The Man Who Can’t Compete
A longtime friend of mine has a problem.
That’s not particularly unusual. He’s an extraordinarily successful entrepreneur who has built a remarkable business in an industry famous for thin margins, fierce competition, and employee turnover. Having problems is pretty much a condition of being open for business.
What’s unusual is how he thinks about those problems.
I’ve written before about why I consider him one of my personal heroes. In I Don’t Buckle, I explored his extraordinary ability to confront adversity, make difficult decisions, and move forward when others might prefer to hide under a rock. But during that same conversation, another aspect of his approach emerged that I find equally fascinating.
He has a workforce problem that he freely admits he can’t solve with money.
Not Amazon’s cloud computing business or its enormous technological infrastructure. The problem is considerably closer to home. Amazon’s warehouses and delivery operations compete for many of the same people who might otherwise work in his business.
And Amazon can often pay more.
When I asked my friend about retaining employees in an industry notorious for turnover, he described the challenge directly. An employee can leave and find another job doing essentially the same work. And now, with companies like Amazon offering higher wages for jobs that don’t require specialized qualifications, the competition has become even more difficult.
He knows he can’t simply match every offer. The economics of his business won’t allow it.
So what does he do?
He competes with something that doesn’t show up in an hourly wage comparison.
Relationships.
Now, I can almost hear the collective groan from anyone who has spent time in the corporate world. Another CEO talking about relationships, culture, and making employees feel valued. Somewhere, a consultant is already preparing a PowerPoint presentation about the importance of putting people first.
But my friend’s approach is different, and the difference isn’t in what he says.
It’s in what he’s willing to do.
A Raise That Wasn’t a Raise
One of the stories he told me began with an employee who had a problem.
The company had an established compensation policy that made sense from a financial and administrative perspective. It was designed to treat employees consistently, control costs, and maintain a reasonable structure as the business grew.
But for one employee, the policy produced an outcome that didn’t feel right.
The company believed it was providing fair compensation. The employee wasn’t necessarily disputing the economics. The problem was that the way the policy worked made the employee feel that continued experience and contribution weren’t being recognized in a meaningful way.
Rather than quietly accepting the situation, becoming resentful, or looking for another job, the employee raised the issue directly with my friend.
Think about that for a moment.
This wasn’t an executive sitting in corporate headquarters. This was someone working within a much larger organization who believed something wasn’t right and felt comfortable enough to bring it directly to the person running the company.
My friend could have explained the policy. He could have referred the employee to human resources. He could have asked one of his executives to investigate and report back.
Instead, he listened. Personally.
He took the time to understand not just the complaint, but why the employee felt the way they did. The distinction might seem trivial to someone looking exclusively at the financial numbers.
He didn’t dismiss it.
But here’s where the story becomes much more interesting.
He didn’t simply authorize an exception for that employee.
He went back to his team and asked how many other people were approaching the same situation. Then he asked how many would be affected over the next several years.
It turned out the issue wasn’t isolated. What appeared to be one employee’s complaint was actually an early warning about a policy that would affect a growing number of people.
His response was to have the structure reevaluated, with an eye toward addressing the problem for years rather than making a temporary adjustment that would need to be revisited almost immediately.
He wasn’t interested in solving the same problem over and over again.
One employee had brought him a complaint. He recognized that the employee might have discovered a problem with the system.
That’s a very different way of thinking about employee relations.
And it raises an interesting question: How many organizations would have treated that conversation as a problem employee rather than an opportunity to discover a problem?
The Difference Between a Job and a Place to Work
There is no shortage of companies claiming that their employees are their greatest asset.
I’ve always found that phrase a little peculiar. If people really are your greatest asset, why do so many organizations manage them as though they are interchangeable?
We spend enormous amounts of time developing systems, processes, and policies designed to make organizations scalable and consistent. Those are important goals. I’ve spent much of my career operating businesses where the ability to repeat a process reliably was fundamental to profitability.
But standardization has a weakness.
A system designed to treat everyone consistently can become a system that stops seeing anyone individually.
My friend seems to understand that distinction.
When I asked whether his company hires people differently from its competitors, he surprised me with the simplicity of his answer.
