This is Why your Rockstar Employees Leave

So last week on the beyond the Apex group coaching call, one of the students was struggling because his Rockstar employee, this person who was like his ride or die, this person that he loved working with and thought they were going to be together for the next 10, 15, 20 years, or maybe not quite that, but, you know, that Rockstar employee, just out of the blue, left the company and he was struggling with it because not only did this fella leave the company, but the fellow left the company, and at the exit interview, told the student, the owner of the company, that he was just trying to get out of that industry. He was just no longer interested in that industry. He was going to go move on to new things. Right? Well, later, what was revealed is that the employee didn’t leave the industry. He left for a competitor. So he’s doing the same job, but now he’s over at the competitor. And on the one hand, losing an employee sucks. On the other hand, losing an employee who lies to you and then goes to your competitor like that really sucks.

And it makes you start to question, what am I doing wrong? What could I have done differently? How can I avoid this in the future? And listen, we all go through this. The hardest part about being in business is people. People are the hardest part because they’re weird, they’re mushy. The things that motivate one human are different than what motivates another human. And we’re not all coin operated, so you can’t always just put more money in and expect to get buy in and loyalty. And that can be really difficult. That is the game of entrepreneurship is figuring out how to recruit, how to train, how to retain top tier talent and to motivate them and focus them in the direction of the team’s goals and of your vision for what the company can be. That’s the meta skill right here.

So we got to learn how to do this. And what we talked about with the student who was struggling is really what happened was that he hadn’t sat down with this employee to really get clear about what it was that that employee wanted for his life, what his vision was for his career. And here’s the funny part, is this student actually did do this or tried to do this. He sat down with the guy, and this was before the guy was leaving. He sat down to try and plot out what the guy’s vision was and all this stuff. But here’s the problem, is that our employees often don’t know what their vision is. They don’t know how to set goals. The average person doesn’t know how to set goals for their life.

They don’t know how to vision cast and then to move towards that. So your job as the business owner, as the leader on that team, is to help them cast their vision, to see it clearly in their mind’s eye and help them get that confidence that this is an attainable thing, and then help them create a roadmap for achieving that goal. When you ask your employees, hey, what’s your five year goal? Where do you see yourself in life? How much all this, like, what do you want for your life? They’re almost always going to hem and, like, I don’t really know. They’re going to give you some really shallow answers. It’s your job to dig deeper, to understand what are those drivers of human behaviors and psychology that they don’t even know that they want yet? Or maybe they do know that they want it, but they don’t want to admit it. And this is where my student went wrong in his conversation, because he was doing everything right. He sat down to try and help this guy vision cast for his future. But they cast a vision around all of the things that this guy said he wanted.
But in reality, the thing he wanted most of wasn’t actually talked about in that meeting. The thing that he wanted most, the reason he left the company, was for more money. That was it? That was it. He just got offered more money at this other place, and he decided to go. And when I asked my student, do you know, like, did you ask him how much he wanted to make, like, what his dream was? What was that number he wanted to get to? My student said, I don’t know. And I said, well, if you don’t know what that number was, then of course you didn’t actually get to the root of what this guy’s vision was for his life. You left out the most important thing. And we know it’s the most important thing in hindsight because he left for that very reason.
Now, here’s why my student didn’t ask the question is because when we’re sitting there and doing the vision casting, as owners, we’re frugal, we’re cheap, we want to manage our resources, and we want to be able to get the result without laying the minimum amount of capital possible, right? So our goal is, if I can get this guy for 70,000 rather than 90,000, Huzzah. That just saved me $20,000. So when we go into this vision casting conversation with our employee, there’s this inherent friction between what you want, which is I want to conserve resources and not pay out the nose for this thing. And what they want, which is I want to be paid all the money. Right. And so when we’re doing this vision casting exercise, it’s very easy to tiptoe around the idea of how much money do you want to be making? Because when they say that number, if they’re currently making 50,000, they’re like, I want to make 120,000. We’re sitting there like, uh oh, now they want to make way more money. I don’t know how we’re going to get to that place.
Right? And now they can see that, or they can sense that you don’t really have a path forward. And it might be that in their current role, there is no way that they can earn that much money. But then what you can do, once you know what their goal is, is you can say, cool. Well, here’s what would need to be true for us to get you to that number. And I’m prepared to lay out this roadmap and invest into you to make that become a reality over the next five years. So here’s the skills that you would need. Here’s how much revenue we need to be generating. Here’s the expenses.

Right? Like, you need to cast the vision very clearly. Here’s a what this would need to be true to get us to this number and then say, I’m invested in you and making that happen. Right? But my student didn’t do that. He didn’t get a number from the guy. And because he didn’t get the number, he wasn’t able to set the roadmap to say, hey, we’re going to get you to that number. So once the competitor came up and said, I’ll offer you this much, the mental calculus for the employee is simply, oh, that’s more than what I’m making now. Cool, let’s do that. And because my student didn’t ask the underlying questions and get to the root cause and ask a really uncomfortable question about, like, how much do you really want to be making over the next five years? Like, what’s that number for you? Because he avoided that conversation.

He didn’t get to the thing that the lever that was actually the most important to the employee. So I share this with you so that you can think about, how can I cast a vision big enough for the dreams of my team to fit within? And for that to occur, you need to know very clearly what that dream is, how much they want to be making what their life looks like, what role they’re in, all of those details, you need to get clear on it. And you can’t be afraid of them telling you that their vision is actually bigger or different than what you can provide. Because knowing that you can actually put them on a roadmap to success rather than leaving you in the lurch, it’s one thing to know, okay, I can only get you over the next two years. I can get you this, this, and this. I can get you to this place, and then at that point, you’re going to hit the ceiling. And then we can talk about what the transition looks like. But as long as they know what their roadmap looks like and that maybe that’s only a two year vision with the company, that’s still better than them leaving you unexpectedly in six months, right? So take this.

Run with it. Go have those hard conversations with your team. I’ll catch you guys in the next episode. But until then, stay hyper focused, my friends.