3 ms·

If the company employs people full time or does critical work for its customers, then even the owner should be redundant to some degree! Maybe a chain of comman

If the company employs people full time or does critical work for its customers, then even the owner should be redundant to some degree! Maybe a chain of command where top employee(s) could step in and keep things running for a while.

onetimeuse92304 3y ago
So the owner is a special case (and I specifically used the term owner and not CEO), because he/she can do whatever they want as long as it is within the law. If they created the company just to feel important and needed then who am I to tell them they need to make themselves redundant? Obviously, there are good reasons for the owner to actually be redundant and if I was advising them, I would try to argue that the business might be healthier and their ownership less risky if there are other people who can pick up the responsibilities of the owner. For example, I have seen companies where the owner would be the only person to have access to the company account and pay out salaries. The issue with this is that sometimes he would be busy and salaries would not be paid on time but maybe a day or two late. The owner never ever lived paycheck to paycheck so had no empathy to understand what is this feeling of uncertainty doing to his people who expect and depend on the money arriving on time. Obviously this was a serious legal problem. But I argued with him that even if it wasn't he would still benefit from somebody else having access to the account and making payments on time just to avoid damaging morale of his entire crew. In this case, the owner could not stand the feeling of surrendering the access to the account to an employee. I advised that he makes two separate accounts, one where he keeps majority of funds that he and only he can access and the other which has enough of cash on it to allow his employees do day to day business without disruption. This way any damage from an employee would be limited. That placated him somewhat and in time he started to enjoy the feeling of not having to be constantly pressed for time to various payments and started keeping larger buffer.

onetimeuse92304 3y ago

So the owner is a special case (and I specifically used the term owner and not CEO), because he/she can do whatever they want as long as it is within the law. If they created the company just to feel important and needed then who am I to tell them they need to make themselves redundant? Obviously, there are good reasons for the owner to actually be redundant and if I was advising them, I would try to argue that the business might be healthier and their ownership less risky if there are other people who can pick up the responsibilities of the owner. For example, I have seen companies where the owner would be the only person to have access to the company account and pay out salaries. The issue with this is that sometimes he would be busy and salaries would not be paid on time but maybe a day or two late. The owner never ever lived paycheck to paycheck so had no empathy to understand what is this feeling of uncertainty doing to his people who expect and depend on the money arriving on time. Obviously this was a serious legal problem. But I argued with him that even if it wasn't he would still benefit from somebody else having access to the account and making payments on time just to avoid damaging morale of his entire crew. In this case, the owner could not stand the feeling of surrendering the access to the account to an employee. I advised that he makes two separate accounts, one where he keeps majority of funds that he and only he can access and the other which has enough of cash on it to allow his employees do day to day business without disruption. This way any damage from an employee would be limited. That placated him somewhat and in time he started to enjoy the feeling of not having to be constantly pressed for time to various payments and started keeping larger buffer.