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Comment by aaxe | Hacker News Reader

> he sits down at his computer every night at home, logs into the ERP system, and reviews sales and receipts

Sorry, what?

How is this OK or even normalized - he should not have to check every single receipt every night. You hire people to do that, and if they cannot do it right, you hire someone else.

As OP mentioned, it wasn't a gradual thing, and when you have a lot of customers, it can easily slip through. Even your father would be the same here - if a few people who should have been charged a recurring bill did not, how would he remember that?

> Every good business owner does it.

Absolutely not. Every good business owner gets someone to take care of it, and then double checks their work at times.

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My dad is not next to me to reply, but your rebuttal patterns a conversation that he and I had many times over the years, when I was first getting my start in business and tried to tell him he was too old fashioned in his business methods. The bottom line is that you absolutely have to be involved in all levels of your business if you want to be successful and don’t want to be taken advantage of by the unscrupulous. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t trust your folks. In fact, he’ll be the first to tell you that you have to trust your people. But, bottom line, you can’t outsource this level of care and attention to detail; you must be involved and you must be constantly on the lookout.

It sounds like a lot of work but over the course of many years running the same business, you develop a sixth sense for problems and can quickly scan a spreadsheet of receipts and spot issues. There are dozens of other “versions” of the late-night ERP scan. He can do the same thing walking across a showroom floor or taking one of the company’s Sprinter vans out for a drive.

It’s a way of life for him. He lives for his business and still works seven days a week at age 74. His business is exceptionally well-run and has been recognized nationally for it.

https://www.mysanantonio.com/sa-inc/article/SAInc-Flux-Bike-...

I love this Q&A exchange:

  Q: How’d COVID impact your business?
  A: Terrible. We haven’t lost any employees, but we’ve had staff who’ve lost family members to COVID.

I was expecting him to talk about financials but this highlights what you said around his interaction with employees. Thanks for sharing.

Your dad seems awesome, what a great role model.

> you absolutely have to be involved in all levels of your business if you want to be successful

But it does sound like your dad is a very effective delegator and has given a lot of autonomy to people in the business - a skill you definitely need to be highly sucessfull in business.

So, maybe... stay involved at all levels, then find people who are good at a role (that you trust) and give them autonomy... and the you don't have to stay in the weeds for all roles any more?

To the parent comment's point, maybe the receipt checking part could have gone that route, but there was never any one who was right for a role like that in the business?

> maybe the receipt checking part could have gone that route, but there was never any one who was right for a role like that in the business?

It would be interesting to learn what his red flags are (for errors and fraud), what his markers for attention are (good customers and staff).

I wonder if some of this could be scripted or otherwise encoded. At a minimum it might help him out.

> The bottom line is that you absolutely have to be involved in all levels of your business if you want to be successful and don’t want to be taken advantage of by the unscrupulous.

I am a highly anxious person, and it can be debilitating.

But when you're talking about taking payments and arranging the collection of tax, I reckon it's wise to treat your anxiety like a colleague. Give it the best chair; make sure it has lunch, and not too much coffee. And listen.

I concur. I also happen to run a business and although I employ almost a hundred people I have never let my eyes of the "tape". I trust my team and owe a great amount to them for helping run the business. But if they make a mistake that directly affects my bottom line, it's ultimately my fault.

Your dad sounds awesome.

If your dad loves the work, okay cool. But your effective implication is you cannot have anyone else do this, which is obviously absurd because there are companies much much larger than either of ours that pull it off.

The key point is not "the owner has to do it", it's someone has to be held responsible for this.

For smaller businesses, it's likely the owner. For someone like your dad's, it's usually someone else. Even a solid bookkeeping system would have picked up what OP missed.

> you develop a sixth sense for problems

100% agreed, but for the owner/operator it's usually all things, but for the person who is responsible, it's usually a lot more of the minutiae.

It's literally impossible to be the master of all things.

To a point, yes. I mean, bikes have changed a ton in 51 years and I guarantee you my dad would struggle to work on the newfangled high end high tech stuff, nor would he be the guy that you'd want to professionally fit you to your new road bike. He's got people on the payroll who do that, for sure.

