The Re-Offer | Ep #66

Hey, I'm Chris Plackey, host of the Lead you'd Team podcast. Running a million dollar business is not easy. And whether you're just getting started with building your team or you've been at this for a while, I'm going to bring you honest, specific and clear practices you can use right now, today to improve how well you lead your team. Let's go ahead and get.

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Welcome to this week of the podcast. This is Chris Plackey. I'm super excited to share today's topic with you and just reconnect with all of you. Thank you to everyone who has recently written podcast reviews. I know I don't mention that a lot, but I am so grateful. I read every single one. It certainly helps other women like you understand what I do and that the work that we do here could be valuable to them. So if you haven't written a podcast review, I would certainly love to invite you to do that. And if you want, and you're on Instagram or Facebook, you can certainly share the screen. If you're listening to this podcast on your story or your newsfeed, make sure you tag me hrisplackie coach and we'll get you my book list of my favorite books that have really informed my perspective of leadership and all of the different elements that I talk about here. And that list keeps growing. I need to probably add a couple books to it. So as we are now, let's see, I'm recording this in mid May. We are starting the process across the country of people reopening in different shapes and forms. And some of you have never closed and some of you won't be reopening, at least not yet. I wanted to talk with you about a technique or an approach that I share with all of my clients for varying reasons, depending on what's going on in their business. But I think it's also relevant right now as you might be. I hope you are evaluating your team and really looking at what your intention is for your business when you do relaunch, when you do go into this, you know, you know, America 2.0, as Mark Cuban calls it, and we really start, you know, I think every founder, regardless of what your business is, and even for those of you who've done really well through this whole pandemic, I think you really have to take some time to evaluate why you do what you do, what it is that you do, and what is the reason for you to continue doing it. And with that, by extension then is who are the people you want to surround yourself with, and who are the people you want to help you, you want to have on the team to help you get where you want to go. And there could be people right now on that team that you have that are not the people you want to keep. You might have discovered through this process that you have, you're no longer going to tolerate some of the things that you've been putting up with or that your needs, your expectations are very valuable and important, and you. You don't want to quit those in advance again, like maybe you have been. And so when we have that happen, then this applies what I'm gonna teach you the re offer. But it also applies at any point in time, and I'll give you some examples. And frankly, for most of you, it's gonna be this latter approach. And when you need this approach to have this in place. But for most female founders who start businesses, you usually start with people at the infancy stages of. And there's not a lot of structure. Everybody's just all hands on deck. You hire people who are friends or friends of friends or, you know, somebody you heard of. You know, your. Even your hiring process is probably pretty light, right? It's not an extensive formal process. So that's when you first started. And then if you're like most of my clients, you have a rapid trajectory. You make money, you get clients and customers, and you start really producing at a much higher level, which means you have to keep hiring. And then you sort of hit this point where you start to realize that the people you have on the team, not all of them anyway, are able to match where the business is today. The business has outgrown their skill set, and they haven't kept pace. And that can present itself in a few different ways. It can present itself literally. Just they can't keep up. They can't do the work that needs to be done. It can also present in their attitude, in the way that they show up at work. They can become, you know, despondent, negative. They can be kind of in the way they can, you know, be. You know, that won't work. We already tried that, you know, creating roadblocks for approaches and change in your business. And there's a whole host of reasons why that happens, which I'm not going to be talking about today. What matters from my perspective for you is you've got to have a really clear process in place to address it, because people who've been with you for a while, that's tough for you, and I know that. And that's okay because you're normal and you're human and you care about people. But your business, right, needs to have employees, needs to have team members in it that drive the success of your business. That's just plain and simple. That's. That's math.

So you hanging on to people in a way that doesn't support the business success isn't useful for anybody. And it, frankly, isn't even useful for them. So what do you do? Right? So a lot of times people come to me and they're like, okay, I have this person. They've worked with me for a while. They're not meeting the expectations. I really need them to be doing this level of marketing, this level of, you know, administrative support, this level of social media work, this level of customer service management, whatever it is, and they can't. They're not doing it and they're in the way. So then you have to follow a few steps. The first thing we have to do is make sure that you have very clearly defined vision, values and expectations, which is the very first thing you do when you work with me. And I know that sounds like I just said it in a sentence. Oh, that must not be that hard. It's not that it's hard, it's just that it's vital. And in the absence of you having those three elements in your business, you can't hold people accountable in a way that's constructive. And it also doesn't help the people who want to succeed know how to do that either. Vision, values, and expectations are how you will get the business that you want to grow in a way that is. Has this level of maturity to it. Most clients who come to me just have this very immature business, even if they're making $7 million, because they haven't built the infrastructure to support it. So the first thing we do is we ensure that you have your vision, values and expectations done. Now, after we do that, then we have to look at this person. Most of the people that we struggle here again in a small business is because there's really not even a good job descript. So then what we have to do is decide what is this person's role. And we have to make sure there's an actual job description. Okay, that has to be in place. And this does, again, does not have to be complicated. I have a very simple, easy job description template that I use for my clients. It's really basic, but it helps you think through what their responsibilities are so that you can hold them accountable. Okay, so we need to have vision, values, expectations, and a job description. And then what we do is we put all that back together as. As a presentation, right? Here is the vision of the business. Here are the values of the business. Here are the expectations that I have behaviorally of you as an employee. Here's your job description, and here are your goals, and here's the salary that you currently earn or that I am going to now pay you. And you make this employee an offer. You ask them if they would like to recommit to everything you've presented. Now, sometimes what you're doing is, you know, I had one client who had someone who was, I think, in a marketing job, right, Helping with all the marketing, but she really was bad at it. It just wasn't her skill set. She was very good at administrative support, the much more tactical work, not the strategic work. And she made her an offer and said, I am offering you now this administrative coordinator job versus this other job that you thought you had that you weren't really very good at. Do you accept? Right. I've just recently had another conversation about that. For somebody who's been with the business a long time, has a very nebulous job, we're rewriting it. So it's very clear what the salary is, what the reporting structure is, because this person is now reporting to someone other than my client. This person has reported to the founder for years, but now the founder has hired a manager, and this person needs to work with and for that manager, not the founder. So they're putting that all back together and making this employee an offer.