No.
He wasn’t claiming to possess some secret recruiting process that identified extraordinary people overlooked by everyone else. He was operating in the same labor market as his competitors, with many of the same challenges.
The difference, at least in his telling, came after people joined the company.
He believes that employees need to feel they’re part of something more than a job. Not because a mission statement tells them so, but because of how they’re treated and the relationships they develop.
He described employees who have remained with the company for decades. In some locations, multiple members of the same family work together. These aren’t necessarily people passing through on their way to something else. For many, the business has become a career.
That represents an important change he has observed over time. Years ago, employment in his industry was much more heavily populated by part-time workers, including students earning money while pursuing other goals. Today, he sees a workforce increasingly composed of people relying on those jobs as their primary livelihood.
The implications extend well beyond scheduling and payroll.
When someone’s job is a temporary stop along the way, the relationship with the employer may be largely transactional. Show up, do the work, collect the paycheck, and move on.
When that job becomes a career supporting a family, the relationship changes. The employee may care much more about stability, opportunity, respect, and whether the organization will stand behind them when something goes wrong.
Of course, they still care about money. A great culture doesn’t pay the mortgage.
But compensation is only one part of the experience.
And that’s where my friend believes he can compete.
He makes it clear that if employees have a problem that isn’t being resolved through the normal channels, they can bring it to senior leadership, including him personally. He doesn’t promise they’ll always get the answer they want. He promises that he’ll listen, investigate, and change something if the company has gotten it wrong.
There is a world of difference between those two promises.
The first would be impossible to keep. The second creates accountability on both sides of the relationship.
When Someone Else Offers More Money
My friend shared another story that I found particularly revealing.
From time to time, competitors enter the market and begin recruiting experienced employees. Sometimes they offer substantially higher salaries, hoping to attract people who already know how to operate a successful business.
That’s a difficult situation for any employer.
You can try to match every offer, but that quickly becomes an expensive game with no guaranteed winner. You can refuse to negotiate and watch valuable people leave. Or you can try to convince employees that the environment they’re leaving behind is worth more than they realize.
My friend takes an interesting approach.
When he believes someone is leaving for an opportunity that looks attractive financially but comes with a significantly worse working environment, he tells them so.
He doesn’t pretend the money isn’t important. He doesn’t insist that loyalty should override someone’s responsibility to themselves or their family.
He simply shares what he knows.
In one case, an employee decided to leave despite his advice. My friend believed the new job would prove to be a mistake and offered that employee a chance to return if things didn’t work out.
As he tells it, the employee eventually discovered that the higher salary came with a workplace they weren’t particularly happy in. They contacted my friend and returned.
The experience became a story that others in the organization could learn from.
But there’s an important detail here that prevents this from becoming just another corporate loyalty parable.
My friend doesn’t discourage everyone from leaving.
When he believes an employee has found a genuinely better opportunity, he says so. If it’s a good company and a good move, he’ll encourage them to take it.
I love that.
Because it reveals something that many employers seem to forget.
You can’t expect employees to trust your advice about staying if you never believe leaving could be the right decision.
If every outside opportunity is somehow inferior, your advice eventually loses credibility. Employees recognize that you’re protecting the company’s interests rather than considering theirs.
But when you’re willing to tell someone that another job really is a better opportunity, the next time you advise someone to stay, your words carry more weight.
Trust isn’t created by repeatedly telling people they can trust you.
It’s built when your actions demonstrate that you deserve it, particularly when doing so comes at a cost.
The Economics of Being Known
There’s an interesting tension in all of this.
Businesses need systems. They need salary structures, operating procedures, organizational hierarchies, and policies that allow thousands of individual decisions to be made without involving the CEO.
As a company grows, those systems become increasingly important.
But there’s also a danger that the organization becomes so dependent on its systems that it loses the ability to recognize when those systems aren’t working.
The employee who approached my friend about compensation wasn’t asking him to dismantle the organization. The employee was asking someone to recognize a problem that the existing system hadn’t adequately addressed.
And my friend didn’t need to personally manage everyone’s compensation to solve it.
He needed to remain accessible enough that the problem could reach him, curious enough to understand what was really wrong, and willing enough to challenge the existing policy.
