"Take this job and shove it."
 

A builder in Tennessee had such a reputation for stinginess that the Federal Wage and Hour Administration sent an agent to investigate his tactics.

'I've been told,' the agent said to the builder, 'that you are violating the law by paying below the minimum wage.'

'You have, eh?' the builder retorted. 'Well let's see.'

'There's Jake, who mixes concrete and listens to rock and roll music most of the day. He gets $400 a week. Then there's Hannah, who's supposed to do the books but she reads love stories and files her nails most of the time. She gets $350 And there's my son, Matt, who practices shooting hoops and drives my truck all over town. He gets $250.'

'Nothing wrong with that,' admitted the government man. 'Anybody else to tell us about?'

'Just the half-wit,' mused the builder. 'He works 18 hours a day and sometimes doesn't get paid at all.'

'Just as I thought!' said the agent. 'I'd like to speak to him.'

'You're looking at him,' said the builder.

Good one!
 

Owning your own business sounds good, but I have too many friends who do and tell me stories like this all the time.

That reminds me of the story one plant owner told when asked about the number of workers he employed.
"Well," he said, "I have about 400 employees here, and about half of them are workers."

Whenever the topic of owning a business comes up, I reminded of something I came up with in the first few years in the restaurant biz. Turns out, it pretty much applies to most businesses.

You don't really own the business.....the business owns you.

I was partners in a oil surveyor venture. We made money like water from a fire-hose for 3-4 years. Then the crunch of the early 1980's hit. We were stupid for 2 reasons: We spent a lot of money needlessly when money was easy and we didn't recognize that the business was no longer solvent and we should fold our cards before financial embarrassment. So we went broke trying to meet a payroll when there was no work to be had, even at a loss. Wonderful lesson in humility and it encouraged me to seek horizons in a graduate education and other lines of work.

B

At about age nineteen I played construction contractor and hired some neighborhood buddies as a work crew. They pretty much always had things that they would rather do than work. They might not show up for a couple days after they got paid. Forget work if there was any excuse for a party. This experience made personnel one of my three dirty words in business.