James Harold Webb shares his top three tips for becoming a successful business owner.

Today’s guest post is by James Harold Webb, author of Redneck Resilience: A Country Boy’s Journey To Prosperity.

Growing up poor in a rural community in the South, I learned early in life that if I wanted more than just food on the table and clothes on my back, I had to earn it myself. From making potholders to mowing yards to being a high schooler operating a printing press and finally becoming an x-ray technologist, I was always super focused on what it would take to change my family’s financial and social presence.

Now that I’ve achieved those dreams, I can look back on what key components it took to accomplish and build an effective career and, ultimately, become a successful business owner. Below are three of my top recommendations.

Value relationships

Listen to people. Invest in people. Take the time to recognize people and to hold yourself accountable to them. Whether it’s your employee or your customer, be more willing to give more to that relationship than you are eager to receive. Investing in relationships has brought more wealth to my life than the stock market ever could, and I’m glad I didn’t wait to “get rich” before I learned that lesson.

Start now. Focus as much or more on your lines of communication as you do on your bottom line, and success will follow. When you meet someone, think about what you can do for them and learn from them instead of what you can get from them. It’s natural to meet and get to know people and recognize opportunities, to think about what they can do for you, but understand that you’ll get so much more if you think of them as an investment rather than a target.

If you take nothing else away from this article, let it be this: You and your career or business will be formed, shaped, built and defined by your approach to relationships. Everything else is just technique and craft. Relationships are the single most important thing in your life.

Work harder than anyone else

I don’t believe in luck, but I have learned that the harder I work, the luckier I get. This isn’t about the appearance of working hard. This is about setting an example for everyone else. When you’re exhausted and have had enough for the day, send two more emails, make two more phone calls, do two more things. When you wake up and don’t feel like going to work, go anyway. Push yourself, because no one else is going to do it for you and it gets really easy to lose your way.

The only thing you can always control in business is your hustle, and the people who hustle the most tend to be the ones who reap the greatest rewards. Don’t fall for the modern trap about work/life balance. For an entrepreneur or career-driven executive, it doesn’t exist. We have one speed—all in—for everything we do. We measure our output in accomplishments, not account balances. Those who want to put in just enough time and work to reach a certain income will lose that income to someone who wants to work.

It will be hard sometimes. It will be exhausting. It will mean delayed gratification and personal sacrifice, but the work is the thing that will set you apart, and the benefits will be obvious.

Set expectations and put your employees in position to succeed

If an employee is fired and they didn’t see it coming, it’s the manager’s fault. Barring theft or some kind of gross incompetence, firing someone means you didn’t put them in a position to succeed. If a business is struggling, it’s on the leadership. If someone in a company doesn’t understand their role, their job, their future within an organization, the blame belongs to the people responsible for putting them there.

I’ve been asked many times for my secret formula for management, and the truth is that there is no secret. It’s simple. Be clear. Be available. Set expectations, make sure they are understood, and check in often. You can’t manage more than a handful of people effectively. Management and leadership require attention and investment, not edicts or intimidation.

Communicate changes, concerns and compliments with equal ease and confidence. Seek feedback. Management and leadership are as much about creating effective, healthy relationships as they are about org-charts and “orders” that have no place in a manager’s playbook.

It’s funny how many of the lessons I’ve learned in business echo those I’ve come to appreciate in life. Saddle up, buckle in, and take the ride utilizing these key lessons.

​​James Harold Webb (www.jamesharoldwebb.com) is an investor, philanthropist, successful multi-business owner, and the author of Redneck Resilience: A Country Boy’s Journey To Prosperity. Webb began his entrepreneurial journey in the health industry as the owner of several companies focused on outpatient medical imaging, pain management and laboratory services. Following successful exits from those companies, Webb shifted his focus to the franchise world and developed, owned and oversaw the management of 33 Orangetheory Fitness® gyms, which he sold in 2019. Not one to stop, he currently has two additional franchise companies in various stages of growth.

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R. Barbara Gitenstein offers leaders ten pieces of advice for improving their organizational communication.

Today’s guest post is by R. Barbara Gitenstein, author of Experience is the Angled Road: Memoir of an Academic.

