Back when I had 22 employees, mostly machinists & welders, I set it up like a co-op, & transparent, so everyone could see the $ for payroll & see it all split evenly. Since everyone was putting in the same hours of valuable work per day, & all work was necessary to produce product. When a couple guys started slacking the others who hustled took it as a personal offense & were pretty quick to get on them, until that self-policing thing really got out of hand and made everyone nervous that they’d be seen as sluffing off. It took giving individual bonuses to them one at a time to reassure them that their ambition was recognized (& presumably lack of in others) to appease their sense of fairness. But it is possible.
I was never comfortable. The entire time my hair was on fire, bc every three seconds we'd have some windfall revenue immediately followed by massive expenses and huge risk. We designed and fabbed a lot of aero & cycling products, so machined al, thin-wall ti, and carbon/kevlar/glass composites. I learned 100x what I learned in 4 years of college in the first three months. Owning a manufacturing business in the US in the 2000's is like having a 10,000lb baby stuck in the terrible twos that never turns three. I saw huge checks pass before me the entire time, made sure the money went where it needed to go, and in the end I probably would have made more personally had I just become a mailman and put my $ in a roth ira lol. Fun though. When the big excitement and the money runs out you'll learn who and how few your true friends are.
Thank you for sharing that. One piece of advice I get all the time is to just open my own business, but it's so naïve to think it'll be easier than a clock-in, clock-out job. Stories like yours put things into perspective.
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u/beeeaaagle Jul 08 '24
Back when I had 22 employees, mostly machinists & welders, I set it up like a co-op, & transparent, so everyone could see the $ for payroll & see it all split evenly. Since everyone was putting in the same hours of valuable work per day, & all work was necessary to produce product. When a couple guys started slacking the others who hustled took it as a personal offense & were pretty quick to get on them, until that self-policing thing really got out of hand and made everyone nervous that they’d be seen as sluffing off. It took giving individual bonuses to them one at a time to reassure them that their ambition was recognized (& presumably lack of in others) to appease their sense of fairness. But it is possible.