Leaders of 2nd, 3rd, and 4th generation family businesses gathered to learn from each other and enjoy a morning of fun in the awesome SAP Boardroom Suite at Levi’s Stadium, home of the San Francisco 49ers.
The session, hosted by Bridge Bank (Emily Ruvalcaba) and Executive Forums Silicon Valley (Glenn Perkins), was designed around a discussion with panelists Brittni Daley-Grishaeva, Adam Beck, Dee Ann Harn, and Ian Barth who shared lessons learned about the challenges and opportunities in taking over from the previous generations.
Prior to the panel discussion, the attendees participated in a Personal Histories networking activity during breakfast. This was followed by a team scavenger hunt in the 49ers Museum to experience and learn from the culture of a large family business—the San Francisco 49ers.
An intimate panel discussion revolved around themes and questions such as:
How or when did you recognize the “super power” of your predecessor? How were you able to replace that “super power” within the organization? How did you apply your own “super power” within your company
What counsel or guidance would you give to those who are assuming a new leadership position in dealing with or overcoming entrenched personnel in a company?
Looking back, what is the biggest opportunity to shake things up that you identified when transitioning?
Can you comment on what may have been scary for you when you took over your position? What was that particular aspect of the business troublesome for you? What did you do to overcome those fears?
What counsel or guidance about support structures or scaffolding would you give to those who are assuming a new leadership position in a company?
Open questions and discussion based on attendee questions.
It was a fantastic event and we want to thank the attendees and panelists for an awesome morning and for being so open to sharing their experience and expertise with everyone.
If a learning and networking event such as this might be of interest to you and the leaders in your generational business, please reach out.
Have you ever considered making it your primary goal to set up your business so that it can thrive and grow without you?
A business not dependent on its owner is the ultimate asset to own. It allows you to have complete control over your time so that you can choose the projects you get involved in and the vacations you take. When it comes to exit, a business independent of its owner is worth a lot more than an owner-dependent company.
Here are five ways to set up your business so that it can succeed without you.
1. Give Them A Stake In The Outcome
Jack Stack, the author of The Great Game of Business and A Stake In The Outcome wrote the book on creating an ownership culture inside your company: you are transparent about your financial results and you allow employees to participate in your financial success. This results in employees who act like owners when you’re not around.
2. Get Them To Walk In Your Shoes
If you’re not quite comfortable opening up the books to your employees, consider a simple management technique where you respond to every question your staff brings you with the same answer, “If you owned the company, what would you do?” By forcing your employees to walk in your shoes, you get them thinking about their question as you would and it builds the habit of starting to think like an owner. Pretty soon, employees are able to solve their own problems.
3. Vet Your Offerings
Identify the products and services which require your personal involvement in either making, delivering or selling them. Make a list of everything you sell and score each on a scale of 0 to 10 on how easy they are to teach an employee to handle. Assign a 10 to offerings that are easy to teach employees and give a lower score to anything that requires your personal attention. Commit to stopping to sell the lowest scoring product or service on your list. Repeat this exercise every quarter.
4. Create Automatic Customers
Are you the company’s best salesperson? If so, you’ll need to fire yourself as your company’s rainmaker in order to get it to run without you. One way to do this is to create a recurring revenue business model where customers buy from you automatically. Consider creating a service contract with your customers that offers to fulfill one of their ongoing needs on a regular basis.
5. Write An Instruction Manual For Your Business
Finally, make sure your company comes with instructions included. Write an employee manual or what MBA-types called Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). These are a set of rules employees can follow for repetitive tasks in your company. This will ensure employees have a rulebook they can follow when you’re not around, and, when an employee leaves, you can quickly swap them out with a replacement to take on duties of the job.
You-proofing your business has enormous benefits. It will allow you to create a company and have a life. Your business will be free to scale up because it is no longer dependent on you, its bottleneck. Best of all, it will be worth a lot more to a buyer whenever you are ready to sell.
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At Executive Forums Silicon Valley, selected business owners and leaders work together to gain clarity, insight and accountability to ignite their leadership engines, grow their businesses and improve their lives. If you are interested in learning more about Business Owner Advisory Boards, Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS), Stages of Growth, Value Builder System or becoming a member at Executive Forum Silicon Valley, please contact gperkins@executiveforums.com or call 408-901-0321. For more information visit http://www.execforumssv.com/ .
The Four Real World Employee Ratios that Can Drive Your Business
It’s a competitive jungle out there, and the most sought-after prizes aren’t treasure chests of money, but people. High performing employees to be specific. Regardless of employment levels, top companies know that success depends on not only attracting and retaining your most productive employees, but also on building a healthy set of employee performance metrics. This article will focus on four employee metrics that are not usually tracked, though they can make or break your business value. These key employee metrics are:
Employees per square foot
Customers per account manager
Ratio of Promoters to Detractors
Revenue per employee
If you’re planning to sell your company one day, tracking key ratios is a must. Acquirers like tracking ratios, and the more relevant ratios you can provide a potential buyer, the more comfortable they will become with the idea of buying your business. The bulk of the employee ratios that successful businesses need to monitor involve how human capital is most effectively used in a given enterprise.
