Episode 130: Double Your Profitability by Hiring Top-performing Employees with Dr. Sabrina Starling

Let's not get there. She's listening to this. I actually owe her money. I owe a hell of a lot.

I am taking notes, Mike.

Yeah, I know. If you listener want to quickly double your profit and you want to do it by changing your mindset and most importantly hiring top performing employees. What do you think of the employees here, Christina?

Oh, I think we're great.

Amazing, right?

Yeah.

But for real, Dr. Sabrina taught me that, that you got to bring in extraordinary talent and it doesn't have to cost a lot of money. It doesn't have to put a business under. These aren't that necessarily are having these, these golden handcuffed jobs at some large corporation. You recruit out. It's, it's the perceivably everyday folk that have extraordinary talents that can be applied specifically in your business. But you have to know how to look for it. Well, Dr. Sabrina showed us how to do it. We're doing it now. We have, we just brought our ninth employee.

I know we're up to nine, nine, nine.

Our ninth employee. Well, Dr. Sabrina Starling could be doing this for you too. Not just me because she is the business psychologist and the author of how to Hire the Best and she's doing something special for listeners. It's a masterclass, truly a masterclass where you can quickly double your profit with the top performing employees. Now here's how you get to sign up something special that we're doing. You can sign up at no cost through us right now for this masterclass by sending a text, the word employees. You asked about that. E M P L O Y E E S employees to this number 44 222. That's employees. Text the word employees to 4422 and you can get signed up to be trained in exactly what I had to pay Dr. Sabrina a substantial amount of money for in how to grow a business by doubling your profits with the top performing employees. Do it now.

So one tax saves your business.

One tax does it all. Alright, now I'm ready to get started for our show.

The only other thing you need to do is grunt along with the introduction. This is the Profit first podcast, episode 170.

Yes. Yes. Dude, you were so jacked.

I didn't hear Dr. Sabrina Starling grunting.

I haven't heard.

What's up with that?

I know, I thought I was on mute.

Come on, give me one.

Give her a grunt.

There we go.

Thank you. Welcome everyone to the Profit first podcast. That's right, you're here. You're in the right Place. My name is Chris Kern. I'm the founder of Fractal Recording and Pause youe Life.

Oh, that's right. And I am Mike Michalowicz, the author of Profit First. And you're. And also Serge, by the way, the book Surge. Pick it up now. And you, listener, you're listening to the Profit first podcast. You know, sorry, we have a whole clouder. That's the word of the day. A whole clouder of people that listen to the show. And I'm gonna quiz Chris on what a clow. Do not Google it, Chris. And this is a show where we explore all elements of profitability. How do you become more profitable? And we've talked about all different parts of it, but one of the most critical parts is hiring extraordinary talent. So Dr. S, as I call it, the doc. Dr. Sabrina is going to come on today's show and share how hiring the best employees can be a game changer to your own little cloud. Oh, what's the word? Clouder.

Clouder. You're going to learn. Now you got two words of the day.

Clouder. No, the first word was clouder. I'm just using clouder a lot now.

That's right. We're going to talk to Dr. Sabrina Starling, and then we're going to give all our takeaways from the interview. And we want to know your takeaways. Well, and we also have a quick word from our corporate sponsors. But you know what? I like what you said, Mike. This show's about profit. Because profit might be Barry, But I'm sorry, hold on, hold on, hold on. I messed it up. Revenue might be Barry. Yeah, but profit is super hairy.

In a good way.

Okay, well, you can find our show wherever. You listen to podcasts, you can subscribe in itunes, Stitcher, tunein, radio, all that. You know what? You can even rate and review this show. Just give Mike Michalwitz five stars and write something funny about him in the itunes comments. It's. It's a nice game to play. Our website, profit first podcast.com. every single episode we've ever done is there. You want to binge listen. You want to pretend like you're a squirrel digging up ground and putting nuts in there? Just go to the website and binge listen, Mike. Right?

Oh, my gosh, she's slapped me.

Slap me.

Those five star ratings. Come on, come on, come on. You know, I actually started binge listening to our own show.

Yeah.

Some people say, oh, Mike, I love what you did in episode, say 78. And I'm like, oh, what was that? So when I take a flight, I am now listening to our own show on 2X. And I got to tell you, Chris, oh, boy, you have the highest squealing voice on 2x. It doesn't supposed to change your voice, but it does.

I'm like a little chipmunk.

Barry sounds like a chipmunk.

I know. Even Barry sounds like a chipmunk. Hey, so, Chris. Oh, yeah. Before we kick things off, I want to know what you've been up to, my brother.

