Michael Erath argues that hiring A players pays for itself because their marginal value typically exceeds their cost by 10 to 100 times. He walks through a client example called Jackie and shows how the extra salary gets recouped within months.
Chapters
And I think there's, there's another great quote that I like to use a lot that I think is part of that mindset shift that has to happen is that your A players are free and they come with a financing option. And so what I mean by that, most organizations, and I know you've seen this as well, is there's a, there's a fear, hesitation to invest in a true A player because it's a little more expensive. Right. And so it's not in the budget. We can only spend $100,000 on this salary. But for 125 you could go get an A player. Right. And if you think about in most organizations, anytime an organization upgrades a key seat from a B or C player to an A player, the marginal value that, that A player brings is always greater than the marginal cost. And it's usually by 10 to 100x. Correct. Which makes them free. Right. So for the $25,000 of additional salary, that's what, maybe $2,500 a month, fully burdened. You think that person's not going to bring 25,000 or more of value each month in terms of your margins, increased sales, increased efficiency, whatever the case may be. And you get to pay them over 24 pay periods, 0% interest. You're financing them. So sometimes we'll actually. And we did this, we were working together with a client last week and one of the things that I drew on a whiteboard. So in this particular case, they've been working with Jackie for probably six months, give or take. Yeah, almost a year. Almost a year already. God, time flies. I know. And so I've been working with them for about five years. She's been with them for the last year. So in their two day annual summit, she came in for two hours on the second day and we kind of parked all the issues that we wanted to get her Insight Culture index. And so we were able to kind of tag team the approach that day, which was fantastic. But I drew a graph on the whiteboard showing the linear 24 pay period, one year cost of the upgrade to the A player. But starting to draw what does it look like in month two and three when the value really starts to take off and you, you create this delta between the investment you're making and the value you're getting and what, what's important for people to see and as part of that mindset shift is the delta between those two lines. That's all the upside, that's the value that you're investing in getting when you upgrade to an A player.
