186 | Transforming Employee Performance & Business Growth through Data with Rob Buffington of Gordian Business Solutions

❓ 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 🙏

Transcript

Isar Meitis: 0:00

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 of probably any business is its human capital. The employees of a business will either make or break the business. And while it's known to everybody, many companies do the very basic, and it's not enough today. So most companies, they pay salaries, they give people whatever benefits they give, and they expect work in return. And that equation is less and less relevant because employees these days want and need and deserve to be fair a lot more. And if you want to grow a successful business, and if you wanna be able to scale it, that's a. Capability and a skill you will need to have in the company. And our guest today, Rob Buffington has grew a remote staffing company from 25 to 400 employees in two years. He also owns and operates seven different companies at the same time, which sounds impossible to me, but it proves one thing is that he really knows how to manage people and he's really good at driving employee engagement and accountability. And this is exactly going to be the topic of our conversation today, like I said, because this can either make or break your business in any business. It's a very important topic and hence, I'm really excited to have Rob as a guest of the show today. Rob, welcome to the Business Growth Accelerator. Thank you for having me. Rob, when did you figure this out? When did it hit you that this is the holy grail, that if you want to grow and scale businesses, you better get your employees to be highly engaged and accountable for the things they need to complete.

Rob Buffington: 2:40

the first thing I would say, to be honest, is I'm not a hundred percent sure that 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 have some great people with me. I know that I couldn't do this without them. And for some reason we have developed a good working dynamic, that way. I think, honestly, I did it cause I believe that it's the right way to treat people, to make them partners in the company, treat them not as employees, but as people that can help you together. and I think that had the unintended side effect of leading to better engagement and better retention and things like that, that I view us as people that are, helping us get where we're going rather than assets of the company or something to be used and discarded.

Isar Meitis: 3:28

I love that. I think it's a great answer and I agree with you a hundred percent. I think if you make your employees a part of the journey, and by the way, that's true beyond that, like if you make people a part of the journey If you make your partners, your suppliers, your clients, your prospects, a part of the journey to a better outcome for everybody. Yeah. Then you end up getting better results.

Rob Buffington: 3:46

Yeah. I never hire anybody that I don't think at least has the potential to stay for 10 years if I don't think that they can grow and achieve their goals. And it's a common question, and I think most people don't really mean it, but I genuinely wanna know. Where are you going in five or 10 years and how are we getting you there? What are we doing to contribute to that? Because the idea is that if you, number one, the companies are growing so quickly, we need people at the top. And I wanna promote from within where possible, but I want people that can be lifers potentially. so yeah, I never hire anybody that I think is gonna use us as a stepping stone or that I feel like would, could outgrow us or that we wouldn't be able to use them in a higher function down the road. I hire for the people they could be.

Isar Meitis: 4:31

I love that. I think we'll touch more on that, on the how of that later on, but it really starts with the basics, right? So let's start with what do you do? So you said you develop this methodology or develop a way to make people feel more accountable and feel more a part of the company. What are the things you do, the practical aspect of it that makes people feel that way?

Rob Buffington: 5:00

I think radical transparency is one of the things that I do. and I don't know that's a conscious business decision as me, as much as me just not having a filter and just, I just say stuff. but I've always viewed it as people need to know what's going on. they need to know the why. They need to know what we're doing and why we're doing it. So it's not just, I need to fill more positions, or I need more bookkeepers. I need to, it's, here's the stepping stone. I actually just got back, 36 hours ago from our executive retreat where the leaders of the divisions came together and we talked about our three year plan. And this is why we're taking on new projects and we've acquired companies that maybe don't make sense in the short term, but looking at the three to five year plan, it's oh, that's where it's gonna come into play. So I'd say radical transparency is definitely a, one of the things we do that's effective.

Isar Meitis: 5:54

So let's take that to the very practical level. How is that translated to the day-to-day? What do you do with employees? First of all, obviously like your leadership, but then down, trickling down the different levels of the companies. How do you make sure that people really know what's going on and why it's going on?