Numerous sources can be found to confirm the following: “There is no doubt about the fact that the human asset is the key intangible asset for any organization. In today’s dynamic and continuously changing business world, it is the human assets and not the fixed or tangible assets that differentiate an organization from its competitors.”
There are four key employee metrics to keep your eye on, the first two having to do with efficiency and the last two focused on effectiveness.
Employees per square foot
By calculating the number of square feet of office space you rent and dividing it by the number of employees you have, you can judge how efficiently you have designed your space. Commercial real estate agents use a general rule of 175-250 square feet of usable space per employee. It’s not about crowding more employees into less space, it’s about workflow and productivity, so take virtual teams and work-from-home options into your calculations too.
Customers per Account Manager
How many customers do you ask your account managers to manage? Finding a balance can be tricky. Some bankers are forced to juggle more than 400 accounts, and therefore do not know each of their customers, whereas some high-end wealth managers may have just 50 clients to stay in contact with. It’s hard to say what the right ratio is because it is so highly dependent on your industry. Slowly increase your ratio of customers per account manager until you see the first signs of deterioration (slowing sales, drop in customer satisfaction). That’s when you know you have pushed it too far. You’re trying to create a balanced, high-performing team, where account managers can effectively spread their expertise over a full plate of customers, removing some of the waste in workflow management so that managers have their time well spent and customer needs are being met by an experienced resource.
Ratio of Promoters and Detractors
The Net Promoter Score® methodology, developed by Fred Reichheld and his colleagues at Bain & Company and Satmetrix, is based on asking customers a single question that is predictive of both repurchase and referral. It works by asking a single question, “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend (insert your company name here) to a friend or colleague?” Now, as much as that can be an indicator of customer satisfaction, it can also be a telling question to ask of employees. The same principles apply, as employees are the single largest source of referrals for new hires, and referrals are a key indicator for longevity and productivity in your employees. Figure out what percentage of the employees surveyed give the company a 9 or 10, and label that your ratio of “promoters.” Calculate your ratio of detractors by figuring out the percentage of people surveyed who gave you a score of 0 to 6. Obviously the results need to be kept confidential if you’re doing the survey of employees, but the results are indicative of internal opportunities and work to be done. You calculate your Net Promoter Score (NPS) by subtracting your percentage of detractors from your percentage of promoters. The average company in the U.S. has a Net Promoter Score of between 10 and 15 percent while a good Net Promoter score is greater than 50 (Netflix, Amazon) and a world class Net Promoter Score is above 70 (Apple, Tesla, BMW). The glaring conclusion is that companies with an above-average Net Promoter Score grow faster than average-scoring businesses.
Revenue per Employee (RPE)
Payroll is the number one expense for most businesses, which explains why maximizing your revenue per employee can translate quickly to the bottom line. It’s a multi-faceted indicator of employee quality, company culture, employee-customer relations and the overall health of the business.
“Revenue per employee (RPE) is one of the most underrated metrics available for assessing business performance in a crowded marketplace.” Many leaders look at gross income and overall market share, but neither metric provides much actionable data. “If a competitor is achieving far higher RPE numbers than you, then you’ve got a pretty clear signpost towards areas for improvement.”
Amongst the largest corporations, average revenue per employee hovers at an astounding $1.3 million, with oil companies leading the way. Technology companies, where employee culture is considered some of the most innovative and efficient, put up some impressive RPE numbers as shown in the graphic above.
Some smaller companies struggle to cross the RPE threshold of $100,000, though their businesses are still wildly valuable (as size definitely does matter). Interestingly, smaller firms, which you would expect to be more productive than their larger competitors, actually average just over $100,000 per employee per year vs. almost $300,000 for the Fortune 500. All those systems and processes do count for something. Typical revenue per employee for various industries are shown below.
If you’re interested in benchmarking your industry, go to www.hoovers.com, the leading business database in the U.S. and search for larger companies in your industry. Click on the Fact Sheet that displays as an option and simply take revenues and divide by the number of employees.
Case Study – Revenue per Employee – The Container Store
An impressive case study can be made from the practices of The Container Store, the privately held retailer out of Texas, named one of the top places to work in the U.S. the past five years. They have a simple productivity formula: one great employee replaces three good employees; pay them twice as much ($20 per hour vs. the standard $10 a typical retailer pays) while having a lower total wage cost; and provide each employee with 160 hours of training. In essence, fewer higher paid smart people rather than a bunch of low paid “dump” folks! It’s your choice. And if you’re having a tough time recruiting employees, consider that The Container Store had 4000 people apply for the 40 positions they needed when they opened one of their retail stores in New York City. By building their business model from the very beginning to focus on garnering three times the productivity from sales associates, they can afford to pay them considerably above industry norm. The extensive training, in turn, helps to drive the productivity necessary to make the economics work. And the higher wages help to attract a better initial employee and retain the highly productive employees they create through their educational programs.
Now, it might seem logical to trim staff numbers to send your RPE ratios through the roof but don’t fall for it, as increasing workloads and lowering FTEs has been proven to negatively impact productivity in the long term.
