Personnel
- You may under invest in some areas. You do not see the benefits so you keep it too lean.
- You may overcompensate and over hire. You might have too many people, too much talent or overpay. An owner with a $2 million company has a CFO that costs nearly $200,000 with benefits. That is nearly 10% of revenues and overkill.
- You may miss out on using good outside part-time or interim help to manage your growth. You are not large enough to bring in a full time person. So you go without. The area suffers. One common area is human resources. You may not realize about good part-time HR leadership firms. You end up being out of compliance in many HR areas and do not even realize it.
- You are not aware of the skills needed. You are familiar with your people and stick with what you know. You promote them based on their good work and loyalty. Your intentions are good. However, you just put them in over their head. They want to do well for you and give it a shot. It can either blow up and the person leaves. Or you end up living with mediocrity.
- You may under train. You may have great programs to teach people how to make your products or service your customers. But people in other areas get little training. It is baptism by fire. There is no or little training budget.
- You inadvertently do other things that make it hard for people to be successful. There could be too much chaos. People turn into firefighters not leaders. They learn to lay low and duck rather than step out. On the other hand, you may have too much structure. It becomes too hard to get things done.
- You miss out on ways to motivate people. You may be a great leader and do the right soft things. However, your benefits may lag behind. You may lose people or miss out on hiring great talent.
- Your people do not get any regular feedback on how they are doing. They may only hear about the problems and not when they do things well. Time slips away. They may get an annual performance review. They may be surprised by their reviews, instead of knowing all along how they were doing.
- You may not be aware of your total personnel costs. Your financials may report costs well by department. However, you may lack a supplemental report that shows how much you spend on personnel. You do not see it in total, so these costs can creep on you without you knowing it.
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