Are You A Doormat?
December 7, 2007
Are you a doormat in business? Do you let staff, suppliers and anyone else who crosses your path walk all over you? Do you spend hours trying to rationalise the behaviour of some assh..e who ripped you off, then wind up feeling sorry for them because they must have had a bad childhood?
Do you worry that you might not be suited to business, because of your wimpish ways? It’s true, you could really screw things up if you don’t change. But, the good news is, changing is v easy. Let me show you how I did it.
You see, I used to be a doormat. In fact, I spent a long time desperately trying not to be one. But, I let people get away with murder – especially members of staff. And you all know what happens when you do that – they don’t just want to commit murder anymore. They want to barbeque you and eat you too.
Here’s a couple of very similar examples – one from my doormat days, and one about the new reformed me, so you can see the dramatic change:
To give you an idea of how big a doormat I was, whilst I was still with Rainbow, one of my technicians asked if he could have compassionate leave the following day, as his wife was feeling very down, and he didn’t like to leave her alone.
The guy had only been with us for about a month, and I didn’t know anything about his wife’s mental state. So, although we were snowed under at work, I agreed to give him the time off.
As you can probably guess, I used to pay people when they were off work on compassionate leave. So you can imagine how upset I was a couple of weeks later when I discovered that they guy hadn’t stayed at home with his wife at all. He’d spent the day doing some work on the side for one of our most difficult customers, using one of my vans and my equipment.
So, what do you think I did? Well, I felt a bit cheated and I told him I was disappointed. But, he said that he honestly didn’t realise he was doing anything wrong. And I believed him. I figured that some people simply don’t know the difference between right and wrong, and they can’t help it – it’s probably down to their upbringing.
With hindsight, I was a complete sap. Anyone who can make up an horrendous lie like that and insinuate that their wife is on the verge of suicide knows exactly what they’re doing. And of course, when you let people get away with cheating you once – they’ll do it again and again.
Have you ever been in that situation and been just as big a doormat as I was? So, how do you change? Well, this was something that I took a long time to grasp, but once you get it, it’s so simple that you really can change overnight.
First, in any business – especially a start up, you need to understand that if you let anyone take advantage on you, it could really harm your business – in fact, it could ruin it. And this is something you have to keep in mind.
Now, if you’re not good at putting yourself first, it helps if you have kids. Think of it this way, if your business suffers, you might not be able to put food on your table, so your kids suffer too.
So just keep repeating this over and over again: “If I’m a doormat in business – my kids will suffer.” And make sure it’s the first thing you say to yourself whenever someone is trying to rip you off.
It may sound simplistic, but it really works. And if you don’t have kids – use someone else who’s dependent on you, whether it’s your partner, an elderly relative, or your cat.
I can promise you – it worked for me, and I’m no longer a doormat in business. In fact, recently, I found myself in a similar situation to the one I just described. But I reacted quite differently.
You see, I make it clear at interviews that I don’t tolerate people doing any plumbing work on the side whatsoever. Anyway, we recently had a job where the customer just wanted us to do the more complicated work, as her son in law was doing the rest.
But, it turned out that her son in law wasn’t doing the work at all. The woman thought it would be cheaper to pay our plumber cash to do the work on the side – using our gear of course. And we might never have known, except he pulled to bits some work that another contractor had done. So she paid him for that work, and deducted it from the other contractors payment. Well, I bet you can guess who called us to tell us what had happened.
I confronted the guy and he couldn’t see what he’d done wrong. Now, If you already have a business, you’ll probably know how much it costs to market your services to customers. In fact, often with a new customer, you’re lucky if you break even on the first job. And in the first few months of a new business, you can’t afford to pay yourself a penny, so it makes things even harder when your staff steal your work.
And this guy had only been with us for two or three weeks when he did this. Can you imagine how much he would have ripped us off if he’d stayed with us for longer?
We fired him. And I also wanted to deduct the money he’d charged the customer from his wages, but decided it could cause a legal dispute – which nobody needs, so I just decided to deduct a small amount for the use of our van and equipment.
You might think my reaction seemed harsh and you couldn’t possibly do the same. But, you can and you must. If you struggle – do the following:
1) Repeat to yourself over and over again – “This person is harming my children (elderly mother, cat, goldfish, or whatever)” and focus on that thought.
2) Don’t involve anyone else in the decision making process. For example, in the above situation, Stuart had a chat with the guy and felt sorry for him. So, when he started making excuses for the guy etc and going over the what if’s, I just politely told him that I didn’t want to know.
3) If someone has ripped you off, don’t allow yourself to feel guilty for dealing with the situation effectively. Focus on the mantra in point number one. And don’t allow yourself to think about the consequences for the other person. And, if any such thoughts do slip into your mind – remind yourself that they didn’t care about the harm they were doing your business, when they ripped you off. And they didn’t consider the consequences this might have on your children/elderly mother/cat/goldfish.
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This is a really interesting point. I’ve run a small business and before that worked within many.
When I was younger, I certainly didn’t appreciate the full commercial realities ofa small business. The business just magically had millions in the bank, right?
