3 Ways to Invest Back Into Your Employees

Your success in business is going to be predicated on your ability to work with and through other people. Businesses exist to deliver value to other humans. So your ability to work with customers, with vendors, with employees, is going to dictate how successful you ultimately are. Now, the word company, it means a group of people, ideally a group of people working towards a common cause. And if you want to grow a true business, then you need to hire. You need to have a team around you who can do the work, who can move the flywheels forward, because as long as it’s you doing it, if you refuse to hire because you’re like, nobody can do this as well as me, I don’t. It’s hard to find good help. All those excuses that we’ve all used before, then you have a job.

You do not have a business because that business doesn’t work unless you’re working in it, which means you have one of the shittiest jobs in the world and you’re working for a crazy person. Bummer. But if you do want to build a business, you need to hire. You need to build a team around you that can run this machine even better than you could. And one of the most important things when it comes to hiring, when it comes to building a team, is to make the people that are working around you better than when they came to you. Your goal is when they ultimately leave you. For you to be able to look back and be like they are measurably better in every aspect than they were when they came here. That should be your objective.

And I know a lot of people actually, who do not like investing back into their employees because they’re afraid I’m going to pour all this time and energy into educating you, getting you these credentials, and then you’re going to take that information, you’re going to run and you’re going to go to this other business where you can get paid more. And that’s a real risk. Honestly, that can happen. But you have to ask yourself, is that worse than the alternative of if you don’t invest into them and they stay no hard pass? That doesn’t sound good. So one of the things at my businesses, at escape climbing, we’ll use this as the example. We were very committed to investing back into our people every single week. And we did this in a number of ways. I want to share these ideas with you so that you can maybe take these and run with them.

So the first thing that we did was, you know, it’s one thing to have the skills, but it’s another thing to have the standards of a high performer. The standards of the high performer are going to transcend every skill that you ultimately teach. And so that’s really the first thing that we really wanted to instill in our people wasn’t just how to do the things at a high level, like the tactical side, but the strategic side of how do we build the values, the systems, the standards of a high performer. And so every Monday morning, we would sit down for a 30 minutes meeting at the beginning of the week and talk about the values of the company, which we had identified as these are the standards. These are the values that if you can get in alignment with, they’re gonna serve you in all areas of your life. And some examples of that is steward manufacturing, which is the idea of being a responsible steward of the things that have been entrusted to you and producing value from that. Another one would have been the path of mastery, or the pursuit of mastery, and saying that anything worth doing is worth doing at the highest levels and getting better and trying to improve at that thing. Idea of incremental improvement.

Again, you can see why that would serve you in all different areas of life. So we would do our Monday values meeting. Wed sit down, we talk through the company values, and wed talk about how did you apply that to your own life, both personally and within the company in the last week? Using this as an opportunity to use real world examples to show people. Heres how you might be able to manifest this value in real time. The next idea that we ran with and had a lot of fun with was this idea of three foot putts. The idea of a three foot putt is very simple. It’s, you know, when you get to 3ft within 3ft of the hole in golf, ideally, you just can put it in every single time. You really shouldn’t miss any putts within 3ft.

So these need to be the skills that we have on such lockdown that we can just execute them without any error. And so we would look at the body of skills in each department, each role, and say, okay, what do you need to have? What those skills that you need to have on lock, those three foot putts. And then we’d identify a different three foot putt every quarter and say, okay, in shipping, you need to have a high attention to detail. So this quarter, we’re going to work on building that skill of attention to detail. Or maybe it’s, you need to be very, you need to be very skilled in Excel. And so we would do an excel course right so we’d identify for each role, each department, what is that three foot putt that we are going to work on so that we can be sure when we get it to that end zone, we never miss. That’s the goal. The third thing that we did, and this was a lot of fun, actually, was that we would do a weekly deep dive training with the team into our products and services.

So at escape climbing, we had hundreds of products. And a lot of the people that worked with us, they were rock climbers, but they didn’t necessarily have in depth knowledge of root setting or of manufacturing or wall building. And we produced a lot of the hardware, like the nuts and the bolts and the t nuts and the plywood that the gyms would use to construct their walls. And yet our employees didn’t know a lot of that stuff. We didn’t want them just to come in and produce the widget. We wanted them to understand why the widget was important and how the person down the line was relying on it, because that then informed their ability to make judgment calls on the line and say, oh, this doesn’t meet our standard of quality. This is why it doesn’t meet that quality of standard. Just because that standard of quality, because we know the consumer on the other end, they need to use this tool in this way, and it won’t serve them if it comes to them like this.

Also, it then enlisted our team, who are on the front lines, to be thinking actively every single day about what are those improvements that we could be making to the product? Because they’re the ones that are handling the product more than anybody else. So as they’re thinking about the customer connecting what they’re producing to that person and the problem that they have, they came back to us all the time with different ways of improving the product. So the way that we would do this is every Wednesday, we would get together the whole team for an hour. And this is, our team was always around 15 to 20 people. And so that’s a big investment of time right there, right. That’s 20 working hours. We bring in the whole team together, and we would pick a different product, and then we would just do a deep dive masterclass on that product, and we would record it. And so that when new employees came, we could show they could make it part of their onboarding process.

Watch each of these videos this week, this is where Anthony talks about the difference between the four prong t nut, the industrial t nut, and the commercial t nut. This other week, this is where we talked about the difference between threadless bolts and stainless steel bolts. Right? And this video, we talked about why we use baltic birch for our plywood walls rather than this other type of wood, right? So we got to team together to build their competence. We then created really valuable trainings out of it that we could use to onboard future employees so that they could get up to speed and really crush their job. And then we took that content and we shared it with our customers. Cause, like, our customers are nerds and they might not even know why. The difference between these different tnuts, right? And so this thing that served as an educational opportunity within our companies became a very great piece of content for our customers. And so those are just a couple of the ways that we’ve thought over the years of, like, how do we improve our employees so that when they leave us and they ultimately will, like, that’s just the nature of things.

They’re eventually gonna move on to other opportunities, other areas of life. They’re gonna move whatever you want them to leave better than when they got to you. I think if you could do that, you will create a culture, a community of people that want to be there, of people who talking and saying, like, oh, you should go work with these guys. They’re awesome. It’s a lot of fun. They’re not just trying to wring out value from you, but they’re trying to actively reinvest into you and make you better. So take those ideas, run with them, and apply them within your own domain as well. Because again, the investments you make into yourself, into your own skills, they pay compounding dividends regardless of market cycle.

So don’t forget your own three foot putts. Don’t forget your own weekly trainings. And that’s going to do it for me, guys and gals, we’ll catch you in the next episode. Until then, stay hyper focused, my friend.