Rob Buffington: 6:15

Again, as I said to the first question, I'm not sure that I'm the paragon for this. I'll tell you what I do, but I'm certainly not pretending to be an expert. the first thing I'd say is time. Especially being a remote company, it, you can go weeks without having meaningful conversations with people. So I try to, we have regular meetings based on position and division. Tuesday and Friday we have our operations call with the these people. I have one-on-ones on a biweekly basis with my direct reports and people that I'm grooming for a higher position. We try to have state of the company meetings on a, at least a quarterly basis, if not more often. So I'd say time is definitely part of it. We encourage, we have virtual socials on a monthly basis. There's something, particularly with remote work, which we'll get into later. I'm sure remote work makes it difficult to have what I call the water cooler effect. Yeah. An amazing amount of productivity and new ideas at a business comes from those impromptu conversations as you pass in the hall or you meet at the water cooler of the cafeteria. So I think virtual socials and things like that can help foster that, as well as just having open and direct conversation. A, any person in my company is welcome to email me and or message me and even say, Hey, you, that's a terrible idea. Or I think this is Stu, I want devastatingly transparent feedback. And that gets harder the bigger you get. People don't always take you at your word, but we try to reward it and just say, Hey, thank you for bringing this to me. let's have conversation and see where we

Isar Meitis: 7:50

go. Okay. So if I summarize this, first of all, it's having regular meetings with the right people, and I assume make sure that they're having the regular meetings with the people under them and so on. Yeah. to report things. And the other is really to create, almost force a more open casual atmosphere where people Quote unquote, casually meet with each other. Yeah. In order to generate those conversations that get people to talk about ideas and give feedback and so on. Yeah.

Rob Buffington: 8:21

the whole model, the whole psychology of a business organization has changed, drastically. It used to be trickle down, the ideas come from the managers and the top and all that, and they filter their way down. Now, you need both, don't get me wrong, but I believe that the people closest to the problem can have the best perspective you need outside perspective, you know you need both, but you have to listen to the people that are actually out there on the front lines dealing with the problems. So for example, the retreat that I just came back from, most of what we did during those three days was simply a half an hour or an hour block. People from the different departments, even if their department wasn't specifically involved, but we would take a topic and go employee feedback, how can we get our clients to give their team members better feedback? And everybody would just give their opinion. And it was just, some, it was very productive. Sometimes people would get defensive, sometimes people, So it, it got confrontational and it was great because we had five different perspectives going at the same problem. And we walked out with a solution and everybody understood the other person's, position better. Even if they didn't agree with it, at least they understood. That's why they're thinking they understood the other side better and that was the purpose of it.

Isar Meitis: 9:42

so I would add to what I said before, foster conversations, right? If you can grab a topic that is important to the growth of the company and involve people from different departments, from different ranks in the business, you will probably solve the problem. And obviously you gotta frame it, otherwise it could be our conversation go anywhere. but if you frame it correctly, you will get all the right aspects. And I love what you said, the people are closest to the problem. I dunno if they're always come up with the best solution. They're always gonna be the people 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 something come up that I literally didn't even know existed, and it was a five minute conversation, but if I wasn't talking to people a couple 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 through three levels, four levels of communication, you have attenuation of signal.

Isar Meitis: 10:41

Yeah. I wanna add something that we did 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 we had, several hundreds of employees across the entire globe and we gave a hundred percent of them. So every single employee. Had access to our full data system. And the full data system had literally everything, every transaction, every search, every sale that happened, every margin, every piece of data you can imagine broken down into, I don't know, 150 different dashboards that could give you information on different things that's going on. And some people saw that as insane. You're like, okay, you're giving your last field person that you hired yesterday access to the vault. yes. Because that will help them do their job better because they have access to all the data. And I think that goes back to your point of like complete transparency gives employees the, a understanding of what's going on in the business better. And they understand nobody's trying to trick them into doing something, but this is really what's going on. And b, gives them better tools to 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 say that they're smarter, they're absolutely better educated, and they grew up in an age where the SumTotal of human knowledge is available in their, remember, you remember, you're not always gonna have a calculator on your pocket, really. It's yes, we will. So this generation grew up with a drastically different perspective on how to process and how to find new information. They grew up not remembering. They grew up researching. And so they, you completely different, some better, some worse, but that's why you involve 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 guy called Christopher Lockhead. He's the, one of the authors of Play Bigger and Consider the grandfather or of the Godfather, if you want, of category design. And he talks recently a lot about maybe the biggest shift in, creation and destroying valuation in the next few years will be from the generationally leap from native analogs to native digitals. And he's saying the world is now a digital world, but people like me, dinosaurs, who still, I'm a huge techie. I'm a huge fan of tech. I play with tech toys all the time. I try new tools all the time. I'm still a native analog. Yeah. We were born to it. I live in an analog world that enjoys heck extensions, who People for people who are born with cell phones and internet in their hands. There is no analog in digital world. There's a world. It has both these aspects equally as important, and to some of them, the digital side is even more important than what I would call the real world, and they would call the physical world, but it's part of the world and they know how to operate in that world in a much better way than I ever will. And I'm way on that far end of the scale of a digital analog that is very techy and digital. Sorry. Yeah. Like a native analog that is very digital. I'm not the norm. The norm is very far from that. And so involving these people in any 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 language for 20 years. Yep. You'll never be as comfortable. Maybe you can communicate as well, but it's not the

