How to turn your team members into profit-generating contributors

We want to empower our teams to be again, profit generating machines, but also really bought into how they can grow this business. And one of the biggest ways that I suggest doing that is really, as I’ve talked about before in the show, really infusing this ownership mindset into your team, because that’s where you get a sense of accountability. Because why the hell would we own something that we are not really bought into? We don’t believe it.

Of course, we’re not going to. Of course, we’re just going to want to do the bare minimum. Welcome to the Managing Made Simple podcast. I’m Leah Garvin, your host and team operations consultant. Through this show and my signature Ops Playbook, I condense a decade of experience driving team operations in some of the most influential companies in tech to save you time, money, and stress. It doesn’t matter if you’re a business owner who realized that running a team isn’t as easy as you thought it would be, or a new manager looking to learn the ropes, or a seasoned manager ready to up their game.

Everyone is welcome to hang out with Managing Made Simple. From conflicts, to feedback, to delegating, and more, we leave no stone unturned when it comes to what makes us love managing, kind of hate it, and everything in between. Let’s go. Welcome back to the show. We hire great people, we pay them well, we inspire them to do great work, and yet sometimes, more often than not, maybe in some of our cases, they’re just doing the job, like the very baseline of what they’re getting paid for, doing the task.

They’re doing okay, but we know that we can see more out of folks. Today, I want to talk about three ways to turn your employees into profit-generating machines, because when we do these three things, we can literally shift things around from folks just kind of clicking off that task, finishing the work that’s in front of them, or ones that are really thinking proactively about growing the business. As we’re looking ahead into 2024, oh my God, it’s literally days away, we want to have a plan.

We want to make sure that everybody can see, okay, we’re still in this weird economic time, we want to be growing, we want to start 2024 off with a bang, let’s do this. Let’s talk about the kind of murky beginning, the place before we do these three things. I like to talk about this because I think sometimes when we listen to suggestions, or go to a training, or listen to a podcast, or whatever, it’s like, okay, that’s cool, whatever.

It’s what I recently heard someone call it brain candy or mind candy. I think it was mind candy. It was such a funny term, because I think we all do that. We hear something, we’re like, oh yeah, that’d be nice, I should implement that. Okay, that’s cool. But we don’t implement it, first of all. It’s like, yeah, that’d be great. I could stop eating. I could go gluten-free after the holidays. We’re like, yeah, sure, maybe. But it’s like, we don’t do it.

My guess is we don’t understand the cost enough, or the cost doesn’t feel too costly. And so when we think about the potential of turning our employees into profit-generating machines, let’s talk about the opposite, is that it is impossible for you to grow and scale your business to the levels that I’m sure that you have in mind if you’re the only person doing it. If your team members truly see only the next task ahead of them.

Okay, that’s not only a recipe for stagnation, but it’s unmotivating for your team member because it feels like they’re just a cog in a machine. They’re going through their task list in Asana or ClickUp or wherever you have it, and they start to feel demoralized. And one thing that’s really funny about, funny, interesting, funny, about when team members get stuck in this, I’m just going to do the next task. They actually, from what I’ve observed, report a higher sense of burnout and overwhelm.

Like I have so much work on my plate. I have all this going on. It’s just, you know, it’s endless, new tasks every day. I have so much. And yeah, some of us could call that, well, that’s just what a job is. But I think the reality is they’re not seeing the bigger picture. And when we don’t feel that bought in, the work can start to feel overwhelming. Like I have all this disconnected stuff I’m trying to get through.

And actually, in exercise, I’ve really connected the dots where people can transform the way they look at the work. Now, when we’re in this space of feeling overwhelmed, demoralized, again, for our team members, they’re not resilient to change. They feel frustrated when something does have to change. Maybe they’re looking for another job. Maybe they feel like, you know, I’m just going to do the mere minimum, like we talked about. And that is not good for your business.

That actually starts to bleed your business dry. Because if one person’s acting like that and talking to their colleagues about it, that’s going to start to really, you know, bring the whole system down because that’s planting seeds of negativity. And why are you even doing this? And that can start to lead to high turnover or just everybody having a general sense of malaise. And they’re just not really, you know, there’s so much more that they could be doing, so many more ideas.

We also can start to see, you know, just a lot of naysaying, I think, and that can really chip away at having psychological safety because someone maybe is excited and they bring up ideas and other people that are kind of over it are just like, I don’t know, why would we do that? And again, that starts to bring the whole system down. So that’s not what we want. Instead, we want to empower our teams to be, again, profit generating machines, but also really bought into how they can grow this business.