The famous line from the 1967 movie Cool Hand Luke seems to resonate with special urgency today. Today’s failure to communicate is most apparent in the public arena, but there are similar problems in the workplace. Both employee and employer are responsible for facilitating a workplace that nurtures communication, but it is the CEO who sets the tone.

In my book Experience is the Angled Road: Memoir of an Academic (Koehler Books: 2022; available on Amazon.com and bookshop.org; there is a special sale on the ebook version from June 7- June 28), I give examples of where I had to learn how to communicate across difference. In my journey to leadership in the Academy, I was very often someone from the outside, the only “whatever” in the room (woman, Jew, southerner, liberal, intellectual). I had to learn how to talk to others who did not share the same perspectives or experiences as I which requires excellent listening skills. I often took on the responsibility in crafting a shared vision for the future.

Once I became a senior academic administrator, I used my well-honed skills to lead significant change in the institutions I led. As Provost and Executive Vice President of Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, I was instrumental in a major curriculum reform, institutional restructuring, and a reduction in force. As President of The College of New Jersey in Ewing, I restored trust between the faculty and the administration, built important partnerships and alliances with the local community, led the revision of the governance structures allowing more transparency, partnered with the faculty and academic administration to upgrade the entire undergraduate curriculum, partnered with the board of trustees in a public private partnership to provide residential and retail opportunities on the campus, and weathered 19 years of crises (including 9-11), budget rescissions, and union negotiations.  In both situations, I partnered with allies and created new allies by working together with disparate groups to forge a shared future.

In my upcoming memoir (Koehler: January 2025), Portrait of a Presidency: Patterns in My Life as President of The College of New Jersey, I explain how I worked with the usual apparatus of shared governance, 5 separate unions, a publicly appointed board of trustees and the New Jersey state legislature and governor to transform TCNJ into one of the most competitive public institutions of higher education in the Northeast. I often focus on the importance of outreach to stakeholders and knowing exactly who your audience is in each communication.

While I was president, one of the most difficult moments where clear and honest communication reassured a frightened community was in 2006 when a student went missing from a residence hall room, only for his body to be found 2 months later in a landfill. The community, particularly the students, had to know that there was one voice for the college and that was the voice of someone whose focus was entirely on their personal safety and sense of security. I did not use a professional communications firm. Rather, working with a very talented on campus communication professional, I made sure that the institutional messages were always clear, sharing as much information as possible, correcting wild journalistic speculations, and reassuring the student body that their safety was my primary concern, not public relations.

My advice to CEOs for improving communication includes the following:

1. Set up structures for communication before crisis overwhelms the organization.
2. As part of the communication structures, set up clear decision-making matrices where there is a clear difference made between consultation and determination. Some groups can be consulted, some merely informed, but likely there is one locus for making the final decision. Those expectations must be clear.
3. Listen as well as talk. You will learn a lot from those who are actually on the front lines of your organization.
4. Reach out to stakeholders early in a process of transformation to keep all informed. The times when I got in trouble with difficult decisions were almost always times when I forgot to reach out to a key stakeholder group. If you have a board, never surprise them.
5. Be willing to compromise when compromise does not undermine the most important goals for the future of your organization. Sometimes during discussions with stakeholders, you will hear ideas or concerns that should modify your plans.
6. Be willing to admit mistakes and learn from them. The most effective way to disarm people who are critical of a particular result is to admit that your decision was a mistake when in fact it was. Then take actions to assure the community that you have learned from that mistake.
7. Give credit when credit is due. You will be much more successful, as will your organization, if you have a strong team around you. Their involvement in developing ideas for the future should be made public and celebrated.
8. Have a sense of humor and a sense of modesty.
9. Do not confuse yourself with the job.
10. Know when it is someone else’s turn at the helm. Leave before most people want you to leave.

Barbara Gitenstein served in senior administrative roles in both the public and the private sectors of higher education, 7 years as Provost at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa and 19 years as President of The College of New Jersey in Ewing. Having lived in the south, the Midwest, and the northeast, she understands how to negotiate sociocultural difference to create a shared vision and is committed to the concept of team leadership in complex organizations.

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