„It’s Not My Fault,“ Said The Entrepreneur.

I got an email this week, from an entrepreneur.

„An SEO com­pany that no longer works for us posted ar­ti­cles us­ing my name and that con­tain links to our web site.

They did this with­out our au­tho­riza­tion and now we need to re­move this ar­ti­cle from your site.”

Re­ally?

What he should have writ­ten is:

„Ah, sorry, we did­n’t care a bit what the SEO guys were do­ing. And be­sides, it was be­fore Pen­guin and Panda, and every­body thought it was a cool thing to do.”

I get a few of these emails every month. Say­ing things like “with­out our con­sent” or “with­out in­form­ing us.”

Again, re­ally?

There’s only one per­son re­spon­si­ble in your business.

Guess who that is?

If you’re an en­tre­pre­neur, and em­ploy­ees, free­lancers, or agen­cies are do­ing things you have no idea about, it means you’re not do­ing your job. You’re not in con­trol of what’s hap­pen­ing in your business.

For 26 years I have been learn­ing every­thing that has to hap­pen in my biz. Lit­er­ally. There is not one sin­gle task, not one tiny lit­tle de­tail, that I couldn’t per­form my­self if I wanted to.

• Learn­ing every­thing my­self was a lot of work.
• I could have saved tons of time by not do­ing it.

But it puts me in a com­fort­able position.

• I know what’s go­ing on in my business.
• I can in­struct peo­ple work­ing for me.
• I can com­pe­tently eval­u­ate the work of agen­cies, free­lancers, and employees.

I’m not say­ing an en­tre­pre­neur must learn every­thing.

But as a leader in your busi­ness the right thing to do is tak­ing re­spon­si­bil­ity for what happens.