You know, I. This morning. Was it this morning or yesterday morning? It was really cold the day before, and we went. We got up in the morning and we looked on the deck, and there's this squirrel sitting on the rail in snow. And he looked really tired and, like, not sad, but just kind of tired. And then he literally. We're like, oh, let's give him something to eat. So we. I literally. He watched me open the deck door, open the sliding glass door. Normally animals run away. He. He just looked at me with this little pathetic look, like he was so hungry. I think it was so cold the day before that he literally was so hungry. And I. We put out some bird seed, which has some sunflower seeds in there, which he likes to eat. And then we put out some other cracker. I put out something else, and he. As soon as I walked away, he kind of made his way over and. And he ate so much. So that's little something nice that happened over here.

Did you guess what the word clowder is, by the way?

Clowder.

A clowder? Yeah, it's a group of something.

I was gonna say like a gathering.

Yeah, well, it is a g. So I'm on this, like, little, like. Well, I'll tell you my own personal story real quick.

Okay.

I'm driving down the highway with my wife, and I said, what's a group of, like, lions? It's a pride, right? What's a group of. What's another common.

Like, a flock?

A flock? I think geese.

Oh, a gaggle.

A gaggle. I think so. And I'm like, I wonder what a group of cats would be. And she looks at me. Cats are independent. They don't form in groups. I'm like, they absolutely do. And so a fight ensues. She's like. She goes, maybe feral cats. And I said, every group has some. A name to him. So I googled it, and just so you know, a group of cats is called a clowder. Oh, a clowder.

Weird.

I said, see, there's There's a group and she, she looks at me and she goes, that's stupid. Yeah. So, okay, so now see, Mike, you.

Won, but you lost. Good job.

I won, but I lost big time. The rest of my day was misery. So, Christina, do we have any community shout outs?

Yes, we do. We have a shout out to Nicole P. She emailed in, she said, hey, Mike, she actually attended your keynote at Service Autopilot.

Oh, awesome.

Yeah, a couple months ago. So she just said she wanted to let you know how amazing you are for sharing your experiences and for wanting to make a difference in other people's businesses. They implemented a lot, but definitely not all of what you've written about. And while they are still a quite small business, they were able to save just over $4,000 in their profit account since March.

Oh, my God.

And she said that wouldn't have happened without you. So shout out to you, Nicole. That's awesome. Keep up the good work.

Yeah, Nicole, so proud of you. Keep doing it. You know, I truly believe that your profitability, it's wonderful for you, it's necessary for you, but it supports your family, your friends, your employees. Right? Christina, you announced on our forum.

I did.

That you implemented Profit first for yourself.

I did, I did. And we actually, Alex and I are signing the lease this week for our apartment and we ended up having to do another deposit, a security deposit. There's no way I could have done that without.

And you had the money.

I do, yeah.

That's so awesome. And that, that's the power of profit first. It's not just the owners of businesses that do this, the employees that work there. You work here.

Yeah.

Start living this.

Let me, let me cap things off with the fact that I just kind of estimated what my taxes are going to be when I file my taxes in early next year. And guess what? I got more money than that in my tax account.

Yeah, baby.

So, Mike, what do I do with that extra money? What do I do?

You write a check out to Mike Michalowicz. No, dude, what you do is you take that out now as a profit. Now you want to, you know, if you're working with the Profit first professional, you realign your percentage next year to get a little bit closer. But that is that literally gets transferred to your profit account and now it's handled like a profit distribution. So parte. Congratulations, dude.

Thanks.

Yeah, no, well deserved. Before we bring our guest on and talk about how to double your profits with top performing employees, which, by the way, my first question is going to be how do you double profit and bring in top performing employees? That sounds counterintuitive. It sounds like, so expensive. But before we do that, I do want to thank our corporate partners who make this show possible.

Yes, please.

Yeah. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I want to thank. I'm going to say Fundera for Less. I want to thank. Fund box.

I love them.

Oh, oh. Nextiva.

I love them.

Receipt bank.

I love them.

Oh, zero, zero.

Oh, my goodness.

And then Corey, I don't know, Corey's like, oh, my God, do not bring me on air. But Cory, if you're there, our audio engineer, Fundera. Right. Cory, big time, didn't love them. Do you mind just sharing what Fundera did for your business? This is unbelievable.

Yeah, we were gonna start up a. We're a podcast production company, so we wanted to get an internal software for recording shows, and we realized we need about 40, $50,000 to build this thing out. We applied through Fundera, and in 24 hours, money literally fell from the sky.

That's amazing.

Yeah. But didn't they also additionally shop out multiple vendors and the first ones that came back to you had offered you money but higher rates and they. They guided you to actually getting a better deal for you.

