❓ Is your business making the most of the data it collects?
In this episode, we dive into the world of data tracking and its impact on employee performance, management, and overall business growth. Our guest expert, Rob Buffington, shares valuable insights and experiences on how to effectively leverage data to make better decisions and drive your company to success.
🎙️ Topics we discussed:
- 📚 The importance of data tracking for businesses
- 🎯 Focusing on the right metrics for success
- 🔄 How to make data actionable for employees
- 🤝 The role of data in employee performance and management
- 📈 Connecting data-driven insights to business goals
About our guest: Rob Buffington is an expert in data analysis and business growth, with experience in various industries. As the founder of Gordian Business Solutions, he helps businesses slice through complex challenges and harness the power of data to achieve their objectives. Connect with Rob on LinkedIn here.
Hi, It's Isar the host of the Business Growth Accelerator Podcast
I am passionate about growing businesses and helping CEOs, business leaders, and entrepreneurs become more successful. I am also passionate about relationship building, community creation for businesses, and value creation through content.
I would love it if you connect with me on LinkedIn. Drop me a DM, and LMK you listened to the podcast, what you think and what topics you would like me to cover 🙏
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Isar Meitis (00:00):
Hello and welcome to the Business Growth
Accelerator.
This is Isar Matis, your host,and we have a special topic
today.
The most important asset ofprobably any business is its
human capital.
The employees of a business willeither make or break the
business.
And while it's known toeverybody, many companies do the
very basic, and it's not enoughtoday.
(00:20):
So most companies, they paysalaries, they give people
whatever benefits they give, andthey expect work in return.
And that equation is less andless relevant because employees
these days want and need anddeserve to be fair a lot more.
And if you want to grow asuccessful business, and if you
wanna be able to scale it,that's a.
(00:41):
Capability and a skill you willneed to have in the company.
And our guest today, RobBuffington has grew a remote
staffing company from 25 to 400employees in two years.
He also owns and operates sevendifferent companies at the same
time, which sounds impossible tome, but it proves one thing is
that he really knows how tomanage people and he's really
(01:04):
good at driving employeeengagement and accountability.
And this is exactly going to bethe topic of our conversation
today, like I said, because thiscan either make or break your
business in any business.
It's a very important topic andhence, I'm really excited to
have Rob as a guest of the showtoday.
(02:19):
Rob, welcome to the BusinessGrowth Accelerator.
Thank you for having me.
Rob, when did you figure thisout?
When did it hit you that this isthe holy grail, that if you want
to grow and scale businesses,you better get your employees to
be highly engaged andaccountable for the things they
need to complete.
Rob Buffington (02:40):
the first thing I would say, to be honest, is
I'm not a hundred percent surethat I have figured it out.
I think it's a moving target.
I think I'm learning every day.
I'm making mistakes every day.
What I do know is that I havesome great people with me.
I know that I couldn't do thiswithout them.
And for some reason we havedeveloped a good working
dynamic, that way.
(03:00):
I think, honestly, I did itcause I believe that it's the
right way to treat people, tomake them partners in the
company, treat them not asemployees, but as people that
can help you together.
and I think that had theunintended side effect of
leading to better engagement andbetter retention and things like
that, that I view us as peoplethat are, helping us get where
(03:22):
we're going rather than assetsof the company or something to
be used and discarded.
Isar Meitis (03:28):
I love that.
I think it's a great answer andI agree with you a hundred
percent.
I think if you make youremployees a part of the journey,
and by the way, that's truebeyond that, like if you make
people a part of the journey Ifyou make your partners, your
suppliers, your clients, yourprospects, a part of the journey
to a better outcome foreverybody.
Yeah.
Then you end up getting betterresults.
Rob Buffington (03:46):
Yeah.
I never hire anybody that Idon't think at least has the
potential to stay for 10 yearsif I don't think that they can
grow and achieve their goals.
And it's a common question, andI think most people don't really
mean it, but I genuinely wannaknow.
Where are you going in five or10 years and how are we getting
you there?
What are we doing to contributeto that?
Because the idea is that if you,number one, the companies are
(04:09):
growing so quickly, we needpeople at the top.
And I wanna promote from withinwhere possible, but I want
people that can be liferspotentially.
so yeah, I never hire anybodythat I think is gonna use us as
a stepping stone or that I feellike would, could outgrow us or
that we wouldn't be able to usethem in a higher function down
the road.
I hire for the people they couldbe.
Isar Meitis (04:31):
I love that.
I think we'll touch more onthat, on the how of that later
on, but it really starts withthe basics, right?
So let's start with what do youdo?
So you said you develop thismethodology or develop a way to
make people feel moreaccountable and feel more a part
of the company.
(04:52):
What are the things you do, thepractical aspect of it that
makes people feel that way?
Rob Buffington (05:00):
I think radical transparency is one of the
things that I do.
and I don't know that's aconscious business decision as
me, as much as me just nothaving a filter and just, I just
say stuff.
but I've always viewed it aspeople need to know what's going
on.
they need to know the why.
They need to know what we'redoing and why we're doing it.
So it's not just, I need to fillmore positions, or I need more
(05:23):
bookkeepers.
I need to, it's, here's thestepping stone.
I actually just got back, 36hours ago from our executive
retreat where the leaders of thedivisions came together and we
talked about our three yearplan.
And this is why we're taking onnew projects and we've acquired
companies that maybe don't makesense in the short term, but
looking at the three to fiveyear plan, it's oh, that's where
(05:45):
it's gonna come into play.
So I'd say radical transparencyis definitely a, one of the
things we do that's effective.
Isar Meitis (05:54):
So let's take that to the very practical level.
How is that translated to theday-to-day?
What do you do with employees?
First of all, obviously likeyour leadership, but then down,
trickling down the differentlevels of the companies.
How do you make sure that peoplereally know what's going on and
why it's going on?
Rob Buffington (06:15):
Again, as I said to the first question, I'm not
sure that I'm the paragon forthis.
I'll tell you what I do, but I'mcertainly not pretending to be
an expert.
the first thing I'd say is time.
Especially being a remotecompany, it, you can go weeks
without having meaningfulconversations with people.
So I try to, we have regularmeetings based on position and
division.
(06:35):
Tuesday and Friday we have ouroperations call with the these
people.
I have one-on-ones on a biweeklybasis with my direct reports and
people that I'm grooming for ahigher position.
We try to have state of thecompany meetings on a, at least
a quarterly basis, if not moreoften.
So I'd say time is definitelypart of it.
(06:55):
We encourage, we have virtualsocials on a monthly basis.
There's something, particularlywith remote work, which we'll
get into later.
I'm sure remote work makes itdifficult to have what I call
the water cooler effect.
Yeah.
An amazing amount ofproductivity and new ideas at a
business comes from thoseimpromptu conversations as you
(07:15):
pass in the hall or you meet atthe water cooler of the
cafeteria.
So I think virtual socials andthings like that can help foster
that, as well as just havingopen and direct conversation.
A, any person in my company iswelcome to email me and or
message me and even say, Hey,you, that's a terrible idea.
Or I think this is Stu, I wantdevastatingly transparent
(07:37):
feedback.
And that gets harder the biggeryou get.
People don't always take you atyour word, but we try to reward
it and just say, Hey, thank youfor bringing this to me.
let's have conversation and seewhere we
Isar Meitis (07:50):
go.
Okay.
So if I summarize this, first ofall, it's having regular
meetings with the right people,and I assume make sure that
they're having the regularmeetings with the people under
them and so on.
Yeah.
to report things.
And the other is really tocreate, almost force a more open
casual atmosphere where peopleQuote unquote, casually meet
(08:13):
with each other.
Yeah.
In order to generate thoseconversations that get people to
talk about ideas and givefeedback and so on.
Yeah.
Rob Buffington (08:21):
the whole model, the whole psychology of a
business organization haschanged, drastically.
It used to be trickle down, theideas come from the managers and
the top and all that, and theyfilter their way down.
Now, you need both, don't get mewrong, but I believe that the
people closest to the problemcan have the best perspective
(08:42):
you need outside perspective,you know you need both, but you
have to listen to the peoplethat are actually out there on
the front lines dealing with theproblems.
So for example, the retreat thatI just came back from, most of
what we did during those threedays was simply a half an hour
or an hour block.
People from the differentdepartments, even if their
(09:02):
department wasn't specificallyinvolved, but we would take a
topic and go employee feedback,how can we get our clients to
give their team members betterfeedback?
And everybody would just givetheir opinion.
And it was just, some, it wasvery productive.
Sometimes people would getdefensive, sometimes people, So
it, it got confrontational andit was great because we had five
(09:24):
different perspectives going atthe same problem.
And we walked out with asolution and everybody
understood the other person's,position better.
Even if they didn't agree withit, at least they understood.
That's why they're thinking theyunderstood the other side better
and that was the purpose of it.
Isar Meitis (09:42):
so I would add to what I said before, foster
conversations, right?
If you can grab a topic that isimportant to the growth of the
company and involve people fromdifferent departments, from
different ranks in the business,you will probably solve the
problem.
And obviously you gotta frameit, otherwise it could be our
conversation go anywhere.
but if you frame it correctly,you will get all the right
(10:02):
aspects.
And I love what you said, thepeople are closest to the
problem.
I dunno if they're always comeup with the best solution.
They're always gonna be thepeople understand the problem
the best.
Yes.
And the hands Exactly.
And help in solving the problem.
Rob Buffington (10:15):
Exactly.
This weekend we had somethingcome up that I literally didn't
even know existed, and it was afive minute conversation, but if
I wasn't talking to people acouple levels down, I, it
would've continued for a year.
And it was a five minute fix of,oh no, that's supposed to be
over here.
No problem.
It's fixed going forward.
But if things filter throughthree levels, four levels of
(10:37):
communication, you haveattenuation of signal.
Isar Meitis (10:41):
Yeah.
I wanna add something that wedid in, in, what are the
companies I was in?
We, I was running or a part of,the leadership team for a very
large travel company, and wehad, several hundreds of
employees across the entireglobe and we gave a hundred
percent of them.
So every single employee.
Had access to our full datasystem.
