they want. If you can't do that, a compromise may be possible: both parties get some of what they want. Sometimes, however, the best solution is really just standing up for yourself, and sometimes other people will get upset or annoyed. Just because someone is upset doesn't necessarily mean you did the wrong thing.

At the end of the day keep this in mind. YOU ARE THE BOSS. if you make a desicion, and you made it for the right reasons then stick with it.