Lesson #17
Good Intentions Will Get You Only So Far
Hiring and fielding a team for a start-up is much like running a spring training baseball farm team. You recruit players to see what they have by putting them on the field with a bat, ball, and glove. You then attempt to see if the players have the right stuff, or at least some talent that can be nurtured. It doesn't take long to figure out who is going to make it and who won't, no matter how hard they might try.
After a few months of bringing some rookies and one key merchant onto the Max-Wellness team, I had a fairly good idea of their capabilities. Unfortunately, the game rules were changing while I was doing this, due to the dramatically deteriorating economic environment. I realized that it was no longer business as usual. Some of the tactics I had used and that worked 20 years earlier were, in some instances, no longer applicable in this new world order of survival of the fittest. I was operating where I had never been previously, and the rules were changing rapidly.
Because I had the battle scars from 15 years of running OfficeMax from start-up to $5 billion in sales, I knew that I had to strengthen the Max-Wellness team lest I wind up doing all of the work myself. It became clear that the margin for error was razor-thin and we could not afford any significant missteps. I decided to find a few additional key executives who had the type of experience I needed and entice them to join the team.
Every entrepreneur learns this ...
