Never Assume Anything… Especially When There’s a 5-Gallon Bucket of Quarters Involved

One of the many life lessons I learned from owning my own business was this:

NEVER assume ANYTHING.

And when I say anything, I mean anything.

There were times over the years when an employee would leave and we couldn’t find a replacement right away. When that happened, we would sometimes turn to a temporary agency.

One position we absolutely had to keep covered was our front desk. We needed someone there to greet people as they came into the office and, of course, answer the phones.

It was an important position, but there could also be some downtime. The phones would go quiet, no one would be walking through the door, and our temporary receptionist would be sitting there without much to do.

Now, as a property management company, we were responsible for collecting the quarters from the laundry machines at a couple of our multi-family apartment buildings.

And I'm talking a LOT of quarters.

They were collected from the machines and brought back to our office in five-gallon buckets. Then someone had to roll all those loose quarters so they could be taken to the bank.

One afternoon, things were pretty quiet, so I asked our temporary receptionist if she would mind rolling quarters at her desk.

She was happy to have something to do and happily agreed.

Perfect!

I went back to my office and got busy with whatever fire I was putting out that day. After a while, I came back out to check on her progress.

She had been busy!

There were rolls and rolls of quarters lined up on her desk.

There was just one little problem...

Every single roll was a different length.

And I don't mean slightly different.

They were significantly different.

If you've never rolled quarters before, a properly filled roll contains $10 worth of quarters. You fill the paper wrapper with 40 quarters, close up the ends, and voilà — one neat little $10 roll.

Well...

If I had to guess, I would say some of these rolls had $6 in them. Some maybe $7. One might have had $8.25.

And I'm pretty sure there was at least one monster roll with $11 stuffed into it!

I don't believe any two rolls were the same length.

I stood there looking at all those beautifully wrapped, completely incorrect rolls of quarters and realized something.

She didn't know.

And why would she?

I had asked her to roll the quarters.

I had never told her that each roll needed to contain exactly $10.

To me, that seemed obvious.

To her, it wasn't.

And that was the day I learned a lesson that stuck with me throughout the rest of my career:

Never assume someone knows the steps just because the task seems simple to you.

If you're giving someone a project, explain it from beginning to end. Give them the details. Tell them what the finished product should look like. Explain the things that seem obvious.

Because what's obvious to you may not be obvious to someone who has never done it before.

There really is no such thing as giving someone too much information when you're teaching them something new.

And sometimes the best business lessons come from the most unexpected places...

Like a five-gallon bucket full of quarters.

Yep.

That's another page for the book.

Or, I guess now, another post for the blog. 😉