One of the business thought leaders I admire a lot is Gary Vaynerchuk. And for a while now, he has been teaching about this idea of working harder than your employees.

It makes sense. Because owning a business is a selfish decision and joining a business is also a selfish decision.

We all see what we can gain. And the point at which profit happens is when everyone is gaining something. The moment we all cannot see the benefit, business is going to collapse.

Gary shows you the grunt work of building a business and doesn’t pretend that all it takes to build a business is nice optics, fake testimonials and gimmicks.

Owning a business is a selfish decision and joining a business is also a selfish decision.

Damilola Jonathan Oladeji

Personally, I find that I work at least 700% harder on my business than the average person on my team. And I let them know that I will reward increased commitment. I designed a model that pays my team members based on how much work they can deliver.

And in a lot of cases, 70% of the time, I have to do the work myself or pull them across the finish line. I believe that they don’t always see what I see and building a business is a selfish venture.

The hardest people to work with are often business owners or idea evangelists who believe that they are creating a selfless business. They want other people to commit to their business 100% while they focus on other things. They think that because they are doing a selfless service, then you cannot but be committed.

You’ll hear things like, “I’m not making any money from this project”. In fact, I am doing this because I have a passion for the needy. I don’t even need this business. They try to sell this nonchalance about their business while trying to convince you to commit your time and resource to the same business.

I personally find this to be one of the most dangerous approaches to negotiation and doing business. You cannot sell me an idea you are not willing to die for and expect me to put my own resources on the line for it.

Also, even when you are fully committed to your business, you cannot expect me to be a champion of an idea that you hide from the world. You hire me to build a website or phblish your book on Amazon but you are too shy to talk about it. Yet, you are asking if I’ll not mind posting about your book. You need to get obsessed with the things you create. The works of your hands should be sacred and important to you that they occupy your time and life.

The only reason you should be outsourcing is because you are already so busy doing work on your product or business.

There are also a set of business owners that baffle me a lot. They are the ones that want to pay the bare minimum for the maximum output. They talk about wanting to outsource everything because they are too busy but then their budget is not even minimum wage.

There are four resources you need for a business. They are time, money, skill, and people. If you don’t have time, you must use money to pay for the skill and people. And a healthy business will try as much as possible to ensure that whatever you can pay matches your expected work output. This means that if you don’t have enough money, then you can pay for that part that you definitely don’t have the skill or time for. Then you will have to find a way to do the rest yourself.

You might also need to commit some of your money to learning skills that you cannot pay appropriately. If you cannot pay for a website designer, see it as a challenge to enroll for website design training so that you can use your free time to build your business. These should be obvious but I hope that reading this post will make this even more understandable.

Let’s become better business people. It’s good that we all want to change the world and create great products. But please always remember that your decision to start a business is a selfish one and nobody owes you more than you are willing to sacrifice.

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I train writers and freelancers. You can find my most recent Work From Fiverr course here: https://jonathanoladeji.com/work-with-fiverr/. Also find all my most valuable resources here: https://linktr.ee/damilolajonathanoladeji. Or go straight to my ebooks here: https://jonathanoladeji.com/downloads/. Send me a message if you have any business content or writing needs you’d like to discuss.