It was a trip. We were like a minute into the application and our phone rang and it was a representative calling to ask if we needed assistance in the application process. And then held our hand for the next 24 hours as at least eight offers came through and advised us what he thought was the best offer for us.

Unbelievable. Corey, thank you for sharing that.

That means they were holding your hand while you were sleeping.

One hand on the phone, the other hand while I was sleeping. They'll literally get in bed with you and make it rain on you.

There you go, Fundera. Yeah. It's a little funky. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, God. Okay, well, we're about to bring our guest and I'm gonna thank a little more. A little more. Thank you for our corporate partners at the end of the show so you can learn from them. And we're also gonna share insights, what we learned from today's episode.

Yes.

I think it's gonna be mind blowing, so I'm not gonna waste any more time. Her name is Dr. Sabrina Starling. She is my business psychologist. That means she is a true psychologist, a degreed psychologist, a doctor of psychology who works specifically with business owners in adjusting their mindset and their team. And what she's found in her process is there's a big challenge with the mindset around bringing on Top performing employees. There's a lot of resistance. I thought I could never afford it. I just need to bring in, you know, just the cheapest people I can get. Who I expected they would stink at what they do. But at least it was a warm body. And she changed my mindset around this. And subsequently, you see the team we've built out here, nothing short of phenomenal people. Well, we're gonna learn how to do it Right now with Dr. Sabrina Starling. Welcome to the show, Doc.

Thank you, Mike. Excited to be here. And profit and employees.

Yeah. So Doc, we got to go right into the first challenge I threw your way when we connected. You said, you gotta bring on top performing employees because you can double your profit. And I said, hold on, Doc. How can you increase profit by bringing on more expensive people? And you said, that's not how it works. How can you double your profit with top performing employees?

All right, we are going deep right off the bat. That's an excellent question. I have been over the last two years really wrestling with that because I'm a certified profit first professional and I'm all about driving profit in my clients businesses and I'm teaching them that you need to hire the best. So here's how this works. If you have a team of like most of us have, a team of warm bodies and a couple of employees who may be a players, they really stand out from the rest. Those warm bodies, they stand around watching other employees work. They come in late, they leave early, they make a lot of mistakes. Those mistakes cost money all over the business. In rework, you lose top customers. They drive your best customers away. You don't get referral business because you had a warm body who did something that ticked off one of your better customers. So there's a lot of hidden costs in a business when you have warm body employees. And that leaves a lot of business owners looking at their payroll and saying, my gosh, my payroll is really one of the biggest expenses in my business. And now you're telling me I need to hire top performing employees and I cannot afford to hire top performing employees. My payroll is already outrageous. But here's the deal. One top performing employee on average is about 900 to 1,200% more productive than a warm body. So let's just wrap your heads, our heads around the implications of this. Number one, you can get away with having fewer employees on your payroll when you're hiring top performing employees, which means fewer benefits that you're paying. So you know when you pay someone's salary or their PayCheck, there's about 30% or more added on to that as benefits that the business is covering. So if you can reduce the number of employees on your payroll, your payroll starts to shrink. Top performing employees make fewer mistakes, so operating expenses start to go down as well. So what I recommend for business owners, looking out at their team and saying, you know, I have a couple of good folks, but I have some other people that, yeah, they really are those warm bodies. Set the intention. It's the beginning of 2017, so set the intention for yourself in 2017 that you're going to hire up and look at how can you start replacing those warm bodies. Don't fire everybody today because then you're going to be scrambling, you're going to be doing all the work again yourself. You don't want to go backward, but just start looking at how do I start networking and attracting these top performing employees and make the intention that every time you hire, you're going to hire an A player or one of those top performing employees. And what you want to do in terms of being able to pay and pay top wages or salaries is if you're going to have an A player, plan to pay them at the 90th percentile for that role, but don't start them there, have very clear performance expectations, you might bring them in at the 50th percentile of pay for their role and let them know, coming on in a week, here's what we expect from you in a month, here's what we expect from you three months out, six months out, and tie those expectations to pay increases that get them up over a year or two's time to the 90th percentile.

Okay, so I already have like 10 questions I wrote down. I do in reverse order because this is kind of where you ended. You said play them in the 90th percentile. How do I know what the norm is? How do I get that comparison to.

The Department of Labor Statistics has wage and salary data. And you can go in. I'm going to try to find this. I'll Give the website bls.govb as in boy, L as in labor and S is in statistics. So it's bureauoflabor statistics.gov.

Okay.

And you click around in there and you find it's occupational employment statistics. You find the role that you're hiring for the closest match to what you're hiring for. I think they even break it down geographically.