(11:03):
And the full data system hadliterally everything, every
transaction, every search, everysale that happened, every
margin, every piece of data youcan imagine broken down into, I
don't know, 150 differentdashboards that could give you
information on different thingsthat's going on.
And some people saw that asinsane.
(11:24):
You're like, okay, you're givingyour last field person that you
hired yesterday access to thevault.
yes.
Because that will help them dotheir job better because they
have access to all the data.
And I think that goes back toyour point of like complete
transparency gives employeesthe, a understanding of what's
(11:44):
going on in the business better.
And they understand nobody'strying to trick them into doing
something, but this is reallywhat's going on.
And b, gives them better toolsto deal with stuff.
So I really like that point.
Rob Buffington (11:57):
Yeah, and one thing people need to appreciate
for all that we talk about,millennials and gen generation,
z I don't know if I would saythat they're smarter, they're
absolutely better educated, andthey grew up in an age where the
SumTotal of human knowledge isavailable in their, remember,
(12:17):
you remember, you're not alwaysgonna have a calculator on your
pocket, really.
It's yes, we will.
So this generation grew up witha drastically different
perspective on how to processand how to find new information.
They grew up not remembering.
They grew up researching.
And so they, you completelydifferent, some better, some
(12:40):
worse, but that's why youinvolve them in the
conversation.
Isar Meitis (12:44):
Yeah, I'll say something else I'll add to that.
I love your point.
I think it's, there's a guycalled Christopher Lockhead.
He's the, one of the authors ofPlay Bigger and Consider the
grandfather or of the Godfather,if you want, of category design.
And he talks recently a lotabout maybe the biggest shift
in, creation and destroyingvaluation in the next few years
(13:07):
will be from the generationallyleap from native analogs to
native digitals.
And he's saying the world is nowa digital world, but people like
me, dinosaurs, who still, I'm ahuge techie.
I'm a huge fan of tech.
I play with tech toys all thetime.
I try new tools all the time.
I'm still a native analog.
Yeah.
We were born to it.
(13:28):
I live in an analog world thatenjoys heck extensions, who
People for people who are bornwith cell phones and internet in
their hands.
There is no analog in digitalworld.
There's a world.
It has both these aspectsequally as important, and to
some of them, the digital sideis even more important than what
(13:51):
I would call the real world, andthey would call the physical
world, but it's part of theworld and they know how to
operate in that world in a muchbetter way than I ever will.
And I'm way on that far end ofthe scale of a digital analog
that is very techy and digital.
Sorry.
Yeah.
Like a native analog that isvery digital.
(14:12):
I'm not the norm.
The norm is very far from that.
And so involving these people inany decision making in the
process is a huge benefit.
Yeah.
Rob Buffington (14:21):
Let's, it's like being a native speaker as
opposed to studying a languagefor 20 years.
Yep.
You'll never be as comfortable.
Maybe you can communicate aswell, but it's not the
Isar Meitis (14:30):
same.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I wanna take it again to thevery practical level.
So when you start, you said, wetalked a little bit about
hiring.
We talked a little about peoplein different positions.
How do you help peopleunderstand exactly, and I'm
talking now about theaccountability side.
What's the role, what they needto do, what they need to
(14:51):
achieve.
So you can even then have thoseconversations on, okay, what's
the problem?
What's going on?
Yeah.
Rob Buffington (14:59):
I think your best friend in that topic is
gonna be metrics.
Okay.
Objective data points that canbe assigned in numerical value,
that can be tracked over timefor positive and negative
changes.
Too many people, I'm very heavy,obviously I'm in staffing.
The staffing largely is focusedon real estate, property
(15:20):
management, things like that.
And I like to say that the mainmetric most companies have in
the property management space ishow many people yelled at us
today.
And that's the only thing thatthey're tracking most of the
time cuz they get yelled at alot.
And what metrics give you isI'll, I like to say metrics
don't tell you what the problemis.
They do not, but they tell youwhere to look.
(15:42):
So the story I like to give is,when I first implemented
metrics, probably 10 years agoat my company, one of the, we
started with just a handful andwe'll go into that later, but
one of them was missed callpercentage.
And we had people say, oh,nobody ever called me back,
blah, blah, blah.
And we brushed it off cuz we hadtwo people.
We knew that was enough and wejust brushed it off.
(16:04):
Cause people exaggerate.
They like to raise a fuss andthese weren't the most stable of
people.
But long story short, we startedtracking missed call percentage
and it was 32%.
Wow.
and I said that's impossible.
We have two people answeringphones.
We're a small company, likesomething is wrong.
(16:25):
Long story short, come to findout that a previous person who
had left, somehow her extensionwas still in the round robin.
And so a third of the calls wentinto this black hole.
Yeah.
Without key objective data, Icould, I would, it would've been
years of missing a third of thecall.
Alls it took five minutes.
(16:46):
it just, as soon as I found outwhat the problem was, oh, just
reroute this.
But without that data, the nextweek it was like 8% and then
very quickly dropped to under 5%and stayed there permanently.
But without that data, I neverwould've known to look.
Now did it tell me, Hey, youforgot to do this.
No, but it took the whole worldof problems down to this little
(17:09):
area and it just took a veryquick, deep dive to find out
what the problem was and solveit permanently.
Isar Meitis (17:17):
I like that.
I'll give an example from myside as well, that again helps
you see situations.
And in this case, it wasn't evena problem.
I found out there's a problemthrough looking at a very
positive situation.
But I was running a sales callcenter.
and in the sales call center,the best employee was, he was
really an awesome salespersonand he sold more, we were
(17:39):
selling travel solutions, and hesold more travel vacations than
anybody else on the floor with abig spread.
Like he wasn't even close, likehe was number one.
And then people were competingfor number two.
And obviously that comes with,better shifts and it comes with,
better pay and it comes withbonuses and it comes with
different perks because he wasthe best salesperson.
But then we started trackingother stuff other than just, how
(18:01):
much you sold and so on.
And one of the things we startedtracking is conversion, like how
many calls you actually convert.
And he was one of the worstYeah.
Converting agents.
And I'm like, okay, how can thatbe?
So then we started tracking howmany calls people take.
And if the average person wouldtake, I may be making the
numbers up, but I think they'reroughly correct.
(18:22):
250 calls a week, he would take750 calls a week.
Okay?
Yep.
Because what he did is okay, Idon't think I can sell this one.
I don't think it can help you,sir.
Boom, hang up the phone.
we don't sell this thing.
Thank you, lady.
Boom.
every time he thought, that'sgonna be either a tough sell or
he is not gonna make enoughmoney, he threw it out.
Now, the other agent, so he wasconverting at like 20%.
(18:45):
The average agent was convertingat 35 to 40%, meaning he threw
away half of the company'spotential revenue, right?
To make more money for himself.
Now, this was my doing because Iincentivized selling more stuff
in a way.
So my incentives created thesituation, but without tracking
(19:06):
additional things.
Yeah.
There is no way I would'veidentified that my best
salesperson is actually damagingthe revenue of the company.
Rob Buffington (19:14):
Yeah.
You have to balance the metricsbecause they can, any statistics
can be skewed if you cherry pickthem in any field.
And so for example, perfectexample on the customer service
side, you can have, average calltime is a very common metric.
Yeah.
You want that number as low aspossible, but unless you're
balancing it with customersatisfaction and first call
(19:36):
resolution, we've all had thecall center that we called in
and we just need this fixed andthey get us off the phone.
Yeah.
And so you have to call againand again.
So maybe it's a five minute callinstead of a 10 minute call.
But there are five more calls,meaning 30 minutes or 20, yeah,
30 minutes total.
And a really pissed off customeras opposed to 10 minutes on the
(20:00):
first call.
So you have to balance yourmetrics or you'll have people
jumping through hoops to meetthe metrics through the
Isar Meitis (20:08):
detriment of the company.
So let me ask you a question.
I think this is a greatconversation.
I think it's extremely valuablefor anybody who's managing
people want to track them.
How do you define, how do youpick the right KPIs to track
per, not per person, but perrole?
Like how do you know what arethe most important things you
need to track?
Because you and I just gave afew examples, oh, I can track a
(20:30):
few things, but then if I don'tbalance them with some other
things, I'm gonna lead to thewrong outcome.
Rob Buffington (20:35):
Yeah.
It's always a moving target.
The list should be gettinglonger and longer as you go.
You should have, it's kinda likea general ledger versus a P&L.
You can look at the generalledger and see every transaction
ever, but it's basically worth,it's worthless unless you need
to do a deep dive and find outsomething.
Most of the time you're lookingat the P&L.
(20:56):
So I always tell people, startwith five.
Just start with five becauseit's working a new muscle group.
And if you tell yourself you'regonna attract 50, it's like a
New Year's resolution.
You're not gonna do it.
So pick the five most importantone and you have to identify
what's important to yourcompany.
So let's stick in my wheelhouseproperty management.
So it could be average emailresponse time, missed call
(21:21):
percentage, percent delinquencybecause cash flow is important.
Sales conversion.
And number of open work orderslet's say.
If it was for a customer servicedepartment, you would say missed
call percentage.
I'm big on responsiveness,missed call percentage, first
call resolution, net promoterscore, customer satisfaction
(21:43):
score, and upselling salesconversion fill in the blank.
So it really depends on, numberone, what is important to your
company and where are your painpoints.
So for example, if you'restruggling with something,
that's where you wanna startbecause it'll tell you where to
look.
So it'll come down to theposition and always pepper it
(22:04):
with some common sense numbers.
Again, they don't take thepersonal thought, but they help
Isar Meitis (22:10):
you hone it.
Awesome.
I like this.
I think the.
You know what?
let's take one more examplebecause I think that's gonna
make it interesting.
What do you track yourleadership team on?
Because what you just said ismore on the, lower level
employees that do the day-to-daystuff.
(22:31):
What are the KPIs that are morestrategic I would say that you
track your leadership team on aregular basis.
Rob Buffington (22:39):
The trick with the leadership team is you have
to align them with the company'svalues or you're gonna have the
same thing.
for example, I rarely givedivision based bonuses.
I give corporate, I give profitshare.
How did the company as a wholedo?