That combination is more powerful than it sounds.
A great deal of management energy is spent trying to prevent exceptions. Exceptions create administrative complexity. They introduce questions about fairness. They can undermine the consistency that makes an organization manageable.
But an exception can also be a signal.
Sometimes the person who doesn’t fit comfortably within your system isn’t the problem.
Sometimes they’re the first person to discover where your system is broken.
That doesn’t mean every complaint is legitimate or that every dissatisfied employee deserves an exception. Quite the opposite. If policies change every time someone objects, the organization eventually loses the consistency that made those policies useful.
The challenge is knowing when a complaint represents an individual preference and when it reveals a broader problem.
My friend seems particularly good at making that distinction.
And this brings us back to Amazon.
Amazon’s advantages in logistics, technology, capital, and scale are extraordinary. Its ability to offer competitive wages in many markets presents a real challenge for employers operating businesses with less financial flexibility.
But not every advantage scales equally well.
An employee who feels known by the people running the company, who believes their concerns will be heard, and who trusts that leadership will act when something is wrong may place real value on that relationship.
It doesn’t necessarily overcome a significant pay difference. There are limits to what goodwill can accomplish, particularly when employees have financial obligations that can’t be met with appreciation.
My friend understands that.
But he also understands something else.
When two jobs are otherwise similar, people aren’t necessarily choosing between two paychecks.
They’re choosing between two experiences of spending a substantial portion of their lives.
One might offer more money. Another might offer more stability, stronger relationships, greater trust, or the simple satisfaction of working with people who genuinely care whether you’re there tomorrow.
Those things are difficult to quantify.
That doesn’t make them worthless.
And unlike a wage increase that a competitor can match tomorrow, relationships built over years are not so easily replicated.
You Can’t Outpay Amazon
There’s one more aspect of my friend’s approach that I find particularly important.
He doesn’t confuse caring about people with avoiding difficult conversations.
During our discussion, he described the importance of being able to look an employee in the eye and tell them they’ve screwed up, while making it equally clear that you care about them and want them to succeed.
That requires a relationship strong enough to survive honesty.
I’ve seen organizations where management confuses being nice with being effective. Problems are ignored because nobody wants an uncomfortable conversation. Poor performance is tolerated until resentment builds among the people who are doing their jobs well.
Eventually, the very culture leadership was trying to protect begins to deteriorate.
My friend’s approach is different. He emphasizes clear expectations, recognition when people meet them, and direct conversations when they don’t.
The common denominator is mutual trust.
And that’s why I think his approach to competing with Amazon is so interesting.
He isn’t offering employees a workplace without accountability. He isn’t promising to make everyone happy all the time. And he certainly isn’t suggesting that compensation doesn’t matter.
He’s trying to build an organization where people believe they matter, where expectations are clear, and where leadership is willing to listen even when listening reveals something uncomfortable.
That’s not a particularly complicated management philosophy.
It’s just remarkably difficult to practice consistently.
Especially when the business is large enough that individual employees can easily become little more than entries in a payroll system.
My friend has built a substantial business in an industry where people have plenty of reasons to leave. Yet he continues to invest his own time in making sure people have reasons to stay.
Not because he has discovered some secret formula for employee retention.
But because he recognizes that the relationship between an employer and an employee is still, fundamentally, a relationship between people.
And perhaps that’s the most important lesson.
You may not be able to offer the highest salary. You may not have the most generous benefits or the greatest opportunities for advancement. Your competitors may possess financial advantages that you simply cannot overcome.
But there are things you can choose to do that have very little to do with the size of your payroll.
You can listen. You can be accessible. You can tell the truth. You can acknowledge when your organization gets something wrong. And you can create an environment where people believe they’re more than interchangeable parts of a machine.
None of those things guarantees loyalty.
But together, they might make someone think twice before walking across the street for a bigger paycheck.
You can’t always outpay Amazon.
You might, however, be able to offer something worth staying for.
🌱 Seed Thought: You can’t always compete on what you pay people, but you can compete on how you treat them. The real test of a company’s culture isn’t what it promises employees—it’s what happens when an employee asks to be heard.