Oh, that is fascinating. So we just hired a video guy. So he starts tomorrow. He does and I didn't do this but doctor, are you saying I could go to bls.gov do a search for I guess video videographer or video recorder person, New Jersey, where we are and find out what the normal or average salary is for that role?

Yes.

Can you depict part time versus full time? Does that make a difference in their pay?

I'm looking here. They have national and state, so you can go by state. Let me just click through one real quick and see if there's. They have hourly wage and annual wage. I don't see part time versus full time, but I think you could back it out. Just assuming that what's showing on the site is full time wages or salaries.

And perhaps hourly is indicative of a part time and annual.

Right.

Wow. Okay, so that is an amazing tip, but now you rewinding. You said start them off maybe at the 50% point. So start them off at the average salary. But will a top employee accept that? Doesn't a top employee know their top employee and say, why am I only getting what everyone else gets? I'm way better.

Well, you have to say, will they.

Talk out of the corner of your mouth too? See, Muggsy, I need a cigar.

So this is key. You cannot give lip service to. We offer opportunities for advancement. Everyone says that you have to be unique as an employer of choice and really stand out. So when you're bringing them in for the inter, you need to say, we offer opportunities for advancement. Slide across the table a plan that lays out. Here's what we expect from you as a top performing employee in this role. When you're hitting these expectations at this mark and this mark and this mark, you get paid this amount, this amount and this amount. So they see it in front of them and it's a, it's a handout. They can take it with them. And I would suggest putting that on brightly colored paper so it doesn't get lost in their paperwork at home.

Oh, I like that. A big neon green one.

Scented as well.

Yeah. Coffee scented or chocolate chip cookie?

So okay, so this is assuming, of course, we find that great employee. You're saying. You said networking. So my next question is around finding them.

Okay.

Is it through networking? Is it through ads? How do you do it?

Okay, so this is what my whole book how to Hire the Best is about. Because as you know, for many years I was living in Wyoming and coaching business owners in Wyoming and that's a very rural part of the country. And these business owners were telling me, look, I have opportunities to grow I have more work than I can handle, but I don't have the employees. And so I really did a deep dive in understanding how any business, no matter where you're located, how you can attract top performing employees. And if these strategies work in rural areas, they work stratospherically better in more urban areas where there's a larger population to pull from. But you have to understand the psychology of a players. So a players are those top performing employees. They are motivated, they are goal getters. They are the folks in your business who if a problem comes up, you don't have to worry about solving the problem. They're going to put their mind to it and they're going to figure out a way around, over or through the problem. They don't just stop, give up and throw up their hands. And that kind of person comprises about 10% of our population as a whole. But that doesn't mean that all of those 10% are employable. So some of them are children, some of them are retired, Some of them may have a physical limitation that prevents them from being able to do the work you need them to do for you. So that is already shrinking. Your pool of a players is already shrinking. Now here's the thing about a they are never unemployed. They are not on Craigslist, they are not trolling the help wanted ads, and they are not down at job service. So the typical strategies that most of us default to when we're hiring is to place a help wanted ad or to post something on Craigslist. A players typically, unless they are in a terrible position at their current job, they're not on Craigslist looking for work.

It's fine. Christina's Point herself Share the story we found you on Craigslist which is an oddity. Tell us.

You know my first job out of college, it took me about a year to find to find a full time my first real job out of college and I was working for this country club and I was their administrative assistant and about eight other things and I just, I was there for almost two years and I just felt so taken advantage of because I'm young and it was my first big job and I was eager so I was taking on everything because I wanted to prove that I can do it and it just ran me into the ground and I was like there has to be something better and I wanted to follow my passion for singing and all that stuff. So then I did. I resorted to Craigslist because I was like I need to get out of here. And then I left my full time job to come to work for Profit First Professionals, which at the time was a part time position. So I left full time salary to switch to part time and it was the best decision I ever made.

So do you see that ever so often, Dr. Starling, that a, A player is so frustrated that they do look at Craigslist?

Yes.

Okay.

Yes. And as a matter, it's so interesting that you're bringing that up right now, Christina, because I was just having a call with my success team lead before we came on this interview and he and I were talking about this very same thing. Can you be an A player but be a warm body in a business? And we both started thinking through our work experiences and I will say I've held jobs that just like what you were describing, Christina. I was totally burnt out. So I was that warm body. I started out as the A player. I got the employee of the month, employee of the year. And then over time, because of things that have gone on in the work environment, I totally lost my motivation. I was the one showing up late, leaving early, calling in sick, you know, doing all kinds of stuff because I hated my work. And I went and started looking around on help wanted ads. And that's what you want to understand about the A player psychology is number one. You can, you can have somebody who is a warm body in another context, but if you put them in the right context, they flourish. So clearly, Christina, that's what's happened for you. You're in the right context at Profit First Professionals.

