Starving the Monkeys: Fight Back Smarter

by Tom Baugh

  This book is written for those individuals who want to improve their personal financial circumstances, but are unsure where to start. And who have begun to feel like much of the advice they receive in the public domain just seems a little too pat to be believed, especially in the tumult of today.

  This book is written for individuals who want to rely on themselves. And are weary of being the only player on their team while the benchwarmers around them get all the benefits of their efforts.

  This book is written for the individuals who feel that they are at the end of their ropes, and are considering drastic options.

  All of these individuals can benefit from the material in this book. Surprisingly, all of these groups of individuals, despite their seemingly disjoint natures, share common characteristics. For them, the material in this book will resonate deeply. As it turns out, most of the problems we face in our world today stem from a single root cause, the suppression of the individual mind. This book will show why this is true, and steps you can take to fix that.

  I can also clearly indicate who should most definitely not read this book.

  This book is not written for the person who feels that only the mass action of a large team is capable of success.

  This book is not written for the person who thinks that someone who is self-taught, self-financed, or otherwise self-reliant has somehow cheated the system. And who feel that those self-reliant individualists have somehow deprived the team of value and, as such, generally should not be trusted by anyone.

  This book is not written for the person who thinks that the value of a person or company or the quality of his or its output is determined by how many jobs he or it provides.

  This book is not written for the person who feels that only the mass action of a large team is capable of success.

  This book is not written for the person who values civility above liberty.

  This book is not written for the person who thinks the Founding Fathers of The United States of America are to be discredited as being out of touch with our modern societal issues.

  This book is not written for the person who feels that dogma or government should rule people's decisions.

  This book is not written for the person who wishes to control the lives of his fellow man beyond protecting himself and his loved ones from direct physical or material harm at the hand of others.

  This book is not written for the person who wishes to silence opposition to his opinions through the use of force, threat, legal action or the withdrawal of legitimate opportunity.

  This book is not written for the person who feels that opportunity should be provided, not on the basis of merit, but through means which seek to correct historical injustices.

  If you find yourself in these latter categories, put this book down right now. You will only be unsettled by the pages which follow. Retreat into your cocoon and await further instructions from your masters.

  A third category of potential reader is the person who is fulfilled by being at the head of his small enterprise. This person knows that if his company were dismantled tomorrow he could arise anew and rebuild. If this is you, feel free to read on for entertainment purposes only. But, be forewarned, this book may probe you deeply enough for you to discover that you actually are in the first set of potential readers.

  I have operated my own business for over a decade now, and in that time I have discovered some fundamental truths which have been helpful to me. I have also enjoyed a level of individual liberty which has been breathtaking in retrospect. I have avoided the vast majority of spiritcrushing debasement which has become the accepted mode of life for a people who have forgotten what liberty actually means. I have come to understand that the principles which make a small business successful are exactly the same principles which define a free man and which create a free nation. It is as if this pattern had been laid down by God Himself long, long ago.

  My business is deliberately very small. I have dozens of products and thousands of customers worldwide, yet my employee footprint is absurdly tiny. The more I accepted these fundamental truths, the more success I found with less staff. Before I had learned these fundamental principles, which have been around since the dawn of man, I started my business in the traditional way:

  Conceive of a great product or service which can help others succeed.

  Plan how to implement the service or design and distribute the product.

  Determine which tasks can be delegated to employees and clearly define their responsibilities.

  Interview, hire, train and reward employees, including generous benefits packages.

  Market the product through channels which have access to the target market, rewarding the actors in that channel for their service.

  I had no idea how wrong I was at first. My story of my business life helps illustrate some of the lessons found later in this book. So join me on this short history.

  Sales started slow, and then began to accelerate. Before long, my company was the world leader in its little niche. I had employee problems here and there, but chalked these up to normal attrition and personnel issues. I also wasn't making any money. But, I was providing great jobs, my company had growing revenues, and my customers were thriving.

  But still, I wasn't making any money. And I was working eighty-hour weeks, stuck in Atlanta traffic twice each day. Sometimes I made payroll by credit card offers despite our booking of large amounts of what turned out to be, in many cases, paper orders with no meat on the bones.

  I was also taking on contract jobs through the business. Rather than just simply keeping this money for myself, I was leaving this income in the business. Essentially, I was paying for product development and payroll and 100% health coverage and monthly steak lunches and flex time. I paid all of these benefits to others from what would have otherwise been lucrative contract proceeds to me.

  Sitting in traffic one spring morning three miles and forty minutes away from my office, I was listening to the more radical of many radio programs I enjoy. I realized that I was working myself to death to provide great jobs to other people, both inside my company and for my customers. And yet I was following the rules of what should have been the model for business success. But I was working for pay which I would have laughed at should anyone have offered me the job.

