Reinventing the Entrepreneur: Turning Your Dream Business into a Reality

Chapter 21

Building Your Team: It’s Good to Be Great!

In case you don’t know who Peter Drucker is, he’s probably one of the greatest business strategists ever to have lived. He said that most entrepreneurs fail because they don’t know their strengths. That means that you identify your strengths as an entrepreneur and build on those strengths.

People think they should only work on their weaknesses, but that’s not true. What you need to do is find people who enhance your strengths and who can do what you’re not good at. Then and only then can you turn what you are good at into greatness.

Regardless which company I was running at the time and regardless of the total number of employees, I never had more than six to seven direct reports (people reporting directly to me) plus an assistant. My direct reports ran individual departments and never had more than seven direct reports. As a general rule, you should never have more than seven direct reports because as the CEO (or any management position), you simply cannot manage more than seven people effectively.

I have consulted for organizations that literally had a flat line organization where twenty people (or more) reported to a single person. That’s just not effective. No one can effectively manage that many people. All you are doing at that point are setting your employees up for failure and soon your company will collapse.

When I started my inbox magazine of Working Moms Only.com, I had been in the corporate world my entire life. ...