Is your structure evolving with the growth of your company? Is your structure properly designed to support both your internal and external strategy? In other words, do you have a structure best designed to serve your ideal prospects’ needs better than any of your competitors? Are you set up to acquire those ideal customers? If your business is like many of the companies I have seen, the answer is probably no to many if not all of these questions.
It Is Common to Underinvest in Administrative Functions
It is probable that you will not hesitate to invest in positions that you believe are critical to creating and selling your products and delivering your services. In fact, you may even overinvest in these functions. However, it is also likely that you underappreciate and underinvest in areas that are truly critical to your success. I often find companies will not have the right level of investment in functions and roles in human resources, finance, and technology. The last case is especially true where your business is not considered primarily technology related. You may justify that you only have a certain amount of resources and therefore have to make tough decisions. However, in many cases you are unable to see what not investing is costing you.
Not Investing in a Position can Cost you 26x the Salary
Too often you are so worried about how much a payroll is going to cost you that you do not realize what it will cost you not to fill a position. I had a client that had been reluctant to add the human resource function to their organizational structure. Their concern was that hiring the type of talent that would do the job well would cost as much as $75,000 in annual salary. Historically the function was absorbed as a secondary activity in everyone else’s job function. There was no one person accountable that could truly say they were one hundred percent focused on human resources. As a result, there was no consistent process for recruiting, the biggest issue for their company. Worse, with no one in the company that you could say was great at recruiting or selecting talent, the function was failing miserably. With everyone responsible and no one accountable, positions were not being filled, subpar talent would go unaddressed because of lack of ability to fill open positions, and a lot of strain was being placed on the management team.
This issue was a topic of discussion at every monthly and quarterly senior management meeting, and at each meeting it was concluded that a human resource person should be hired. However, the Chief Financial Officer carried too much weight in decision-making, was cost-oriented rather than growth-oriented, and the function organizationally reported to him. As a result, over the course of nine months the leadership team continued to allow this void to go unaddressed. Then, the perfect storm hit. Operations could no longer handle the sales volume it currently had, so sales had to start turning away business. The organization was now almost at a standstill because they failed to have the necessary people on the team. All of which could have been prevented had their human resources function been operating properly. The leadership team concluded that not spending the $75,000 cost the company about $2 million in cash flow.
Are You Unconsciously Stunting Your Growth?
It is common for leaders to unconsciously stunt their own growth by not evolving their structure to support that growth. You have to build it before and not after. Sometimes, you have the right structure but are not filling the positions with the right level of person or type of person. Continuing with the human resources role, one crucial mistake is not appreciating the role of Human Resource Manager and the many variations there are for this position. Not having the right person or people could stunt your growth. Many leaders either fail to fill this position with a competent trained professional, thinking of it as an administrative role, or they fill it with someone with the wrong skill sets.
In a firm’s early days, it needs someone that can increase the speed of recruiting, help avoid some critical miss-hires, develop the infrastructure for onboarding and training the new talent that is hired, and help build the systems for accountability. Having the right person in this function can accelerate your ability to grow and scale and takes a tremendous amount of pressure off the other leaders in your organization. Often organizations fail to hire because they do not want to make the investment. What they do not realize is that while there is not a financial statement line for failing to fill positions fast enough, failing to fill positions with the right people, and the cost of all the lost productivity in the organization from failure to fill this role, these are real liabilities with real price tags. Essentially having the right person can pay for itself at a minimum multiplier of 10. You can never recover the lost revenue and profit in the lost time from not adding the human resource person to your infrastructure in the first place.
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