Because for example, asalesperson can land everything
(22:59):
under the sun, but if they'velowered the prices and they're
poor quality customers that takea lot of time, then that doesn't
help the company.
So the beauty of it is you canalign the interests.
So for example, our salescommission structure is usually
based on profitability ratherthan gross revenue or volume.
(23:20):
I take a look at, so let's takerecruiting for example.
I will take a look at the kpi, pi of the people under them and
see how we can do that.
So what is the purpose of aleader?
It's to make the people underthem, equip them with better
tools, encourage them to goabove and beyond, make that
operation run better.
(23:41):
Better employee retention,better employee engagement, all
of that.
So for a recruiting supervisorfor example, it would be the
same things that a recruiter hasnumber of positions filled,
average fill time over on the HRside.
You might have retention,engagement, et cetera.
And then you could look atmetrics for their sub employees
(24:03):
of how long have they been withthe company?
Number of times called off,employee attendance, things like
that.
And then you can also add insome financial metrics,
profitability.
So for example, retention isboth HR and recruiting based,
because recruiters can be justlike the salespeople we talked
about, just cuz they pushsomebody past the interview
(24:26):
doesn't mean they're gonna workfor a year.
So if a recruiter andparticularly a recruiting
supervisor is tracked andincentivized for the long-term
benefit, they're more likely tobe cautious with the candidates,
which is, and which is the wayit should be.
so you want some of it to be thepositions under them as a whole
and some of it to be corporateas a whole, because they're
(24:48):
responsible for their part ineverything.
It helps align the interest ofthe division to the whole.
Isar Meitis (24:54):
Great answer.
I think having a good balanceof, in, in the leadership
tracking between strategy, socompany strategy, and you are in
charge of the results of thepeople under you, both the
people and the results.
So both aspects of it, that'swhat you're in charge of.
And putting it all together, Ithink something that we're both
saying several times and I wouldlove to hear your thoughts on
(25:15):
that because you, we bothtouched on it, is the incentive
side of things.
At the end of the day, people.
Will do better job because oftwo things.
One, and you touched on that aswell, if they believe in what
you do if they believe that thisis the right thing to do, that
you're helping somebody somehowwith the company's goals, with
(25:36):
the company's core values, withthe company's, mission
statement.
That's one thing that helps.
And the other thing is what arethey particularly incentivized
to do?
Because at the end of the day,yes, people come to work to be
fulfilled, but they also come towork to pay the bills and have
enough money to go on vacationwhen they want to.
And so it's always a mix ofthese two things.
(26:00):
How do you put the rightincentive packages in place?
What do you incentivize and howdo you incentivize people, I
think is a very importantquestion.
And I think you have a good wayto solve it because of a lot of
things you already mentioned.
Rob Buffington (26:13):
So the first part of what you talked about is
the believing and I'll, I justwanna take a minute on that.
Again, we've talked about thedifferent generations and what
they want and what's importantto them, and it's real easy to
make fun of millennials.
I've done it plenty of myself,millennials, and Generation Z
and it's a new way to do things.
Like we talked about analogdigital.
Here's something that's rarelytalked about.
(26:35):
When a millennial believes inyour company, truly believes not
as happy, not, hasn't left yet,but when they believe in what
you're doing, they will becomeyour biggest brand ambassadors.
They will bleed for yourcompany.
They will talk about it to theirfriends.
We have the most potential inthis generation because again,
they have the best tools to dealwith this new world that we're
(26:59):
coming into.
So if they truly believe beyondjust, this is a well paying job,
but if they believe in thevalues and the direction and
what you're doing, they will beyour passionate representatives.
So that's part one.
And I think that mean, that canmean just as much as the
incentive because some peopleare mercenary and hey, that's
(27:21):
fine.
We've got some people that theyjust, I want the money.
Give me the money.
Okay, let's do it.
The majority of people, andthose people can always be
offered something better.
They can always be offered 10%more and they'll jump.
The people that truly believethose are your lifers.
And like I said, I like lifers.
I want people that, people move.
(27:41):
I get it.
I'm not thinking that most ofthese people won't take another
job, but I like to think thatthey could be.
So incentivizing needs to beboth value-based and, pardon the
pun, but value based.
The advantage of these metricsis that they can help you
develop a formula for how toincentivize people.
(28:02):
And the more that you can betransparent about why it works
this way, the better.
So let's stick with therecruiting example cuz we just
recently went over the bonusstructure for it.
obviously they want the numberof positions filled is gonna be
important, but like we justtalked about, there also needs
to be a component that relatesto how long do those people
stay?
(28:23):
Because a recruiter can, again,they can force people through an
interview.
They can coach them on what tosay, they can get them higher,
but if there's also an incentiveto make them stay for a couple
of years, that, that alignstheir interests with the
companies.
So you have to have differentversions.
and the best thing to do is betransparent with the data and
(28:45):
let them know this is why you'regetting it.
It's 20% this, it's 10% this, etcetera.
Because this generation grew upwith what we call gamified,
rewards.
Everything they do, whetherit's, farm, I honestly don't
know what they're playing today.
I'm a bad example, but Farmvilleor whatever it is, they're all
(29:06):
gamified.
Robinhood perfect example, hasgrown tremendously because
they've gamified stock trading,which personally I think is a
dumb idea.
Isar Meitis (29:17):
Yes.
it's dumb idea for anybodythat's one to trade the old way.
That's the only reason.
It's a
Rob Buffington (29:23):
dumb idea.
Yeah.
If you're doing it because youget the little notifications,
like that is not why you tradestocks.
But that's a rabbit hole.
But perfect example.
They grew because they harnessedthis new generation and they
gamified the process.
You get a free stock and youget, you get this many points
and all this stuff because itincreases their revenue.
(29:45):
but they did it successfully.
And whether it's a good thing ornot, they succeeded.
And so you need to do the samething.
You need to have, you can havecompetitions.
I'm not the world's biggest fanof competitions.
I like to have it against yourprevious record and
incentivizing and you todayversus you a year ago.
(30:06):
But you can have competitions,you can have, referral contests.
You can have, you, you can becreative, but the more that you
let people see the rewards andunderstand how they can
determine it and know ahead oftime, the better.
People like to not be surprised.
They like to know what's coming.
(30:27):
Yeah.
Isar Meitis (30:28):
I want to go back to the example I gave before
with the call center and thesalespeople.
We change the plan all the time.
And I love the fact you said, ohyeah, it's always a moving
target, right?
we changed the incentive planseveral times every year because
we started to understand that,okay, we can gain more here, we
can be better at that.
(30:48):
And the, we found out that thebest way to do this is to change
the incentive structure.
And we made it so that people,like you said, we got everybody
together and we had differentcalls and we did these
simulations.
So in the new plan, if you dothis is what you're gonna get.
Exactly.
Versus exactly.
If you do what you did so far,this is what you're gonna get.
So explaining to people how theplan works.
The other thing that I foundthat works very well in the
(31:10):
incentive side, it's not alwaysmoney.
Different people want differentthings.
And sometimes it's the prestige,sometimes it's access to things
they don't have access to.
So extra p t o, another PTO workfrom home days.
One of the favorites, which Ialways found funny, but I gladly
did it, was dinner with me.
(31:30):
So once a quarter we did dinnerwith, the head of the division
and there was only, I thinkeight seats and there were, I
don't know, 50 people in thecall center.
So everybody wanted to be one ofthose eight people that goes to
dinner.
And I'm like, okay, it's onedinner in a quarter.
Yeah.
It's not a big deal.
But people really wanted thatand people could pick,
different, bonuses that youcould, that they could play for
(31:51):
if you want.
and it worked very well becausethen you give people something
they want and you allow them tobe more flexible with what
they're getting for basicallydoing what's best for the
company.
Because that's the whole pointof incentives.
Yeah.
Rob Buffington (32:06):
Incentives should be.
win.
The better you do, the betterthe company does, the better you
do.
It should not be punitive, dothis or else this.
Yeah.
Isar Meitis (32:17):
I gotta ask you a very practical question because
we're giving a lot of examplesof, what to track and what's the
result and how to incentivize,how do we actually track these
things?
do you have this fancy software?
what, how do you put togetherthis whole thing in a way that
like, oh, here's what Joe, andhere's what Jenna did this past
week, aligned with what we said.
(32:38):
Yeah, they will do last month.
Rob Buffington (32:40):
great question.
you may not like my answer, buthere it is.
I use Excel.
okay.
I've got, one of my VPs is, has,we've rolled out HubSpot and it
seems really powerful and Ithink eventually it will
generate a lot of these, but thehonest no BS answer is for the
last five years, most metricshave just been, we go in, we
(33:02):
pull the report and somebodytypes it into a spreadsheet, and
every week we compare it and itworks.
I'm a big believer that if youstart simple and build up, it's
perfectly fine.
What happens is people willinvest three months into a
one-stop solution that's gonnagive you a hundred metrics at a,
(33:23):
at your fingertips, and by thetime it gets rolled out, they're
onto the next project.
It's better to pick, like Isaid, start with five things,
get an Excel spreadsheet or aGoogle sheet or something in
SharePoint that you share withyour key people and just have
somebody log in and record it.
Because once you do that, you'llstart to see the value.
(33:44):
And again, it's gamification.
You have a dashboard, you cansee what your company is doing,
and you can make it pretty, youcan use charts and graphs and
all that.
and you should, I have anadvisory board that I meet with
quarterly, and I have, I'm, Imake the data look a little bit
better, but at the end of theday, most of what I'm playing
with is in Excel.
Because you know what?
In Excel, there are so manyfunctions I can use.
(34:06):
Give me the average of thistimeframe.
Help me see the pr, proprogression of the, it's so much
easier because it's close to rawdata, but it's not, unworkable.
It's a profit and loss, not a GLfor that analogy.
So that, personally, that's whatI like.
I will say a lot of the, a lotof the software we use gives us
the metrics.
So for example, average emailresponse time.
(34:28):
I don't need to go to everyemail and look at when it came
in and when it went out.
But we take that data and thenwe put it in an Excel
spreadsheet.
Yeah.