Isar Meitis: 14:30

same. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I wanna take it again to the very practical level. So when you start, you said, we talked a little bit about hiring. We talked a little about people in different positions. How do you help people understand exactly, and I'm talking now about the accountability side. What's the role, what they need to do, what they need to achieve. So you can even then have those conversations 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 can be assigned in numerical value, that can be tracked over time for positive and negative changes. Too many people, I'm very heavy, obviously I'm in staffing. The staffing largely is focused on real estate, property management, things like that. And I like to say that the main metric most companies have in the property management space is how many people yelled at us today. And that's the only thing that they're tracking most of the time cuz they get yelled at a lot. And what metrics give you is I'll, I like to say metrics don't tell you what the problem is. They do not, but they tell you where to look. So the story I like to give is, when I first implemented metrics, probably 10 years ago at my company, one of the, we started with just a handful and we'll go into that later, but one of them was missed call percentage. And we had people say, oh, nobody ever called me back, blah, blah, blah. And we brushed it off cuz we had two people. We knew that was enough and we just brushed it off. Cause people exaggerate. They like to raise a fuss and these weren't the most stable of people. But long story short, we started tracking missed call percentage and it was 32%. Wow. and I said that's impossible. We have two people answering phones. We're a small company, like something is wrong. Long story short, come to find out that a previous person who had left, somehow her extension was still in the round robin. And so a third of the calls went into this black hole. Yeah. Without key objective data, I could, I would, it would've been years of missing a third of the call. Alls it took five minutes. it just, as soon as I found out what the problem was, oh, just reroute this. But without that data, the next week it was like 8% and then very quickly dropped to under 5% and stayed there permanently. But without that data, I never would've known to look. Now did it tell me, Hey, you forgot to do this. No, but it took the whole world of problems down to this little area and it just took a very quick, deep dive to find out what the problem was and solve it permanently.

Isar Meitis: 17:17

I like that. I'll give an example from my side as well, that again helps you see situations. And in this case, it wasn't even a problem. I found out there's a problem through looking at a very positive situation. But I was running a sales call center. and in the sales call center, the best employee was, he was really an awesome salesperson and he sold more, we were selling travel solutions, and he sold more travel vacations than anybody else on the floor with a big spread. Like he wasn't even close, like he was number one. And then people were competing for number two. And obviously that comes with, better shifts and it comes with, better pay and it comes with bonuses and it comes with different perks because he was the best salesperson. But then we started tracking other stuff other than just, how much you sold and so on. And one of the things we started tracking is conversion, like how many calls you actually convert. And he was one of the worst Yeah. Converting agents. And I'm like, okay, how can that be? So then we started tracking how many calls people take. And if the average person would take, I may be making the numbers up, but I think they're roughly correct. 250 calls a week, he would take 750 calls a week. Okay? Yep. Because what he did is okay, I don'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's gonna be either a tough sell or he is not gonna make enough money, he threw it out. Now, the other agent, so he was converting at like 20%. The average agent was converting at 35 to 40%, meaning he threw away half of the company's potential revenue, right? To make more money for himself. Now, this was my doing because I incentivized selling more stuff in a way. So my incentives created the situation, but without tracking additional things. Yeah. There is no way I would've identified that my best salesperson is actually damaging the revenue of the company.

Rob Buffington: 19:14

Yeah. You have to balance the metrics because they can, any statistics can be skewed if you cherry pick them in any field. And so for example, perfect example on the customer service side, you can have, average call time is a very common metric. Yeah. You want that number as low as possible, but unless you're balancing it with customer satisfaction and first call resolution, we've all had the call center that we called in and we just need this fixed and they get us off the phone. Yeah. And so you have to call again and again. So maybe it's a five minute call instead 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 customer as opposed to 10 minutes on the first call. So you have to balance your metrics or you'll have people jumping through hoops to meet the metrics through the

Isar Meitis: 20:08

detriment of the company. So let me ask you a question. I think this is a great conversation. I think it's extremely valuable for anybody who's managing people want to track them. How do you define, how do you pick the right KPIs to track per, not per person, but per role? Like how do you know what are the most important things you need to track? Because you and I just gave a few examples, oh, I can track a few things, but then if I don't balance them with some other things, I'm gonna lead to the wrong outcome.