  A few months after this epiphany a curious thing happened. Our receipts finally began overwhelming the checks we were writing. Suddenly, we were debt-free. I then made the mistake of paying myself more than pocket change, and then reinvesting this money back into the business in the form of loans.

  Why was this a mistake?

  It turns out that when I was the lowest-paid employee in the business, everyone was happy. But, when I first paid myself a reasonable amount, an employee doing system maintenance on our database discovered this fact. This amount was entirely reasonable given what I would charge a client for my direct services for the amount of time I was working. And it was reasonable given why I had started this company in the first place. Regardless, it was my money to do with what I chose. Even if I chose to pay it to myself.

  Knowledge of this payment was then communicated to the entire staff. And soon I had what amounted to a passive-aggressive revolt on my hands.

  Snide comments were whispered about my compensation from people who had a better job than they could find anywhere else. Wide-scale theft of office materials. Rudeness to customers. Endless interoffice drama. Absenteeism.

  In the midst of a major product development, employees I had trained to do design tasks suddenly forgot how to do the simplest things. Then, just as I leapt in to do much of this work myself, the beneficiary client of this product development chose to renege on promised marketing.

  At this point, I considered cancelling that whole project. But foolishly, out of a sense of misplaced honor, I chose to live up to my end of these obligations despite every single other party ignoring theirs. I eventually canceled this product line two years later, after
six figures of investment plus more than a year of my time. After reflection, I should have paid attention to my gut and dropped the project on the spot.

  You have to trust your gut.

  This concept has now been popularized by that same radical radio talk show host. This means trusting yourself, despite the societal programming which the world uses to try to extract unearned value from your efforts. Later, I explain in detail why your gut is correct, and how this destructive programming is implemented. As a teaser, one such destructive program attempts to convince you that your gut is wrong.

  I also noticed that I apparently wasn't alone. Many of my customers run small businesses themselves, and I began to discover that they were having many of the same issues. In addition, for some reason a small business magazine showed up in my mailbox every so often, and its pages are littered with tales like:

  "We are doing so great thanks to the tips in your magazine. Things are going so well that our fifty employees spread rose petals beneath us each morning as we descend from our coach." Bob and Sue Sapmather operate a $4 million San Jose business providing hand-glazed eco-friendly widgets.

  Stories such as this are often accompanied by pasted-on smiles which don't hide the fear and panic in the eyes of the owner. Doing a little bit of math reveals why. First of all, the average gross revenues amount to about eighty-thousand dollars for each employee.

  This seems OK, unless you live in San Jose. And have to buy the materials for all of those eco-friendly widgets and the hand glazing. The math reveals that while the Sapmather's are providing great jobs to those fifty glaze-caked mouths, they themselves are probably pouring their own money into the company. Just as I was.

  At least when I had to jump in to salvage that project I had the presence of mind to fire the weakest of the team members. Amos smiled throughout the entire process. Until I pointed out the well-documented nature of the firing process. This documentation included his repeated failure to perform the assigned tasks for which he had been well-trained. And included his failure to perform them in the manner in which he had been instructed. Because of this documented history, Georgia law prohibited granting him unemployment benefits.

  When I informed him of these facts his smile vanished.

  For you see, most employers, to avoid a disgruntled shooting or other unpleasantness, tend to layoff, not fire. A layoff means "lack of work" in unemployment law terms, and is often misused to get rid of some useless deformed cog in their organizational wheel. Lack of work means that you ran out of stuff for this person to do. And further, that this lack of work is not his fault, and that you are entirely willing and eager to rehire him if new work materialized.

  Listing lack of work as a reason on the unemployment documentation is both ethically and legally unemployment fraud. Especially when the actual reason is that the individual concerned has been a useless wart. Not all warts are useless, though. Some warts have purpose and motivation. If they had Social Security Numbers I probably would have rather hired a few of them over the years. Regardless, these employers are essentially bribing the former employee against violence or other drama by tapping the state's unemployment fund. Yet, these funds are paid into by all the other employers in the state. But, this fraud is so commonly done that employees have come to expect unemployment benefits even if they sit around all day.

  It seemed to me that, given his tender age, Amos had been coached on these presumed benefits. This set of circumstances might also lead one to believe that he deliberately malingered in order to get fired in the first place. I think he needed a better coach.

  I enjoy the lowest unemployment tax rate in Georgia, by the way. I wonder why? It could be because in all these years I have only had one unemployment payout. My first firing was from the naive perspective that an employer has a right to hire or fire whomever they please. I learned my lessons from that one well. After a time, I stopped even seeing the dispute forms. I suppose my reputation in the Department of Labor precedes me. In any event, there are precious few digits in my unemployment taxes, most of them to the right of the decimal.

  Anywho (as my mother used to affect a Southern charm to indicate a change in conversational course).

