Are you the boss?

Put your hand up if you are…

I am not the boss. My husband is the boss. My official title is Director of Communications and Intelligence, but what that really means is I am in charge of everything that my husband is not. He is the entrepreneur, I am the person that makes his ideas a reality. He is the creator and I am the worker. He owns the company. I don’t. The buck stops with him.

Coming from a corporate background (which I loved) into a small business has been a tough experience for me.  Whilst on maternity leave, hubby asked me to help with bits and pieces of his work, marketing, recruitment, quality. This wasn’t a problem, I headed up teams of these types of people doing marketing, quality and recruitment day in and day out, like I said, no problem.

Except there was.
Where were my staff? Yes, don’t snicker, you know what’s coming don’t you…
You are the staff was the response. Outsource if you must, if you don’t have the skills, but your budget is zip.

Yes. Zip.

They don’t teach you this at university. They teach the theory of everything, but none of the reality. In a small business you are often everything – legal department, recruitment department, marketing department and ‘anything that don’t go anywhere’ else department, oh and the floor needs sweeping – that’s your department too. Over the last 5 years I have fine tuned a hundred new skills that I didn’t have before I worked in a small business.

For example I handle objections much better than when I worked in the corporate world. I knew the theory but did I truly handle any objections? nah, I had a department for that and I coached the staff in handling this themselves, I had no need to do it. Someone querying an invoice, yes, I had a department for that too, now that department is me.

I truly understand why a small business owner works in the business, you are completely immersed from day one. It’s easily done and it’s very hard to work on the business, when you have to do everything. Often a budget for one thing goes out of the window when an essential item is in need of replacement or repair and you may not get it back. Ever.

So you adapt, you learn new skills. You even learn a bit of grammar and small bit of punctuation (you still wonder why people get their knickers in a twist over an apostrophe tho’).

You learn a lot, and in the corporate world  knowledge = power = money.

So I was thinking the other day, what would be my value to the corporate world should I ever return? When I left, it was £65,000 a year. My husband was annoyed by my musings and said he would pay me a salary, instead of me issuing invoices. So I asked him what he thought he would have to pay on the open market for what I do for him. He summed it up with a few blogs, a few phone calls and a bit of twitter about £16k a year. Oh plus bonus bringing it up to 20k a year.

How little? yes, in learning a hundred new skills and working morning, noon and night for someone else’s business – I feel somewhat under valued. So exactly what am I worth?

He of course couldn’t understand the my outrage. Undervaluing employees does nothing for morale and he now understands to another transport company or group I am an untapped goldmine, with one drawback. I am married to the boss. On paper it looks like I only have my position because I am married to the boss, a job for tax reasons.

Which made me wonder, perhaps I am the boss, after all it could be said I have him over a barrel. I could be the linchpin in his business, the person that gets things done. The person that zips along at the speed of light making it look like I do nothing, making it look easy and at the same time providing no security for the company – if I leave, my skills go with me.

So I shall ask again, how many of you are the boss?

Sarah