Rob Buffington: 20:35

Yeah. It's always a moving target. The list should be getting longer and longer as you go. You should have, it's kinda like a general ledger versus a P&L. You can look at the general ledger and see every transaction ever, but it's basically worth, it's worthless unless you need to do a deep dive and find out something. Most of the time you're looking at the P&L. So I always tell people, start with five. Just start with five because it's working a new muscle group. And if you tell yourself you're gonna attract 50, it's like a New Year's resolution. You're not gonna do it. So pick the five most important one and you have to identify what's important to your company. So let's stick in my wheelhouse property management. So it could be average email response time, missed call percentage, percent delinquency because cash flow is important. Sales conversion. And number of open work orders let's say. If it was for a customer service department, you would say missed call percentage. I'm big on responsiveness, missed call percentage, first call resolution, net promoter score, customer satisfaction score, and upselling sales conversion fill in the blank. So it really depends on, number one, what is important to your company and where are your pain points. So for example, if you're struggling with something, that's where you wanna start because it'll tell you where to look. So it'll come down to the position and always pepper it with some common sense numbers. Again, they don't take the personal 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 example because I think that's gonna make it interesting. What do you track your leadership team on? Because what you just said is more on the, lower level employees that do the day-to-day stuff. What are the KPIs that are more strategic I would say that you track your leadership team on a regular basis.

Rob Buffington: 22:39

The trick with the leadership team is you have to align them with the company's values or you're gonna have the same thing. for example, I rarely give division based bonuses. I give corporate, I give profit share. How did the company as a whole do? Because for example, a salesperson can land everything under the sun, but if they've lowered the prices and they're poor quality customers that take a lot of time, then that doesn't help the company. So the beauty of it is you can align the interests. So for example, our sales commission structure is usually based on profitability rather than gross revenue or volume. I take a look at, so let's take recruiting for example. I will take a look at the kpi, p i of the people under them and see how we can do that. So what is the purpose of a leader? It's to make the people under them, equip them with better tools, encourage them to go above and beyond, make that operation run better. Better employee retention, better employee engagement, all of that. So for a recruiting supervisor for example, it would be the same things that a recruiter has number of positions filled, average fill time over on the HR side. You might have retention, engagement, et cetera. And then you could look at metrics for their sub employees of how long have they been with the company? Number of times called off, employee attendance, things like that. And then you can also add in some financial metrics, profitability. So for example, retention is both HR and recruiting based, because recruiters can be just like the salespeople we talked about, just cuz they push somebody past the interview doesn't mean they're gonna work for a year. So if a recruiter and particularly a recruiting supervisor is tracked and incentivized for the long-term benefit, they're more likely to be cautious with the candidates, which is, and which is the way it should be. so you want some of it to be the positions under them as a whole and some of it to be corporate as a whole, because they're responsible for their part in everything. It helps align the interest of the division to the whole.

