Fun is Important
I was having lunch with someone who runs a small business and he asked me what I thought the biggest sign of a healthy business was. I rolled that around in my head while I took a bite of gyro (shoutout Beet Box) before saying, “I think it’s if you can tell that the people who work there are having fun.”
Before you call me corny, hear me out. Because here are some things that are probably also true if the people who work at a business are having fun:
They want to be there.
They have genuine relationships with customers, suppliers, and coworkers.
They know the objective.
They are having success.
They are optimistic about the future.
They feel appreciated.
If you have a business with fairly-compensated engaged employees getting after the plan, that’s a healthy enterprise. And the inverse, a business with under- or over-compensated, disengaged employees who don’t know the plan, definitely isn’t.
Of course, if you had told a younger version of myself that fun was the most important KPI, I would have scoffed. So I’ve come a long way.
At this point, I’ll reveal that I’ve had that beginning to this whatever-it-is written for a while now, but hadn’t followed through on finishing it because I thought the takeaway seemed a little light and not important enough to tell you about (not unlike a previous one of these that was deemed not my best). And I continued to think that until John Linehan, President of Irresistible Foods Group (parent of King’s Hawaiian among other brands), dropped by our office wearing a floral print shirt to visit the other day and started telling us about their Grillo’s Pickles business.
Grillo’s, he said, was his favorite business to visit. The reason that was so is because the energy in the building is infectious. From the minute you walk in the door, you, like everyone else in the building, feel all in on solving pickle problems (and he told us about some doozies involving exploding pickle pallets at Costco). And that’s because they’re having fun solving fun problems with fun people. And while that fun has begotten growth, he said if the growth ever came at the expense of fun, he would sooner give up the growth.
“Not everyone thinks this way, but I believe that if you’re not having fun doing what you do,” John said before leaving, “you should do something else.”
Well, I think that way too. Now, at least. And it’s important enough that I tell you about it.
See you Friday.
– Tim
