GM,
It’s Chris,
One of the hardest lessons I learned about business was during my days as an Operations Manager for a small retail store.
We had a customer service lead, always on time, knew everything, kept everyone else in check, and willing to stay after when needed.
He was the guy you could rely on.
Then, one day, Mark retired.
It hit the fan pretty quickly after that, the rest of the team got lazy, unorganized, and sloppy whenever I wasn’t up front keeping an eye on them.
It was a messsss there for a while.
After some time, I got the rest of the team up to speed and it was once again smooth, but that experience taught me about a very scary number in business.
ONE.
If you have one rockstar team member, or one really big client, if that team member leaves, or that client stops buying…it’s not looking good brav.
The ideal situation you’d want to be in for either of these scenarios is to have a whole team of killers and a big list of large clients.
So how do you get there?
The team has to be trained and maintained.
Your SOP’s should be on point, and you should be keeping track of the team regularly, maintaining the standard.
The problem of laziness is solved quite quickly then, because underperformers will only stay at places where they can get away with it.
Big clients are a similar deal.
Once you get one, knock it out of the park from them, that testimonial will make it verrrrryyyy easy to get other big clients, creating a big green snowball for you and them.
Once you’ve gotten both fronts on lock, a team member can leave or retire, or a client can cancel, and you are not immediately in dire straits.
Talk soon,
-Chris