Well, thank you.

And what I'm also hearing, Dr. Starling is that that was just fortunate happenstance for us. There was a moment that there was an A player said, I'm looking, you look for one day. We happen to have our ad up there that day that was pure luck. But what I'm hearing from you is there's a deliberate practice and Craigslist ain't going to cut the mustard on this. How do you do it deliberately?

Exactly. So what you want to do is you want to be that employer who is top of mind with folks like Christina at that moment that she finally says, I've had it, I'm done with this job, I'm looking for something else. You want her to be thinking about? Oh yeah, that might. That guy Mike Mishmallo Schmitz at.

I.

Remember he told me about an opportunity. I need to give him a call. I need to quit tolerating this job that I don't like anymore. I'm going to give Mike a Call, that's the employer that you want to be.

Okay, but then how do I become that employer? How do I plant the seed so when the A player is ready to go that they're aware of me and I'm aware of them.

Okay, so first off, we as business owners have to embrace a new way of thinking as our business is growing. So when we start our businesses, that startup mentality that we're going to do everything and get all this stuff done ourselves, that's great for a startup. It does not work. As your business grows, as your business starts growing, you have to grow up in your mindset as the business owner and recognize that your role becomes one of the chief responsibilities for growing your business is sourcing, connecting, and recruiting A players. That is what successful CEOs do in good, great places to work. They think of their role as 50% of their time needs to be devoted to sourcing A players. 50%. And that's not what most of us do.

Oh, my God. No, no.

Yeah, no kidding.

So how. I mean, I can't go to my competitor. Maybe I can, but I don't think I can go to my competitor down the street and just hang out, say, hey, you know, who's the A players here? What do you guys do it. You want to have a little legend?

That's not. That's not going to work. So the good news is that everything that we know about successful selling of our product or services can be applied. All that marketing that we know that grows our business, we can apply that same psychology and mentality and strategy set to attracting A players to our business. So it becomes more important than us as CEOs of our companies selling our services and products, it becomes more important that we work on building our team and sourcing those A players.

All right, so honestly, if we could get you Dr. Sabarna, that's what the Mahalowitz.

I don't like that name, Mike.

Yeah, Deal with it. Song twister right there. It is a tongue twister. But Dr. Sabrina, if we could get you like my dream is if I could get you working at our company. Holy cow. Game over. The world's best psychologist on growing businesses and recruiting employees. It's a win for us. I'll do anything to get you on board. I also know you've got your own business and there's nothing I could do to get you on board. Is there certain people I shouldn't even waste my time trying to recruit? Or is it, you know, maybe the circumstance will present itself one day and I should make an effort. And how do I go about the ultra A player? Something like you, honestly.

Okay, so what you. It's not just about finding any. Any ultra a player. You really need to start with your vision for your company and where you're headed, where you want this company to go in the next three years, and then look at the roles that you're going to have for your ideal vision in the next three years. And always hold that picture in mind of the most important roles that you're going to need to fill in the next three years to grow your company in the way you want it to grow. So just because you have the opportunity to hire an A player, for example, if one day I just said to you off the side, man, I'm really frustrated with owning my business, and you said, oh, that's it. That's my opportunity to hire Dr. Sabrina. Well, you may not have a role that you really need me for for where your company is going. So you want to be really clear on those roles and then identify the strengths needed to perform those roles exceptionally well. And for each role, there are two key questions you need to ask yourself. The first one is, what is the most important outcome that I want from the person filling this role? The one outcome. If they get nothing else done for me in a given day or a given week, what is the one most important thing that I want them to do? Because employees are really confused. We give them too many things that we tell them are top priority, and they don't know what is really the top priority. So you got it. Before you hire, you need to know that. The second question is, how does that outcome tie to the company's profitability? If you cannot connect that outcome to the company's profitability, you don't need that role in your business. Every employee can impact the profit either by making the company money or saving the company money. And they need to know how they impact that.

Okay, that's kind of what I was going to ask you about. Like, and this is maybe a tangential conversation, but how do I empower them to know the impact they're having? I don't think, Christina, you could sit down and say, oh, I've improved our profitability by 10%. What are ways that I could educate my team on how they personally are impacting profitability?

Well, let's just take Christina, for example. If you're okay with that, Mike and Christina, I'm gonna put you on the hot seat. Are you okay with that?

Yeah.

Now I'm a little nervous. Last time she did this, I was laying back in a couch and I started crying within about one second. So be ready. Both of us are gonna be crying.

