Road map to a great employee

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?My name is John Hopper, and I’ve been a business owner and employer for nearly 20 years. I’ve negotiated, sold and completed hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue over the course of my career and if you asked me what the hardest part about the business is, I will tell you that it’s without a doubt finding, training, and retaining the right employees.

Employees are hard. It's like herding cats, pounding a square peg in a round hole, personalities and personal life issues all come into play. Employees are hard to find, develop, manage and retain. I know this because I've done it for Twenty-years. They are also the lifeblood of our business, we simply can't do it without them. We can actually survive for a short time with no customers, we just need to have money and we can weather the storm but with no employees? We're closing in the next 5-minutes. We simply can't be open for business with no employees.

It took me Seventeen-years but I have created a list of Six things we need to have to have a great employee. These six-things are universal to every business, retail, auto sales, construction, engineering, restaurants, car sales almost every business. All of the businesses have the same issues that if the employee can bring these Six things to the table they are The Greatest Employee on the Planet.

Individually these Six things aren't that spectacular but combined magic happens.

"The two most important things in any business don't show up on its balance sheet: It's reputation and it's people"

- Henry Ford

1. The most important thing in your business.

As owners, managers, and leaders we often put the emphasis on "customers" which is normal because the customer has the money. We're trading our products and services and the customer is giving us money allowing us as a business to survive another day. Having customers is critically important to the success of the business. They are however not the most important thing. You can run out of customers and still stay open for business, it happens every day. There are thousands of businesses who will be open for business today and not bring in one dollar in revenue today. All you need to survive is some money. Yes, you will eventually need more customers but for the time being as long as you have some money you don't need customers.

Let's say we run out of customers. If we have great people, they will go get more customers. If we run out of money and we have great people, they will go get more money. Now, what happens if we don't have employees? Who is going to service the customer? Who's going to manage the money? Who's going to grow the business? Without employees you can't even open the doors, we're officially closed today. We're out of business right now, there is no tomorrow.

If your business won't run without the employees then the employees are the most important thing in your business. The challenge is the employees don't see themselves as important. They feel like they can simply be replaced if this doesn't work out between you and them and to a degree that is true but they must be replaced. As we said the business will not run without them.

The employee is the most important thing in your business and we need the employees to understand that. If they don't understand they are important they aren't going to operate as if they are important.

We have five more things to go. Number one is the employee is the most important thing here. We need to realize that and we need the employee to realize that because employees who feel important work harder and contribute more and do more and those are all good things.         

2. Money / Sales / Revenue

I don't care what you call it, we need it. Without money, we will eventually go out of business even if we have great employees. Money is a must have if the business is going to survive. It's not as important as the employee but it's a close second.

What we really need is everyone focused on it. I messed this up in my career. We write job descriptions and don't ask the employee to focus on money. We want everyone focused on it. If you can have everyone focused on sales do you think sales will go up or come down? They will go up.

If you have an employee who understands they are important to the business and they are helping bring in the money they are a valued asset to the business already and we're only two items into this list. When we get done with creating this employee you'll see that we have created The Greatest Employee on the Planet.

3. The Follow Up

Follow-up is the initial downfall of customer service problems. The customer comes into an agreement with you to do business with you and then you don't hold up your end of the bargain because you didn't follow things up. This is how we have customer service problems. Could you imagine not following things up in your private life? You drop the kids off at school and you don't go to pick them up? Think about how irresponsible that would be because irresponsible is exactly what it is when someone in your organization doesn’t follow up.

Everyone in your organization needs to follow up on their completed projects or assignments to make sure that it made it through the pipeline and the cycle was closed out. In your business, there’s a customer waiting on the other end of that line and the quality of what your company produces is directly tied to their ability to get things done, which means follow up and follow through.

This needs to be a focus at your company. "WE DO WHAT WE SAY WE'RE GOING TO DO" How do you think that would affect your reputation? Do you think gives you a stronger reputation or a worse reputation? It makes it stronger. Customers begin to know you do what you promised at every turn.

