Many African entrepreneurs pride themselves on building businesses that feel like a family. We hire people with good character, treat them well, and trust them to have our backs. However, hiring good-natured people and relying on blind trust is often a recipe for accidental business sabotage.
No story explains this better than that of Adeyemi Adeola, a Nigerian entrepreneur who repairs and sells musical instruments. He took in a young NYSC (National Youth Service Corps) graduate who wanted to learn the trade. Seeing the young man’s potential, Adeyemi personally trained him intensively for nine months, eventually hiring him as a full-time employee. He paid the young man well and even allowed him to build his own customer base under the company’s brand.
It looked like a win-win scenario until Adeyemi noticed a disturbing trend.
Whenever the employee worked on jobs provided by Adeyemi’s business, the quality was notably poor. But when the employee brought in his own customers, the work was excellent.
The Danger of Shifting Incentives
The reality became clear: Adeyemi was paying the technician a 30% commission for company jobs, while the technician kept almost 100% of the profit from his personal clients.
The employee wasn’t necessarily a malicious person; his incentives had simply shifted. Without necessarily intending to, he began building his own independent business at the expense of his employer’s. Because Adeyemi trusted him entirely, he had stopped checking the quality of the work. As a result, customer complaints piled up, and loyal clients walked away.
Adeyemi eventually made the hard choice to fire his star technician. Surprisingly, the very next month after stepping back into the repair role himself, Adeyemi’s business revenue shot up by 40%.
The core takeaway? Good people are important, but good systems are even more important.
People have personal goals, ambitions, and financial incentives that can easily conflict with your business interests. Blind trust assumes that an employee will always prioritize your company over their own growth. A reliable business system, however, protects the company regardless of an individual’s personal ambitions.
How to Shift from Blind Trust to Bulletproof Systems
Trust your people, but build your business as if trust alone is not a system. Here is how you can start implementing true accountability today:
- Monitor Quality Control: No matter how long an employee has been with you, create a standardized checklist for quality. Randomly spot-check deliverables before they reach the customer to ensure they meet your brand’s standards.
- Create Direct Customer Feedback Loops: Don’t rely on employees to report their own mistakes. Set up a system where customers can review your services directly. Whether it’s an automated WhatsApp follow-up or a simple feedback form, listening to customer complaints early can reveal declining quality before it costs you the client.
- Align Incentives with Business Goals: Review your compensation structure. If an employee makes significantly more money side-hustling your clients than fulfilling their actual job, you have designed a system that naturally encourages them to cannibalize your business.
- Separate Responsibilities: Avoid single points of failure. Don’t let one person control the entire pipeline from customer acquisition to final delivery. As your business grows, build managers who can oversee staff, and create systems that monitor those managers. Accountability is built through checks and balances.
As your business scales across the continent, remember that the biggest threat to your growth isn’t always your competitor. Sometimes, it’s the person you trusted so much that you stopped checking their work.
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