Isar Meitis (34:36):
and I'll add one more thing.
it sounds like a lot of work,but today with all the
automation tools out there,yeah.
You can do 90 something percentof it without anybody has to
actually log in data.
It will go and pick up the datafrom the different sources and
plug it into, like you said, theExcel or Google sheets or
whatever other, database userfriendly tool you want to use.
(35:00):
And you can start tomorrow.
And I think that's the biggestbenefit because people can
analyze the software or theydon't afford the software or
they don't have the time toimplement the software.
Everybody knows Google Sheets orExcel, and you can gain Huge
benefits from using just thatout of the box.
And like I said, start simple.
Start with a few parametersYeah.
For every single person.
(35:21):
Have it as automated as possiblewith tools like Zapier and stuff
like it.
and you can get a very goodworking solution with almost no
investment.
Yeah,
Rob Buffington (35:32):
and it's, we don't have four people full-time
doing research.
this is one person in eachdepartment who takes half an
hour a week to update themetrics sheet.
It is very straightforward, andas you said, if you wanna get
fancy, you can use Zapier andWeb Merge and all that.
some things you can have thememail you automatically, like I
(35:52):
get a phone log sent weekly withthe data so that I don't have to
go in and do it.
it just simplifies.
So there are levels ofprogression, but I would say
it's more important that you getthe data than how you get it.
Isar Meitis (36:05):
Makes sense.
I wanna take you to the nextstep.
So now you have, we'veidentified the key metrics for
employee and we've identifiedthe how to track it and where to
track it.
What do you do with the data andhow frequently?
So how frequently do you look atyour employees data?
(36:25):
How frequently do your leaderslook at their employees data and
what do they do?
what kind of feedback mechanismis built into this whole thing
to make it work?
Rob Buffington (36:36):
So it's gonna depend on the metric.
missed call percentage is gonnabe weekly.
I have a building servicescompany.
We have, gross revenue dividedby number of payroll hours.
That's gonna be weekly.
Other numbers like gross margin,that is gonna be monthly
something.
Most things should be weekly ormonthly.
But then some reports are onlyanalyzed on a quarterly basis.
(36:58):
But what we do is we track it ona weekly and quarterly basis,
and then we aggregate the data.
In terms of feedback, it goesback to gamification.
As weird as it is, people reallywant the data and they don't
want it.
annual reviews, I've said for along time, annual reviews are
dead.
If you're not doing quarterly ormore often, your people are
(37:21):
gonna feel disconnected andthey're gonna drift.
so giving them access, andagain, you have to decide what
information and how they get itand all that, but letting them
at any point check in and see,oh, this was my progress for
last week.
Interesting, cuz are youfamiliar with the Dunning Kruger
effect?
(37:42):
No.
Dunning Kru.
Basically the people that aremost confident are usually the
least experienced or least notintelligent, but have the least
reason to feel confident.
Yeah.
Basically, the more experiencedyou get, the less confident you
get at stuff.
And I'm probably butchering thenumbers, but I wanna say
(38:04):
something like, at a survey theydid, when they were researching
this, it was 50% of people at acompany surveyed identified
themselves in the top 5% ofemployees.
Yeah.
And so the problem is mostpeople, Not inflated self-worth,
(38:25):
but they're not always realisticabout their progress.
And so bringing it down toobjective data helps them
identify what to look for.
The same way that companyleaders need to know where to
focus to improve things,employees need to have something
to track it with.
And again, it should be againstwhere they were yesterday.
It shouldn't, depending on thesituation, but you shouldn't try
(38:48):
to embarrass them or, oh, Neilis better than that.
That's not what it's for.
But if they can see on a weeklybasis that, Hey, my missed call
percentage is going down, or myresponse time is skyrocketing,
then they have that objectivedata that even though they feel
like they gave it their best,the results don't show that.
And they should feel free tosay, Hey, I think this data is
(39:09):
wrong.
It doesn't take into accountthat I spent eight hours with
our biggest client trying tosalvage the account or whatever.
It never replaces common sense,but it gives them raw data in a
gamified way that, Hey, I'mdoing better, I'm doing worse.
They know exactly how they'redoing.And on some level they
want that.
It makes them feel more secureand that there's a structure in
(39:32):
place.
They're not just at people'swins.
Isar Meitis (39:36):
So you're saying on the individual employee level,
at the task level, if you wanttheories, regular feedback
because they have access toreports and data that they see
all the time.
And on aggregated data,depending on the data, there's
either weekly meetings ormonthly meetings or quarterly
meetings to go and review thedifferent information.
Rob Buffington (39:57):
So on our quarterly reviews, we include K
P I by positions.
So by building services company,my operations manager, it would
be the aggregate of the data forthe company.
It would be what is our grossrevenue divided by our payroll
hours, how much percentage ofovertime did we have?
what was the average rollouttime?
What was the attendance rate,what was the gross margin on the
(40:18):
job?
those kinda things.
But then there's also weeklyreports.
That specific people have accessto different facets of that.
They can log in at any time andsay, last week sucked.
what?
What's up?
And they can look at it and go,oh, yeah, got it.
But it can also help peopleidentify much quicker, like
(40:40):
problem clients, for example.
I guarantee you anybodylistening to this, you have one
client that you're spending waytoo much time on that is not
worth the revenue or the margin.
And you don't know it becauseyou're not digging deep into the
data.
So yeah, the more data you have,the more informed choices you
Isar Meitis (40:59):
can make.
Yes.
I really like that.
I'll say one more thing again,from my experience of this, one
of the things that we did, basedon all the reports that we had,
and just like you, we weretracking more or less everything
that we could was making itactionable, meaning it's It's
one thing to look at a reportand to figure it out.
It's another thing to.
Already take the report and turnthe report into something that
(41:22):
is actionable.
I'll give you a great example.
We were, let's say, it doesn'tmatter which business you are,
you have 10 different suppliersfor the same thing, and you
wanna always buy from the bestone at the right time at the
right rate.
And how do you do that?
How do you know which supplierssell to you at better rates at
any given point?
Or how do you know that thissupplier is sending to you at
(41:42):
$200 into somebody else at 180?
And that means if you're biggerthan them, you should buy it for
one 70.
And we had a system that did allof that for the employees, so
they didn't have to go and digin and try to figure out the
numbers themselves.
So the next level in theevolution of having data is to
take the data that's in thesystem and make it actionable,
(42:03):
like actually defined.
So when an employee logs intohis system in the morning, he
has three things he needs to dobased on data that the system
provided to him based on resultsof what happened yesterday or
the week before.
And.
Today with the availability ofAI analysis capabilities, it
became almost a crime not to dothis because you can overlay
(42:27):
some kind of a AI tool on top ofthe data you already have and
query that and get action itemsas a response.
I'm sure there's already, and Idon't know a specific one, but
I'm sure there's already toolsthat do it for almost any
database out there, just becauseit became so readily available
in the last few months.
And so look for these things,looks for a way to take the data
(42:50):
and make it actionable.
The other thing that I want totouch on that is related to this
is to not just make the dataavailable to employees, but
educate them.
So in many cases, when you do a,especially when you do like a
company wide, and I dunno howfrequently you do that, but when
you do like a state of thecompany kind of talk, some
people are not at the level,they understand a p and l
(43:12):
because they've never seen a pand l before.
And so doing some kind of aneducational process.
And that was just one example.
That's something that I used todo.
So every quarter I would sharethe p and l with the whole
company and I would actually goand explain it as if it's, and
some people's okay, I know whata P N L is.
But for a lot of people, thatwas awesome.
People would come to me afterthat.
Great.
This was the best explanationI've ever run.
I ever got to, where is thecompany right now, financially.
(43:36):
So I think these two things oftaking the data is making it
more practical for more peopleis another great way to take
this in, to take this conceptforward.
Rob Buffington (43:46):
Yeah.
Yeah.
My college professor would say,you have to put a handle on it.
You've got the tool, put ahandle on it.
Isar Meitis (43:53):
Rob, last question before I let you go, because I
know you had a really crazyweek.
how do you know, as the leaderof all of this, that all these
things that you're doing areactually leading to the business
goals.
How do you connect the dots youfrom your seat?
Because that's why we do all ofthis, right?
We do all of this, right?
(44:14):
So the company as a whole dobetter.
How do you know what stuff islike, oh my God, why the hell
are we tracking this thing?
It's just a waste of time versusThis is go, what's going to lead
us to, I'll go back to what yousaid, be a better company in
three to five
Rob Buffington (44:29):
years.
There's no such thing as baddata, in my opinion.
there's inaccurate data, butthere's, the more you can track,
the more efficient you arebecause it may not even be
something you need now, but ayear from now, you may need to
audit and go back and it tells astory.
it can even tell you whenemployees are having personal
(44:51):
issues.
Cuz we've had employees thatlike, man, they're stellar.
And then just boom.
So let's check.
Hey, how you doing?
You need, like, how's thingsgoing?
What, what's up?
not trying to penalize them, nottrying to, just, do they need
help?
Are they okay?
Is there something going on intheir lives we should be aware
of?
So that's part of it.
(45:11):
Tho the important numbers willchange over time.
There are a lot of reports thatI used to pay a lot of attention
to that.
Now they've become so rote thatI only look, I actually tell
people, highlight if it'soutside of this range.
Otherwise I'm not even gonnalook at it.
Yeah.
Because I trust the people underme that they're just, they've
(45:32):
done this long enough.
If something is above, thisnumber or below this number,
that's a red flag.
Let's dive in.
But otherwise it's good.
If anything, it can tell youwhere you don't have to look.
Yeah.
So it can save you time byhaving too much data.
And that's the thing, if youhave an, if you start tracking,
it's gonna be useless.
(45:52):
It's gonna take a month tofigure out, except like in my
instance, the 32% missed callpercentage.
But if you start tracking for ayear and somebody new comes in
and it's their first week andthey say, oh, we got first call
resolution of 83%, is that goodor bad?
Okay, here's a year's worth ofdata.
Yeah.
On first call resolution,average res and data that you've
(46:15):
never used before can save timein the future.
So in my opinion, there is,there's very little useless
data.
Awesome.
