EP143 - Ask Stuart #4 - How Do I Get More Out of My Team? With Ian Luckett and Stuart Warwick

INTRO

In this episode of the IT Experts Podcast, we asked Stuart how do I get more out of my team.

Welcome to the IT Experts Podcast, the only podcast to help MSP scale to 1,000,000, and if already there get to 5 and go fast at the end of the day, isn't it all about building a business that works for you rather than you for it. I hope you enjoy the show.

IAN

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Welcome to the IT Experts Podcast, and in this episode of the Ask Stuart Series, we asked Stuart Warwick how do I get more out of my team? So welcome to the show, Stuart.

STUART

Hello, Ian. Great to be back. Hello, everybody.

IAN

Excellent stuff. So today this is a question, you know, we're talking to a lot of MSP's about, you know, scaling, growing their businesses and people are really important. But how do people get more out of their team? You know, you've deployed these teams, they've come in as mainly as technicians and before you know it, the single business owner could have 10 or 11 people reporting into them very flat structure, which we know is not very scalable. And in this episode we're going to go through the mist, the problem, the opportunity what you need to do, so that you can get more out of your team. So Stuart, what's this all about? Why does this question keep coming up all the time?

STUART

It is the number one question alongside how do I get more leads, more sales, I think it, this is how do I get more out of my team because I'm so busy. I have no time. I have no focus. I want to get on to bigger, better things. I want to work on the business. Not in the business and it's completely, it's the common space that we call Drive, where you are somewhere between 200K and 600K probably. Unless there's two or three directors. And you're chasing everything you know. All roads lead to you. You're big enough to be busy and need a few people in the business you've probably not got the ideal structure, so you're all stuck in the engineering. Most likely you might have somebody in administration doing a bit of finance. Possibly it might be your wife or your husband. Depending on who runs the business, but ultimately it's okay most of the time, Ian as well. But actually when they step back and they're having another 60 hour week or they're being called out at the weekend because something's gone down or there's been a breach they’re like....

IAN

Right.

STUART

This business, this business owns me. And I think this is what stems what the question stems from how do I get more from my team? Because the business is consuming me and I can't get out of it, what I need to get out of it, which is...

IAN

Yeah

STUART

If you're a business owner, more time, more money and ultimately choices, which is freedom.

IAN

Exactly. And you know. The reason everyone's in business is to make profit, isn't it? And then the one thing with the MSP model that we know is obviously highly profitable, it's highly scalable, it's highly automated, but, most of the pinch points we see in acceleration and kind of regression on growth is when, like a big project comes in, doesn't it cause a massive big project comes in great look at this opportunity. I've just sold this big piece of work and it's like an atom bomb, isn't it? Just landed on the business and it pretty much this is going to sound dramatic now, just decapitates the business, doesn't it? Cause it's just not prepared.

STUART

Yeah, you. You end up in stalling. You know, if it was an aircraft, take it stalls and obviously it's not as perhaps threatening as a stalling.

IAN

We fall. Like it's a very dramatic show, aren't we? I like where this is going.

STUART

We just ran an in-House mastermind today and one particular client in two years in succession has had not two but each year has had a three stroke £400,000 project. Yeah, land on them, kind of literally land on them from existing clients and what is amazing, it's really stalled their growth and mindset. Now he's got enough capacity to cope with it, but actually it's consuming and that's for a business that is profitable and of a reasonable size. But it's so consuming cause it's unexpected and it's not planned for and in fact we had a conversation about hiring ahead of the curve and thinking how to actually anticipate this because of the types of clients he's got and these types of projects that come out. However, you know the impact of not having enough capacity and not getting your team to do well, you ultimately comes down to have you got the right people in the right roles, doing the right things, and that conversation starts with you. Are you in the right role? And even if you are, but you're wearing all those hats that you have to wear, if you're in the drive space, is which hats do you want to wear? And having a plan to work towards, making sure you only wear that hat. It might be sales marketing. It might be being the lead technical architect you want. You love the technical side and you want to be the VCIO working with your clients. In that case, some of the other operational sales, marketing people, stuff finance stuff, you've got to delegate and have you got the right people with the right skills for whom you can give that stuff to, gently over time. Now, if you're quite small and you haven't got enough profit or a small amount of profit in which to invest, it's like okay, who do what do I need first, but the starting point is looking at your own team, assessing their competencies, technical skills and their behavioral skills and their attitude, and also what they aspire to do. And if you can get them all working to their strengths and what we call their genius, then everybody starts to be more effective, more productive and also happier. You know, if you do what you love every day. You're going to be happy.

