Last week, we asked an important question: Do you trust your employees?

Trust changes the speed and cost of business. When trust is high, work moves faster. When trust is low, everything requires review, control, and time.

But trust does not travel in only one direction.

This week, let’s turn the question around:

Do your employees trust you?

That question became especially real for me this past week.

I took a big step at 40 Accounting™ by introducing incentive stock options for two key employees whom I want to be involved with the company for the long term. The details and reasoning deserve a future article of their own.

If I want key employees to commit their talent and future to building this company, I need to show that I am committed to building a future with them.

Trust cannot simply be demanded. Owners must demonstrate it.

Trust Starts With the Basics

My first paying job was picking strawberries when I was about 12 years old.

I remember bringing in a flat after working for what felt like forever. Someone would stamp a card, and I had to trust that my work would turn into a paycheck.

That is employment at its most basic:

I will do the work, and I trust that you will pay me.

Employees need to know they will be compensated on time. I have worked with companies where paychecks bounced. Once that happens, employees begin wondering whether they need another job.

Employees do not need every financial detail. But they need confidence that the owner understands the numbers, manages cash responsibly, and keeps the company’s commitments.

Employees Need to Feel Safe

Safety goes beyond equipment, buildings, and written policies.

Employees need to know they will not be screamed at, humiliated, harassed, or punished for raising a concern.

A workplace cannot be called a family while people are afraid of the person at the top.

Accountability matters. Difficult conversations are sometimes necessary. But neither requires disrespect.

People should be able to make a mistake, acknowledge it, learn, and improve. That does not mean tolerating poor performance. It means creating an environment where the truth can be spoken before a small problem becomes a major one.

Employees Need to See a Future

Once the fundamentals are covered, employees begin asking:

Is there an opportunity for me here?

Can I learn, take on more responsibility, increase my compensation, and advance?

At 40 Accounting™, we have grown from two employees to ten. Growth creates challenges, but it also creates opportunity.

Growth is not just about increasing the owner’s income or making the company more valuable. It creates opportunities for the people who helped build it.

When employees cannot see a future in the company, their only path to advancement may be leaving.

Share Some of the Success

Employees work because they need to support themselves and their families. When the company succeeds, consider giving employees an opportunity to participate through bonuses, profit sharing, commissions, benefits, or variable compensation tied to results.

At one company where I worked, we paid profit-sharing bonuses in 11 out of 12 quarters. Employees would wait outside the office asking, “What’s the number?”

They understood the connection between company performance and their reward.

Could Employees Earn Ownership?

For some companies, the next level may be equity.

I understand why many owners do not give employees stock. Owners often invest savings, guarantee loans, survive years without predictable income, and carry risks employees were never asked to carry.

But some employees create extraordinary value over time. Their leadership, relationships, and effort increase what the business is worth.

That is where earning ownership becomes powerful.

At 40 Accounting™, our long-term mission is to build an employee-owned company where employees have the opportunity to earn ownership. It will not be automatic. But people who help build the company should have a path to participate in the value they create.

The Highest Level Is Genuine Care

Compensation matters. Safety matters. Opportunity, bonuses, and ownership matter.

But the deepest level of trust is more personal.

Does your employee believe you genuinely care about them as a person?

A healthy organization is a high-performing team. People coordinate, hold one another accountable, and work together to win.

Sometimes the relationship grows deeper. People celebrate weddings, births, graduations, and promotions. They show up during illnesses, losses, and difficult seasons.

That culture cannot be manufactured with a slogan. It is created when leaders choose honesty, consistency, generosity, and care.

Trust Goes Both Ways

As an owner, you should ask whether you trust your employees.

But you should also have the courage to ask:

Do my employees trust me?

Do they trust me to pay them, protect them, tell them the truth, create opportunities, share success, make responsible decisions, and care about them beyond what they produce?

You may own the business, but you do not automatically own your employees’ trust.

That must be earned.

Once it is earned, protect it. A company where owners and employees trust one another can move faster, accomplish more, and create opportunities neither side could create alone.

The 40 Strategy Growth Workshop™

Last week we kicked off our speaker announcements with Tommy Breedlove.  Next up is Mike Garrison. I met Mike at the Growth Drive Summit, hosted by George Sandmann, and knew our community needed to meet him. As a past Measure Success Podcast guest, his premise was simple, if your sales approach is weak, your business will always struggle. Listen to his episode here. 

Mike helps professionals win their ideal clients through referrals instead of cold outreach. Over more than 25 years in sales training, business coaching, and strategic planning, he has taught thousands of owners and advisors how to turn client and center-of-influence relationships into a predictable engine of introductions.

He is the author of Can I Borrow Your Car?, which reframes a referral as borrowing someone's most valuable asset, their reputation, and treats it with exactly that weight. He also co-authored the bestseller Truth or Delusion: Busting Networking's Biggest Myths and contributed to the #1 bestseller Masters of Success. His core argument is blunt: if you can't predict your referrals, you don't have a system, you have hope. His latest book, Would You Build This?, includes a forward by Carl.

Based in Roanoke, Virginia, Mike writes regularly on referrals, trust, and the role of AI in modern business development. When he's not coaching, he's on the water fly fishing or caring for his special-needs son alongside his wife.

For any owner who has burned money on ads, cold email, and lead lists that never turned into clients, Mike's whole life's work is the alternative: relationships, built on trust, that produce introductions you can count on.