The Employees Every Business Owner Dreams of Finding

We’ve spent a lot of time in this newsletter talking about founders —  

But there’s a group I haven’t given enough credit to, and it’s time to fix that. 

The employees who think and act like founders. 

You know the ones. They show up before they have to. They notice the thing nobody asked them to notice. They take a problem personally, even when it isn’t theirs. 

And they are, increasingly, rare. 

Somewhere along the way, the script flipped. A lot of people now believe employers should feel lucky to have them. That showing up is the contribution. That effort beyond the minimum is somebody else’s problem. I was raised differently. I was taught to be thankful for the job, respectful of the opportunity, and to prove my worth every single day. 

At my company, we have something we call the Soda Can Award. 

The idea is simple. If an employee walks past a discarded soda can on the ground and actually stops to pick it up, they get recognized for it. Not because the can is important — because they are. The kind of person who picks up the can is the kind of person who catches the email that almost got missed, the invoice that doesn’t add up, pushed against the roadblock holding up progress, the small things that would have become a big thing if nobody bothered. 

But here’s the part that humbles me most. 

Sometimes the obstacle isn’t the market or the customer or some bureaucrat in an office somewhere. 

Sometimes the obstacle is me. 

Small business asks too much of everyone in it. Decisions stack up. Approvals get stuck on the founder’s desk. Every founder I know has been the bottleneck in their own business at some point. If you say you haven’t, you’re either new or not paying attention. 

The best employees don’t sit back when that happens. They don’t build a quiet case in their head about how the boss is the problem. They keep moving. They find a workaround. They make the call they can make and flag the one they can’t. They adapt. They roll. They try to solve. 

Standing still and blaming should not be allowed in a small business — not by anyone, including the founder. Momentum belongs to the people who refuse to let any obstacle, even the founder, be an excuse to stop.