In exactly two weeks it will be Gossip Genie’s 5 year anniversary! I cannot believe that on February 10th, we will have been in business for half a decade. I like the sound of half a decade because it makes me feel like we are no longer in the startup category but I know many people consider a 5 year old company to still be very young. I remember the day I decided to embark on this entrepreneurial adventure. I was with my mother in her kitchen discussing a business plan. We were brainstorming names for the company and I am so glad I didn’t settle on some we had thrown out there, such as: Monieson Media – I got married the following year and changed my last name from Monieson to Liberman. That would have caused all kinds of confusion and despite the occasional piece of mail we receive addressed to Ron Monieson, there was no negotiating on whose last name would be our family name.
Over the course of 5 years, I have managed 20 different employees, never more than 7 at a time. I have said before and I will say it again, good employees are hard to find. Of those 20 people that I hired, I think all of them had and have a lot of potential. The majority of the 20 people were with me over a year or close to it. Hiring, firing and key employees moving on to other opportunities is the hardest part of running my own business. You are only as good as your employees. I realized that a long time ago because when I started Gossip Genie, I was working 14 – 16 hour days doing EVERYTHING from account management, business development, accounting, prospecting, company marketing and everything in between. I couldn’t handle it and I knew I was going to burn out quickly. I do think it’s important for a business owner to do every job within their business before hiring someone else and delegating. After a few months, I hired a few interns to help with some administrative tasks. A year into the business, I hired someone full time and learned a hard lesson.
I was naive and hired this person without a non-compete or a contract in place. Finally, I had help from someone that knew the industry and knew how to service clients the way that I was doing for the past year. Fast forward to a couple of months of working together and she was unreliable, sloppy and lazy. I had to let her go. Little did I know she was going to make me pay for that decision. At the time, I had 5 solid clients, 3 of which this woman managed to turn against me. Overnight, she started her own social media company which automatically had 3 great clients. That’s all the detail I want to go into with that story but the moral is that I learned my lesson, I bounced back and rebuilt. Oh and no, she’s no longer in business.
When it comes to Gossip Genie, I really take everything to heart, losing clients is not something I take lightly. I always need a thorough explanation because I try to learn from it and apply it to the future. Often times, employees moving on is a natural progression in someone’s career but I still need to know why and if necessary adapt the way I manage to try to keep my team happy going forward. I am finally at a place where I can lean on my team and I know they have my back. I really feel that everyone is working for the betterment of Gossip Genie and that is a fantastic feeling to have going into year 5.
Here is a screen shot of my first website – which I built myself to save money through Wix…we have come a long way with the new Gossip Genie site we launched last month.