Isar Meitis: 24:54

Great answer. I think having a good balance of, in, in the leadership tracking between strategy, so company strategy, and you are in charge of the results of the people under you, both the people and the results. So both aspects of it, that's what you're in charge of. And putting it all together, I think something that we're both saying several times and I would love to hear your thoughts on that because you, we both touched on it, is the incentive side of things. At the end of the day, people. Will do better job because of two things. One, and you touched on that as well, if they believe in what you do if they believe that this is the right thing to do, that you're helping somebody somehow with the company's goals, with the company's core values, with the company's, mission statement. That's one thing that helps. And the other thing is what are they particularly incentivized to do? Because at the end of the day, yes, people come to work to be fulfilled, but they also come to work to pay the bills and have enough money to go on vacation when they want to. And so it's always a mix of these two things. How do you put the right incentive packages in place? What do you incentivize and how do you incentivize people, I think is a very important question. And I think you have a good way to 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 just wanna take a minute on that. Again, we've talked about the different generations and what they want and what's important to 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 analog digital. Here's something that's rarely talked about. When a millennial believes in your company, truly believes not as happy, not, hasn't left yet, but when they believe in what you're doing, they will become your biggest brand ambassadors. They will bleed for your company. They will talk about it to their friends. We have the most potential in this generation because again, they have the best tools to deal with this new world that we're coming into. So if they truly believe beyond just, this is a well paying job, but if they believe in the values and the direction and what you're doing, they will be your passionate representatives. So that's part one. And I think that mean, that can mean just as much as the incentive because some people are mercenary and hey, that's fine. We've got some people that they just, I want the money. Give me the money. Okay, let's do it. The majority of people, and those people can always be offered something better. They can always be offered 10% more and they'll jump. The people that truly believe those are your lifers. And like I said, I like lifers. I want people that, people move. I get it. I'm not thinking that most of these people won't take another job, but I like to think that they could be. So incentivizing needs to be both value-based and, pardon the pun, but value based. The advantage of these metrics is that they can help you develop a formula for how to incentivize people. And the more that you can be transparent about why it works this way, the better. So let's stick with the recruiting example cuz we just recently went over the bonus structure for it. obviously they want the number of positions filled is gonna be important, but like we just talked about, there also needs to be a component that relates to how long do those people stay? Because a recruiter can, again, they can force people through an interview. They can coach them on what to say, they can get them higher, but if there's also an incentive to make them stay for a couple of years, that, that aligns their interests with the companies. So you have to have different versions. and the best thing to do is be transparent with the data and let them know this is why you're getting it. It's 20% this, it's 10% this, et cetera. Because this generation grew up with what we call gamified, rewards. Everything they do, whether it's, farm, I honestly don't know what they're playing today. I'm a bad example, but Farmville or whatever it is, they're all gamified. Robinhood perfect example, has grown 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 anybody that'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 you get the little notifications, like that is not why you trade stocks. But that's a rabbit hole. But perfect example. They grew because they harnessed this new generation and they gamified the process. You get a free stock and you get, you get this many points and all this stuff because it increases their revenue. but they did it successfully. And whether it's a good thing or not, they succeeded. And so you need to do the same thing. You need to have, you can have competitions. I'm not the world's biggest fan of competitions. I like to have it against your previous record and incentivizing and you today versus you a year ago. But you can have competitions, you can have, referral contests. You can have, you, you can be creative, but the more that you let people see the rewards and understand how they can determine it and know ahead of time, the better. People like to not be surprised. They like to know what's coming. Yeah.

Isar Meitis: 30:28

I want to go back to the example I gave before with the call center and the salespeople. We change the plan all the time. And I love the fact you said, oh yeah, it's always a moving target, right? we changed the incentive plan several times every year because we started to understand that, okay, we can gain more here, we can be better at that. And the, we found out that the best 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 different calls and we did these simulations. So in the new plan, if you do this 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 the plan works. The other thing that I found that works very well in the incentive side, it's not always money. Different people want different things. 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 work from home days. One of the favorites, which I always found funny, but I gladly did it, was dinner with me. So once a quarter we did dinner with, the head of the division and there was only, I think eight seats and there were, I don't know, 50 people in the call center. So everybody wanted to be one of those eight people that goes to dinner. And I'm like, okay, it's one dinner in a quarter. Yeah. It's not a big deal. But people really wanted that and people could pick, different, bonuses that you could, that they could play for if you want. and it worked very well because then you give people something they want and you allow them to be more flexible with what they're getting for basically doing what's best for the company. Because that's the whole point of incentives. Yeah.

Rob Buffington: 32:06

Incentives should be. win. The better you do, the better the company does, the better you do. It should not be punitive, do this or else this. Yeah.

Isar Meitis: 32:17

I gotta ask you a very practical question because we're giving a lot of examples of, 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 together this whole thing in a way that like, oh, here's what Joe, and here's what Jenna did this past week, aligned with what we said. Yeah, they will do last month.