I won't make you cry. All right, so what is the one most important outcome that you need from Christina if she gets nothing else done in a given week?

The most important thing Christina can do for us is actually it's move to billing. So we've had significant issues with appropriate billing for our membership as we've grown so quickly. So the system is no longer effective. So correct accurate billing.

Okay. Correct accurate billing. How does that impact profitability?

So we in some currencies are actually overcharging customers and then catching it and having to refund it. So that undermined or not undermines can compromise their belief that we're a quality organization. So that's a real issue. We could lose a member that way. Secondly, there's some people that we don't bill that of course don't speak up, and they're actively getting services and we forgot to charge them. And I don't know what the numbers. It's frightening, Barry. It's terrifying.

It is terrifying.

And I don't know if it's 5%, 3%, 10% of our membership. Now, see, I'm starting to. You hear me choking up.

I know, Mike.

Damn it.

I said I wouldn't make you cry, but I want to cry. This is terrible. You have what all of us with growing companies go through. You're rapidly scaling up and things fall through the cracks, and you're identifying. Here's a leak. So this ties directly to profitability. Because if there's. If the billing is not accurate, you could be losing your best Profit first professionals. You could also be not getting paid from people who are profit first professionals and who are receiving services so that both of those directly impact the profitability of the company. So you've got to have conversations with Christina. I'm glad we're all talking today. It's good to get these things out. You've got to have these conversations with Christina and continue to tie it back to profit. So in your weekly one on ones, I hope you guys have weekly one on ones.

Do we have daily? Actually, we actually do it daily.

Daily.

Daily.

It's called the podcast.

When you're asking Christina about her wins and successes, you want to be. If she's not spontaneously telling you about billing corrections that she's caught, you want to be asking about, what have you caught? Where have you found that we are not billing somebody appropriately and have her talking about that and then reinforce and reward when she says, wow, we had one person that we have undercharged for the last 12 months jump up and down and say, oh, my gosh, Christina, that's awesome. I'm so glad you found that. That is huge for our profit. So it's an ongoing conversation about the importance of profit in the company and how the employee's most important responsibility ties to that.

I love that. You know, we have a daily huddle, and there's a saying, what gets measured gets done. And one thing I just wrote up there, a little bit flippantly, this is two, three months ago, was we got to reduce the overwhelm. And we never really actively talk about what are you doing? Specifically reduce overwhelm. But we mentioned it every so often today. I just asked, how are we doing on this, guys? And everyone in the room said, there's a little less overwhelm. We've actually made progress on this. I'm wondering, doctor, if we should put on the board a metric around our billing. What's our billing efficiency or some metric that measures how accurate our billing is. What do you think about that, Doc?

If it's important, you should be measuring it. And if it ties to profitability and it's not being measured, it sounds like it's important.

We're talking. You couldn't hear. I just did the hallelujah sound effect, but it's not playing, so. That was beautiful. That was beautiful. Okay, so just a couple more questions. We're gonna wrap up. We're running tight on time here when it comes to hiring. What about the retention component? And I got the A player on board. I found them. I'm paying them. I have a plan to increase their compensation. What do I need to do to keep them? They could be perceived by someone else as an A player, because they are. I'm afraid someone's going to come to me and take them away.

There's lots of touch points related to keeping those A players. So the first, most important one is when you're bringing an A player on board, you want to be finding out about their goals in life. Not just career goals, but overall goals in their life and encourage them to dream big. I love getting my clients to read the book the dream Manager and taking on that dream manager mentality as you're working with your employees. So find out what Christina and your other employees big dreams are, and then look for ways that you can support them in achieving their big dreams. So, like, you all have your employees implementing profit first and you know, here's Christina, she's putting down, you know, a deposit and she has the money for that. You're helping her in a key area in her life that really isn't related at all to the job. But that creates buy in, significant buy in. And when you can start having an impact on your employee's family because that employee works with you and a positive impact, not a negative impact, but a positive impact, all the better. That creates buy in and loyalty too. But the other piece is that you want to have ongoing conversations with your A players about how they're doing towards their goals with the company, how they're progressing and looking for the next move up for them. Because A players like new challenges, they like to advance. They're not going to be content to stay stagnant. And when you have a real A player, you really need to put your seatbelt on and be prepared because they going to grow and stretch you. Just 10 minutes before this call, I was talking with my success team lead and he threw out to me what his Q1 for 2017, what his goal is. And I nearly choked on my tea that I was sipping because I thought, holy cow, if he hits that goal, I'm going to have to scale this much and I better make sure our systems can handle what he's working towards. So that when you have that WE mentality with your A players, that we're a part of a team, we're working on building something together and they're buying into your vision and you're continually talking about your vision for the company as well as their vision for their life. It's that mutual collaboration that is way more important than paying top wages or salaries. Money only goes so far as a motivator. The biggest motivator for an A player is seeing progress towards achieving their dreams.

