Congrats on Your Work Anniversary

LinkedIn keeps celebrating the worst decision I ever made in business.

LinkedIn keeps congratulating me, and it has no idea what it's doing.

Every year, right on schedule, the notifications start rolling in. "Celebrate Tracy's work anniversary at Kantex." People I genuinely respect tap the little button, send the cheerful auto-message, and mean every word of it. They think they're marking something worth marking. A milestone. A win.

What they're actually celebrating is the anniversary of the worst decision I ever made in business.

But what’s funny is Kantex doesn't really exist anymore.

It took me longer than I'd like to admit, and it cost me more than I wanted to spend, but I rebranded the whole company back to Tracy Jepson Consulting, the way it should have been all along. The only place the old name still lives is a LinkedIn profile I never got around to updating. And maybe an old proposal template.

So once a year, like clockwork, the internet reminds me of the most expensive lesson I ever bought, and cheerfully asks me to throw it a party.

Let me actually tell you the story this time, because I think a few of you are standing in the same store I once stood in, wallet already open.

It didn't start as a mistake

It started as one of the best working relationships I'd ever had.

I had a contractor who was, simply, excellent.

He showed up.

He delivered

He made my life easier, and he did it consistently enough that I started doing the quiet math every owner knows by heart.

The math where you imagine what it would look like to have this person around all the time, on your team, in your corner, for good. I wanted to hire him full time. The only problem was that he didn't want to be hired by anyone. He wanted what I had. He wanted to be an entrepreneur.

So instead of letting that be the end of the conversation, I let it become the beginning of a much worse one.

We sat down, and somewhere in the middle of all that excitement and optimism and genuine fondness, we decided to build something together. We rebranded. I'm from Kansas. He's from Texas. Kantex. We laughed about how perfect it was, and it felt like the obvious next step for two people who got along well and liked the work.

It was basically a cliff with good lighting.

Here is what I didn't understand yet. The thing that would eventually cost me a year of my life to learn.

Everything that made him a phenomenal contractor had almost nothing to do with whether he'd be a phenomenal partner.

They are not the same job.

They aren't even the same species of job.

As a contractor, his interests and mine pointed in the same direction, and I held the one thing that kept them aligned: a check, and the ability to stop writing it.

As a partner, I had given that away.

I had taken the single piece of leverage that protects an owner and handed it to him with a smile, gift-wrapped, in exchange for nothing he wasn't already giving me for a rate I was happy to pay.

Two lessons I paid full price for

These are the best two pieces of advice I’ve ever received in business and I want to be honest about where they came from. They were handed to me, whole and complete, by my dear friend and colleague John Briggs.

If you don't know John, he's the founder of Incite Tax and the author of Profit First for Microgyms, and he's one of those rare people who can say the truest thing in the room using the fewest possible words.

We were sharing a panel, I asked him a question, and what he handed back were the two sentences I have carried with me ever since.