You’ve heard it a million times. That piece of advice. That tip. Those wise words that were spoken to you over and over and over. In a family business, you hear it at work and at home. You hear it all the time.
But that doesn’t mean everyone is getting the message.
“Every employee can make a $500 decision.” That’s what Steve Pattie told his sons Jonas and Brian, and his company staff for years. “It means, if you need to spend $500 to make a client happy, do it,” says Jonas, president of The Pattie Group in Novelty, Ohio. “He was saying, ‘Act.’”
Pattie realized that the team was not getting this message when he received a phone call while in a client meeting. A team member wanted to know if they could order a pizza for the workers. “I thought to myself, ‘really, you can’t make a $30 decision?’” Pattie says. “I told Brian, ‘We have to change this. We can’t make every decision for everyone, and something we are doing is leading people to believe they can’t make a decision. They can’t act on things.’”
Pattie realized that a culture of dependency was brewing. The Pattie brothers were not continuing to deliver their father’s favorite saying: Any employee can make a $500 decision.
“We had heard it a million times, assumed others had heard it a million times, and perhaps were even looking for our own way to say it,” Pattie says. “But if you say nothing to deliver that message, that’s the worst.”
So the Patties started giving employees a similar pep talk which is “Any employee can make a $2,000 decision any day, any time for any reason. Just act.”