It think I got this right…at least a few times in the last several years.

I think it is always hard to partner with somebody smarter than you in business or in life…and it’s even harder to hire smarter. I don’t claim to be all that smart but I always feel like I need to micromanage those that I hire or partner with. I need to know what they’re doing to make sure they don’t do it wrong…it is such a breath of fresh air when you partner with somebody or hire somebody smarter than you. I don’t need to micromanage and they do sooo much better than I could ever do when I finally let them be free in their expertise! I know I hold people back when I micromanage. Leadership by micromanagement is a bane to greater success.

David is my biz partner at Click Walrus. He is a programming/server side genius. I have been trying to tackle and understand the ‘cloud’ at Amazon and I’m trying to learn Ruby and Rails…but I’m good at marketing and advertising! With David on the team, I don’t NEED to know the server stuff and trying to execute server/programming stuff based on what I know just wastes time that I should be marketing/advertising the business. So, I’m sticking with marketing/advertising/general biz stuff and letting David handle all technical aspects of the company. What a relief to me – and probably to David too!

Shane is the best web designer/css/html front end programming guru I know. He is also the greatest educator I have ever seen speak at industry conferences. While I would love to learn those traits, they aren’t my strengths right now. As soon as I learned to let Shane take control of all things aesthetic on the web and I focused on the sales part of the design and copy writing, we succeeded tremendously at semvironment. Shane is also the guru behind the Click Walrus design.

Regarding ‘partner smarter’ in life. I can’t even pretend to be smarter or more resiliant or stronger than my wife. I hands down married up and was lucky enough for her to see a glimpse of potential in me. I hope I deliver – I know I’m trying my hardest.

This is my criteria for partnerships or hiring:

-Must be smarter than I am in your trade/expertise

-Must be an excellent communicator (better than me – it’s not hard to be better than me…ask my wife! haha!)

-Must be better than I am at executing a plan

-Must be more tenacious than I am at working towards success

The bottom line is that every person should strive to ‘partner smarter’ and ‘hire smarter’ to really succeed in business and life.