And one of the biggest ways that I suggest doing that is really, as I’ve talked about before in the show, really infusing this ownership mindset into your team, because that’s where you get a sense of accountability. Because why the hell would we own something that we are not really bought into and we don’t believe in? Of course, we’re not going to. Of course, we’re just going to want to do the bare minimum. So when we create an ownership mindset, we really fuel that with the three things I’m about to talk about.

That’s where we see people take personal accountability. Ooh, I’m going to be proactive. I’m not just going to bring you problems. I’m going to bring solutions. I’m not just going to do that task list. I’m going to think, hmm, what’s a better way to do this? Or what would deliver a better outcome for the client? And I’m going to suggest those ideas. Okay, so three ways to do that. Number one, we set clear priorities with our team members.

We don’t have, and I talk about this in my book, Ops Playbook. I talk about it all the time on the podcast. We set clear priorities that are not too vague and not too many, okay? Because we want to find that sweet spot of saying, here’s what’s most important. And you can’t have 37 things that are most important if you have five team members, okay? It’s too many to get through, so it becomes unrealistic. And we can’t have too vague of priorities because then people don’t know what they’re actually supposed to be doing.

So we want to find that sweet spot of having, I don’t know, one to two clear, clear priorities for the year. And then we want to connect the dots between, okay, if our big priority or big goal is to double our revenue or open a second location for our business, how does every single job map to that? And again, I talk about this in depth in my upcoming book, Ops Playbook. I work with clients on this in the Ops Playbook program to figure out really what are those priorities and how do we articulate how each single role connects to that?

Because that’s where we feel the sense of ownership. That’s where we get the buy-in because we see, oh, I see. Okay. I work at a gym and my responsibility is putting equipment away between sessions and cleaning off machines. I might start at the point of feeling kind of demoralized, like, hey, I want to have one of the cool jobs. I want to work at the front desk or I want to be a trainer, but my job kind of sucks.

I’m just cleaning up after people. That might be the starting point. But when you connect the dots for someone and you say, hey, you know, we want to have this premium experience where everybody that walks through the doors knows they’re being taken care of. And I mean, I don’t care how great the trainers are. I don’t care how awesome the shampoos are in the bathroom. If the machines are dirty, if weights are a mess, if it’s like a total disaster when people walk in, they’re not going to come back.

And that is going to be the only thing that’s talked about in the Yelp reviews. So your job of cleaning up the equipment and keeping everything pristine and having everything organized, this is one of the most important roles that we have in doubling our revenue or being able to open that second location. As a business owner, when I have a lot on my mind, there is nothing more helpful than having a checklist and nothing more gratifying than crossing things off that list.

And as the leader of your team and company, it might feel like the list of things you have to remember to do to be a good manager gets longer every day. That’s why I created my thriving team checklist, including 10 things you can do this week and every week to show up better for your team. Get in the rhythm of completing these things every week and you will find that not only is your team performing better, your job is getting easier in the process.

It’s the ultimate win-win. Grab your copy today at leahgarvin.com checklist. You see what I did there? When you connect the dots for people, they’re like, oh, wow, I didn’t even realize my job was that important, but now I’m excited about it. And now that person that’s cleaning the equipment, they go, hey, you know, here’s a really cool way to organize the weights so that people can grab them faster. Or I’m noticing that this is the higher peak time.

And so I want to take another, you know, I want to make sure that I have time built in my day to really make sure everything’s spotless. You see what I mean? Then they’re not just doing the task list, but they’re bringing proactive ideas. And that again, helps grow the business so much faster than if you were doing all of it yourself, right? Second thing, we want to set expectations with our team members that they are responsible for growing the business.

Okay. And this is another one where I think we can be disconnected with our team members. We set these revenue targets, we set these goals, and then we just have their job as kind of disconnected for them. Maybe we’ve connected the dots around why their role is important, but really making sure people understand that they have a responsibility to growing the business and what’s in it for them in that case, which is things like being able to get raises and bonuses, being able to offer better benefits, being able to offer more kind of fringe things like trainings or conferences or travel or things like that.

We want to explain to our team members that, hey, we are all responsible for growing the business. So they’re not just like, oh, I thought the sales person does that. Or I thought the business development person does that. And it’s funny because when I work with folks on implementing the Ops Playbook with small businesses, a lot of times we find that just telling people that, hey, this is part of how you’re valuing, this is one of your responsibilities, it clicks in their minds like, oh, wow, I actually, I want to help to grow the business.