We now have an employee who understands they are important, they help bring in sales and they are doing what the company promised. Let me guess you're thinking about letting them go? Of course not if you're still with me on this you're probably thinking "that's enough, this is a great employee already" while the employee is good so far they are still fireable and I want them unfireable. I want it to hurt your soul if they leave you and I want this for all of your employees.

4. Good Character

The fourth most important thing that we care about is that we want to be dealing with people of character. It's not just you or the customer who wants to be dealing with good people but the other employees want it also. No one wants to be dealing with a liar or a cheater or a drug user we want to be dealing with other people like us.

The most important reason this matters is because your employees deal with your customers without you being there. We need to make sure we can trust them. There will be times when a customer gets upset and even though we did what we were supposed to do and we need to know an employee is a good person. The employee didn't maliciously ruin the customers day.

Being a person of good character is important and it comes in the list at number four.

5. Team Work

Number five on the list is we're all on the same team. This has been a huge problem for me in my career because employees don't like each other. They're going way out of their way to get each other fired. They're stepping on top of each other to get to the top and we're all on the same team. Competition is down the street. We don't compete here and no great team should have cutthroat competition in their environment.

We compete with whoever’s down the street, or better yet, we dominate. We want to be dominant in our industry, so we don't have time to fight with each other. We need team players on our team that will help the entire company rise. So when you’ve got a high achiever who’s toxic to the environment, sometimes you need to make the hard call and cut them before they infect the rest of the team.

5.5. I can stop here if I want to.

If I want to I can stop here. I have an employee who understands their contribution is the most important thing to the business, they help bring in money and follow things up to ensure the company is doing what it said it would do, they are a person of good character and they are a team player. I can't fire this person. I'm greedy though so I'm going to ask for one more thing;

6. The Push to do more

The sixth most important thing and the final thing we should care about is we want everybody pushing to do more. We don't want them to do more jobs. We want them to do the job. They're already doing better. If they're pushing to get things done, that's what we're looking for. As employers, we want the type of employees that will push to do more all the time and follow through until the end on whatever they’re responsible for, and even some things they’re not directly responsible for.

Closing

So now you take these six things and you culminate them together as part of your company’s culture. And what you will get is employees who understand their value and contribute greatly to the growth of your organization.

They're helping bring in sales, they’re persons of good character, they're following up, they're team players, and they're pushing to do more. When you have employees who do all of this they become un-fireable.

If they come to you and say, I want more money, what are you going to say? “No, I'm not giving you more money”. They're producing sales. Of course, you're going to give them more money. They understand their value because at this point they’d be bringing so much of it to the table. So if they come to you and they say “Hey, I can't work on Saturday”... If they're an employee who understands their value, they're helping with sales, they're following up, they're a person of good character they’re a team player who’s pushing to do more then you’re going to give them what they want. Because these employees are worth it. And that’s exactly what you want, so it makes sense to pay a premium for them if they’re truly exceptional.

The employee ultimately writes their own ticket. So now when the employee comes to you and says, Hey, I need a raise. Hey, I need a day off. Hey, I need to come in late. Hey, I need this. Hey, I need that. When you start seeing that your needs are being met, you're going to give it to them. And you can forget about trying to motivate your employees to do things because they’re going to produce it for you so they get what they need in return. 

If you're just like the dozens of other business owners who found this article to be helpful and would like to gain access to more content like this please reach out to me services I offer include:

Employee workbook for your people to become The Greatest on the Planet. Motivational Speaking to your people, consulting services to your upper management and people departments.

I hope you like what I'm doing here and I hope I can help you schedule a 15-minute call and I'll see if I can personally help you in your business so that you're surrounded by The Greatest Employees on the Planet.

Be Great 

https://thegreatestontheplanet.com

John Hopper 

313-358-4900