How Knowing Your Numbers Can Help You Attract Top Talent

Nearly every small business owner I know shares one need right now: hiring the right people at the right time. This is no easy task, though, especially with today’s job market. There are a lot of different steps you can take to attract the top talent you’re looking for, but one you may not think of is the importance of knowing your numbers.

This might sound odd – after all, shouldn’t you be focusing on job descriptions and ways to vet your candidates? These are essential, and we do strongly recommend focusing on them (we even have a 6-week Boot Camp that equips you to do so) – but knowing and using your numbers effectively will give you the right foundation for building your profitable team.

Building a strong Financial Dashboard and understanding how to use it will give you an advantage in not only knowing who to hire and when, but also in creating a strategic compensation plan to attract and retain the team you need.

Balancing Competitive Compensation and Profitable Growth

Many business owners are finding themselves in the position of hiring reactively. They have an urgent staffing need, so they put out a job ad and quickly hire someone who (they hope) can do the job. When it comes to finding the payroll, they scrimp in every way they can to try to make ends meet.

There’s a better way.

When it comes to compensation planning, your goal is to balance offering a competitive compensation package with maintaining (and growing) the company’s profit and cashflow.

This is not an easy job. It takes a deep understanding of the profitability of each position in your company – and a plan, based on your historical numbers, for growth. (In other words, there’s a lot of math involved.)

If you want to do advanced algebra and polynomial math in your head, that’s an option, but this really isn’t how I recommend spending your precious time. Instead, by building an effective Financial Dashboard, you’ll have all of these numbers at your fingertips.

And with this information in place, you’ll be able to plan for the growth you want to achieve!

Putting the Right Financial Tools in Place

One of the tools we help our clients put into place is a program that helps them answer vital hiring questions that include:

• How much can we afford to compensate our team?
• What should our staff targets be for the firm to accomplish its goals?
• What does my business look like if new employees and experienced employees have different targets?
• What would a bonus & compensation plan that makes sense for the firm and incentivizes the staff look like?

It’s one thing to come up with ideas that may work – and then to hope they function like you think they will.

It’s another to use your numbers to create a plan that works for the growth of your business and your staff.

Tools like this – a strong Financial Dashboard that’s tailored to your business – will help you develop that plan and pivot it as needed.

Attracting the Right Talent

There’s a lot that goes into attracting and retaining the right talent. Your Core Values, your culture, your goals, your leadership, and your compensation plan all play a large part.

Obviously, your numbers don’t tell the whole story, and they aren’t the only factor to consider. You do need to put time and energy into developing the other areas of your business – and into building the systems that will allow your team members to hit the ground running and excel.

What your numbers will do show you where you are and help you build an action plan to get where you want to be. When you’re equipped to plan ahead, you can hire proactively. You can build your team growth straight into your business plan and develop the necessary infrastructure ahead of time.

And when you have that in place, it’s far easier to develop the hiring systems that will help you reach the talent you want to hire. It’s easier to vet and interview them when your goal is to put the right person in the right seat.

And you’ll be far more confident about the decisions you make and the team that you build when you know your plan is backed up by the data. In turn, this allows you to focus on being the leader your team needs you to be!

If you’d like to know more about creating these tools and systems for your business, contact us – we’re happy to sit down and talk with you about your goals and help you develop an action plan to reach them!