Scaling smart

RCS Influencer Randy Chaffee says to invest in people before you need the people.

Editor's note: The following is the transcript of a live interview with RCS Influencer Randy Chaffee. You can read the interview below, listen to the podcast or watch the recording.

Alex Tolle: Hello, I'm Alex Tolle with RoofersCoffeeShop.com, and I'm back here with Randy for another Influencer response. So our July RoofersCoffeeShop question is, "What steps can be taken to overcome growth plateaus and build the infrastructure needed to scale a business to the next level?"

Randy Chaffee: Yeah, that's a great question. And it's one that even the most successful businesses go through it. It'd be nice to think that it's going to be this rise of steady and easy because you could plan for everything. But it's never that way. There's the ups and downs. But I think one of the first things, Alex, is to audit yourself and what's working and what's not working. Because we make decisions way too many times on gut feelings and gut feelings has a place, but is that really the case? And it's important to find out what's not working. That's a big part. And I think we sometimes, I would say guard against always looking at what's not working. That's sometimes glaringly obvious and it's important to know, but I think it's equally important to know what is working too. So let's fix what's not working, but if we don't know what's working well, we may inadvertently fix things that we probably ought to leave alone or learn from and make better.

So I think auditing upfront and with that, document what you're auditing. Don't just sit and have meetings and talk about this stuff, say, "Yeah, you know what, this process just really doesn't work." But if you don't document it and be able to have everybody walk away from that meeting or those discussions and be able to actually do something actionable and come back to the table and explain to the group what we've done, here's where we're at, if you don't have that documentation, you're going to get lost and you're not going to remember what you were or were not doing. And I don't know about you, Alex, but I can forget what I was just talking about two minutes ago. What were we...? No, I'm just kidding.

And I think another really important, and maybe the most important of all and this one really gets lost, is invest in people before you need the people. Because so many times, "Well, I guess we probably should hire somebody to fill this position." Well, by the time you get around to actually doing it, you probably should have had them six months ago or a year ago and now you're starting today already behind and it's going to be six months to a year to two years before they're up to speed to where they need to be. And you've lost all that ground, right?

I'm not saying that you just go out, and here's an old school word, willy-nilly, whatever that means. I just like it. I say words I like sometimes and not even if they make sense, I just like them. But just, "Well, I think we just hire 10 people." I'm not saying that at all. I'm just saying have a plan. And if we think we're going to be at this level or this need six months from now, six months is too late already, we need to start planning today. And that's not just in hiring new people, but investing in the people we have. Is there more training we need to do? Do we need to cross train some people? Be thinking about where we're going to the next level.

If we get surprised by success, and see, lots of times we get surprised by failure because we don't intend to fail. We don't want to fail. We think we can't fail. Or even worse, we play to fail. But what about playing to win? And if you're playing to win and you're playing to be successful, you need to plan for that and assume and accept that in six months I'm going to be here. Now something changes, you obviously might have to adjust, but don't wait until that time to make the change because then it's already too late.

And I think lastly and probably is equally important on that too is what is your customer's experience? See, customers have choices. There's that one really, really interesting thing about business, right? There's this age-old thing, I hate policy, I understand the reason for policy. I understand we all have to have them, right? But one of the words or statements that I hate more than anything that I think's a killer to business is when we say, "Well, it's not our policy," or, "It's our policy." Understand you got to have them. But watch how we deal with that because as a consumer, I have a policy too and my policy is if I don't like your policy bad enough, I'm not going to give you my credit card. I'm not going to give you the PO. Because guess what? This really, really strange thing called a customer has choices.

In our last conversation, we talked about a steakhouse. If I keep going to the steakhouse and I don't like something that happens there, I have a choice because nobody at gunpoint makes me go to that steakhouse again. So I'm going to take my credit card and I'm going to go to a different steakhouse. And it's the same thing in our world of roofing. If the experience is bad, if you're not taking care of my issue, my problem and just going, "Well, our policy says we won't do that," like I said, my policy says, "Okay, I'll pay for what I owe you, but I'm never going to recommend you and I'm never coming back." So I think we have to, that and take care of your people and understand what your needs are, are two really, probably of everything we talked about, they're all important, but those are ones that get missed a lot.

Alex Tolle: Yeah, absolutely. Well, and there's this fear too I've heard of not wanting to invest in a training for your employees because it's expensive. And what if they get that training and then they leave? But a lot of times people appreciate that you put the effort and you back them to train them and they're more likely to stay with you because of those things.

Randy Chaffee: Well, they are. Two points to that and I love that. One of the biggest thing I think that if you look at research, employees, of course there's pay and benefits and work conditions, but they want to be trained. Most employees want to do a good job. They want to be valuable. They want to be important. They want to be part of the team. They don't want to come in every day going, "I don't know what the hell I'm doing."

Alex Tolle: They want to be the expert.

Randy Chaffee: They do. They want to be. And the second thing, what you said, I really love is, "Well, what if I train them and then they go somewhere else?" Well, what's even worse is what if you don't train them and they stay with you? That's even worse yet.

So if you train them and you do the things that I talked about and you invest in people and you continue to invest in the training, you stay competitive with wages and all the stuff that you do, take care of them and let them know you love them and care about them, they're probably not going to leave you.

Alex Tolle: Yeah.

Randy Chaffee: Makes sense to me.

Alex Tolle: Thank you again, Randy. Appreciate your insights on this very important topic and we'll see you next month.

Randy Chaffee: We'll be here. Cheers.