And as you said, with AI andautomation, it's becoming easier
and easier to get that dataAgreed.
Isar Meitis (46:32):
Rob, this was really great.
I think we touched on a lot ofreally important points.
If people wanna follow you,connect with you, work with you,
what's the best way to do that?
Rob Buffington (46:44):
You can find our website at it's,
slicingthegordianknot.com, oryou can follow me on LinkedIn.
Rob Buffington, I'm available onthere as well.
Gordian Business Solutions.
Isar Meitis (46:54):
Rob, thank you so much.
This was really great.
I appreciate your time.
Thanks for
Rob Buffington (46:58):
having me.
Hello and welcome to the Business Growth
Accelerator.
This is Isar Matis, your host,and we have a special topic
today.
The most important asset ofprobably any business is its
human capital.
The employees of a business willeither make or break the
business.
And while it's known toeverybody, many companies do the
very basic, and it's not enoughtoday.
(00:20):
So most companies, they paysalaries, they give people
whatever benefits they give, andthey expect work in return.
And that equation is less andless relevant because employees
these days want and need anddeserve to be fair a lot more.
And if you want to grow asuccessful business, and if you
wanna be able to scale it,that's a.
(00:41):
Capability and a skill you willneed to have in the company.
And our guest today, RobBuffington has grew a remote
staffing company from 25 to 400employees in two years.
He also owns and operates sevendifferent companies at the same
time, which sounds impossible tome, but it proves one thing is
that he really knows how tomanage people and he's really
(01:04):
good at driving employeeengagement and accountability.
And this is exactly going to bethe topic of our conversation
today, like I said, because thiscan either make or break your
business in any business.
It's a very important topic andhence, I'm really excited to
have Rob as a guest of the showtoday.
(02:19):
Rob, welcome to the BusinessGrowth Accelerator.
Thank you for having me.
Rob, when did you figure thisout?
When did it hit you that this isthe holy grail, that if you want
to grow and scale businesses,you better get your employees to
be highly engaged andaccountable for the things they
need to complete.
Rob Buffington (02:40):
the first thing I would say, to be honest, is
I'm not a hundred percent surethat I have figured it out.
I think it's a moving target.
I think I'm learning every day.
I'm making mistakes every day.
What I do know is that I havesome great people with me.
I know that I couldn't do thiswithout them.
And for some reason we havedeveloped a good working
dynamic, that way.
(03:00):
I think, honestly, I did itcause I believe that it's the
right way to treat people, tomake them partners in the
company, treat them not asemployees, but as people that
can help you together.
and I think that had theunintended side effect of
leading to better engagement andbetter retention and things like
that, that I view us as peoplethat are, helping us get where
(03:22):
we're going rather than assetsof the company or something to
be used and discarded.
Isar Meitis (03:28):
I love that.
I think it's a great answer andI agree with you a hundred
percent.
I think if you make youremployees a part of the journey,
and by the way, that's truebeyond that, like if you make
people a part of the journey Ifyou make your partners, your
suppliers, your clients, yourprospects, a part of the journey
to a better outcome foreverybody.
Yeah.
Then you end up getting betterresults.
Rob Buffington (03:46):
Yeah.
I never hire anybody that Idon't think at least has the
potential to stay for 10 yearsif I don't think that they can
grow and achieve their goals.
And it's a common question, andI think most people don't really
mean it, but I genuinely wannaknow.
Where are you going in five or10 years and how are we getting
you there?
What are we doing to contributeto that?
Because the idea is that if you,number one, the companies are
(04:09):
growing so quickly, we needpeople at the top.
And I wanna promote from withinwhere possible, but I want
people that can be liferspotentially.
so yeah, I never hire anybodythat I think is gonna use us as
a stepping stone or that I feellike would, could outgrow us or
that we wouldn't be able to usethem in a higher function down
the road.
I hire for the people they couldbe.
Isar Meitis (04:31):
I love that.
I think we'll touch more onthat, on the how of that later
on, but it really starts withthe basics, right?
So let's start with what do youdo?
So you said you develop thismethodology or develop a way to
make people feel moreaccountable and feel more a part
of the company.
(04:52):
What are the things you do, thepractical aspect of it that
makes people feel that way?
Rob Buffington (05:00):
I think radical transparency is one of the
things that I do.
and I don't know that's aconscious business decision as
me, as much as me just nothaving a filter and just, I just
say stuff.
but I've always viewed it aspeople need to know what's going
on.
they need to know the why.
They need to know what we'redoing and why we're doing it.
So it's not just, I need to fillmore positions, or I need more
(05:23):
bookkeepers.
I need to, it's, here's thestepping stone.
I actually just got back, 36hours ago from our executive
retreat where the leaders of thedivisions came together and we
talked about our three yearplan.
And this is why we're taking onnew projects and we've acquired
companies that maybe don't makesense in the short term, but
looking at the three to fiveyear plan, it's oh, that's where
(05:45):
it's gonna come into play.
So I'd say radical transparencyis definitely a, one of the
things we do that's effective.
Isar Meitis (05:54):
So let's take that to the very practical level.
How is that translated to theday-to-day?
What do you do with employees?
First of all, obviously likeyour leadership, but then down,
trickling down the differentlevels of the companies.
How do you make sure that peoplereally know what's going on and
why it's going on?
Rob Buffington (06:15):
Again, as I said to the first question, I'm not
sure that I'm the paragon forthis.
I'll tell you what I do, but I'mcertainly not pretending to be
an expert.
the first thing I'd say is time.
Especially being a remotecompany, it, you can go weeks
without having meaningfulconversations with people.
So I try to, we have regularmeetings based on position and
division.
(06:35):
Tuesday and Friday we have ouroperations call with the these
people.
I have one-on-ones on a biweeklybasis with my direct reports and
people that I'm grooming for ahigher position.
We try to have state of thecompany meetings on a, at least
a quarterly basis, if not moreoften.
So I'd say time is definitelypart of it.
(06:55):
We encourage, we have virtualsocials on a monthly basis.
There's something, particularlywith remote work, which we'll
get into later.
I'm sure remote work makes itdifficult to have what I call
the water cooler effect.
Yeah.
An amazing amount ofproductivity and new ideas at a
business comes from thoseimpromptu conversations as you
(07:15):
pass in the hall or you meet atthe water cooler of the
cafeteria.
So I think virtual socials andthings like that can help foster
that, as well as just havingopen and direct conversation.
A, any person in my company iswelcome to email me and or
message me and even say, Hey,you, that's a terrible idea.
Or I think this is Stu, I wantdevastatingly transparent
(07:37):
feedback.
And that gets harder the biggeryou get.
People don't always take you atyour word, but we try to reward
it and just say, Hey, thank youfor bringing this to me.
let's have conversation and seewhere we
Isar Meitis (07:50):
go.
Okay.
So if I summarize this, first ofall, it's having regular
meetings with the right people,and I assume make sure that
they're having the regularmeetings with the people under
them and so on.
Yeah.
to report things.
And the other is really tocreate, almost force a more open
casual atmosphere where peopleQuote unquote, casually meet
(08:13):
with each other.
Yeah.
In order to generate thoseconversations that get people to
talk about ideas and givefeedback and so on.
Yeah.
Rob Buffington (08:21):
the whole model, the whole psychology of a
business organization haschanged, drastically.
It used to be trickle down, theideas come from the managers and
the top and all that, and theyfilter their way down.
Now, you need both, don't get mewrong, but I believe that the
people closest to the problemcan have the best perspective
(08:42):
you need outside perspective,you know you need both, but you
have to listen to the peoplethat are actually out there on
the front lines dealing with theproblems.
So for example, the retreat thatI just came back from, most of
what we did during those threedays was simply a half an hour
or an hour block.
People from the differentdepartments, even if their
(09:02):
department wasn't specificallyinvolved, but we would take a
topic and go employee feedback,how can we get our clients to
give their team members betterfeedback?
And everybody would just givetheir opinion.
And it was just, some, it wasvery productive.
Sometimes people would getdefensive, sometimes people, So
it, it got confrontational andit was great because we had five
(09:24):
different perspectives going atthe same problem.
And we walked out with asolution and everybody
understood the other person's,position better.
Even if they didn't agree withit, at least they understood.
That's why they're thinking theyunderstood the other side better
and that was the purpose of it.
Isar Meitis (09:42):
so I would add to what I said before, foster
conversations, right?
If you can grab a topic that isimportant to the growth of the
company and involve people fromdifferent departments, from
different ranks in the business,you will probably solve the
problem.
And obviously you gotta frameit, otherwise it could be our
conversation go anywhere.
but if you frame it correctly,you will get all the right
(10:02):
aspects.
And I love what you said, thepeople are closest to the
problem.
I dunno if they're always comeup with the best solution.
They're always gonna be thepeople understand the problem
the best.
Yes.
And the hands Exactly.
And help in solving the problem.
Rob Buffington (10:15):
Exactly.
This weekend we had somethingcome up that I literally didn't
even know existed, and it was afive minute conversation, but if
I wasn't talking to people acouple levels down, I, it
would've continued for a year.
And it was a five minute fix of,oh no, that's supposed to be
over here.
No problem.
It's fixed going forward.
But if things filter throughthree levels, four levels of
(10:37):
communication, you haveattenuation of signal.
Isar Meitis (10:41):
Yeah.
I wanna add something that wedid in, in, what are the
companies I was in?
We, I was running or a part of,the leadership team for a very
large travel company, and wehad, several hundreds of
employees across the entireglobe and we gave a hundred
percent of them.
So every single employee.
Had access to our full datasystem.
(11:03):
And the full data system hadliterally everything, every
transaction, every search, everysale that happened, every
margin, every piece of data youcan imagine broken down into, I
don't know, 150 differentdashboards that could give you
information on different thingsthat's going on.
And some people saw that asinsane.
(11:24):
You're like, okay, you're givingyour last field person that you
hired yesterday access to thevault.
yes.
Because that will help them dotheir job better because they
have access to all the data.
And I think that goes back toyour point of like complete
transparency gives employeesthe, a understanding of what's
(11:44):
going on in the business better.
And they understand nobody'strying to trick them into doing
something, but this is reallywhat's going on.
