S11 E13-16 (TurboCharge Your Business) 13 Weeks to Financial Literacy - People Planning with Patty Lawrence

S11 E13-16 (TurboCharge Your Business) 13 Weeks to Financial Literacy - People Planning with Patty Lawrence on the IBGR.Network

Welcome to TurboCharge Your Business, a show for business owners who are tired of just working IN the nuts and bolts of their businesses and ready to work ON the business itself from a big-picture, growth-oriented, strategic perspective. 

I’m Patty Lawrence: founder of TurboExecs, money finder, consulting CFO, and right hand to growth-minded CEO’s. This season is called 13 Weeks to Financial Literacy and over the course of the season, I’m teaching you everything you need to know to take your business from confused and chaotic to strategically growing with you in the driver’s seat. Before we get into this episode, you can reach me at turboexecs.com. 

PEOPLE PLANNING

Today’s show is all about the individuals you need in your business. By the end of our time together, you’ll gain insight into what you need on the people-side of your business as you grow. 

​

S11 E17 People Planning: Roles
Companies are people driven. You need great people inside and outside of your company: employees, contractors, clients, community. It’s important to manage the relationships, which are the fabric that knits all of us together. 

As business owners, we want to be happy and we want our people to be happy. Happy, engaged people are way more productive in the business. That applies outside the business, too! You want community, clients, and stakeholders to be engaged, too, because that means we have alignment which equals velocity. 

All of those different pieces of the puzzle are critical to the success of our companies. We need to ask ourselves as it relates to people day-in and day-out, would you “rehire” those people into your company or would you rehire that client? These are important questions that we need to be asking ourselves. If we say no, we need to determine why. Why wouldn’t we ask that client to come back? Why wouldn’t we rehire that team member? Why wouldn’t we engage again with a vendor or another stakeholder? 

Let’s reference “Scaling Up” again from the last episode, and pull in some of the concepts from the people section. When we look at roles, we’ll examine dynamics, functions, and processes.

The first role we’ll look at in our company is Leaders. Our leaders are required over time to grow and evolve in our skillset and maturity. As the business grows, we need to grow, too. There are three key leadership roles:

• Accountability. Accountability is really the one person who is tracking and in charge of progress. There can only be one accountable. 
• Responsibility. Responsibility is anyone who has the ability to respond in support of something. You can have more than one person responsible.
• Authority. Authority means final decision making power. You don’t want to be accountable without authority.

With the chart below, you can take inventory of all the functions in your company. Go through, list all of those, and then attach names to those functions. Then, attach KPIs or measurements you are going to hold each function accountable for. How do you measure performance? Then, list the results and outcomes. 

Once you have all those items completed, scan the list. Is there more than one person in a seat? Is there a person in more than one seat? Or are there empty seats? Would you enthusiastically “rehire” each one of those people? This is one quick tool you can use to evaluate your company’s functions and the people in them.

The second idea we’ll explore is Team. You need a great team of people to provide the level of output, service, and production you require. Hiring the wrong people is a waste of time, energy, and money, so it’s important to get that right. You hire for cultural fit, will, values, results, and skills, in that order.

The third idea we’ll explore is Coaches (managers). Their job is to retain, grow, and educate our team. This will keep your team happy and engaged, and you want to make sure you’re listening to these people! 

My recommendations from Verne Harnish’s “Scaling Up” in regards to Team are:

• Hire fewer people, but pay them more.
• Give them recognition and show appreciation.
• Set clear expectations and give the team a clear line of sight (how do they impact the KPIs and measurements that are important to you?). 
• Don’t demotivate. De-hassle the function and make it easier for them to do their jobs.
• Help people play to their strengths. This is essential to helping people play at their highest level, which will take your company to its highest level. 

Listen to “TurboCharge Your Business” on the International Business Growth Network or wherever you get podcasts and gain access to even more great resources at https://turboexecs.com/turbocharge. 

TAGS: succession planning,how to succession plan,people management,human resource management,talent management
​

S11 E18 People Planning: Succession Planning
Succession planning is the process of identifying critical positions within your organization and developing action plans for individuals to fill those positions.

That entails: 

• Putting job descriptions together for every role. 
• Documenting what specific roles feed into and are accountable for certain processes and workflows in your organization.
• Looking at your processes and make sure you have enough support for those workflows as designed to support the delivery of your goods and/or services to your clients and customers. 

Seeing all of this laid out visually, on a whiteboard or something similar, will give you the ability to see what might be missing and understand what’s actually going on. 

