Rule #4: They Won’t Care as Much as You Do

Checking email for the 10th time this hour and still, nothing. So you keep grinding on your stuff, thinking that your copywriter or developer is doing the same. Email gets checked again, still nothing. Hours turn into days, and still nothing. What’s up with that? 

This business is your baby, it’s how you spend your time, and clearly, you care deeply about it. Why the heck don’t they?  

Frustrating? Absolutely. But annoyingly for us, it’s entirely normal and makes perfect sense.

Think about some of your past jobs. If you’re anything like me, once the laptop is closed or we’re out of the building, we’re largely checked out — there’s a definite line between work hours and off-time. This line exists because employment is basically an agreement — we work and the company pays us; it’s a business transaction, just like the ones we enter when we hire someone. If either party in that transaction fails to perform, the deal’s off. 

In our current roles as founders however, there is no agreement, no transaction; we’ll work for months, sometimes years, without a paycheck, oftentimes taking a huge financial hit while we’re at it. So, in a very real sense, starting our business is very much a time- and money-consuming hobby. 

Employment is transactional, founding is personal. And, when we hire someone, it can be incredibly easy to assume that they’ll bring a personal relationship into a transactional relationship. 

Here’s an interesting question: if any of us were independently wealthy, we had enough money so that we’d never have to work another day in our lives, would we keep working? As a founder, I’d say absolutely. As an employee though? Not a freaking chance. How many people would answer that question with, “I’d go to work at Apple or Meta!” If working for someone else is in the plans, you can be sure that it’ll be doing something that interests them as opposed to trying to generate a few bucks here and there on Upwork or Fiverr. 

But at the same time, we need to get things done, quickly — we want to see progress. And that’s completely normal. Meanwhile, we’re bringing people on board who don’t have the same level of emotional investment in our companies. And that’s completely normal as well. They’re not going to care as much as we do about our companies, but that doesn’t mean that they still can’t contribute and do great work — we just can’t expect our urgency and passion to become theirs just because we clicked “hire”. 

Keep grinding.