Surround Yourself with Smart People

Tips for Success from Successful People

Love him or hate him, Robert Kiyosaki of “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” fame is a successful person. Whilst his investment advice may not be to everyone’s tastes, we’ve always considered his advice to surround yourself with people who are smarter than you to be pivotal for businesses. It’s no surprise then to see similar quotes appear from other great business people of our era:

“It’s all about finding and hiring people smarter than you…” – Sir Richard Branson

“It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.” – Steve Jobs

This becomes self-evident in a lot of areas of business. For instance, few people will attempt to represent themselves in legal matters relating to their businesses. That’s what we have lawyers for. Sure, you could spend four years (and a ton of money) studying law, but why bother? Firstly, you’re probably not going to be very good at it straight out of university; secondly, you’ve just lost time and money, both precious commodities. No, we make the smart choice and hire a professional.

The Dilemma of the Unknown

Unfortunately, in less well understood areas of business the lines become blurred. Here the adage “you don’t know what you don’t know” rears its head again. Business owners and managers alike tend to become jacks-of-all-trades over time, gaining a base understanding of all areas under their control. However, this can extend to an overconfidence in that knowledge, a false sense of understanding that hampers the business. New opportunities can be missed that would have increased business efficiency or cascading faults are not noticed until it’s too late.

When these problems occur, it can be even more costly to correct as you must expend resources to fix the issue, resources that may not be ideally suited to the task and therefore take a lot longer. The very same resources that should be using their time to grow your business. And the more specialised the problem, the longer this can take.

The Power of Support

This is where access to those “smarter” people comes into play. Today, we have specialists in just about every niche you can possibly imagine. Need someone to provide you with employment contracts for overseas workers? Covered. Want to maximise the efficiency of your core-business SQL servers? I think you see where we’re going with this.

Having access to the right people means that issues are solved in a timely manner. It means that your full-time staff are left uninterrupted to do what they do best. It means reduced costs as you’re only paying for the services you need. But it doesn’t stop at fixing problems. Bringing in these consultants before disaster strikes can avoid these situations in the first place, saving you even more.

So put down your law textbooks, stop Googling “how to reduce SQL server response time”, and pick up the phone. Don’t spend unnecessary time trying to achieve the level of understanding that is just a phone call away. Surround yourself with smart people now and receive the benefits successful businesses are already enjoying.