This is powerful stuff and I'm excited, Doc, that you're coming back next week to share some more tips. But for now, unfortunately we got to part ways because the clock is working against us. Thank you so much for this. Where can people learn more about you and this masterclass you're putting on?

All right, so in 2017 we are getting the word out big time to help small business owners double their profit with top performing employees. So we're putting on free masterclasses. You can find out when the next one is coming up by texting the word employees. That's employees with an S to 442-224-4222 and you'll get the dates for my upcoming masterclass how to quickly double your profit with top performing employees. Plus, we're going to give you access to my five secret to getting exceptional performance from your employees and free people.

This is free. Now here's the dealio. Like if you're listening to like a, a binge right now and it's like 20,000, you know, 2020 or some kind of future date, like this isn't gonna be available any now anymore. So do this now. I met the doc through, well, not through this means, but I wish I did through an introduction where I just got a taste of what she did and I was blown away. And that's where I ended up bringing on our services. You will be blown away for free. So do it now. Doc, thanks for joining us today.

Thank you.

All right, guys.

Dr. Sabrina, thank you.

Yeah, I always start talking and cut you guys off, but thank you for thanking her. So in a second we're gonna recap what we learned and, and go through some other cool stuff. But first, I do want to thank our corporate partners who make this show a reality.

Yes.

And you know who I want to start off with actually. And this is gonna be a little unexpected. Pause your life. Oh, you didn't expect that? I did not Pause your life. Chris, tell us a little bit about your awesome organization.

Yeah. Pause your life.org is the website and my wife and I started a organization. We host retreats and meetups to allow people to hit the pause button and relax. Drop all your baggage, drop all your roles and titles. Just be a frickin human being and without all the madness and drama and nonsense. And it's so cool when people spend either a couple hours or a couple days doing that. It's truly refreshing. It's like not, it's not, it's not like a vacation. You're not going surfing and all this stuff and all, but you're just bringing it back to you, the core of you. And it's so powerful. You get to re enter your life. So much more powerful and get more done and be more profitable. Thank you.

You know, we were talking about retention and could you imagine your a players? You send them to pause your life. You send them through this process with Chris and his wife just to be themselves. So many people try to squeeze every ounce of juice out of their employees.

Yeah.

Why don't you give them some juice back? Oh, so let me thank a couple other corporate partners. Receipt, bank receipt. Bank receipt. Bank is a efficiency tool, quite frankly. You can scan in all those receipts that are jammed in your wallet in your purse, in your shoe box, and you scan it in, it syncs up with your accounting system. And now, God forbid you ever get audited. You can print out all the receipts. 1, 2, 3. All right. Also, Xero, that's our accounting system of choice. It's a cloud based platform. It's the only accounting system out there that was developed on the cloud. It is a cool efficiency tool. Work from anywhere, have the accounting at your fingertips. Anywhere. That's what zero does. And then, of course, we have Fundbox as a cash flow fund box. Did I swallow the D?

No, no, you did good. I just like to say it.

Thank you. Oh, thank you, sir. So Fundbox is a cash flow accelerator. So if you have invoices due to your company right now and you're not getting the money and you're like calling the client, give me the money. Please give me the. Give me the money. If you're doing that, just call Fundbox. They'll go over the mail, break some legs. Or maybe. Or maybe they will just give you the money out of their own wallet. And that's actually what Fundbox does. They fund you. And then when you collect the money from your client in the normal means, you don't have to break any legs when you collect the money from your client, when they pay you, you return the funds to Fundbox, plus their small service fee. It's pretty cool. And then of course, there's Fundera. We lauded on about them just earlier, what they do with shopping out financing for you and educating, you know, you need a loan. They educate you what the best loan is. But my favorite company for today is Nextiva. Oh, that's a voiceover P phone system. And as I was talking to Corey, our sound guy, that's his official name. He's not a sound engineer. He's been elevated to sound guy. He's like, oh, yeah. So Fundera, this is last week he did Fundera. Now he goes, you know, now we're getting the next EVA phone system. System. Nice. Corey, you're on fire.

We started another one as well. Oh, for Christian. Yeah.

And oh, we need one more conference phone for the education, the training room.

Good to know.

Yeah, make the note of that. Another poly. See if we can get a polycom that's a little bit louder because that room's so big, you know.

Okay.

