Creating People Leverage for Business Growth
May 5th, 2016 // 3:37 am @ Scott Manning
Last week I said “Your business will always and only be as good as the people in it – and they will only do as well as you are dedicated to helping them achieve growth – and you will as a result.”
All people (at least those who have the desire to be successful), just like you, need clarity of purpose and of priorities. Achieving growth through your people is essential and the entire point, but if they don’t understand what growth looks like or how to create it, contribute to it, and sustain it they will disappoint you without even knowing it.
I promised leverage points of growth through your people. The bottom line is, you can’t expect your people to help you grow the company if they don’t understand how to and most importantly how they fit in to it.
Usually, when Entrepreneurs look at hiring people, they look at the expense instead of the investment: the return on talent, return on time, return on people, return on leverage.
It’s very easy to expand personnel in a way in which there is no leverage to growth and then you see your overhead climb and your profit nosedive. This is why you must be able to see increase in revenue and profitability in parallel to increasing people on your team in your business.
I always tell my Clients “the right decision will always pay for itself.” This means the people we do not have are costing us far more in missed opportunity, lost revenue (just revenue that you do not see), and stress which leads to inefficiency which leads to reduced profitability and usually employee turnover … and that is perhaps the most costly thing of any of this, not just because you have to hire and train but because you lose the production of the person who left.
This is the equivalent of trying to get to a destination fast but having to start and stop or slow down instead of driving pedal to the metal.
You want to be in the straightaway of growth and hit your stride with your people as fast as possible and empower them to own their position, in charge of their responsibilities, capable of making decisions, growing their performance and being accountable for their results.
That is the only way.
So, leverage points of growth for your people.
I’ll give you the 4 basic ones today. Next week, we’ll talk about how to ‘develop’ your talent and truly empower them to perform at the highest level, perhaps and hopefully even better than you could possibly do, in whatever their role is.
4 Leverage Points of Business Growth through People
First, the obvious…Sales
If you want to grow your business, the best way is to have more people asking for money and selling. When you add people who can do this, you can’t fail as long as they are capable.
Next we have…Capacity
When you sell more, you have to fulfill, deliver, service more. If your business has any type of capacity to it and you want to grow by getting bigger, you have to have more people who can ‘earn’ money for you.
Then there is what we’ll call…Retention
Retention of customers, clients, patients is so critically important, and it’s overlooked. In Dentistry, practices are cheap about hiring enough people to handle the incoming flow of phone calls and live patients going in and out of their office.
And in fairness, they are often not trained on how to effectively contribute, manage, and grow the practice from a business, money, patient service stand point. Instead they are just ‘task people.’
But, every phone call missed, every patient not exited properly, every bill not paid is money lost. And the same goes for the customer service side of the business.
Most people work so hard to get people in the front door but then they lose them out the back door or give them such a mediocre experience while they are engaged in their business they never come back to buy again.
I see Dentist (NOT MY CLIENTS for damn sure) who are inept, they are getting 100’s of new patients but yet their hygiene department (the RETENTION of the BUSINESS) never grows. They have been in practice for decades without any retention of patients.
They don’t understand that the average Hygienist sees 20-30 patients per week, that’s, let’s just say 100 a month, that’s 1000+ a year, so for every 300 new patients a year you should be forced to add another day / column of Hygiene per week…for some that means they need another Hygiene day and some that means they need a new full time hygienist.
Either way, they think the problem is the patient. Instead, it’s because we do not have enough Team Members to focus on GROWTH and Leverage through Retention of Patients therefore we need more new patients every month because we lose all of them and start over again and again.
This is just one example and there are many different types of practices. The point is, business leverage through your people is as much about Retention of Opportunity as it is about Sales and finding New Opportunity.
Finally, we have leveraged growth through People where we are actually expanding the business itself. This could be through marketing, through adding services, expanding size and the only way to do this is to have the people to support it.
Leverage through people – if it’s not attached to one of these four things – sales or faster acquisition of customers and money, capacity or delivery which includes efficiency, retention or service, expansion of earning potential then you are going to be unhappy and see money added to the expense column without anything added in multiples to the revenue and profit columns.
There’s a lot to think about here. Write down each of the four and assess your business growth as it is today and the way you envision it for the future. Find your people leverage points inside of these quadrants – continue to grow your potential and prosper every step of the way.
Category : Blog
