You were excited when your LNC business became full time. No longer did you have to work for a boss. Here is the myth some business owners believe: You could do what you want to do. You’d have freedom. You didn’t have to answer to anyone else. You could set your own hours. You haven’t considered what it means when you are becoming a boss.
When you own your own LNC business, you might work eighty hours a week, but they are your eighty hours. At last, you are independent. No one is making a schedule a month in advance and telling you when you need to work.
If, as you hope, your business grows successfully, you may notice that the eighty hours have turned into one hundred or more. The attorneys often have last minute requests and want you to work evenings and weekends to accommodate them.
- Your family and social life are suffering.
- You don’t think about anything other than your business and how you can get everything done.
- You take cases in which you have no expertise and spend extra non-billable hours learning the medicine so you can be effective.
Your business is turning into a monster. You can’t take a vacation or be sick – there is no one to pick up the slack.
It occurs to you that maybe you need one or more employees. This idea terrifies you. It means you face becoming a boss.
Know Your Fears
Write down every negative thing you can dream up about experiencing bad bosses or being a boss. Your list might look something like this:
1. I never had a boss whom I liked.
2. Bosses are insensitive and callous.
3. All they care about is money.
4. My bosses never asked employees’ opinions.
5. They ignore employees’ needs.
6. If I become a boss, I’ll have to fire people.
7. I’ll have to generate enough cash to pay someone a salary- and what happens if the work slows down?
8. I’ll be responsible for my employees’ lives.
Face Your Fears about Becoming a Boss
Recognize that most of your opinions and fear of bosses are based on the relationships you had with your bosses you had in the past. Separate facts from opinions.
How many of your negative opinions are based on your past frustration over being an employee who lacked independence? If you longed for years to have your own business, it’s reasonable to assume that you experienced resentment that colored your opinions of your various bosses.
Your frustration and resentment may have led you to make broad assumptions. “Bosses are insensitive and callous.” “They ignore employees’ needs.”
It’s a normal element of human behavior that sometimes we imagine a situation to be worse than it is in order to push ourselves out of it. The more difficult we experience working for someone else, the more we want to be our own bosses.
Having Employees is Part of Being an Entrepreneur
Before you began your business, you did a lot of research. You asked others’ opinions. You may have read books or taken an LNC course. You compared prices and suppliers. You did whatever was necessary to give your business a good start.
Learning how to deal well with employees is more of the same. Whether or not the list you make of bosses’ faults is completely accurate or not, it can serve as a guide to the kind of boss you want to be.
Decide that well before you hire your first employee. Ask other entrepreneurs who have employees how they handle various issues.
Lots of books are in print about how to be a good boss. Here are some examples.
Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity, by Kim Scott. This book has hundreds of Amazon reviews.
Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best… and Learn from the Worst by Robert L. Sutton.
I list them as examples of the resources available to you. If you read books on the subject of being a boss, you’ll learn that others have shared your fears, and you can discover strategies for dealing with them.
You can decide, instead, to continue as a solopreneur with no employees, but is that really your vision?I Is it the most effective use of your time to generate invoices? To organize medical records? To ship out cases to experts?
You didn’t let fear kill your dreams of your own business; don’t let fear stifle its growth.
Get our mobile app, BizEdu
Did you know you can read our weekly blogs on your phone – on your new app, Bizedu? Whenever you have a few free minutes, you can watch a video, read a blog, or request a special report. Get the app here at legalnursebusiness.com/bizedu.