They have an amplifier or something for it.

We'll offline this.

Yeah, I don't know why. I'm making an order right now for Next Diva. Okay, so that's our Corporate partners. I want to thank all of them for making the show possible. And now I want to learn what you learned from the show. Chris, what did you learn?

Yeah, I'll go first. And I just want to mention too, that you're listening to this. We want to know what you learned from our guest. Go to this episode on profitfirstpodcast.com and in the comments, write what you learned and ask a question to either Mike or our guest. I like the idea of a top performance culture. So if you get a players, you get a bunch of a players together, they're gonna create this culture of man, we kick ass, we get stuff done. There's a momentum that's created. You know, I just saw Rogue One. It's this new Star wars and there's in it, there's a small band of badasses that go on this mission and they don't, they don't wait for permission and for help. They just go, you know what, we're gonna go do this and. But they're badasses. And I think everybody loves being part of a winning team. So if you get the right employees and develop the right culture, I mean, I mean, you're just going to kick ass.

I think all they say about Rogue One and Scientifical report from California was saying the same thing.

That's true.

Thank you, Barry. Chris. All to say about Rug one is Princess Leia.

Don't ruin it. I haven't seen it yet.

Princess Leia, would you learn, Christina?

Oh, I learned that you better strap in your five point seat belt because you need to be prepared for a players and not only how you're going to grow your business yourself, but how they are going to stretch you and grow you from their performance.

I like that. My takeaway was, what is the one most important outcome you want from this person? She's so right that we say, oh, I need you to do a million things. And that's probably even the words we use. But what is the big game changer? You know, I haven't had that conversation with you. It is the finances. And I bet you didn't even know that importance of that.

Well, I knew it was a big player, but I also have a couple other big players on my plate.

Right. But this is. That's the biggest player of all our finances, if that's correct. So it's a great way to make that apparent just by myself defining what is the most important thing you do. All right, so that's what we learned. We also want to know what you Learned. So post that in the ratings on, on all these different pod catchers. Oh, Chris, I'm kind of stepping into what you normally say. What else?

No, no, no. Yeah, go rate and review our show wherever you listen to the podcast. Mike loves five stars.

You know, just.

Just a little hint. I mean, we're not compelling you. We're not twisting your arm at all.

No, no.

I mean, you're free to, to give any, any five star review you want. You could just.

Exactly, exactly five times over, you know, fine.

That's right. So. Profitfirstpodcast.com. that's all our previous episodes. And seriously, there's been some doozies. Okay, I mean, serious in a good way. What do you mean in a bad way? Come on. No, the show is never bad.

And you can even. You even know what a clouder is now.

Oh, that's weird.

What is a clouder?

A cluster of cats.

Yes, very weird. So there you go. So. And this whole show is brought to you by Profit First Professionals. You know what? You need an accountant. You need a bookkeeper. You need a coach. Well, guess what? Why not hire one that is literally all day every day trying to make you more profit. Think about that. Somebody with a cape somewhere thinking about you and your prophet. I mean, jeez, get one.

Come on. For God's sake. People who are, you know, we're recording this on December 20th. The year comes to the close. We did our last global call with all of our Profit first professionals. These are accounts, bookkeepers and coaches. And what do we do in our last call? What do we do in our forum? We say, how have you changed the world? And report after reports coming in on how our members have increased the profitability of countless businesses. I don't care what business you're in. You could be a business psychologist yourself. You could make potato chips. I guess you could be in the porn industry. I don't know. Whatever you want to do. There's an opportunity. There's an opportunity for more profitability. And our Profit First Professionals will help you. You need an accountant anyway. You need a bookkeeper. You need a business code. Why not have one that's certified in the Profit first method? We have a team now of nine people starting.

Nine.

Nine people who are training these. 163.

Something like that.

Something like that. 163 or so members in bringing profitability to your business. Now here's what you need to do. Go to profitfirstprofessionals.com step one, step two. Click on the find button. It's right at the top of the screen and then fill out the little form. We will match who we feel is the best profit first professional to you. You interview them just like you would any other vendor you're choosing and get ready to drive levels of profit in your business like never before. And maybe you love your calendar bookkeeper. I'd be kind of surprised if they don't do profit first and you love them but if you do, tell us about them and maybe we can turn them on the profit first too. But no matter what, let's drive profit in your business now. So go to profit first professionals.com click on find and we'll hook you up.

That's it. Thanks everybody for listening. Thank you to our guests. Thanks Mike, Christina and everybody in the background over there. We'll see you next week. And remember, profit first laugh last.

I love it. I love it. He's a clowder. He's part of. He's a part of a clouder.

Sam.