[GH85Carrera]

The one job most managers or business owners hate the most is hiring and firing employees.

All my life, I worked for a family owned businesses. Just one boss, the owner. I saw him deal with many employees over the many years I worked at my second ever job. I worked for 4 different bosses at four companies. Now I work for myself.

Oklahoma is a hire and fire at will state. If a lousy employee needs to go, he would always wait until Friday, payday, and take them in his office. Tell them straight up, why they are no longer needed, and give them the check they had earned, and if they had worked there for over a year, another two weeks of pay as a goodby, and that was just out of the goodness of the boss's heart.

He kept trying to pawn that part of the business off on me as the manager. I told him that will require a raise on my salary if I have to be the heavy and fire people. It is really hard to fire a incompetent or just plain stupid person that really needs a job. We were not a charity, and needed employees to do the task.

That entire industry is gone now, digital photography killed traditional professional photo labs dead. I can do everything we did with 12 employees, a 5,000 square foot custom built building, and a million bucks worth of equipment, in my little office by myself, with a service bureau to print any prints for a small fee and zero overhead.

That is the toughest part of any business, adapting to change. Not many buggy whip makers or wheelwrights today. Commercial professional photography was a great career but it is almost gone now. Very few are still in business.