Fire fast

One thing I’ve learned in my startup career is to always fire fast and hire slow. It’s the cliche statement that any experienced operator will tell you, but unfortunately most people need to live through a tough situation before they actually take action on it.

It’s simply just hard to fire people as there’s a human aspect to all this. We learned the hard way early on at Secfi with probably a couple individuals that needed to be let go months after the hire when we realized it wasn’t working out. As per the script, we let it go many months too long and it caused a lot more issues than it needed to.

Of course, the lessons from work could also be applied in real life. We hired a temporary nanny for two months in San Francisco as Sophia went back to work. We knew it was temporary as we were moving to New York and was upfront about it. We hired fast as it was just temporary and the first person we met seemed to be okay and had a good referral from the last family.

After the first week, it was evident she was not great. She complained a lot, made a lot of excuses, and did not seem to be on a good rhythm with Colin. We probably should have made the switch early on, but since it was temporary, we decided to tough it out.

She took good enough care of Colin that it wasn’t an urgent need to let her go. But she couldn’t stick to our schedule and make excuses for why she couldn’t. We now regret that decision and should have made the change early on.

Of course, with her last day tomorrow, she called in sick this morning. It seemed like the perfect day to call in sick as it was a payday and she had only 2 days with us remaining. While I wanted to believe it was innocent, we also noticed that she took her stuff with her yesterday when she left so this was clearly planned.

At minimum, we now know for future needs. But sometimes we have to learn the hard way.