As an employee at several companies over the years I was frustrated with the terrible, toxic culture, lack of structure, lack of clear boundaries, roles or expectations, the inefficiencies, etc. Once I had gained significant experience in the field, I went into consulting as a way to both get out from under the mess and potentially help companies change the way the operate.

Even in roles as a director, I was hardly ever listened to in terms of what need to change or how, so I felt that I needed to be an outsider to actually get the owner’s ear.

And to a degree, this works. But honestly, it’s really only at the larger and more corporate companies where I ever feel like anything I do actually gets put into place.

here are some of the pitfalls I see over and over again in small business:

– Owners consumed by fear and paranoia. They keep a lot of info that isn’t proprietary under wraps as if no one can be trusted with it, and then employees can’t do their jobs because they don’t have all of the information and tools they need. Even keeping different departments siloed from each other because they are afraid of them “talking to each other”, when collaboration is necessary to complete the work. When employees leave in droves, whether to a competitor or to start their own enterprise, it usually isn’t because they came in with that intention. Most people would prefer to stay at a job if it is tolerable rather than risk another unknown. So if you constantly hemorrhage staff, it is due to the toxic work environment, burnout, lack of feeling like they can do anything purposeful with the company.

– constantly moving the goals posts, setting employees up for failure, and needing to be “the only one who does anything right”. I have watched countless times as owners give 30% of the tools needed to do the job to someone, then call them into the office to ask why they didn’t complete it the way they were never trained to and didn’t have the necessary tool or information to do so. Then they often go on a rant that they can’t trust anyone, no one wants to work anymore, no one know what they are doing. Yes, that last one is often true, and it’s often the owner’s fault. Later they reveal some document or file or tool or instruction that the employee would have need to complete the task, which now has to be redone in a waste of everyone’s time and energy, but the owner still wants the employee to grovel about what a huge mistake they made.

– zero accountability while constantly blaming other. I can’t count on all my fingers and toes the number of times an owner was in the middle of berating someone for an error, then it is found that something was signed or submitted by the owner and it was their mistake, only to have them then go on a big showy rant ” WHO SIGNED MY NAME? WHO DID THIS?”. You lose respect and credibility when you want to constantly call out everyone else but can never own up to anything.

-no real process for onboarding or continued education. Just slapping an additional title onto a grunt worker who seems to fear losing their job more than stroking out from running half the company for minimum wage, and calling it a day. So now Gary is also HR on top of 3 other titles, as you send new employees to him and expect him to figure it out with no guidance, then will yell at Gary when you find out there isn’t the full blown new employee training happening that you didn’t actually hire a full time HR employee or HR consultant to build and put into place. And you wonder why people keep leaving after a couple months. No, they aren’t all “lazy people who don’t want to work”. They literally never felt like part of the company or had a sense of their role, because there as no true onboarding or training.

-no structure in general. No sense of project management, no debriefing to improve regular operations. Every day is like doing triage on passengers of a train that just derailed. Day after day after day. Everything feels on the fly, at the whims of the owner/owners, never forms into something more cohesive.

The majority if the small businesses I have attempted to help still ran like start ups even if they were 5, 10, 20 years old. And that’s why they stay small and don’t get anywhere. It isn’t your marketer, it isn’t the economy, it is most likely the owner.

And the grand finale of all of this is, they seldom even let me come in and do my job either. They don’t really want anything to change. At least I don’t work for them, but it’s gotten to the point where it’s even getting too exhausting to work WITH them. I identify where changes are needed then they tell me they don’t want to or can’t change that because of XYZ. I still get paid either way, but it’s really not fulfilling at all to just collect checks from tyrants for advice they won’t use. I’d rather help companies actually put these things into action and improve.

Please, if you are a small business owner: recognize your areas of non-expertise, hire people into those roles, allow them to actually do their jobs, stop thinking you do everything perfectly and better than everyone in every department (you don’t, and you look silly marching around micromanaging everyone while actually making things worse in your wake), show appreciation toward your employees instead of contempt, stop trying to control every detail and focus on being captain of the ship, taking it in a direction instead of spinning in circles.