People First

What do you need to look for when you are considering outsourcing your bookkeeping? I would say the first thing is you want to make sure that that organization or the organizations you’re looking at, you want to get references. You want to find out, you know, how many clients they have. You want to...

The first thing that comes to mind is artificial intelligence. AI is just, I was introduced to it very recently. And it has really saved me a lot of time. And so we need to be careful with it. But used correctly, it is a huge time saver and can help you. While you’re thinking...

Ethics are the most important thing to me. I want to be able to sleep at night. So my feeling on that and my belief on that is that, always approach things as if, how do I want to be? How would I want to be treated? And treat your employees that way. Ethically, if...

We need to adapt to our employees. Okay. That’s my opinion. I mean, you could talk to 10 people and maybe nine of them are going to disagree with me, but I feel that if you adapt to what your needs of your employees are, again, back to the goals, as long as you adapt...

Well, the first thing is you need to understand, understand all the different generations and what their expectations are, what their needs are. And then it becomes a difficult task to have policies in place and how you manage people when you’re dealing with those, the multi-generations. So that becomes an individual thing. I guess...

So balancing work-life balance and strong customer service doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive. Again, it’s in determining what everybody’s role is, making sure that the workload is not such that creates number one, if somebody is stressed and has been given deadlines and goals that go way beyond the hours that it takes to...

You don’t want to have these goals and then just tell employees this is what I need you to do and they don’t understand why they’re doing those things. If they understand this is our financial goal and I do that every quarter, this is our quarterly goal, this is where we need to be,...

Balancing structure and flexibility is really important because I guess from my perspective, I am not a micromanager. I want my people to be educated and have the knowledge and the skills to be able to do their job. I want to then give them their tasks and then I want them to be able...

A CFO saying, “you know, what if we train them and they leave?” And the CEO came back, “what if we didn’t train them and they stay?” That leads me to someone years ago that I worked with who said, “I would love to have an individual put on their resume that they worked for...

Training employees is critical and you want them, you don’t want them to fall into a rut because to be honest, when someone is in a rut like that, that’s when mistakes happen. You want to constantly be challenging their mind so that they’re always seeing new opportunities, new ways to do things, new technology,...