I remember a quote from a professor in college who said if you are working for a living, you are in the wrong field. Work is something you must do, not what you love to do.
When you opened your business, or picked your career, it was based upon something you loved to do. But like everything in life, there are the things that you must do, to be able to do the things that you love to do. I love to sit in my backyard, I must cut the grass to do it. I love to go fishing, I must ask my wife to be able to do it. We try and minimize the things we “must” do to maximize the things we love to do.
When you are deciding where to add staff or resources to your business, the first positions filled are typically what the principal/owner does not want to do, usually administrative tasks. Filling these positions may feel random but they are the correct positions to fill. The reason that these are the correct positions is that there is a concept called “opportunity costs”. Opportunity costs are where someone does one task, and they are taken away from a different, more valuable task. If the different task they are taken from creates more value (revenue, increased savings, etc) then there is a repercussion associated with the task (the lost revenue, lost savings, etc). For example, if a business owner is reconciling the bank account, and that takes him/her away from selling or fulfilling the product or services of the business, then the actual cost of doing the bank reconciliation is the owner’s time + how much revenue or savings that are potentially lost due to the owner performing that work.
As a company grows, additional staff are required to further the growth, such as additional sales, to provide/fulfill the product and/or service. An old adage is that a business can only grow as much as the owner will let it. If the owner does not delegate and tries to control everything, then the growth is stifled by how much the owner can do.
So not only do we need to find the right people for these administrative or growth positions, we want to seek out people that love that type of work. Those are the individuals that will have a greater impact / contribution to the overall business. We also need to make sure that the people we have are in the correct positions.
At Mendelson Consulting and Noobeh we ensure that our staff are doing the tasks that they love the most, and in return we gain the best results from them. On the consulting side, we provide different types of services: analytics & reporting, training, database manipulation, data conversions, custom integrations, inventory management and more. No one person can be an expert on all these. For example, someone who is good at training may excel at data manipulation, thus becoming more effective, and gaining more personal satisfaction by working on data manipulation. We continually assess where our staff is at their best and move them to the positions in which they thrive. It is no coincidence that where people are at their best is also the work they love to do. We continually refine our internal workflows and processes to ensure we are addressing the “opportunity costs” and gaining the most in both output and satisfaction from our employees.
You are probably thinking… what about entry level staff? This applies here as well. We hire those individuals with the thought of growing them with the business and moving them upwards through the organization.
In conclusion: Early in my father’s life he was a construction foreman. One of his workers would show up late every morning. The employee continued to be late, so my father fired him and told him that he could focus on his music career, which he loved more than his real job. That employee was Randy Bachman, of Bachman-Turner, Overdrive. This experience for Randy may very well have been the impetus for the song “Taking Care of Business.
If you do what you love, you will love what you do.
Mendelson Consulting is here to help. Contact us for more information about how we can assess your workflow and processes to drive greater satisfaction and performance from your team.