IAN

Just on that point, let's just talk the difference between employing someone and employing someone in a role in the business. So, so many people across any business sector, we'll see someone and they'll go. Oh, that's a great person. I'm going to make them my administrator, technician, chef, whatever you want, whatever you want to call. But that might not be the right role for the business, and sometimes we then start creating roles around people rather than people around roles. What's the danger if you start creating this bit of a hybrid lab, around a person, who's really good, but in actual fact they might be doing a little bit of tech. They might be doing a little bit of project work. They might be doing a little bit of admin purchasing. Do you know what I mean when they're when they're creating this, Unscalable structure around a person because they worried about that person might leave. So this definition of role...

STUART

Yeah, well, well it is boxing people in into something that is the right box for them. It sounds quite constraining, putting people in the box.

IAN

But nothing on that.

STUART

But if everybody is a Jack of all trades, then nobody as you scale, you need to specialize. So you need to have people that are happy and are competent at dealing with first line technical thing. You then need to possibly replace yourself on the second and third line. If you're also, you know at weekends doing the finance, you need to find somebody to take care of the finance box or the financial administration box that you keep an eye on. And so, you know, in this case, we're talking about smaller MSP. So you know between that 200 and 600K mark and then for those that are maturer and we see this regularly, those MSP's that have got past the 1.5 million two, three doesn't really matter if the business isn't really working for them as well as they'd like it to, and only you know that and you feel consumed by it or frustrated by it, it's likely that you're not getting what you need from your team and some benchmarking numbers like. You know when we get people's heads around the finances is, there are a number of reference points in the finances that tell us if that business is mature and really as profitable as it could be. So whilst you might making profit, I is there enough, are you at a world class level of revenue per employee because that if that's out of kilter but you are still making profit, then there's a lot of efficiency and therefore additional profit. But perhaps you're not optimizing.

IAN

Yeah

STUART

You've either got too many staff or not enough clients at the right revenue or the right profit level. And so that just that financial ratio, that final piece of financial data gives you insight into, well, actually have I got my people doing. What I need them to do.

IAN

Yeah, exactly that exactly that.

STUART

So you know, we're perhaps getting a bit complex there, but ultimately getting people what are the specialist areas of your business that you need people to do so that you can have confidence and let go and not do it yourself the other element then of you know, how do I get my team to step up and do more? And again, it's an eye roller here. It's a cliche, but communicate and connect, we ran an intensive last time, you know, teaching everybody about how to connect and motivate your team and the impact of it's amazing. You know 8 weeks in from that intensive the feedback of how they've had better conversations about where the business is going and why it's going and the connection that they're feeding back that departments and individuals are stepping up more because they've got greater clarity as individuals within the business about where it's going and what their role is that they play in it and how they all connect together. It's a subtle thing, but it's really, really powerful and unless you're doing it, and many of our clients have been doing it, but they've just taken it to another level of clarity and all it is regularly talking to their staff, telling them about what's going on and how they're getting on and looking at where the bottlenecks are, involving them in the journey so... It's the leadership 101 element that drives the connection piece and the motivation piece. As long as you've got everybody in the right role doing the right thing.

IAN

Exactly that. And we were hearing some great stories today about how people all of a sudden are now engaging within the business. Some people have decided to leave their businesses because they their values don't match and they don't want to know where the business is going, but yhat's what we call, you know, kind of a bad egg. And I think over the last couple days we've heard a couple of stories now of where someone's left the business. The business owners immediately gone. Oh my God. I can't believe I can't be doing without that person literally. As soon as the door was shut, everyone's gone. Ohh my word. Thank God they've left. They were so toxic. They were just no good. They were just being really negative. They were doing things out of process and stuff like that and. You know, for us, we know that that's going to happen and it's going to come true. And we know that you're going to get that great feeling. The initial feeling of shock is like, Oh my God. But right people, right roles right values communicate with them. Tell them where you're going, and then they're going to want to come with you or they're going to jump off the bus. And if they jump off the bus, do you know what that's called? Cause they'll be someone who wants to come onto your bus and enjoy what you're doing.

STUART

That's it. That's it. And energy levels. If you were to describe the energy levels in your business, what, how would you describe it? Cause if you said flat. Then why is it flat? If you go in every day and it's a bit flat in the office or a bit quiet, it's. Like, well, quiet is good. Of course, getting on with stuff, but do you enjoy going into the office? Do you enjoy working with the people you work, and I'm not talking about, you know, drinking loads and jumping around and dancing on the tables, although you know that that is a thing.

IAN

We can do that.

STUART

We can do that. The energy checking in on the energy between you and your teammates and your staff, because it should be fun. It should be enjoyable. And of course, serious. At times, yeah.