I just didn’t realize that that was something that you thought I should be doing. Okay. So simply making that shift for people, this is going to be an accelerator for growing your business. Just watch. I have had clients, once we have really set this very clearly, set this expectation, have team members bring in $13,000 within weeks because they realize, oh, I know how to do that. I have ideas. And then they do it. So we got to plant that seed and then we hold them accountable and we see them show up for us.

And that’s how they become profit generating machines. And again, if we want to talk about specifics, how to do that, you can book an SOS call at leahgarver.com slash SOS, or we can dive into the full Ops Playbook because connecting the dots across priorities, linking these expectations and performance, which is one of the kind of key things that we do in the Ops Playbook, this is what’s going to drive the most impact and transformation on your team.

Okay. Third thing, we set clear metrics and targets and we check in on them routinely. If you set a goal and you never check in on it, who the hell cares, right? It’s meaningless. And if you don’t set any goal, people don’t know what they’re marching towards. Right? So we want to set clear goals, clear metrics for the business, for individual roles, if that makes sense, for projects, for whatever it looks like. If you have someone working on social media, maybe you set targets around impressions or shares or likes or account growth.

If you have someone that’s working on, you know, their performing services, it’s client rebooking rates or memberships or whatever, right? We want to set clear goals. We want these to be stretched goals. We don’t want them to be something where people love. It’s completely impossible. So then they don’t care anyway, right? We want to push, but we want to do that in a space that we’ve provided the resources to get there. And then we check in on it routinely.

Maybe it’s monthly, maybe it’s quarterly, but I wouldn’t go more than quarterly because then again, it’s like, we can’t course correct. So we want to set goals, targets that people are aware of that they feel accountable to that they are following progress on. And this is key. You know, it’s not helpful to check in on a target in a quarterly team meeting or town hall or something like that when no one has prepped or thought about how they’re going to talk about, you know, how they got there or if they’re close or, you know, gaps they’re having or whatever.

So it’s really helpful to have people responsible to owning reporting on their own targets, really being clear on that. Maybe someone on your team provides the reports, but each person, you know, there’s an expectation that they review them on a weekly or monthly basis, right? So that then they are reporting that to you. Now that becomes an income and profitability accelerator because when you’re not the only one chasing that, people already feel more responsibility and they are going to be doing more to increase that profitability and increase those targets.

It also accelerates profitability because you’re not sort of assuming sole responsibility for it. We want people to own their own reporting and being accountable to talk about the reports for two reasons. First, if you are the one that’s always reporting on and asking questions about it, the accountability really is in your court. It kind of presents like I’m responsible for this and you’re just telling me stuff. And if you don’t ask the right questions, you know, you don’t know really what the issue is, then the buck stops there.

But the second reason is because when your team member owns whatever metrics reporting on it that they’re responsible for, they’re going to be proactive to trying to move the needle on that and hit the targets way more because they have a close pulse on that. So that is a great opportunity, a great thing to be able to delegate is, you know, people really owning their own metrics, reporting on them, being the one that speaks to them, the one that’s talking about opportunities to move the needle on those, that’s going to really shift that sense of ownership and then accelerate profitability.

Okay, so those are three specific clear things that we can do at the end of this year, at the beginning of next year, to turn our team members into profit generating machines. And again, I know this is not just mind candy. This isn’t a nice to have. These things are guaranteed to make shifts because it’s like when our teams aren’t doing this, it is guaranteed to slow you down. If your team members do not feel bought into moving the business, if they don’t know how to do it, if they don’t know how their role fits with it, if they don’t have clear targets, it is virtually impossible for them to do that because there’s no kind of roadmap paved for them.

And that’s why we do this in the Ops Playbook because I make it as clear as possible for a team to understand exactly where we’re going and how to get there. And we remove all the obstacles because process should be easy. It should be simple. It should be straightforward. It’s not about adding more structures. It’s about saying, hey, what is the easiest path to getting here so that everybody’s on the same page? So if you want support in doing this and really rolling out these three things and really making it easier to be in your team, easier for you to manage and easier for your team members to be successful, reach out.

I would love to support you with the Ops Playbook program. It’s a great way to start the beginning of the year. Everybody aligned on the same page. And again, turning your employees into profit generating machines. See you next time. That’s all I have for today. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Managing Made Simple podcast, where my goal is to demystify the job of people management so that together we can make the workplace somewhere everyone can thrive.

With that said, let’s spread the word. If you love this episode, please pass it along to someone who might benefit from it. See you next time.