The think tank at McKinsey has looked at RPE and at the intangible value that human capital contributes to businesses, and their results are thought-provoking:
“The vast majority of companies still gauge their performance using systems that measure internal financial results—systems based on metrics that don’t take sufficient notice of the real engines of wealth creation today: the knowledge, relationships, reputations, and other intangibles created by talented people and represented by investments in such activities as R&D, marketing, and training.
Companies fill their annual reports with information about how they use capital but fail to reflect sufficiently on their use of the “thinking-intensive” people who increasingly drive wealth creation in today’s digital economy.”
They go so far as to suggest a remedy for company CEOs and leadership that might be stuck in the past. “To boost the potential for wealth creation, strategically minded executives must embrace a radical idea: changing financial-performance metrics to focus on returns on talent rather than returns on capital alone. This shift in perspective would have far-reaching implications—for measuring performance, for evaluating executives, even for the way analysts measure corporate value. Only if executives begin to look at performance in this new way will they change internal measurements of performance and thus motivate managers to make better economic decisions, particularly about spending on intangibles.”
When it comes to building or presenting the value of your business, whether you’re looking to sell it or not, the data picture that you present truly does speak volumes. Like an artist using multiple textures and colors, data ratios, especially as they relate to employee efficiency metrics, can tell a much more compelling story than just looking at gross revenues or inventory turns.
If you’re still wondering if revenue per employee translates into bottom line performance, consider this: one recent study in the technology industry (software, hardware, IT services, etc.) found that the top 10% of companies ranked by performance had roughly twice the revenues per employee as the average. Now, can you afford not to examine RPE in your own business? Something to think about, hard.
At Executive Forums Silicon Valley, selected business owners and leaders work together to gain clarity, insight and accountability to ignite their leadership engines, grow their businesses and improve their lives. If you are interested in learning more about Business Owner Advisory Boards, Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS), Stages of Growth, Value Builder System or becoming a member at Executive Forum Silicon Valley, please contact gperkins@executiveforums.com or call 408-901-0321. For more information visit http://www.execforumssv.com/ .
Avoid the Mile-Wide Trap in Your Business COVID 19 Response
What is the difference between a mile-wide versus a mile-deep approach to building your business? And why does it matter?
As many companies’ growth has stalled due to Covid-19’s shelter-in-place, unemployment, reduced consumption, workplace protection and other changes and limitations, some are looking everywhere for new businesses, even scrambling to diversify by adding new products and services to sell.
However, before a necessary pivot, it is important to make sure that you don’t fall into the “Mile Wide Trap” as you look to diversify your business.
The Mile Wide Trap
The Mile Wide Trap first starts to ensnare you when you do an excellent job serving a small number of great customers and they ask you to handle more of their DIFFERENT TYPES of work. You keep delivering, and they keep broadening the list of products and services they want you to supply. Your company is wildly profitable serving the expanding needs of this small list of “great customers” so you keep falling deeper and deeper into what eventually becomes “the mile wide but an inch deep” trap.
Pretty soon, you’re an inch deep and a mile wide in offerings and the only person in your company with the depth of industry experience to deliver all of the services is you. But you’re trapped because your expenses have crept up as your revenue has increased – leaving you dependent on the sales you get from a small group of demanding customers. And the chase never ends.
Another example of the Mile Wide Trap is when there is a disruption in the market, and you look to capitalize by doing something your company has not done before. This may be particularly attractive during this time of economic upheaval caused by Coronavirus.
A Mile Deep is Better Than a Mile Wide
Instead of selling more things to a few customers, first concentrate on understanding your company’s core focus – the intersection of your passion and your expertise, then sell a few things to a lot of customers.
In order to scale up a company, employees, not owners, need to be able to execute work with quality and speed. This is much easier to accomplish repeatedly when the company operates within its core focus where everyone is already trained to do their best.
As an extreme example, Ferrari represents a high-performance racing type automobile. Ferrari’s core focus is: “We build cars, symbols of Italian excellence the world over, and we do so to win on both road and track.” They are a mile deep in what they do – high performance Italian cars. They know that the gold is buried deep. One might think they could go wide and diversify into high performance motorcycles, snowmobiles or even airplanes, however, they stay close to their core focus and avoid the Mile Wide Trap.
When the markets seem to be in turmoil, it is easy to fall into The Mile Wide Trap that will eventually choke off your growth. Do pivot when necessary, but more often than not, doubling down on your core focus will provide the long term, scalable growth you are looking for.
If you’re curious to benchmark your company on growth potential and the other seven factors that drive your company’s value, take 13 minutes and get your Value Builder Score here: https://bit.ly/36nPCKn
At Executive Forums Silicon Valley, selected business owners and leaders work together to gain clarity, insight and accountability to ignite their leadership engines, grow their businesses and improve their lives. If you are interested in learning more about Business Owner Advisory Boards, Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS), Stages of Growth, Value Builder System or becoming a member at Executive Forum Silicon Valley, please contact gperkins@executiveforums.com or call 408-901-0321. For more information visit http://www.execforumssv.com/ .