IAN

Yeah, exactly that exactly that. So we got the right people in the right roles but this is now about having that difficult conversation of that expectation exchange and getting people to do what they might do. It's the P word, the dreaded word. How do we how do we get them to perform?

STUART

Yeah. And the IT comes back to the communication piece, which is a bit of a get out of jail card, but people need to know what's expected of you. So if you want to grow the business to an exciting 2,000,000 this year and you want to bring on all these extra products and you want to bring in some new technology and that's exciting for you guys as a team. And everybody's excited about it. It's like, OK, So what, what does that mean for the guys on the help desk? What does that mean to the guys in projects, the guys in finance and so given that they're all in the right role and they're in their boxes, yeah, what does that box need to produce? In terms of, you know, might be aged debtors, getting the aged debtors down to a certain time scale, it might be SLAS in terms of tickets and today we were talking about dashboards and the visibility of KPIs and performance on the help desk through the use of things like brigade, hugely powerful way of communicating daily if not hourly expectations and performance.

But then when you set those KPIs, those expectations of individuals and also departments then, following up on them at the individual level and at the team level on a weekly and or monthly and possibly even a monthly or quarterly level or bi-bimonthly at a company level, you know, having what we people call a town hall meeting, putting up a few slides showing how the ticket queues have dropped or not showing how project completion times have compressed or accelerated looking at customer satisfaction because people want to know how they're doing. You know positively where you can apply and this. And this is this feeds into it, Ian. It’s having set the expectation explain exchange. And the KPIs and you're beginning to feedback, it feeds into that thing called RNR. Reward and Recognitioin. Now, it's not necessarily a need for handing out loads of cash in terms of bonuses every week. That's not really the driver. Human beings want to feel valued. And for you to be able to recognize collectively the team or the company departments, individuals for exhibiting. You know, great profitability, possibly closing new business saving you know an existing clients, yeah, spotting problems proactively have been you know having the first to best first time response you know ratio on the on the help desk whatever it is. People feel great when they're, when they're subtly or overtly depending on the character mentioned by the boss, yeah. And then you can back it up with nights out pizza. You know, cash bonuses, possibly, you know, certainly at the end of the year depends on the role and when you've got the right people in the right role and you're communicating effectively what they need to do, you're giving them clear measures of what success looks like with the KPIs and then you're closing the loop, not leaving the loop open. And recognizing and rewarding them collectively in individual. That's how we answer this question of how do I get my team to do what I need them to do successfully so that I can feel confident to scale my business.

IAN

And this then builds up, you know, your employee engagement. It builds up their fulfilling not many people wake up in the morning and go, crikey, I wish today I'm really looking forward today of earning 237 pounds, 48 P everybody wakes up in the morning to want to win. They want to solve problems. They want to go to work. They want to help people out, you know, and it's this human need. And when you know, when you've shared with your team, what winning looks like in that role and what success looks like in that role. That's where job satisfaction comes from.

STUART

Isn't it so true, so true.

IAN

So that's brilliant Stuart, thanks very much for those tips and tricks there. Just all about that, because this is, as we say, this is one of the really big things that we hear an awful lot of time in the channel. But with, as with all this, with the our Stuart series, we don't just give you a lot of information and let you get on your way. We point you to some of our great content and we've got this amazing PDF called the Great Create more time formula. Easy for me to say, Stuart, why do people need to download this?

STUART

Because it's about time getting more out of your people starts with you and so the create more time formula is a really, really great formula for helping you get under the skin of where your time is going, where you should be applying it, and then you're in a really powerful position to think about how to optimize your staff so that you optimize your time and ultimately the productivity of your business.

IAN

And you could get hold of that by just by clicking the link in the Show Notes and popping in details and away you go. And as always with this series, which is going to be a series that's going to go on for many, many, many, many months, indeed, we're bringing on lots of different questions that we've got. If you've got a question yourself, there's a link in the show notes. Click here. Fill out the the form. Tell us what question you want us to answer. We'll drop it on the podcast. We'll shout you out and we'll help you out. No problem whatsoever. Thanks very much for your time and insights this afternoon Stuart been absolutely brilliant.

STUART

You're very welcome indeed. Love it. And please send your questions in because love to do some freestyling on questions that people send in.

IAN

Yeah, that would be brilliant. So enjoy the rest of your day and until next time look forward to catching you soon. Take care.

OUTRO

So I hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, I'd love it if you could leave a rating and review on your favorite podcast platform. If you want to learn more about how to take your MSP to a million, or if you're already there, go faster then come and join Stuart Warwick and myself in the Scale of Confidence. Facebook group. Link’s on the Show Notes. You go and enjoy the rest of your day and. I look forward to connecting with you soon.