I have listened to hundreds of business owners, and managers tell their hiring horror stories. One manager confided in me “of the hundreds of people I have hired, I can count my good hires on one hand.” An executive shared with me that he has given up trying to hire people and now he just hires a lot of people—believing that the bad ones will eventually be terminated, leaving only good employees. I remember asking a former boss how he hired people, and he told me, “you can never really know who you’ve hired until they’ve worked here for a few months. Every new hire is a crapshoot.” You can hear the comparisons between hiring and gambling. Most hiring managers tell me that the hiring … [Read more...]
Small Business Articles on People
Read small business articles from the Anchor Advisors team for best practices on management and employees. Go back to all Articles »
Beyond Salary: How to Build a Winning Executive Compensation Strategy
Executive compensation can be a hard topic to tackle, especially for startups and other growing companies that need to attract experienced talent on a smaller budget. What you may not know is that base salary is the smallest component of executive compensation, generally outweighed by incentive pay. That is good news for growing companies with smaller margins; your creativity will be rewarded. It's common for executive compensation to be structured to reward actual results. That means you can get top talent with a lower upfront investment, as long as you compensate executives fairly for their contributions to your company's growth. Generally, this compensation will reward short-term … [Read more...]
7 signs that you may be headed for business owner burnout
The stereotype of a business owner is the ever optimistic ball of energy who’s working hard, playing hard and enjoying life; and I meet a fair number of business owners who fit that stereotype. Over the last couple of years though I’ve noticed that a growing number of the folks I’m meeting fit in a different category. They are still optimistic and full of ideas, but their energy is more muted, sometimes edgy. As I talk to them I notice that they’ve been fighting and clawing to get their business going for a number of years, and though they don’t really think about it—they’re tired—maybe even exhausted. On the outside they’ve still got the positive, optimistic vibe going, but on the inside … [Read more...]
Learning from Failure: Things don’t always work out perfectly…
“We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success. We often discover what will do by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery.” ~ Samuel Smiles I was listening to Alex Blumberg interview Nina Jacobson on the podcast WithoutFail when she mentioned the idea of a failure resume. She said she was inspired by a professor who found that “failures sort of define who you are and what you’ve learned and how you’ve really sort of been impacted in many respects more than your successes do. And that owning those failures and embracing them is sort of a critical component to successful people.” That professor is Tina Seelig and she’s the ED … [Read more...]
More Ideas Than Time
I have more ideas than time! My team is so frustrated. We are loaded with good ideas—ideas that will make us money! But we can't even get the work done to execute on the services we already have going! When my team sees me roll in with another "great idea" their eyes shoot daggers at me. How do I decide what we should execute on, and what we should delay? Should we just work harder? What do I do with these ideas we can't get to? When a business is just starting out, the most important question that a business owner is asking (and they ask it a lot) is "Will this thing GO? Can we survive?". When you're facing survival, trying everything is a rational strategy. You don't really know … [Read more...]
Why You Will Hire The Wrong Person
One article consistently stood at the top of the list of “Most Read Articles” on the New York Times website in 2017: Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person by Alain de Botton. In it, de Botton argues that we are looking for an ideal partner (without flaw or conflict), while ignoring the fact that, as human beings, we all are deeply flawed and often a little bit crazy. In summary he says, “Marriage ends up as a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don’t know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully avoided investigating.” To me this sounds like the way most of us make hiring … [Read more...]
A Recipe for Recruiting and Managing Creative People
Recruiting great creative talent is hard. The best, most talented creatives are always in demand and have their choice of where to go work. Good creatives have high standards! They aren’t going to work just anywhere. If you need top creative talent you need to build a culture that allows them to do great work. I’ve seen a few strategies that do just that. Preparation Start by bringing in fresh client challenges. These are challenges that don’t have easy, “textbook” solutions and will require the best out of your current team in order to succeed. Make sure that these clients really need great solutions—that they won’t settle for “pretty good” —because the challenges that they face are … [Read more...]
Don’t just think about it—do something!
“Change leads to insight more than insight leads to change” ~Milton H. Erickson Sometimes you just have to give things a try. I’ve spent many hours with clients trying to help them to understand a new or different concept that I’m confident will help their business. I want clients to “understand” the concept. Understanding a new concept helps them to accept it; and can also give them the resilience to persist even if the early results aren’t what they expect. I’m happy to put in that time. But I’ve been doing some reflecting on when I’ve made the biggest changes in my life; and they mostly weren’t driven by great insights, or sudden new awareness or information. The greatest changes … [Read more...]
So you think your agency needs a salesperson…
As the business owner, the job of business development for your creative agency has been yours—from the beginning. But the thing is, you don’t like it. Maybe you don’t feel good at it, or successful as a salesperson, or maybe it just feels icky. But none of that matters now, because there’s a solution. You’re going to hire a salesperson, and that’s going to fix everything. It makes perfect sense. A skilled and experienced salesperson would (likely) know exactly what to do in order to increase sales. A skilled and experienced salesperson would handle the clients better, write better proposals, and close more of them…You’re asking yourself “Why didn’t I do this sooner?” before you even have … [Read more...]
Regular business success beats heroic efforts every time.
“Oooh, I LOVE that,” one of my clients said to me, “She worked half the night to finish that project. She’s a superhero! How do I find more people like her?” The only thing small business owners love more than telling stories about how hard they are working, is to tell stories about how hard their team is working. Get them started and you’ll hear about all-nighters, about 100 hour work weeks, and travel stories that go on and on—and they’ll be bursting with pride the whole time. I have a different reaction to those stories. Sure, it feels great when someone delivers 150% effort on your business’ behalf; but at what cost? When I hear about someone who worked all night, or who took a … [Read more...]
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