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Tony Stewart on Taking Charge
Rusty Jarrett / Getty Images
Everyone thinks they can run a company better than the boss. That is, until they become the boss of that company—or start their own.
Making that transition into an ownership or supervisory role can be difficult, especially in a dark economy. It’s even more of a challenge if you’ve been perceived as a problem child employee at times in your career.
All of which makes Tony Stewart’s first-year performance as an owner-driver on the NASCAR Sprint Cup circuit all the more impressive. Through July, Stewart is in first place in the Sprint Cup standings. Ryan Newman, his Stewart-Haas racing teammate, is seventh.
The 38-year-old Stewart spent 12 years with Joe Gibbs Racing, winning two Cup titles. As a young driver, Stewart was best known for clashing with opponents and the media. He’s matured in recent years, becoming a gregarious, self-deprecating elder statesman of sorts. Throughout this season, he’s offered advice on making the transition from employee to owner.
1. Find good people and give them credit.
“You win races and championships with people,” Stewart says. “It’s not with fancy race cars and by having trick strategies. That’s not what happens in the long haul. In the long run it’s people.
“You hire the right people to do the right jobs and it’s their responsibility to do their job and it's my responsibility to do my portion of it as a driver on the weekends. If you don't trust the people that you have working for you, you're never going to be successful.”
2. Recognize your shortcomings.
As Clint Eastwood famously said, “A man’s got to know his limitations.” Working for Joe Gibbs, Stewart respected the Hall of Fame football coach for not pretending to be an expert on race cars.
“Joe doesn’t know how they work,” Stewart said, “but he knows how to hire the right people to do the right jobs in the organization, and that's what has made him successful in the NFL, in NHRA and NASCAR. He's extremely successful at hiring the right people to do the right jobs.
Stewart, likewise, has been a shrewd judge of talent.
“Part of that process is being able to take five résumés that can be identical and being able to pick which guy is going to work with everybody else in the organization and has the right mindset, no matter whether there's eight more guys that have the same skills they have. That's something that I feel like I was able to bring from Gibbs Racing and apply it to Stewart-Haas.”
3. Be prepared to surrender your free time.
Ask any entrepreneur what the toughest part of the job is, and they’ll tell you it’s the 20-hour days. As an employee, it’s much easier to disconnect from the office.
“You have so many added responsibilities as an owner and budgeting your time is one of the biggest things,” Stewart says. “It's just knowing that there's 24 hours in a day and only 365 of those days in a year to get everything that you need to get done.
“I told somebody the other day. They said, ‘If there was one thing that you could change, what would it be?’ I said, ‘We'd make 30-hour days and 400-day years to get everything that we want to get done. It's just finding the time with everybody's schedules as hectic as they are to be able to get everything that needs to be done. That seems to be the hardest part of what we do.”
About The Author
Pete Williams – Pete Williams is a contributing writer for CorePerformance.com and the co-author of the Core Performance book series.
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