Think like an owner

Does your business use this phrase: “Think like an owner.”?

For many years, I heard that mantra from business leaders. “We want our employees to ‘think like an owner.’” Owner-thinking was common in management circles at the time.

It stuck with me. In context, I thought I knew what it meant.

At that point in time, thinking like an owner meant making decisions the way the owner of the business would. After all, reduced to a base description of your job, you are a decision-making proxy for the owner. You’re making daily microdecisions on behalf of the company’s leadership (an individual or board of directors), and you’re trusted to be the expert at doing … whatever your job is. You’re expected to make the decisions the owner would make, if the owner had your skills and your low-level knowledge of the facts. Your decisions should be focused on moving the company in the owner’s preferred direction.

What does it really mean to ‘think like an owner’?

Well, what does it mean to be an owner?

Entrepreneurs are hard-working, no-nonsense individuals when it comes to their business. As a group, they dedicate their every waking hour to the pursuit of an idea. As a group, they are driven to generate the maximum productivity with the minimum resources. To pursue productivity and efficiency relentlessly. To understand priority and drive their actions accordingly. To be conscious of the image and brand they project (and protect) at all times. To be successful, they must possess these qualities.

Owners don’t spend the company’s money and resources capriciously. They don’t allow the facilities to fall into disrepair. Their processes, their space, their brand are precious and represent them. They prioritize relentlessly and do as much as they can with every resource they have. They foster the business’s growth and change with every breath they take.

That’s thinking like an owner.

Who wouldn’t think like an owner?

If you’re not the owner of a business and are working for a wage, you’re an employee (or contractor, but let’s not split hairs… yet). Employees represent the rest of the population. They might possess entrepreneurial qualities, but they don’t need to be an entrepreneur to work. Sometimes they don’t have the entrepreneurial drive. Or maybe they need more structure in their work. Everyone has worthwhile skills, but not everyone has that “owner” mentality. Not everyone is wedded to their company’s branding and identity.

Further, some people might make decisions that are not optimal for the company, but themselves. Leaf node employees might not take risks to do or say unpopular things for fear of being treated poorly by co-workers, or might not share their knowledge for fear of being let go, or even hide company risk to avoid extra work.

Before I was a remote employee, I was once sitting in my cubicle working on a project when I overheard the manager in the cube next door talking quietly and conspiratorially to another manager. The first manager said, “Aw man, I found a really significant hole in the project, and it could be a big problem. The thing is, if I bring it up, they’ll ask me to put together a plan to fix it, and I have already got too much on my plate. So I’m just going to keep quiet.”

The second manager said, “Good idea.”

Good idea.

How do you think the owner or owners of that company would feel about hearing this exchange? Would he advise those managers to take the same course of action? I doubt it. Those managers were not thinking like owners.

The propagation of bad news provides another case study of not thinking like owners. Owners want to know bad news yesterday. Their ability to guide the business depends on current, important information. An owner steers their majestic vessel through the sea in the fog at night. If there’s an iceberg on the horizon, they may need to react. If a project’s going to fail; if a deadline isn’t going to be met; if the budget is overshot, owners want to know. As evidence, consider how many times you have heard of a company wanting to implement an executive project dashboard with drill-down capability?

Not all project managers, however, want that information to be public. Maybe the project is only a little behind, and with a lucky break or two, the deadline could be met. Or maybe they’re just afraid that they’ll be reprimanded and are looking for some time to find a way out. An owner wants transparency into the decisions their proxies are making.

If you are an owner

So we have a situation where you have owners of a company wanting you to think like an entrepreneur. To solve problems expediently, to prioritize relentlessly, to spend frugally, to waste nothing. And many of the employees in any given organization are not owners. So if you’re an owner, how can you get your employees to treat your business as you do?

Lead by example

If you own the business, nothing is beneath you. How the facilities look, the state of the office fridge, the temperature of the building are all your responsibility. The buck stops with you. Take the time to make sure the environment looks and feels great to all employees and customers.

This kind of leadership is contagious. People who see the owner of the company running the dishwasher think, “Oh, if the owner can do that, so can I, because it’s clearly everyone’s responsibility.

Remind them to think like owners

Those companies I worked for that talk about thinking like owners? I actively remember that about them. Turns out asking people to think like owners has at least a chance of working. Give them examples of what you’re looking for. Employees want to please their supervisors and do a good job. Let them know that they are empowered to think like owners. Let them know they should:

• Look for opportunities for the business that managers might not see
• Elevate bad news to visibility
• Proactively identify idle cycles and use them to improve your skills
• Network with other departments to identify cross-disciplinary wins
• Keep the work environment neat and tidy

Help them represent the brand

This idea can be tough to stomach, because it costs some money, but I’d argue that every dollar is worth it. Two words: company swag. Why? If you shower your employees with your branded swag, they will use it. Does your company sponsor conferences and give out fidget toys and pens to market to others? I know I’ve taken pens from conference sponsors. Those pens make it around. They keep the brand in front of the employee, reminding them they are part of a vision bigger than them.

