Do a little of everything

When your business is small, everyone does everything. There are no positions, no titles, no managers. Everyone is working hard to make it work and run well.

That’s what Sophie and I did for a long time – and it still happens frequently to us!

It's a funny moment when someone calls and asks to speak to the "sales manager", so in all seriousness you say, "yes, of course, just a moment." You put your hand on the phone to cover the microphone and you tap the shoulder of your partner who is two steps away from you, saying “for the sales manager” with a BIG wink. She smiles, takes a deep breath, picks up the phone and answers the caller in her most entrepreneurial voice possible. And there you have it, we officially have a “sales manager” that day.

Other times, we are in the middle of blowing glass, sweating our lives in the ovens which heat up to 1200 degrees Celsius. It's 45 degrees Celsius in the workshop and one of the salespeople comes to tell us that a customer has a request for one of us. Neither one nor two, we grab a spair sweater that we always keep in a locker in case, we make a quick stop in the office to change, mop our forehead, put on the deodorant and fix our hair . We then take a deep breath and pass “to the store side”, fresh as a rose, slowly to chat with the customer. We take the time we need to see what the customer needs... even if we know that every minute the ovens are on and we're not working on glass, we're paying a workshop in vain. Shling shling shling!

You can do this several times a day! But in the end, we end up taking the upper hand and working with each other's strengths so as not to duplicate what we do. Now we really have a communications manager and really an employee training manager... but the team is not bigger... just more optimal.

This is often the key, before moving on to the next stage of growth. We untangle ourselves little by little, we see where our strengths and our interests lie. We deal with that. We will engage where our weaknesses and our needs are!