You’re Growing But It Doesn’t Feel Like Growing
If thats you, Rob Levin thinks you may be paying skilled specialists to do unskilled work without realizing it.
Good morning!
Here are today’s highlights:
Julian Scadden says it isn’t disloyal to speak honestly with a long-term employee who has plateaued.
For many, owning a business can be isolating. One solution? Find a mastermind group.
A new study finds that if you want employees to act like owners, just giving them ownership isn’t enough.
The construction industry isn’t known for being quick to adapt, but the labor shortage may change that.
HUMAN RESOURCES
Are you paying skilled specialists to do unskilled work? “Your estimators are working nights to keep up with bid volume. Your dispatch team is making mistakes they didn’t used to make — missed appointments, late follow-ups, angry customers. Your controller is so buried in invoice processing that the financial analysis you actually need keeps getting pushed to ‘next week.’ You’re hearing grumbling about workload. Maybe you’ve already lost someone good who just got tired of the pace. The people who stayed are stretched thin, and you can see it in the quality of their work — not because they’re incompetent, but because they’re overwhelmed. You’re growing, but it doesn’t feel like growth. It feels like everyone is running faster on a treadmill that keeps speeding up.”
“The instinct is to hire another specialist. Another estimator. Another accountant. Another operations manager. But specialists are expensive and hard to find. And here’s the thing — when you look closely at what’s actually burying your team, most of it isn’t ‘specialist’ work.”
“A construction company pays a top-notch estimator $150,000 a year (all in). That estimator spends 30-40 percent of their time on tasks that don’t require their expertise — chasing subcontractors for pricing, manually entering costs into spreadsheets, following up on missing specs, double-checking quotes for accuracy. That’s $45,000-$60,000 worth of their salary going toward work that doesn’t require a $150,000 skillset.”
“The same pattern shows up everywhere. Your $90,000 dispatch manager tracking shipments and chasing carriers for proof of delivery. Your $80,000 controller processing invoices and reconciling expenses. According to Zapier, 41 percent of knowledge workers’ time gets consumed by low-level tasks. That’s not a personal failing — it’s a structural problem.You’re paying $150,000 specialists to do $25-an-hour work.” READ MORE