  Oddly, after this particular firing my paper theft problem essentially evaporated. I also found a reason for some of his reduced productivity when his phone started ringing. "Hello?" I answered, sitting at his desk banging away on the project Amos had just been fired from.

  "Uhh, is Amos there?" the voice asked.

  "Who is this?" I demanded.

  "This is Felicia with Monkey Trends magazine, and I need to work through a survey with Amos," she said.

  "He no longer works here," I replied. It is risky to simply say that you fired the worthless sack of monkey pus. This could be considered defamatory, even if it is well-documented that he does, indeed, contain a measurable amount of monkey pus, and that his primary life purpose is to contain said pus, as if a sack. I think that this is due to the possibility that monkey pus has value to someone, and thus cannot be truthfully stated as being worthless, and so, by extension, the sack must have some measurable value as well. I kept this analysis to myself.

  Felicia responded, "That's terrible. He was our contact person in your company to call with surveys. Are you the person who answers surveys for your company, then?" she inquired. "If so, I can list you in the system as the contact for all the other survey companies as well", she offered helpfully.

  That conversation went nowhere good from there, as did dozens of similar calls from other affiliated market survey firms over the next month. I had assigned Amos as the support point for a major product of ours, that product aligning nicely with his development responsibilities. Our support policy was to update our online Frequently Asked Questions section of our product pages should even a single call come in about an issue.

  Over the years I discovered that my own productivity was greatly enhanced by the solitude of an office, yet destroyed absolutely by cubicle life. Accordingly, I had spent a pretty penny to make sure that everyone had a private office. Not one employee sat in a cubicle. More on this later, but all those times I passed by his office, seeing him happily interacting on the phone, I thought he had been talking to customers about his product area. And in so doing improving our support data. But in fact, he had been answering meaningless surveys on my time. Beats working, I guess.

  The flip side of this was that the product support was being neglected. This I discovered when I answered about forty support calls to his phone over that same month. Most of these calls came in the first week after his departure. Most were dealing with the same three issues, none of which had been updated on the web. After correcting that, support call volume for his product area dropped precipitously, as desired, these customers now finding the answers for themselves on our site.

  Customers were now happier, I had more time, repeat sales of that product area improved, and I had more money in the bank. If I had listened to my gut and dropped the fledgling product which precipitated his firing in the first place things would have been far better. But then again, I might not have been sitting at his desk to take those calls, and I might have not learned that lesson.

  Getting rid of Amos turned out to provide so many benefits I started looking around the office. And what I saw were the other neo-disgruntled campers wandering around like productivity zombies.

  Looking back, I then saw a string of previous employees who, after having been trained in state-of-the-art techniques and technology, would quit for a cubicle job, many times at reduced pay. Almost universally, these people would say things such as "I need to get a real job" or "I appreciate all you taught me, I really learned a lot." I realized that I should have instead simply implemented their work in the time I took to train them. If I had done that rather than counting on them for future return on investment, I would have been much farther ahead. Or, if I simply sold the training materials I created to train them, I would have had an entire product line
on its own.

  Others, like Amos, refused to implement their knowledge once taught. So the free training, make that highly paid training, had come to an end. And then that decision undercut an entire class of employees currently drifting about. My axe grew sharper at the thought. So next on the list was Archie, who had the longest time in the saddle of the then-current staff. Archie was also the first employee I had ever hired who lacked a degree.

  My earlier hires all had degrees ranging from B.S. to Ph.D., but were effectively unteachable and chose to not implement designs the way I wanted them implemented. The fact that those episodes were in the Y2K boom era didn't help with their attitude toward instruction. Years later, after having realized what good jobs they had turned away when that bubble had popped, most of these came back asking for work. I declined each such request. In the meantime, my product concepts flourished when implemented my way, despite the pop of that particular bubble.

  My rationale for hiring Archie was that he was to be my go-to guy for little tasks which got in my way. In exchange for this service I would not only pay him well, but also teach him the trade of software development. Sort of like an indentured servant, but without the benefits to me, and with all the benefits to him. Benjamin Franklin would have killed for that job when he left home as a tween.

  When I hired Archie, he was working at a big box retailer selling TVs, or more accurately, ringing up TV sales. I'm not sure he ever actually sold anything. Archie's first job was to cut my grass. This left me time to work on my first book. Each subsequent hire, degreed or otherwise, was intended to further shed me of relatively simple tasks which kept me from writing that book. But, each new hire also introduced his own set of new tasks and needs, drawing me farther from the pen. So, that book never got finished before the underlying product line became obsolete.

  Archie always seemed to have special needs. As a child, he suffered terribly from a medical condition which was genuinely tragic, which he survived heroically. I thought that this background would be a positive, he knowing what bad times were, rather than some of the prima donnas who preceded him. I based this concept on my own appreciation for my work as beating hauling a pack around in the snow or in the desert or in a tropical forest. While potentially getting shot at.