And so when we talk about what are our priorities, these are specific things that we are doing and we're focused on in our work. This is what you gotta communicate to your team members, because if they don't see themselves in the priority, you got nothing. Okay? Now you're, they're not even focused on the priorities.
They go back to that job description, they do the bare minimum, and then they're done.
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Welcome back to the show. Today's episode is for my business owners out there, my founders, my entrepreneurs who feel like they're the only person caring about building this business, right?
I am the only one who's focused every minute of the day, a lot of times middle of the night on growing the business, on hitting our revenue goals. And this can be exhausting. Because you bring on a great team, you try to support them, you pay them well, and it still feels like a little bit, some of the people are just there to collect a paycheck, and that's tough because to carry that weight that you are the only one responsible for building this business, this is gonna lead you to burn out, to be working all the time, to be really, really hard to delegate, to step away.
It creates all the problems that actually I work to solve in the Ops Playbook program by getting you a little bit outta the weeds. But it also creates this sense of distance between you and your employees. So today I wanted to share this three part kind of trifecta that I think when you totally nail this, this is going to be game changing in your business.
And these are three key pieces of the ops playbook that we build out so that people see. Hey, this is the connection. This is why I'm here. This is how I am successful, and this is what my role is in growing the business. All right, you ready? This trifecta is the link between priorities, expectations, compensation.
Okay. This is it. Don't stop the episode yet, even though that was the magic part, because I wanna explain to you how all of this comes together when we are working in a company. There is more than just the roles and responsibilities, like the job description, that's the baseline. Okay. But if we want people to really feel accountable to it, to go above and beyond or really sort of be, be a part of more than just what's on paper, this is where we have to start with, what are the priorities for your overarching business or team?
And a lot of times this can be really unclear. I worked on a team years ago where the priority was help a billion people. Okay, this is not a priority. This is a vision statement maybe, but that doesn't tell me anything like, how am I supposed to do that? It's very abstract. It's intangible, and so when we talk about what are our priorities, these are specific things that we are doing and we're focused on in our work.
This is what you gotta communicate to your team members, because if they don't see themselves in the priority, you got nothing. Okay? Now even they're not even focused on the priorities. They go back to that job description. They do the bare minimum, and then they're done. So the first, first piece of this trifecta, establishing very clear priorities and then not changing every 20 minutes, okay?
There's times when priorities will shift. You have things coming in from competitive forces or whatever, and then in that situation you go, Hey, our priority was to double our revenue this year, right? Based on these three activities, let's say. And now we're seeing instead of this third activity, we're gonna do this other thing.
It's still grounded in the overarching double the revenue theme. If instead you said, instead of doubling our revenue, we're actually gonna try to cut it in half and do this other product. This is where you start to create thrash, especially if you do that a number of times. If you have a clear story and you have a good change management process, which we can talk about another time, it's possible to change priorities, but you don't wanna be doing it every month, every three months, because it becomes hard for people to understand what they're working towards.
Once you set your priorities, let's say it's doubling the revenue. Now we go to step two of the trifecta setting crystal clear expectations for every single role. Okay, so let's say you got a customer service person, a marketing person, um, uh, an executive assistant and ops person, okay? All, all working on very different things.
What is each person's specific tasks and responsibilities they can do to help double the revenue? And I believe that when that's your priority, every single job should have some connection back to it. So the customer service that might be about retaining clients as opposed to getting new ones, the marketing person might be about getting new clients.
The ops person is about giving a seamless experience so that people don't leave, right? These are all specifically tied to that overarching priority, and you can give really clear expectations for how everybody is a part of that picture. So now we see, okay, I get the priorities and I know how, me personally in my role as the social media manager in my role as the ops person, in my role as the customer service person, in my role as the executive assistant, I see exactly how I fit into the picture.
But those two things alone, they're not gonna get people to be working on doubling that revenue unless you do part three of the trifecta. And I gotta tell you, this is where most jobs I've ever been in get it completely wrong. Most team members, most people I've ever interacted with, like e everywhere, everywhere.
This is a missing step. And this is going to be the biggest, most transformational thing, is to connect rewards and compensation back up to those priorities. Because a lot of times we reward people on just doing the job description, on just the basics, just the tasks. And we forget that we've actually asked them to take a more holistic responsibility.
If we want them responsible for helping to grow the business, we gotta reward and compensate them based on revenue targets on these, you know, other metric things, like we said, memberships or growth or whatever it is. And so setting really clear targets based on what the priorities were. This is going to show someone that, hey, when I move the needle on this priority, I am rewarded for it.
