Q. How do you sell the
employees on the fact that
your company is worth working
hard for?
You have to share with
them, back to the vision
statement of, ‘Here’s how I
see it in the long run. Here’s
where the short term is.’
(It’s) no different than you
buying stock as a consumer.
I’m going to buy company
stock, and the reason I’m
going to buy that company’s
stock is because I look at
their (price-earnings) ratio,
or I look at what the product
is or I look at what their
sales proposition is, and I
place a bet. That bet is my
money spent on that stock is
a better bet than any place
I’m going to invest in stock.
Well, employees coming on
board are really investing in
your stock. It’s your job as
the owner of the company to
make their stock more valuable. So they sit, they listen
to the story.
They’ve worked with you
in the past, or they like
where you’re positioned in
the market, and they buy
that stock and invest their
time. You’ve got X amount
of months before they start
to say, ‘Hey, this is really
starting to appreciate,’ or,
‘You know what, I made an
investment and I need to
leave because it’s not really
showing signs of life.’
The next job is to keep
people informed of how the
company’s progress is
doing. Be straight. ‘Are we
growing?’ ‘We grew, we doubled, we tripled. We went
up by 10 percent. Your
investment is doing well. It
does well for you to stay
here.’
Q. How do you determine
how much information to share
with employees?
People tend to do what
you pay them to do and not
a lot of what you don’t pay
them to do. So, you could
pay them to wash windows,
but if you are expecting
them to sweep the floors
when you pay them to wash
windows, your floors are
going to be dirty.
So the same applies, and
for me in this role, which is
you’ve got a quarterly revenue goal, you’ve got an
annual profit goal, you’ve
got individual metrics that
make both those things go,
how are we doing against
that?
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