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Tag: Hiring

  • Consultant Saves 25% over In-House Cost for Member Research

     

    Cost Comparison between In-house and hiring a consultant for a typical member research project. Assumes In-Depth Interview method, with 20 Interviews, and recommendations report.
    consultant      inhouse

    Costs calculated based on 6-month project, utilizing 15% of three salaried employees’ time and costs. Consultant saves 25% overall.

    There are lots of reasons to hire a consultant: to drive additional revenue programs, add to your creative firepower, review your efforts with an outside, impartial perspective, add to your staff’s existing skill-set, and now there’s one more – saving money! Many executives have a perception that hiring a consultant is an additional expense, is very expensive, and a waste of money since they are already paying in-house staff.

    Not the case, as proven by the above graphics. By the time you add up all the expenses of using staff to do a given task, it turns out to be less expensive to outsource to a consultant in many cases. This doesn’t even account for the added expertise, and years of experience, which not only makes projects run more smoothly, but also gets them completed faster with fewer errors.

    Faster, better, cheaper, more in-depth – the right consultant can be a real asset to your organization’s growth!

    Would love to hear your opinion . . .

  • How Do You Know It’s Time To Get Some Expert Help?

    How Do You Know It’s Time To Get Some Expert Help?

    Adding a senior employee can bring short-term costs but long-term gains. Here’s how to tell if the time is right for your business.

    When you’re the owner of a small business, knowing when to hire a senior employee isn’t always easy — but it is important. By freeing you to focus on high-value activities where you have true expertise, it can help you take your company to the next stage of growth or, in some cases, simply ensure its continued viability.

    “Entrepreneurs are accustomed to hiring ancillary employees and pawning off smaller tasks on them,” observes Dave Poulos, chief consultant at Granite Partners LLC in Sparks, Maryland. “But at some point, they discover that they’re working their tails off and still can’t be everywhere they need to be or do everything they need to do. That’s when they need to make a high-level hire.”

    While cost can be an issue, Poulos says companies should consider how much they might be able to boost revenues with a new player on the management team. Ideally, it will more than cover the additional salary.

    Chuck Cohn, CEO of Varsity Tutors, a Washington, D.C.-based tutoring service, says that over the past several years he’s “fired” himself from various duties and brought in expert replacements to handle, among other things, bookkeeping, sales and advertising. “Each time it’s had a dramatic impact on how effectively that role is done, my happiness, and our ability to grow — because my time became available for higher-level projects,” he says.

    Wondering whether your company is a candidate for a high-level hire? Here are five signs it may be time to expand the executive suite:

    1. You’re working long hours but missing operational goals or revenue targets. Julie Sue Auslander, president and chief cultural officer at cSubs, a New Jersey-based provider of outsourced subscription services, says a bell tolled for her when she realized that she was doing “a lot of work” but never seemed to have any money.

    “I hired cheap, tried to do it all myself, hired multiple part-timers, and, as a result, missed out on growth opportunities,” she says. Taking a new tack, she outsourced payroll and brought in a bookkeeper who discovered that some invoices were being paid twice or in the wrong amount while some of her own clients weren’t being billed at all. “The revenue I realized from her correct work covered her salary,” she says. “In addition, offloading those activities freed me to do work that nobody else could, and in turn helped my company reach the Inc. 5000 list.”

    Auslander has since hired a part-time controller, which has helped her secure additional funding for her business, enter comfortably into strategic partnerships, and even plan an exit strategy for herself.

    2. Critical parts of your business are proving error-prone or inefficient, and you don’t know how to fix them. Eric Thomasian, head of business development and strategy for Blayze Inc., an online video company, says his firm knew it was time to hire a chief technology officer after its technology systems, which had been outsourced to a third-party developer, turned out to be bug-ridden and not true to their original design.

    “As soon as we made the hire, our CTO hired more coders to create an internal technical team,” Thomasian says. The results were impressive. Turnaround time on system changes rose by 800 percent, funding became more easily attainable because investors felt safer when they could actually meet the company’s technical team face-to-face, and customer satisfaction increased by 90 percent.

    3. Essential tasks are going unfinished. Brianna Sylver, president of Sylver Consulting, a business consultancy with offices in Chicago and Brazil, says she knew it was time to bring in high-level help when “we got into a situation where I needed to be able to duplicate myself in order to get everything done.” After documenting her specific pain points, she brought in a director of global insights and innovation in May 2011. “The results have been fantastic,” Sylver says. “She’s a great addition to the team in multiple ways and has helped us grow as a company.”

    4. Business initiatives yield poor results because you’re not an expert in that facet of your business. Brock Blake, co-founder and CEO of Lendio, an online service that helps small businesses find bank loans, says he decided to hire a vice president of marketing about a year ago after realizing that his own marketing initiatives weren’t helping the company meet its goals. “I wasn’t cut out for that job,” Blake concedes. “We were just going in circles.” After a three-month search, Blake found the right person to take the job, and the results, he says, have been phenomenal. “We’ve doubled in size, both in revenue and in our number of employees.”

    5. You’re continually telling customers you can’t meet their needs. “If your customers are constantly asking, ‘Do you have this?’ or ‘Can you do that?’ and the answer is always ‘No, because we don’t have time,’ you’re making a mistake,” Poulos says. One of the advantages of being a small business, he argues, is the ability to act quickly and nimbly to meet customer demand. “The answer to ‘Can we do?’ and ‘Do we make?’” he says, “should almost always be ‘yes.’”

    Making a high-level hire can be intimidating, especially if you’re accustomed to doing everything yourself. But it can also make you happier and more productive, and your business more profitable.