And b, gives them better toolsto deal with stuff.
So I really like that point.
Rob Buffington (11:57):
Yeah, and one thing people need to appreciate
for all that we talk about,millennials and gen generation,
z I don't know if I would saythat they're smarter, they're
absolutely better educated, andthey grew up in an age where the
SumTotal of human knowledge isavailable in their, remember,
(12:17):
you remember, you're not alwaysgonna have a calculator on your
pocket, really.
It's yes, we will.
So this generation grew up witha drastically different
perspective on how to processand how to find new information.
They grew up not remembering.
They grew up researching.
And so they, you completelydifferent, some better, some
(12:40):
worse, but that's why youinvolve them in the
conversation.
Isar Meitis (12:44):
Yeah, I'll say something else I'll add to that.
I love your point.
I think it's, there's a guycalled Christopher Lockhead.
He's the, one of the authors ofPlay Bigger and Consider the
grandfather or of the Godfather,if you want, of category design.
And he talks recently a lotabout maybe the biggest shift
in, creation and destroyingvaluation in the next few years
(13:07):
will be from the generationallyleap from native analogs to
native digitals.
And he's saying the world is nowa digital world, but people like
me, dinosaurs, who still, I'm ahuge techie.
I'm a huge fan of tech.
I play with tech toys all thetime.
I try new tools all the time.
I'm still a native analog.
Yeah.
We were born to it.
(13:28):
I live in an analog world thatenjoys heck extensions, who
People for people who are bornwith cell phones and internet in
their hands.
There is no analog in digitalworld.
There's a world.
It has both these aspectsequally as important, and to
some of them, the digital sideis even more important than what
(13:51):
I would call the real world, andthey would call the physical
world, but it's part of theworld and they know how to
operate in that world in a muchbetter way than I ever will.
And I'm way on that far end ofthe scale of a digital analog
that is very techy and digital.
Sorry.
Yeah.
Like a native analog that isvery digital.
(14:12):
I'm not the norm.
The norm is very far from that.
And so involving these people inany decision making in the
process is a huge benefit.
Yeah.
Rob Buffington (14:21):
Let's, it's like being a native speaker as
opposed to studying a languagefor 20 years.
Yep.
You'll never be as comfortable.
Maybe you can communicate aswell, but it's not the
Isar Meitis (14:30):
same.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I wanna take it again to thevery practical level.
So when you start, you said, wetalked a little bit about
hiring.
We talked a little about peoplein different positions.
How do you help peopleunderstand exactly, and I'm
talking now about theaccountability side.
What's the role, what they needto do, what they need to
(14:51):
achieve.
So you can even then have thoseconversations on, okay, what's
the problem?
What's going on?
Yeah.
Rob Buffington (14:59):
I think your best friend in that topic is
gonna be metrics.
Okay.
Objective data points that canbe assigned in numerical value,
that can be tracked over timefor positive and negative
changes.
Too many people, I'm very heavy,obviously I'm in staffing.
The staffing largely is focusedon real estate, property
(15:20):
management, things like that.
And I like to say that the mainmetric most companies have in
the property management space ishow many people yelled at us
today.
And that's the only thing thatthey're tracking most of the
time cuz they get yelled at alot.
And what metrics give you isI'll, I like to say metrics
don't tell you what the problemis.
They do not, but they tell youwhere to look.
(15:42):
So the story I like to give is,when I first implemented
metrics, probably 10 years agoat my company, one of the, we
started with just a handful andwe'll go into that later, but
one of them was missed callpercentage.
And we had people say, oh,nobody ever called me back,
blah, blah, blah.
And we brushed it off cuz we hadtwo people.
We knew that was enough and wejust brushed it off.
(16:04):
Cause people exaggerate.
They like to raise a fuss andthese weren't the most stable of
people.
But long story short, we startedtracking missed call percentage
and it was 32%.
Wow.
and I said that's impossible.
We have two people answeringphones.
We're a small company, likesomething is wrong.
(16:25):
Long story short, come to findout that a previous person who
had left, somehow her extensionwas still in the round robin.
And so a third of the calls wentinto this black hole.
Yeah.
Without key objective data, Icould, I would, it would've been
years of missing a third of thecall.
Alls it took five minutes.
(16:46):
it just, as soon as I found outwhat the problem was, oh, just
reroute this.
But without that data, the nextweek it was like 8% and then
very quickly dropped to under 5%and stayed there permanently.
But without that data, I neverwould've known to look.
Now did it tell me, Hey, youforgot to do this.
No, but it took the whole worldof problems down to this little
(17:09):
area and it just took a veryquick, deep dive to find out
what the problem was and solveit permanently.
Isar Meitis (17:17):
I like that.
I'll give an example from myside as well, that again helps
you see situations.
And in this case, it wasn't evena problem.
I found out there's a problemthrough looking at a very
positive situation.
But I was running a sales callcenter.
and in the sales call center,the best employee was, he was
really an awesome salespersonand he sold more, we were
(17:39):
selling travel solutions, and hesold more travel vacations than
anybody else on the floor with abig spread.
Like he wasn't even close, likehe was number one.
And then people were competingfor number two.
And obviously that comes with,better shifts and it comes with,
better pay and it comes withbonuses and it comes with
different perks because he wasthe best salesperson.
But then we started trackingother stuff other than just, how
(18:01):
much you sold and so on.
And one of the things we startedtracking is conversion, like how
many calls you actually convert.
And he was one of the worstYeah.
Converting agents.
And I'm like, okay, how can thatbe?
So then we started tracking howmany calls people take.
And if the average person wouldtake, I may be making the
numbers up, but I think they'reroughly correct.
(18:22):
250 calls a week, he would take750 calls a week.
Okay?
Yep.
Because what he did is okay, Idon't think I can sell this one.
I don't think it can help you,sir.
Boom, hang up the phone.
we don't sell this thing.
Thank you, lady.
Boom.
every time he thought, that'sgonna be either a tough sell or
he is not gonna make enoughmoney, he threw it out.
Now, the other agent, so he wasconverting at like 20%.
(18:45):
The average agent was convertingat 35 to 40%, meaning he threw
away half of the company'spotential revenue, right?
To make more money for himself.
Now, this was my doing because Iincentivized selling more stuff
in a way.
So my incentives created thesituation, but without tracking
(19:06):
additional things.
Yeah.
There is no way I would'veidentified that my best
salesperson is actually damagingthe revenue of the company.
Rob Buffington (19:14):
Yeah.
You have to balance the metricsbecause they can, any statistics
can be skewed if you cherry pickthem in any field.
And so for example, perfectexample on the customer service
side, you can have, average calltime is a very common metric.
Yeah.
You want that number as low aspossible, but unless you're
balancing it with customersatisfaction and first call
(19:36):
resolution, we've all had thecall center that we called in
and we just need this fixed andthey get us off the phone.
Yeah.
And so you have to call againand again.
So maybe it's a five minute callinstead of a 10 minute call.
But there are five more calls,meaning 30 minutes or 20, yeah,
30 minutes total.
And a really pissed off customeras opposed to 10 minutes on the
(20:00):
first call.
So you have to balance yourmetrics or you'll have people
jumping through hoops to meetthe metrics through the
Isar Meitis (20:08):
detriment of the company.
So let me ask you a question.
I think this is a greatconversation.
I think it's extremely valuablefor anybody who's managing
people want to track them.
How do you define, how do youpick the right KPIs to track
per, not per person, but perrole?
Like how do you know what arethe most important things you
need to track?
Because you and I just gave afew examples, oh, I can track a
(20:30):
few things, but then if I don'tbalance them with some other
things, I'm gonna lead to thewrong outcome.
Rob Buffington (20:35):
Yeah.
It's always a moving target.
The list should be gettinglonger and longer as you go.
You should have, it's kinda likea general ledger versus a P&L.
You can look at the generalledger and see every transaction
ever, but it's basically worth,it's worthless unless you need
to do a deep dive and find outsomething.
Most of the time you're lookingat the P&L.
(20:56):
So I always tell people, startwith five.
Just start with five becauseit's working a new muscle group.
And if you tell yourself you'regonna attract 50, it's like a
New Year's resolution.
You're not gonna do it.
So pick the five most importantone and you have to identify
what's important to yourcompany.
So let's stick in my wheelhouseproperty management.
So it could be average emailresponse time, missed call
(21:21):
percentage, percent delinquencybecause cash flow is important.
Sales conversion.
And number of open work orderslet's say.
If it was for a customer servicedepartment, you would say missed
call percentage.
I'm big on responsiveness,missed call percentage, first
call resolution, net promoterscore, customer satisfaction
(21:43):
score, and upselling salesconversion fill in the blank.
So it really depends on, numberone, what is important to your
company and where are your painpoints.
So for example, if you'restruggling with something,
that's where you wanna startbecause it'll tell you where to
look.
So it'll come down to theposition and always pepper it
(22:04):
with some common sense numbers.
Again, they don't take thepersonal thought, but they help
Isar Meitis (22:10):
you hone it.
Awesome.
I like this.
I think the.
You know what?
let's take one more examplebecause I think that's gonna
make it interesting.
What do you track yourleadership team on?
Because what you just said ismore on the, lower level
employees that do the day-to-daystuff.
(22:31):
What are the KPIs that are morestrategic I would say that you
track your leadership team on aregular basis.
Rob Buffington (22:39):
The trick with the leadership team is you have
to align them with the company'svalues or you're gonna have the
same thing.
for example, I rarely givedivision based bonuses.
I give corporate, I give profitshare.
How did the company as a wholedo?
Because for example, asalesperson can land everything
(22:59):
under the sun, but if they'velowered the prices and they're
poor quality customers that takea lot of time, then that doesn't
help the company.
So the beauty of it is you canalign the interests.
So for example, our salescommission structure is usually
based on profitability ratherthan gross revenue or volume.
(23:20):
I take a look at, so let's takerecruiting for example.
I will take a look at the kpi, pi of the people under them and
see how we can do that.
So what is the purpose of aleader?
It's to make the people underthem, equip them with better
tools, encourage them to goabove and beyond, make that
operation run better.
(23:41):
Better employee retention,better employee engagement, all
of that.