Rob Buffington: 32:40

great question. you may not like my answer, but here 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 I think eventually it will generate a lot of these, but the honest no BS answer is for the last five years, most metrics have just been, we go in, we pull the report and somebody types it into a spreadsheet, and every week we compare it and it works. I'm a big believer that if you start simple and build up, it's perfectly fine. What happens is people will invest three months into a one-stop solution that's gonna give you a hundred metrics at a, at your fingertips, and by the time it gets rolled out, they're onto the next project. It's better to pick, like I said, start with five things, get an Excel spreadsheet or a Google sheet or something in SharePoint that you share with your key people and just have somebody log in and record it. Because once you do that, you'll start to see the value. And again, it's gamification. You have a dashboard, you can see what your company is doing, and you can make it pretty, you can use charts and graphs and all that. and you should, I have an advisory board that I meet with quarterly, and I have, I'm, I make the data look a little bit better, but at the end of the day, most of what I'm playing with is in Excel. Because you know what? In Excel, there are so many functions I can use. Give me the average of this timeframe. Help me see the pr, pro progression of the, it's so much easier because it's close to raw data, but it's not, unworkable. It's a profit and loss, not a GL for that analogy. So that, personally, that's what I like. I will say a lot of the, a lot of the software we use gives us the metrics. So for example, average email response time. I don't need to go to every email and look at when it came in and when it went out. But we take that data and then we 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 percent of it without anybody has to actually log in data. It will go and pick up the data from the different sources and plug it into, like you said, the Excel or Google sheets or whatever other, database user friendly tool you want to use. And you can start tomorrow. And I think that's the biggest benefit because people can analyze the software or they don't afford the software or they don't have the time to implement the software. Everybody knows Google Sheets or Excel, and you can gain Huge benefits from using just that out of the box. And like I said, start simple. Start with a few parameters Yeah. For every single person. Have it as automated as possible with tools like Zapier and stuff like it. and you can get a very good working 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 each department who takes half an hour a week to update the metrics sheet. It is very straightforward, and as you said, if you wanna get fancy, you can use Zapier and Web Merge and all that. some things you can have them email you automatically, like I get a phone log sent weekly with the data so that I don't have to go in and do it. it just simplifies. So there are levels of progression, but I would say it's more important that you get the data than how you get it.

Isar Meitis: 36:05

Makes sense. I wanna take you to the next step. So now you have, we've identified the key metrics for employee and we've identified the how to track it and where to track it. What do you do with the data and how frequently? So how frequently do you look at your employees data? How frequently do your leaders look at their employees data and what do they do? what kind of feedback mechanism is 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 gonna be weekly. I have a building services company. We have, gross revenue divided by 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 or monthly. But then some reports are only analyzed on a quarterly basis. But what we do is we track it on a weekly and quarterly basis, and then we aggregate the data. In terms of feedback, it goes back to gamification. As weird as it is, people really want the data and they don't want it. annual reviews, I've said for a long time, annual reviews are dead. If you're not doing quarterly or more often, your people are gonna feel disconnected and they're gonna drift. so giving them access, and again, you have to decide what information and how they get it and all that, but letting them at any point check in and see, oh, this was my progress for last week. Interesting, cuz are you familiar with the Dunning Kruger effect? No. Dunning Kru. Basically the people that are most confident are usually the least experienced or least not intelligent, but have the least reason to feel confident. Yeah. Basically, the more experienced you get, the less confident you get at stuff. And I'm probably butchering the numbers, but I wanna say something like, at a survey they did, when they were researching this, it was 50% of people at a company surveyed identified themselves in the top 5% of employees. Yeah. And so the problem is most people, Not inflated self-worth, but they're not always realistic about their progress. And so bringing it down to objective data helps them identify what to look for. The same way that company leaders need to know where to focus to improve things, employees need to have something to track it with. And again, it should be against where they were yesterday. It shouldn't, depending on the situation, but you shouldn't try to embarrass them or, oh, Neil is better than that. That's not what it's for. But if they can see on a weekly basis that, Hey, my missed call percentage is going down, or my response time is skyrocketing, then they have that objective data that even though they feel like they gave it their best, the results don't show that. And they should feel free to say, Hey, I think this data is wrong. It doesn't take into account that I spent eight hours with our biggest client trying to salvage the account or whatever. It never replaces common sense, but it gives them raw data in a gamified way that, Hey, I'm doing better, I'm doing worse. They know exactly how they're doing.And on some level they want that. It makes them feel more secure and that there's a structure in place. They're not just at people's wins.