Now I didn’t steal or do foreigners, but I did do what most young lads do – I had the odd “sickie”.
If I’d been out the night before late, I could have a lie in if I could just get myself out of bed long enough to call in and report myself sick.
Now I know the commercial reality and consequences of running a business, I realise that a sickie is effectivedly stealing too.
Don’t get me wrong, the last thing I want is sick people coming into work.
But I do want staff to appreciate the commercial consequences of those actions.
If an engineer is off, we have to cover them. Usually it means we have to cover the work they had scheduled. And because we have to shuffle things, it meas the customer first in the diary will almost always suffer.
Now if that upsets that customer, then it may contribute to their dissatisfaction. We may be late.
Now okay, many customers will understand lateness. But if you have a persistently late or falsely sick employee then eventually the dissatisfaction will inevitably grow.
It will have an impact beyond the immediate loss of chargeable time – the customer may defect.
I’m lucky that right now we don’t suffer from much sickness. So we’re coping. But I have done in the past. And it’s amazing how contageous that is!
I’m glad to have had business experience working when I was as young as 13, coming into contact with well-paying adults. Gave me the social skills I need now to never become a doormat.
Hi Catherine,
Wow, that’s amazing that he used his wife and created that lie (well, was he even married??), and then used your van and equipment behind your back. At least you learned from it but it’s too bad that this probably put doubt in your mind about your employees in the future, if they did have any issue come up and needed time off.
Hi Ian – that is so true. Many people who don’t have a business seem to think that those who do are rich.
And you are right – the sickness bug is contagious. Once one person does it a few times, the rest seem to think they can all get away with it. But, I’ve noticed – this mysterious disease only seems to happen on a Friday and a Monday.
MW – you definitely learned a lot quicker than me. I also started working in my teens, but I was very naive.
JoLynn – it was a terrible lie. And you’re right, it does make it tough to trust people, which is a shame. But, at the same time, it makes you realise that you have to put an excellent system in place so that people can’t get away with ripping you off, or your business will never grow.
I have a friend who works for Virgin trains and I was telling her about the problem. She explained that Virgin don’t suffer much from staff pilfering as they have a watertight system in place to prevent it from ever happening.
[...] Are You A Doormat? – Catherine Lawson asks us to stand up for ourselves and stop being a doormat. Grab an extra helping of motivation by checking out her article. [...]
Catherine,
Unfortunately, in business, you run into shady, lazy, and/or unethical employees.
Years ago we had an employee give us a sob story, and we “lent” him some money. Well, in less than a week he quit. We told him he didn’t have a “final paycheck” as his hours didn’t cover the loan. Long story short…he turned us into the state for non payment of wages. The state said the loan had nothing to do with his wages, so we had to pay his wages, and we never did get the money we lent him..
We felt like we had “sucker” written on our foreheads, but did learn not to let employees think of us as a “bank”.
Due to the number of sob stories I was hearing, I finally hung a sign in the office that says…”Lack of planning on your part, does not constitute an emergency for me”.
Sob stories have about ceased, and the sign also reminds me not to “fall for sob stories” from others as well.
Hi Barbara – I too have done the money lending thing and didn’t get it back. Unfortunately too many people think small businesses make much more money than they do.
Your idea of the sign on the wall is great and definitely worth doing.
Why is that? If a person has a business, others think they are rich?///// Family members included…
I think that’s one of the biggest pet peeves of mine – in business. Then you feel obligated to defend yourself, and they still don’t believe you.
You should write a post about that…, unless you have already, but I haven’t read it.
.
Barbara – It is so annoying isn’t it. I am lucky – my own family have their own business so no sponging or rich assumptions there.
But, inlaws and even ex inlaws seem to think they don’t need to pay when we do work for them.
I think I might just write a post about it. It may have to wait until after Christmas though as it’s probably going to offend some people!
Catherine,
I will be watching for that post.
Do you ever have people (friends/family/employees) who want to borrow your “equipment” so they can do the job themselves?
We do, and it bugs me when something comes back broken, but they don’t tell us that they broke it…or they didn’t even have the decency to put fuel in it.
We have friends/business associates who have offered to let us use their equipment, but we won’t…for those reasons. We would rather go out and rent from a rental company, and pay a little extra for the rental insurance…just in case something goes wrong.
Barbara – I have had that happen a lot. In fact, when I actually sold the business, I found myself chasing up a couple of borrowed items at the last minute.
Vehicle borrowing has always been a big one. Or people who want us to move their stuff in a van – and they never offer to pay for the fuel.
The one thing I always refused to lend out was the carpet cleaning machine, as it cost a fortune to maintain and repair. The only person who was allowed to borrow that was Stuart (before he was actually married to me).
This is a really, really good point. If you don’t stand up and protect yourself, your business, and your loved ones, you WILL get walked on and used.
Plumbing Business
Hi – thanks. I found it difficult to be hard for a long time, until I kept reminding myself that folk who did things like that were potentially harming my kids by ripping me off.