Having networked and established strong relationships with numerous client organisations, the biggest frustration hands down is… attracting better people. The vast majority of Business Owners, all adept in their own profession, me us identified skills gap is with communication, people and leadership skills. But that doesn’t mean Small business owners should write off the idea of building a high-quality team, far from it. There are countless current examples we can case study to evidence that it is possible and even more probable if we’re willing to rethink our approach and apply a better recipe.
THE TALENT RECIPE
No different to any other business or success principle, attracting talent into a business firm requires use of the right recipe. We all know in the kitchen some recipes are simply better than others, and usually this can be attributed to quality ingredients and a good sense of timing. Recruiting talent works just like the good old cook-book, the better your recipe the more productive the result you will achieve.
WHY SMALL BUSINESS OWNERS DON’T ATTRACT THE TALENT THEY WANT
Time moves fast. Most small businesses live in hope for a different result rather than investing time and energy in planning to achieve their most important objectives. Clearly some of these objectives need to be attracting, retaining and developing talent as successors across day to day compliance, operational and client service activities.
But if as small business owners we’re not planning to achieve these things then what are we doing instead?
This is the paradox of service-based businesses. When we’re busy servicing our clients time flies by into another lodgment deadline and BAS Quarter. The myriad of email and inbound requests keeps the core team busy and so time poor that the right time to make changes remains elusive.
Busy practitioners feel increased overwhelm every year because the opportunity to rise above their day to day operations to be more strategic, is hampered by lack of talent, structure, policy and systems.
TALENT WANTS TO WORK IN THE NEW WORLD
Talent wants to work in the new world. Cloud-based holistic services are founded on commonsense efficiencies and technological progress endorsed by crowd funding. Let’s face it, Xero is crowd funded.
By this I mean that the crowd signalled their interest in next generation bookkeeping and the money followed, making MYOB and QuickBooks essentially obsolete.
Talent wants to combine all the strengths of the modern applications available to offer a practical suite of value adding services that save your firm, AND the client, time and money.
TALENT INNOVATES NATURALLY
The young generations of graduates are intuitive with technology, born with computers, smartphones and apps in their hands. We can be oblivious to their ability because to them these skills are instinctive and unconscious, available on demand as we attempt to wrestle a spreadsheet. Talent are motivated to innovate on the job and if empowered to do so, they’ll be the team of employees that take your practice to the cloud and roll out new age contemporary services for you. Working ever smarter, faster and interacting with by the technology that is part of them.
Talent is attracted to other talent and will naturally construct a tribe of innovators that initiate solutions for the success of your business, if you have the vision to recruit, ensure flexibility and accommodate their styles.
TALENT WANTS PROGRESS
The opportunity is to empower your talent to push your firm forward. To retain the high performing workforce you may need to rethink traditional work arrangements that stymy ideas, growth and development. Ensure you provide a stimulating workplace to retain team members enabled to work in ways that seem natural and logical to them. Examples might include nine-day work weeks, work from home arrangements or other structures that maximise productive time, outputs, motivation and abilities.
TALENT WANTS TO BE CHALLENGED
Talent wants to be given the client manager’s role while they’re young. They don’t mind making mistakes on their way to success and whilst that’s terrifying for older small business owners, it’s critical if senior members of the firm aim to increase their scalability, work life balance and ROI. Handing over clients to young talent is a void in most firms. A positive look at succession planning that guides and builds knowledge development through mentorship, will support the opportunity to hand over the client portfolio progressively and free the principal up to be more strategic with time and systems. You might even play golf!
This approach provides the opportunity to close the knowledge gap between senior and junior team members over time. The trick is plan, and then to GET started with client handovers, review, adjust, communicate and keep going.
TALENT WANTS TO LEARN AND GROW
Talent is thirsty for stimulation and the opportunity to learn, to gain knowledge and apply it. Old school thinking objects to this because of old stories “we had to do it the hard way in our day”. Those days are gone forever and a shift in your mindset can be transformational for your business. Talent is the answer to solving your capacity, scale and productivity problems if you consciously embrace the opportunity and build a team to their full potential.
TALENT LEARNS FASTEST BY DOING
We struggle with this because a profession dedicated to mitigating risk for its clientele hates making mistakes. It’s not in our nature to foster a mistake driven environment that can contribute to our success. It doesn’t make sense does it?
However, managed correctly this is precisely what is required to get us out of the compliance cheese wheel of public practice and move into the sexy new age of cloud-based scalable advisory and other value adding services.
TALENT IS ATTRACTED TO TALENT
Talent will flock to the logical point of opportunity. The best schools, universities, online apps and technologies. Young guns attract young guns not old farts. Mature Small business owners have so much to give, yet can get stuck in the thought process (procrastination) and don’t commit to building a young talent factory where like attracts like. We have encouraged a fellow sole practitioner to dilute some equity to a twenty-six-year-old junior partner. His firm could then demonstrate hard evidence in terms of an attraction place for young talent to congregate. When Paul (the next young gun) took some equity a year later the proof was undeniable. Fast forward five years later and the firm is globally recognised for innovation. A once small compliance firm in Ballarat Victoria (Australia) is now transformed.
Attracting genuine talent is not easy. However, it’s not as hard or nearly as impossible as you might think, and it might just be the gateway to the sustainable scalable business asset you dream of.
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