Isar Meitis: 39:36

So you're saying on the individual employee level, at the task level, if you want theories, regular feedback because they have access to reports and data that they see all the time. And on aggregated data, depending on the data, there's either weekly meetings or monthly meetings or quarterly meetings to go and review the different 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 for the company. It would be what is our gross revenue divided by our payroll hours, how much percentage of overtime did we have? what was the average rollout time? What was the attendance rate, what was the gross margin on the job? those kinda things. But then there's also weekly reports. That specific people have access to different facets of that. They can log in at any time and say, last week sucked. what? What's up? And they can look at it and go, oh, yeah, got it. But it can also help people identify much quicker, like problem clients, for example. I guarantee you anybody listening to this, you have one client that you're spending way too much time on that is not worth the revenue or the margin. And you don't know it because you'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, based on all the reports that we had, and just like you, we were tracking more or less everything that we could was making it actionable, meaning it's It's one thing to look at a report and to figure it out. It's another thing to. Already take the report and turn the report into something that is actionable. I'll give you a great example. We were, let's say, it doesn't matter which business you are, you have 10 different suppliers for the same thing, and you wanna always buy from the best one at the right time at the right rate. And how do you do that? How do you know which suppliers sell to you at better rates at any given point? Or how do you know that this supplier is sending to you at$200 into somebody else at 180? And that means if you're bigger than them, you should buy it for one 70. And we had a system that did all of that for the employees, so they didn't have to go and dig in and try to figure out the numbers themselves. So the next level in the evolution of having data is to take the data that's in the system and make it actionable, like actually defined. So when an employee logs into his system in the morning, he has three things he needs to do based on data that the system provided to him based on results of what happened yesterday or the week before. And. Today with the availability of AI analysis capabilities, it became almost a crime not to do this because you can overlay some kind of a AI tool on top of the data you already have and query that and get action items as a response. I'm sure there's already, and I don't know a specific one, but I'm sure there's already tools that do it for almost any database out there, just because it became so readily available in the last few months. And so look for these things, looks for a way to take the data and make it actionable. The other thing that I want to touch on that is related to this is to not just make the data available to employees, but educate them. So in many cases, when you do a, especially when you do like a company wide, and I dunno how frequently you do that, but when you do like a state of the company kind of talk, some people are not at the level, they understand a p and l because they've never seen a p and l before. And so doing some kind of an educational process. And that was just one example. That's something that I used to do. So every quarter I would share the p and l with the whole company and I would actually go and explain it as if it's, and some people's okay, I know what a P N L is. But for a lot of people, that was awesome. People would come to me after that. Great. This was the best explanation I've ever run. I ever got to, where is the company right now, financially. So I think these two things of taking the data is making it more practical for more people is another great way to take this in, to take this concept forward.

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 a handle on it.

Isar Meitis: 43:53

Rob, last question before I let you go, because I know you had a really crazy week. how do you know, as the leader of all of this, that all these things that you're doing are actually leading to the business goals. How do you connect the dots you from your seat? Because that's why we do all of this, right? We do all of this, right? So the company as a whole do better. How do you know what stuff is like, oh my God, why the hell are we tracking this thing? It's just a waste of time versus This is go, what's going to lead us to, I'll go back to what you said, be a better company in three to five

Rob Buffington: 44:29

years. There's no such thing as bad data, in my opinion. there's inaccurate data, but there's, the more you can track, the more efficient you are because it may not even be something you need now, but a year from now, you may need to audit and go back and it tells a story. it can even tell you when employees are having personal issues. Cuz we've had employees that like, man, they're stellar. And then just boom. So let's check. Hey, how you doing? You need, like, how's things going? What, what's up? not trying to penalize them, not trying to, just, do they need help? Are they okay? Is there something going on in their lives we should be aware of? So that's part of it. Tho the important numbers will change over time. There are a lot of reports that I used to pay a lot of attention to that. Now they've become so rote that I only look, I actually tell people, highlight if it's outside of this range. Otherwise I'm not even gonna look at it. Yeah. Because I trust the people under me that they're just, they've done this long enough. If something is above, this number or below this number, that's a red flag. Let's dive in. But otherwise it's good. If anything, it can tell you where you don't have to look. Yeah. So it can save you time by having too much data. And that's the thing, if you have an, if you start tracking, it's gonna be useless. It's gonna take a month to figure out, except like in my instance, the 32% missed call percentage. But if you start tracking for a year and somebody new comes in and it's their first week and they say, oh, we got first call resolution of 83%, is that good or bad? Okay, here's a year's worth of data. Yeah. On first call resolution, average res and data that you've never used before can save time in the future. So in my opinion, there is, there's very little useless data. Awesome. And as you said, with AI and automation, it's becoming easier and easier to get that data Agreed.

Isar Meitis: 46:32

Rob, this was really great. I think we touched on a lot of really 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, or you can follow me on LinkedIn. Rob Buffington, I'm available on there 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.