I was so afraid of being a bad boss that I almost ran my business into the ground.

I'd had so many terrible micromanagers in my past life, I swore I'd never be one. So when I hired my first couple of people, my whole philosophy was just trust. No timesheets, no tracking, just get the work done. I thought it was a genius culture hack.

Fast forward six months. I'm looking at the bank account and just panicking. We were busy all the time, but we were going broke.

I had no idea why. Were my quotes too low? Was a client eating all our time? Was someone slacking? I had no data. Zero. The whole trust me system is a complete liability and I was too proud to admit it.

I finally had to swallow my pride and get a real system in place. I was already using Monitask just to track my own hours for client invoices, so I knew it was simple enough. I sat the team down and was honest. It had come to a point where this was about survival. We needed real data to quote jobs properly so we could actually stay in business and they could, you know, keep having jobs.

The lesson I learned the hard way: being a good boss isn't about being liked. It's about running a healthy company. Trust your people, but for god's sake, track your numbers.