    For more like this to maximize your business growth curve, pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

     

  • Building Your Team – Looking for Folks Who Aren’t You

    Building Your Team – Looking for Folks Who Aren’t You

    There comes a time in most working professionals life when they are tasked with something significant and asked to create or build a team to tackle it. For some of us, this can resemble the team-picking exercise we all got through on the school yard for kickball – with predictable results: poor cohesiveness, bad management skills applied inexpertly, a lack of motivation and poor morale. In short, the project sometimes gets done, usually by the strongest or most domineering two or three, leaving the rest feeling disenfranchised or segregated, negated or worse, and a less than optimal project outcome as well. This is not a recipe for greatness.

    Those who take a more strategic approach sometimes fare better, but not always. Those who look good on paper, and have incredible skill sets and diligence to spare, may not work well with others, may not mesh with the overall “gears” of the group, may not parse out their skills in a way that the team appreciates. The results are similar to the above, but with bigger egos.

                  Really good teams at their root have a level of respect for the challenge . . .

    A recent view of the movie “Moneyball” reveals that business is not the only discipline where emotionally selecting co-workers can have negative consequences, but that even things that look good on paper may not work well in real life. It also illuminates the fact that there is a hidden “something” that all winning teams have that all the statistical analysis, investigative scouting, referral burnishing or other team-selection method will not reveal. There’s a certain “chemistry” among winning teams that is difficult to duplicate, harder to engineer or manufacture.

    One way to set the stage for this “Chemistry” is to find individuals with complimentary skills, and personalities, and just enough commonality to let each be comfortable. Six big ego type A personalities banging around in there is likely to be a disaster, just as five or six introspective, analytical introverts. But two or three of each, with a couple of “neutrals” to referee and act as the voice of reason, and things start to look more productive. Sometimes pushing everyone outside their comfort zone has positive results, because the “adversity” acts like a bonding catalyst, sets up an “Us vs Them” mentality that motivates, coalesces, and helps the normally divergent skills and personalities converge to solve the challenge at hand, just to prove they can.

    Really good teams at their root have a level of respect for the challenge and for each of the members that keeps things moving forward and fosters trust. The more difficult the challenge, and the more exclusive the team, the better this works. Setting the stage for this starts with the team’s nominal leader, showing an even-handed, rational and realistic approach to how they handle the others.

    Team-building has to be looked at from many different angles and good ones are effective on several levels. A group of professionals who respect each other and each others’ talents and skills, and who also spend off time as friends, is a rare combination but can be a very effective one. There’s a certain element of vulnerability that helps cement things a bit more closely when you’ve seen the other team members let their hair down a bit and you do the same, put yourself out there a bit and show another side of yourself – let them in, and have them let each other in, and that’s where the “magic” seems to start.

                 . . . the “adversity” acts like a bonding catalyst, sets up an “Us vs Them” mentality that motivates, coalesces, and helps the normally divergent skills and personalities converge . . .

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  • Human Resources Are Your Finest Resources

    Human Resources Are Your Finest Resources

    We get asked for advice and guidance by firms large and small every day, and when reviewing whether or not to work with a new client, we try to do our due diligence and determine for ourselves whether this going to be something beneficial for both client and consulting firm. One of the unspoken, immeasurable, but over-riding factors we consider is: “Do we like working with these people”. The human factor is an “X” factor that is hard to quantify, but is crucial to a successful outcome.

    How do you find, and keep those “Good” people in your organization, the ones that are loyal, hard working, dedicated and passionate about their work? Top talent requires top treatment, but how do you craft an incentive program that keeps them challenged, interested and passionate? What kind of carrot do you dangle in front of those talented executives to keep them in your stable?

    According to some of the region’s foremost HR experts, a one-size-fits-all approach to benefits, incentives and retention is no longer viable, and I tend to agree. If you think about it, as marketers, we know that you can’t expect great results by sending the same package to wildly different audiences. So why would you expect great results making the same offer to a broad range of employees? Internal segmentation is just part of the story. If you dig deeper, you’ll find there are other elements that add to retention that you might not have thought of. Transparency is a tough issue that many private or family firms struggle with, but that can make a huge difference in your retention of top senior executive talent – they are savvy enough to want to know where the money is going and how decisions are being made that affect the future of the company. The lower- and mid-level employees should share this access to information, but for them, some more intensive and extensive education is coupled with the information, so that they can understand what they are seeing and how to interpret the data accurately and draw reasonable conclusions.

    Most of the experts agreed that while retention is an issue, making good hiring decisions in the beginning is the single largest factor in keeping good talent on board. Some suggest pre-employment screening tests and inventories of various stripes, but most agreed as well that any single instrument should not be weighted too heavily, and certainly not weighted above the interviewers insights and impressions, background checks and due diligence. In general, their feeling was, skills can be taught, attitude can not, and that those with the right mindset that will fit in culturally with the mission and goals of the organization will do better long-term than those with top skills but behavioral issues.

    What does any of this have to do with marketing? It strikes me that there are parallels between how you select and retain employees, and how you attract and retain customers. Aside from the obvious connection that the marketing department are crucial hires for your organization, and often some of the highest turnover ones. Good marketing talent is difficult to find, even at a point where double digit unemployment is quickly becoming the norm. If you find such individuals, you should strive to assess their needs and hold on to them using any means necessary, because they can make or break your company faster than any other department. Marketers can do more damage with a slipshod approach than any embezzler or bull-in-a-china-shop manager.

    Spend as much time on hiring your marketers as they do segmenting their customer lists and researching the target market, and all will be well. Spend time to get to know them, make sure they’re compatible with your mission. Don’t worry if they seem a little “off” in a couple of social areas – these top talents are trained to think way outside the box, to innovate, to be renegades, not to be the round peg in a round hole. Don’t hold that against them in the hiring process, for these are signs of their future success . . .

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