Here’s how to create your plan:

• Identify the critical roles in your company. 
• Construct “success profiles” answering: what does success look like in those roles? 
• Assess your staff to see what unique talents and abilities they have to offer the company (which could allow them to grow within the company). 
• Create development plans outlining what expertise and skills staff need to obtain to grow. This is how you create successors. 
• Develop and ready those successors over time to do the jobs you need them to do. Make sure they’re getting what they need along the way.
• Review! After you create your succession plan, you should revisit and update it annually. The organization’s needs will change all the time, so you don’t want this plan to get stale. 

 
Listen to TurboCharge Your Business on the International Business Growth Network or wherever you get podcasts and gain access to even more great resources at https://turboexecs.com/turbocharge. 

TAGS: succession planning,how to succession plan,people management,human resource management,talent management

S11 E19 Growth-Related People Planning 
As you grow, you’re going to need more help. You’ll need more people and more of the right people in the right seats. 

The right seats are the roles. What roles do you need as you continue to grow?

And for people, how do you get those people? Where do you get those people? What do those people look like? How do we staff and continue to successfully staff our organizations so that we can continue to serve our customers and clients at the highest level?

Here are a few tips:

• It begins inside of the company. It’s really building an attractive place to work that people want to come work for.
• Always be hiring. If you’re in fast growth mode, you should always have your fishing pole in the pond.  
• Evaluate: what are we going to need next?
• Have job descriptions written down. 

As you go ahead with growth-related hiring, after you’ve figured out the roles you need, the market value for those roles, and the job descriptions for the roles, you’re going to need to do an interview process. Do you need peer group interviews? Do you want them to meet the team? Do you want them to do interviews with multiple people in leadership? What’s important to the people already on your team? What does your culture dictate? 

Think about the things that will attract people to the company, in terms of hard benefits, soft benefits, and compensation. Think about the recruiting tools you’ll use (like recruiters and job sites). How do you get the word out most effectively? These are all important things to take into consideration as you grow your company and face this growth-related people planning aspect. 

 Listen to TurboCharge Your Business on the International Business Growth Network or wherever you get podcasts and gain access to even more great resources at https://turboexecs.com/turbocharge. 

TAGS: how to attract talent, how to retain talent, talent attraction, succession planning,how to succession plan,people management,human resource management,talent management  

​
S11 E20 People Planning: Accountability & Metrics
Accountability is the person owning a particular metric. They’re accountable for it. The opposite of that is if you have two people who are accountable, then you have nobody who’s accountable. So there’s only ONE person who’s accountable, and there are metrics that go with it. That’s what we measure against.

In the scope of people planning, we need to have job descriptions. That’s really where accountabilities and metrics are laid out. It obviously depends on the role and function, but metrics come down to answering the question: are we achieving success in this role as a team member in the company? 

The answers can be qualitative and quantitative. What systems do we have in place to measure what we want to track and turn them into stats? Make sure these metrics are communicated and that they have the skills and qualifications needed to meet them (or that you’re training them to meet them). You’ll also need a feedback mechanism to give feedback to her person in the role so they can learn, grow, develop, and take on more responsibility for your clients, customers, and community. 

People generally want to grow and make a positive impact in your company. Your job is to help them do that through offering the feedback, communication, and training they need. Accountabilities and metrics help keep people engaged and motivated – that’s the secret. Once you have that for each role in your company, that will be the difference-maker for you that allows you to uplevel your company and make it a huge success. 

Listen to TurboCharge Your Business on the International Business Growth Network or wherever you get podcasts and gain access to even more great resources at https://turboexecs.com/turbocharge. 

TAGS: succession planning,how to succession plan,people management,human resource management,talent management

TurboCharge Your Business is a show for business owners who are tired of just working IN the nuts and bolts of their businesses and ready to work ON the business itself from a big-picture, growth-oriented, strategic perspective.

Listen to TurboCharge Your Business on the International Business Growth Network or wherever you get podcasts and gain access to even more great resources at https://turboexecs.com/turbocharge. 

Patty Lawrence is a money finder, consulting CFO, right hand to growth-minded CEOs, and founder of TurboExecs. At TurboExecs, she works with $2M+ professional services and non-profit organizations that struggle to get the timely & accurate financial reports they need to function, often because one person holds this information hostage or lacks the skills required to do the work.

Through outsourced accounting and CFO services, she and her team reveal the story behind the numbers so leaders confidently can make data-driven decisions that allow them to leap forward, trusting they have the team and finances in place for manageable, profitable growth. As a result, TurboExecs’ clients typically increase the bottom line by at least 15% and feel in full control of their finances and results.

Connect with TurboExecs at turboexecs.com. Continue the conversation with Patty on LinkedIn.

​