I don't just get paid whatever or get a raise, whatever, because I showed up to work today. Okay. I get more when I do more, and this is just gonna be tr game changing. I'm telling you, for any kind of situation where you're feeling like people kind of come in, they do the bare minimum, they leave, they're like asking when the raise is.
This changes that whole conversation because you go, oh, Here's the priorities, here's expectations, and this is how you're rewarded for that. Now sometimes, you know, you don't need everybody focusing on like, kind of pedal to the metal on all these different things, but when you want people to go above and beyond, you wanna make a really clear case for, okay, you know, here's some goals that we have.
Here's some bonus opportunities. Potentially, when you help grow the business by this amount, I'm gonna be giving out, you know, annual bonuses based on these different metrics. So this dot connecting, this is gonna be a lever that you have to pull when you really want to help encourage people to go above and beyond.
Let me give you an example to bring this to life. So Lisa, one of my clients, she runs in Med Spa and she feels like the only person that's really staying up at night, figuring out how to grow this business, how to grow the memberships. And we talked about really how to connect the dots across these three things.
And so we said, okay. One of the biggest, biggest priorities for the year is to grow the amount of annual memberships. That was the biggest priority. And just saying that alone, you know, there was too many jobs that felt disconnected from that. Like, for example, the medical assistant who's cleaning off the machines, okay.
Or the person that's ordering the supplies. So we said, okay, we gotta connect the dots between, you know, how to grow these memberships and these individual roles that maybe feel disconnected. We said, okay, well, for the medical technician that's cleaning the machines, growing memberships, looks like every single time I walk into a room it is immaculate and I know this place is somewhere that I want to be.
For the nurses, it meant calling clients after visits and checking in, seeing how they're going. It meant for the folks ordering the supplies. They're looking and researching like, what are better versions of these supplies? How do we make sure that we're never out without anything? How do we get things automated?
Okay. There were specific expectations and responsibilities we could assign to people that really laddered up to this goal of improving the membership rate, even if it felt disconnected before. Now everybody could see their role in growing the memberships. So that's how we connected. Priorities.
Expectations. And then when it came to rewards, we said, okay. So we want everybody to be growing the memberships. Now we gotta give them specific goals and targets. So every six months we're gonna have a drive for memberships and everybody has an opportunity to participate. So this meant people could launch their own social media campaigns, do referral drives, be showing up at events, all marketing the business to try to get that bonus.
And even if their job felt slightly disconnected from that membership student before, now they had a real opportunity to dive in and be a part of hitting that priority. And this is just one example of how you can bring together priorities, expectations, and rewards, and give your team members really specific ways that they can grow, they can earn more money, and how they see themselves within the bigger picture.
Because let's be honest, all of us just wanna be seen. All of us just wanna know that we matter. Okay? It's not a great feeling just to show up and, and punch the clock and collect a paycheck. So when we start to believe that's all our employees want, I think it can create an artificial divide between us and them that doesn't have to be there.
And when you give your team members really clear expectations, when you show them I believe in you, like I wanna give you a chance to earn more money, I wanna give you a chance to step up and be a leader. They show up. They will show up so much more than you might have thought when you give them the opportunity.
So I encourage you to think about it. How can you connect the dots across these three things? Or gimme a call because this is my favorite thing when we can solve this. The connection between priorities, expectations, reward. When we get this really, really clear on paper. And we show your team how they can continue to grow, no matter what role they're in, how they have a critical role in building this business.
That's where all this comes together. That's where you get outta the weeds as a business owner. That's where people start to really step up and it transforms their business. So this is really just one example of what we can create through putting together your ops playbook. It's a four hour meeting where we dive into where we are today and where you wanna go across six dimensions, including priorities, expectations, rewards, also onboarding, decision making, work tracking.
And then behind the scenes, I create your ops playbook ready to implement. And then I hold your hand through the whole implementation because the messaging is so important, reminding your team members that this is for them. This is a tool for them to be successful. Sharing examples like the one I just talked about, Hey, this is what we mean when we say priorities.
Expectations and rewards are one thing, okay? And that's really where the magic comes together. When your team sees, wow, it's so much easier to get work done in this company. Now I'm so much clearer and I have a future here. So that's what I want to help you create with your team, with the ops playbook.
And I am so excited for you to try out what we talked about today, make that connection between priorities, expectations, and reward. Send me an email, let me know how it goes. And if you're ready to get rolling with the Ops playbook, I have two more slots this month. Send me a text to 4 1 5 2 3 4 5 7 1 6.Text the word playbook and let's do this. 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. I always love to hear from you, so please reach out at liagarvin.com or message me on LinkedIn.
See you next time.