Good idea.

Branded clothing is another fantastic way to build teams and show appreciation. And if it’s of decent quality, it will get worn. It will get worn at the grocery store. It will get worn on the golf course. It will get worn to the social meetups. It will get worn at That Conference. And if it’s worn, there’s a chance it gets asked about:

“Who is Zuh-Blibba Consulting, and why do I care?” asks everyone else.

And your employees, thinking like an owner, will share what a great company it is to work for and what a pleasure it is to work for you. If your business provides a product or a service that the person likes, it may get purchased. If you have an opening for talented employees, they may apply. All because they noticed your swag associated with their friend or acquaintance.

Note, if you’re not sure that they would evangelize your organization, that problem must get solved first.

Relentlessly market to your employees.

Treat your employees like owners

If you hope your employees will think like owners, it makes sense that you should treat them like owners.

Make them owners. If it’s possible, make them owners. Employees with incentives aligned to the business are more likely to make decisions that benefit the business, because it directly benefits them. Give them equity. Provide incentives that guarantee if the company succeeds, they succeed. The best bonus I ever received was paid monthly based on a simple percentage of a key performance indicator. You’d better believe that during those months, every single decision I made was colored by that bonus.

Treat them like owners. If that’s not possible, at least treat them like owners. Show them by example how to behave. Small things make a huge difference. Eat in the cafeteria with them. Talk to them. Meet them. Occasionally be seen where they’re working. Don’t let the employees develop a wall between you and them. In a company, it should all be “us”, never “us and them”.

Celebrate people that think like owners. Find people that think like owners. Have your line managers watching out for owner-like behavior. Such a thing should be done anyway for succession planning, but if the organization is neither that big nor mature, an easy way to identify people with the right stuff is to see who takes pride in what they do. Create a quarterly HR award for those people who show they think like an owner. Give a nominal cash prize, or just a coffee-shop gift card. Something to say, “Hey, thanks for looking out for the company’s best interest.”

And if you’re not an owner?

Yeah, statistically, you’re not. But someday you might be inspired to be one. You may find a vision that sings out to your inner purpose. A need that isn’t being met by anyone or anything else. Or maybe you lead a team and own that team’s vision. Or maybe you manage a department and own the delivery of that team. Owner-thinking can be a benefit at every level of an organization and in every career.

Reduced to a base description of your job, you are a decision-making proxy for the owner.

Practice thinking like an owner

Here’s a couple ways you can think like an owner today:

Think long-term. Too often, decisions are made in a panic. Features are necessary, and deadlines are fixed, meaning that the quality suffers. “We’ll fix it later” is so easy to say and so hard to follow through on. When faced with two relatively similar decisions, remember to evaluate them according to their total cost over the lifetime of the decision’s impact.

Keep your environment clean. Confession, I’m not a neat freak. My office is often unkempt and disorganized. But I recognize that owners want their organization to appear effective, efficient, orderly. Nothing says disorder like an environment with trash lying everywhere. I won’t cast specific aspersions here, but if I did, I’d be looking at those Enterprise Architects whose desks are piled high with Gartner reports, books, and cast-off system diagrams. Ask me how I know.

Don’t spend the company’s money capriciously. When the owner takes you out to dinner, what do you order? “Oh man! I’m at a work function! It’s my chance to do the 48 oz. prime rib challenge in an hour!” or “Did you know their whiskey pours here are only $30 apiece? Let’s get a round!” I’m not suggesting you don’t enjoy yourself, and there are certainly occasions that call for a little extravagance, but always be mindful of the money you are spending on the owner’s behalf.

Don’t spend your time capriciously. I know not everyone has a job where they only perform about an hour or two of meaningful work in a day, but I have heard of them out there, and I believe they’re more common than anyone would be comfortable with, especially the owners. Environments where the resource allocation is so poor that talented employees sit idle waiting for work to do, while the managers are in so many meetings they can barely get out to delegate. If you’re stuck in that situation, what would the owner think if the owner heard you were getting paid 8 hours wage for two hours work? Can you think of ways to spend that time to enrich the company? Sure! Make yourself more valuable! Level up on a technology you’re using with Pluralsight. Talk to colleagues and find cross-disciplinary wins. Do some networking with colleagues in other organizations. The sky is the limit when you put just even a little extra time to your personal goals on a daily basis.

Here at That Conference, our staff thinks like owners. Every one of us is constantly looking for ways to improve not only the Conference in August, but the community we’ve built around it. We all share the vision that Clark Sell has for the community and work to meet that vision year-round, including through sharing our thoughts via columns like this one.

Want to join the growing list of folks with an ownership stake in our community?

• Come write for us!
• Submit a talk when Call for Speakers opens 2/1!
• Volunteer to help! Check out our volunteer channel on Slack!