So for a recruiting supervisorfor example, it would be the
same things that a recruiter hasnumber of positions filled,
average fill time over on the HRside.
You might have retention,engagement, et cetera.
And then you could look atmetrics for their sub employees
(24:03):
of how long have they been withthe company?
Number of times called off,employee attendance, things like
that.
And then you can also add insome financial metrics,
profitability.
So for example, retention isboth HR and recruiting based,
because recruiters can be justlike the salespeople we talked
about, just cuz they pushsomebody past the interview
(24:26):
doesn't mean they're gonna workfor a year.
So if a recruiter andparticularly a recruiting
supervisor is tracked andincentivized for the long-term
benefit, they're more likely tobe cautious with the candidates,
which is, and which is the wayit should be.
so you want some of it to be thepositions under them as a whole
and some of it to be corporateas a whole, because they're
(24:48):
responsible for their part ineverything.
It helps align the interest ofthe division to the whole.
Isar Meitis (24:54):
Great answer.
I think having a good balanceof, in, in the leadership
tracking between strategy, socompany strategy, and you are in
charge of the results of thepeople under you, both the
people and the results.
So both aspects of it, that'swhat you're in charge of.
And putting it all together, Ithink something that we're both
saying several times and I wouldlove to hear your thoughts on
(25:15):
that because you, we bothtouched on it, is the incentive
side of things.
At the end of the day, people.
Will do better job because oftwo things.
One, and you touched on that aswell, if they believe in what
you do if they believe that thisis the right thing to do, that
you're helping somebody somehowwith the company's goals, with
(25:36):
the company's core values, withthe company's, mission
statement.
That's one thing that helps.
And the other thing is what arethey particularly incentivized
to do?
Because at the end of the day,yes, people come to work to be
fulfilled, but they also come towork to pay the bills and have
enough money to go on vacationwhen they want to.
And so it's always a mix ofthese two things.
(26:00):
How do you put the rightincentive packages in place?
What do you incentivize and howdo you incentivize people, I
think is a very importantquestion.
And I think you have a good wayto solve it because of a lot of
things you already mentioned.
Rob Buffington (26:13):
So the first part of what you talked about is
the believing and I'll, I justwanna take a minute on that.
Again, we've talked about thedifferent generations and what
they want and what's importantto them, and it's real easy to
make fun of millennials.
I've done it plenty of myself,millennials, and Generation Z
and it's a new way to do things.
Like we talked about analogdigital.
Here's something that's rarelytalked about.
(26:35):
When a millennial believes inyour company, truly believes not
as happy, not, hasn't left yet,but when they believe in what
you're doing, they will becomeyour biggest brand ambassadors.
They will bleed for yourcompany.
They will talk about it to theirfriends.
We have the most potential inthis generation because again,
they have the best tools to dealwith this new world that we're
(26:59):
coming into.
So if they truly believe beyondjust, this is a well paying job,
but if they believe in thevalues and the direction and
what you're doing, they will beyour passionate representatives.
So that's part one.
And I think that mean, that canmean just as much as the
incentive because some peopleare mercenary and hey, that's
(27:21):
fine.
We've got some people that theyjust, I want the money.
Give me the money.
Okay, let's do it.
The majority of people, andthose people can always be
offered something better.
They can always be offered 10%more and they'll jump.
The people that truly believethose are your lifers.
And like I said, I like lifers.
I want people that, people move.
(27:41):
I get it.
I'm not thinking that most ofthese people won't take another
job, but I like to think thatthey could be.
So incentivizing needs to beboth value-based and, pardon the
pun, but value based.
The advantage of these metricsis that they can help you
develop a formula for how toincentivize people.
(28:02):
And the more that you can betransparent about why it works
this way, the better.
So let's stick with therecruiting example cuz we just
recently went over the bonusstructure for it.
obviously they want the numberof positions filled is gonna be
important, but like we justtalked about, there also needs
to be a component that relatesto how long do those people
stay?
(28:23):
Because a recruiter can, again,they can force people through an
interview.
They can coach them on what tosay, they can get them higher,
but if there's also an incentiveto make them stay for a couple
of years, that, that alignstheir interests with the
companies.
So you have to have differentversions.
and the best thing to do is betransparent with the data and
(28:45):
let them know this is why you'regetting it.
It's 20% this, it's 10% this, etcetera.
Because this generation grew upwith what we call gamified,
rewards.
Everything they do, whetherit's, farm, I honestly don't
know what they're playing today.
I'm a bad example, but Farmvilleor whatever it is, they're all
(29:06):
gamified.
Robinhood perfect example, hasgrown tremendously because
they've gamified stock trading,which personally I think is a
dumb idea.
Isar Meitis (29:17):
Yes.
it's dumb idea for anybodythat's one to trade the old way.
That's the only reason.
It's a
Rob Buffington (29:23):
dumb idea.
Yeah.
If you're doing it because youget the little notifications,
like that is not why you tradestocks.
But that's a rabbit hole.
But perfect example.
They grew because they harnessedthis new generation and they
gamified the process.
You get a free stock and youget, you get this many points
and all this stuff because itincreases their revenue.
(29:45):
but they did it successfully.
And whether it's a good thing ornot, they succeeded.
And so you need to do the samething.
You need to have, you can havecompetitions.
I'm not the world's biggest fanof competitions.
I like to have it against yourprevious record and
incentivizing and you todayversus you a year ago.
(30:06):
But you can have competitions,you can have, referral contests.
You can have, you, you can becreative, but the more that you
let people see the rewards andunderstand how they can
determine it and know ahead oftime, the better.
People like to not be surprised.
They like to know what's coming.
(30:27):
Yeah.
Isar Meitis (30:28):
I want to go back to the example I gave before
with the call center and thesalespeople.
We change the plan all the time.
And I love the fact you said, ohyeah, it's always a moving
target, right?
we changed the incentive planseveral times every year because
we started to understand that,okay, we can gain more here, we
can be better at that.
(30:48):
And the, we found out that thebest way to do this is to change
the incentive structure.
And we made it so that people,like you said, we got everybody
together and we had differentcalls and we did these
simulations.
So in the new plan, if you dothis is what you're gonna get.
Exactly.
Versus exactly.
If you do what you did so far,this is what you're gonna get.
So explaining to people how theplan works.
The other thing that I foundthat works very well in the
(31:10):
incentive side, it's not alwaysmoney.
Different people want differentthings.
And sometimes it's the prestige,sometimes it's access to things
they don't have access to.
So extra p t o, another PTO workfrom home days.
One of the favorites, which Ialways found funny, but I gladly
did it, was dinner with me.
(31:30):
So once a quarter we did dinnerwith, the head of the division
and there was only, I thinkeight seats and there were, I
don't know, 50 people in thecall center.
So everybody wanted to be one ofthose eight people that goes to
dinner.
And I'm like, okay, it's onedinner in a quarter.
Yeah.
It's not a big deal.
But people really wanted thatand people could pick,
different, bonuses that youcould, that they could play for
(31:51):
if you want.
and it worked very well becausethen you give people something
they want and you allow them tobe more flexible with what
they're getting for basicallydoing what's best for the
company.
Because that's the whole pointof incentives.
Yeah.
Rob Buffington (32:06):
Incentives should be.
win.
The better you do, the betterthe company does, the better you
do.
It should not be punitive, dothis or else this.
Yeah.
Isar Meitis (32:17):
I gotta ask you a very practical question because
we're giving a lot of examplesof, what to track and what's the
result and how to incentivize,how do we actually track these
things?
do you have this fancy software?
what, how do you put togetherthis whole thing in a way that
like, oh, here's what Joe, andhere's what Jenna did this past
week, aligned with what we said.
(32:38):
Yeah, they will do last month.
Rob Buffington (32:40):
great question.
you may not like my answer, buthere it is.
I use Excel.
okay.
I've got, one of my VPs is, has,we've rolled out HubSpot and it
seems really powerful and Ithink eventually it will
generate a lot of these, but thehonest no BS answer is for the
last five years, most metricshave just been, we go in, we
(33:02):
pull the report and somebodytypes it into a spreadsheet, and
every week we compare it and itworks.
I'm a big believer that if youstart simple and build up, it's
perfectly fine.
What happens is people willinvest three months into a
one-stop solution that's gonnagive you a hundred metrics at a,
(33:23):
at your fingertips, and by thetime it gets rolled out, they're
onto the next project.
It's better to pick, like Isaid, start with five things,
get an Excel spreadsheet or aGoogle sheet or something in
SharePoint that you share withyour key people and just have
somebody log in and record it.
Because once you do that, you'llstart to see the value.
(33:44):
And again, it's gamification.
You have a dashboard, you cansee what your company is doing,
and you can make it pretty, youcan use charts and graphs and
all that.
and you should, I have anadvisory board that I meet with
quarterly, and I have, I'm, Imake the data look a little bit
better, but at the end of theday, most of what I'm playing
with is in Excel.
Because you know what?
In Excel, there are so manyfunctions I can use.
(34:06):
Give me the average of thistimeframe.
Help me see the pr, proprogression of the, it's so much
easier because it's close to rawdata, but it's not, unworkable.
It's a profit and loss, not a GLfor that analogy.
So that, personally, that's whatI like.
I will say a lot of the, a lotof the software we use gives us
the metrics.
So for example, average emailresponse time.
(34:28):
I don't need to go to everyemail and look at when it came
in and when it went out.
But we take that data and thenwe put it in an Excel
spreadsheet.
Yeah.
Isar Meitis (34:36):
and I'll add one more thing.
it sounds like a lot of work,but today with all the
automation tools out there,yeah.
You can do 90 something percentof it without anybody has to
actually log in data.
It will go and pick up the datafrom the different sources and
plug it into, like you said, theExcel or Google sheets or
whatever other, database userfriendly tool you want to use.
(35:00):
And you can start tomorrow.
And I think that's the biggestbenefit because people can
analyze the software or theydon't afford the software or
they don't have the time toimplement the software.
Everybody knows Google Sheets orExcel, and you can gain Huge
benefits from using just thatout of the box.
And like I said, start simple.
Start with a few parametersYeah.