Now, this doesn't mean that their behavior changes immediately, but what it does do is it recalibrates expectations cleanly and very succinctly so that if they don't deliver on what you expect in terms of the alignment with vision, values, expectations, job description, and goals, it's much easier to have the more difficult conversations about fit and whether or not they should continue to work in your business. If it does work, and it sort of helps them reposition and rethink about their job, it's amazing. And that's the goal, of course, right? Is that we help through our clarity, we help them be successful. That's the win. It doesn't always work that way. But either way, what needs to happen is the business benefits because you have somebody sitting in a seat that you're paying $50,000, $60,000, $80,000, that there's a result that is driving the success of the business as a result of this person sitting in the Seat, Right? That's what it's all about. So this is called the RE offer. And this is. This can be done with everyone on the team all at once. You could have those all set up. You have meetings. This is really powerful. When you need to do a culture reset. If you've been having some culture issues on the team and you're frustrated and people are doing stuff that you don't think aligns with what your expectations are, you can do a whole reset that I have done that before in my life. I did that with a whole team of 80 people where we reset and we made a re offer. And it works because some people will immediately opt out. Right. If you haven't had consistent accountability in your business and you start holding people accountable, they hate it. Not everybody. The people who really want to be successful love it. But people who don't really want to work that hard or want to be held to something like that, they really don't love it. And that's for you as the leader, to sort of decide, like, okay, wait, what do I want my culture to be? But. But the RE offer is an incredible culture reset. The RE offer is an incredible reset for somebody who is just not performing from a behavior perspective. And you need to kind of remind them, like, hey, here's what your job is. Here's what we expect of you when you're here. The reset is really great for someone who's never really had a job description and. But they feel and act a little entitled to a role in your company. This way, we land them into their job and we tell them what's expected and we RE offer them the job and they have to recommit. And it's also a really good reset if you have someone in the business who's been in a job and they're just not able to deliver because the demands of your business have changed. But you like them and you think they offer value to your. To the business. They have your values, they have good skill. They're just in the wrong seat on the bus. Then we make them a new offer, a RE offer with, you know, a new compensation and everything that aligns with whatever the other job will be. Your job in the RE offer is to do your due diligence in the presentation and development of the offer. So your work is in the vision. Values, expectations, job description and goals, and making sure that's all dialed and feels really good. Your job is not to manage their response. That's up to them. That's their business. They might get upset they might quit, they might beg, they might blame other people, they might thank you, they might feel relieved. That's up to them. So this is, you know, always comes back to why we don't do the hard things, right? Because we're worried about what other people will do and how we'll handle that. I want you to really focus on this. This is how you show up as a leader is you take responsibility for the elements I've talked about and you take responsibility for your behavior and how you show up and your intention, but you can't take responsibility for their response. The business is counting on you to hold this and do this for the business. Right? So a RE offer is incredibly powerful. I've been coaching a lot of women on RE offers just in the last two weeks, partially because of changes in the and partially because of changes in the founder. Because a lot has changed for people who are running businesses right now. A lot of unwillingness. I'm really noticing in my clients this lower level of tolerance of inadequate performance. And you can qualify that however you like, but just doesn't align with who I want to be as a woman who runs a business. And I don't have any reason to continue to put up with it. So whatever your reason may be, I hope the RE offer is a extension for you into another toolkit. You know, it's a toolkit ad for you as a founder that you can take and use as needed. And of course, if you have questions about how to use that or you really think this is something you'd benefit from learning more about, I always invite you to consider joining me in the founders lab. Now I am offering a class. I don't ever do this. It's a 90 minute class and it's called Performance is Not an Opinion. And we're going to focus all about in this course how to focus clearly on what, how you measure people's performance so we get your emotion out of it. Your emotion is not useful when we're managing performance. But usually the reason that your emotion is what takes over is because you don't have things in place that neutralize how you assess performance. So that class is actually going to be this week. This podcast is dropping on a Monday. The class will be Thursday. It's $279. It's 90 minutes. It will be small. So you will all get personal attention from me. And this is exclusively for female entrepreneurs. And if you're interested and you'd like to grab a spot at this recording, when I'm recording it, the week before. We still have a few spots open. The web address is chrisplacky.com theclass and it's pretty self explanatory. We'll get you a spot in there and that'll give you an opportunity too. If you've been a podcast listener and aren't sure if you want to work with me long term as a as your coach, but you would like to interact with me and meet some other female founders, I'd certainly love to encourage you to join this. I think it's going to be, I know it'll be incredibly powerful and useful content. I also think it's going to be a really great experience which I'm excited to share with you. So chrisplackey.com theclass and until then, I'll talk to you next time.

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