A short YouTube monologue by Mike Andes advising that hiring more staff often masks weak operational systems. Using phone-answering and field-work examples, the speaker recommends measuring processes (track missed-call volume, time-of-day, and call type; track budgeted hours and employee efficiency), implementing SOPs and software, and considering alternatives to hiring such as IVR call routing or third-party answering services.
Hiring more people is how bad owners hide bad systems. And it's so easy to throw more bodies at the problem, especially as you get bigger. Would you have a two, $3 million business? You have 15, 20 employees. Okay, the phone's not being answered on time. We're missing phone calls. Okay, get more office employees. Is that really the problem? And so many times we don't have systems. We don't have the ability to actually track how many phone calls are being missed. Is it only 1% of calls? We don't have the ability to track, like, what time of day are the calls being missed? Okay, that's an opportunity. Okay, what type of phone calls are being missed? If we actually tracked and had a system in place for all these things, we might instead opt for a redirect of like, press one for sales and press two for service. We might have a fail safe or a switch where if we do miss a call, it goes to a third party answering service where they might only answer a couple calls a day instead of hiring an entirely new person. But it's because we don't have systems, software and mechanisms in place, standard operating procedures that we can measure, and having the metrics of the business that we just throw people at the problem. And the same thing is true out in the field. It's like, oh, the jobs aren't getting done on time. Oh, we should hire more people. It's like, whoa, whoa. Have we actually tracked budgeted hours? Do we actually know our efficiency score? Do we actually know if the employees that we currently have and have trained are actually efficient out in the field?