For every single person.
(35:21):
Have it as automated as possiblewith tools like Zapier and stuff
like it.
and you can get a very goodworking solution with almost no
investment.
Yeah,
Rob Buffington (35:32):
and it's, we don't have four people full-time
doing research.
this is one person in eachdepartment who takes half an
hour a week to update themetrics sheet.
It is very straightforward, andas you said, if you wanna get
fancy, you can use Zapier andWeb Merge and all that.
some things you can have thememail you automatically, like I
(35:52):
get a phone log sent weekly withthe data so that I don't have to
go in and do it.
it just simplifies.
So there are levels ofprogression, but I would say
it's more important that you getthe data than how you get it.
Isar Meitis (36:05):
Makes sense.
I wanna take you to the nextstep.
So now you have, we'veidentified the key metrics for
employee and we've identifiedthe how to track it and where to
track it.
What do you do with the data andhow frequently?
So how frequently do you look atyour employees data?
(36:25):
How frequently do your leaderslook at their employees data and
what do they do?
what kind of feedback mechanismis built into this whole thing
to make it work?
Rob Buffington (36:36):
So it's gonna depend on the metric.
missed call percentage is gonnabe weekly.
I have a building servicescompany.
We have, gross revenue dividedby number of payroll hours.
That's gonna be weekly.
Other numbers like gross margin,that is gonna be monthly
something.
Most things should be weekly ormonthly.
But then some reports are onlyanalyzed on a quarterly basis.
(36:58):
But what we do is we track it ona weekly and quarterly basis,
and then we aggregate the data.
In terms of feedback, it goesback to gamification.
As weird as it is, people reallywant the data and they don't
want it.
annual reviews, I've said for along time, annual reviews are
dead.
If you're not doing quarterly ormore often, your people are
(37:21):
gonna feel disconnected andthey're gonna drift.
so giving them access, andagain, you have to decide what
information and how they get itand all that, but letting them
at any point check in and see,oh, this was my progress for
last week.
Interesting, cuz are youfamiliar with the Dunning Kruger
effect?
(37:42):
No.
Dunning Kru.
Basically the people that aremost confident are usually the
least experienced or least notintelligent, but have the least
reason to feel confident.
Yeah.
Basically, the more experiencedyou get, the less confident you
get at stuff.
And I'm probably butchering thenumbers, but I wanna say
(38:04):
something like, at a survey theydid, when they were researching
this, it was 50% of people at acompany surveyed identified
themselves in the top 5% ofemployees.
Yeah.
And so the problem is mostpeople, Not inflated self-worth,
(38:25):
but they're not always realisticabout their progress.
And so bringing it down toobjective data helps them
identify what to look for.
The same way that companyleaders need to know where to
focus to improve things,employees need to have something
to track it with.
And again, it should be againstwhere they were yesterday.
It shouldn't, depending on thesituation, but you shouldn't try
(38:48):
to embarrass them or, oh, Neilis better than that.
That's not what it's for.
But if they can see on a weeklybasis that, Hey, my missed call
percentage is going down, or myresponse time is skyrocketing,
then they have that objectivedata that even though they feel
like they gave it their best,the results don't show that.
And they should feel free tosay, Hey, I think this data is
(39:09):
wrong.
It doesn't take into accountthat I spent eight hours with
our biggest client trying tosalvage the account or whatever.
It never replaces common sense,but it gives them raw data in a
gamified way that, Hey, I'mdoing better, I'm doing worse.
They know exactly how they'redoing.And on some level they
want that.
It makes them feel more secureand that there's a structure in
(39:32):
place.
They're not just at people'swins.
Isar Meitis (39:36):
So you're saying on the individual employee level,
at the task level, if you wanttheories, regular feedback
because they have access toreports and data that they see
all the time.
And on aggregated data,depending on the data, there's
either weekly meetings ormonthly meetings or quarterly
meetings to go and review thedifferent information.
Rob Buffington (39:57):
So on our quarterly reviews, we include K
P I by positions.
So by building services company,my operations manager, it would
be the aggregate of the data forthe company.
It would be what is our grossrevenue divided by our payroll
hours, how much percentage ofovertime did we have?
what was the average rollouttime?
What was the attendance rate,what was the gross margin on the
(40:18):
job?
those kinda things.
But then there's also weeklyreports.
That specific people have accessto different facets of that.
They can log in at any time andsay, last week sucked.
what?
What's up?
And they can look at it and go,oh, yeah, got it.
But it can also help peopleidentify much quicker, like
(40:40):
problem clients, for example.
I guarantee you anybodylistening to this, you have one
client that you're spending waytoo much time on that is not
worth the revenue or the margin.
And you don't know it becauseyou're not digging deep into the
data.
So yeah, the more data you have,the more informed choices you
Isar Meitis (40:59):
can make.
Yes.
I really like that.
I'll say one more thing again,from my experience of this, one
of the things that we did, basedon all the reports that we had,
and just like you, we weretracking more or less everything
that we could was making itactionable, meaning it's It's
one thing to look at a reportand to figure it out.
It's another thing to.
Already take the report and turnthe report into something that
(41:22):
is actionable.
I'll give you a great example.
We were, let's say, it doesn'tmatter which business you are,
you have 10 different suppliersfor the same thing, and you
wanna always buy from the bestone at the right time at the
right rate.
And how do you do that?
How do you know which supplierssell to you at better rates at
any given point?
Or how do you know that thissupplier is sending to you at
(41:42):
$200 into somebody else at 180?
And that means if you're biggerthan them, you should buy it for
one 70.
And we had a system that did allof that for the employees, so
they didn't have to go and digin and try to figure out the
numbers themselves.
So the next level in theevolution of having data is to
take the data that's in thesystem and make it actionable,
(42:03):
like actually defined.
So when an employee logs intohis system in the morning, he
has three things he needs to dobased on data that the system
provided to him based on resultsof what happened yesterday or
the week before.
And.
Today with the availability ofAI analysis capabilities, it
became almost a crime not to dothis because you can overlay
(42:27):
some kind of a AI tool on top ofthe data you already have and
query that and get action itemsas a response.
I'm sure there's already, and Idon't know a specific one, but
I'm sure there's already toolsthat do it for almost any
database out there, just becauseit became so readily available
in the last few months.
And so look for these things,looks for a way to take the data
(42:50):
and make it actionable.
The other thing that I want totouch on that is related to this
is to not just make the dataavailable to employees, but
educate them.
So in many cases, when you do a,especially when you do like a
company wide, and I dunno howfrequently you do that, but when
you do like a state of thecompany kind of talk, some
people are not at the level,they understand a p and l
(43:12):
because they've never seen a pand l before.
And so doing some kind of aneducational process.
And that was just one example.
That's something that I used todo.
So every quarter I would sharethe p and l with the whole
company and I would actually goand explain it as if it's, and
some people's okay, I know whata P N L is.
But for a lot of people, thatwas awesome.
People would come to me afterthat.
Great.
This was the best explanationI've ever run.
I ever got to, where is thecompany right now, financially.
(43:36):
So I think these two things oftaking the data is making it
more practical for more peopleis another great way to take
this in, to take this conceptforward.
Rob Buffington (43:46):
Yeah.
Yeah.
My college professor would say,you have to put a handle on it.
You've got the tool, put ahandle on it.
Isar Meitis (43:53):
Rob, last question before I let you go, because I
know you had a really crazyweek.
how do you know, as the leaderof all of this, that all these
things that you're doing areactually leading to the business
goals.
How do you connect the dots youfrom your seat?
Because that's why we do all ofthis, right?
We do all of this, right?
(44:14):
So the company as a whole dobetter.
How do you know what stuff islike, oh my God, why the hell
are we tracking this thing?
It's just a waste of time versusThis is go, what's going to lead
us to, I'll go back to what yousaid, be a better company in
three to five
Rob Buffington (44:29):
years.
There's no such thing as baddata, in my opinion.
there's inaccurate data, butthere's, the more you can track,
the more efficient you arebecause it may not even be
something you need now, but ayear from now, you may need to
audit and go back and it tells astory.
it can even tell you whenemployees are having personal
(44:51):
issues.
Cuz we've had employees thatlike, man, they're stellar.
And then just boom.
So let's check.
Hey, how you doing?
You need, like, how's thingsgoing?
What, what's up?
not trying to penalize them, nottrying to, just, do they need
help?
Are they okay?
Is there something going on intheir lives we should be aware
of?
So that's part of it.
(45:11):
Tho the important numbers willchange over time.
There are a lot of reports thatI used to pay a lot of attention
to that.
Now they've become so rote thatI only look, I actually tell
people, highlight if it'soutside of this range.
Otherwise I'm not even gonnalook at it.
Yeah.
Because I trust the people underme that they're just, they've
(45:32):
done this long enough.
If something is above, thisnumber or below this number,
that's a red flag.
Let's dive in.
But otherwise it's good.
If anything, it can tell youwhere you don't have to look.
Yeah.
So it can save you time byhaving too much data.
And that's the thing, if youhave an, if you start tracking,
it's gonna be useless.
(45:52):
It's gonna take a month tofigure out, except like in my
instance, the 32% missed callpercentage.
But if you start tracking for ayear and somebody new comes in
and it's their first week andthey say, oh, we got first call
resolution of 83%, is that goodor bad?
Okay, here's a year's worth ofdata.
Yeah.
On first call resolution,average res and data that you've
(46:15):
never used before can save timein the future.
So in my opinion, there is,there's very little useless
data.
Awesome.
And as you said, with AI andautomation, it's becoming easier
and easier to get that dataAgreed.
Isar Meitis (46:32):
Rob, this was really great.
I think we touched on a lot ofreally important points.
If people wanna follow you,connect with you, work with you,
what's the best way to do that?
Rob Buffington (46:44):
You can find our website at it's,
slicingthegordianknot.com, oryou can follow me on LinkedIn.
Rob Buffington, I'm available onthere as well.
Gordian Business Solutions.
Isar Meitis (46:54):
Rob, thank you so much.
This was really great.
I appreciate your time.
Thanks for
Rob Buffington (46:58):
having me.
Popular Podcasts
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.