Bookkeeping is different, though. He's actually been defrauded by a bookkeeper in the early 1980s. I don't know the details but she was siphoning money from the business in some scheme, probably a 1981 version of OP's Stripe API issue. If you simply trust a person like this and don't verify regularly, the mistakes and frauds happen. Receipts is where the rubber meets the road for a retail biz and I just don't see a substitute for an owner who cares and checks.

> and don't verify regularly

I think that's it really - you need to have checks and balances on all things (including yourself imo as the boss).

Personally I would not want to be double-checking receipts every day (and with 100 employees, the volume is likely significant), but if he enjoys it, that's all that matters eh!

Similar situation as OP. My dad started the business (his 3rd overall) 22 years ago and it's been growing steadily since. My dad still does daily scans of our ERP. I run the business with him and we have 40 employees, and I too have had similar conversations with him.

While I'm sure there is a better way to do this (e.g. invest in BI, hire and train a person to do this etc.), the fact of the matter is no one else is as invested in your business as you. So you are wired to find issues (even if none exist). It might just be an old-school small business mentality, but it works.

At the same time, it's tied him to the business in a way that he doesn't know how to get out.

I think your mentality is right (as a small business owner myself).

However, to push back a bit, I think sometimes it’s easy to believe that we’re the only ones who can do something because we’re the only ones who have lived and breathe it for 5+ (Pick your number) years. And one might be surprised if they actually tried outsourcing how competent some folks can be.

Can you share what kind of tasks you've successfully outsourced? In my experience it was very hard to outsource task with a vague definition like "look for things that aren't running smoothly".

The low hanging fruit answer is "admin." It's easy to fall into this trap of "only I know how the whole business runs; so I should just keep doing admin stuff." But you'd be shocked at how quickly a competent administrative assistance can handle some of this stuff (including pre-drafting email responses in your "voice").

Next step up is stuff outside of your core-competency. So that's where the CPA comes in to take some financial stuff off your plate. This can be hybrid with an admin assistance.

Then you get into the "core" functions. For a media creator, that might mean editing. Again, it's easy to fall into a trap of thinking some other editor won't be able to match your style or voice. But when you hire someone who sees themself as primarily an editor, and they're good at their job, they're really good at adapting and adopting voice.

With all of these things, often the person you're offloading to can't match your output 1:1. But if they can get you 90% completed rough drafts of the final deliverable, there's immense value there all the same.

Thanks. Maybe my issue was that the people I hired just weren't competent enough.

I completely agree.

Coming from the tech world, a lot of my focus has been setting up processes, piece-meal outsourcing and letting employees have more autonomy. Recently we even set up a small team in the Philippines to handle data entry.

However, I've grown to appreciate his view as well over the years.

> no one else is as invested in your business as you

This is so important, and I think it's what differentiates small owner operated businesses from multinationals and chains.

Your employees are not going to idly look through logs to see if everything is running smoothly when they are done with their tasks, they'll just go home and call it a day.

> Your employees are not going to idly look through logs to see if everything is running smoothly when they are done with their tasks

Because that's a job!

While I'm pretty sensitive to "victim-blaming" and feel for the fellow involved here, and there's certainly some evidence that Stripe may have shipped an under-tested product, I would argue that the distance between

> Every good business owner does it

and

> Every good business owner gets someone to take care of it

is…maybe not really that large? Both amount to "every good business owner ensures that receipts are checked daily," and that clearly wasn't happening here.

LOL did you miss the part where he said his dad has 100 employees and is one of the biggest bike dealers in the country? How successful is your company?

To me that makes sense, like if you own a factory, visiting the production line might tell you what is really going on at the core of the business.

You are a business owner? I have similar experiences as the OP. You cannot simply hire someone to oversee such large extend of information and business. Yeah that would be a CEO. But no ceo is willing to do that shitty administration work. Automation could help maybe. But generally it's just you yourself who needs to do it.

Yeah, this is nuts. Sounds like he has no internal controls, except for going over everything each night. But that’s not a very smart nor efficient way to go about it.

If you compare that dad story to the SaaS story that this article is about, it's pretty clear whose strategy is more successful.

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