Permission to Screw Up

August 21, 2017
In this frank and well-told business memoir, Hadeed tells the story of how her craving for “a nice pair of jeans” led her to found the cleaning service Student Maid in Gainesville, Fla., in 2007, when she was still a college student. At first, everything seemed to be going smoothly, until, suddenly, 45 out of the 60 Student Maid employees walked out in the middle of a cleaning session, dissatisfied with their working conditions. After winning them back with her honest and unassuming manner, Hadeed successfully fulfilled her first big contract. However, this initial test was just the first of many challenges Hadeed would face. For the past 10 years, she’s confronted as many difficulties as a business owner could imagine: being threatened with a lawsuit for infringing a similarly named company’s trademark, paying employees 100 times their salary due to an intern’s accounting error, confronting an employee who lied about her working hours, and having to accept the sudden resignation of a trusted and longtime employee. Although not well suited to businesspeople seeking step-by-step guidelines, the book’s emphasis on narrative will suit readers interested in learning by example. It urges young leaders to keep going and not be afraid of making mistakes, because “behind every leader is a perfectly imperfect story.”