Talent acquisition and management is a constant challenge for any organization. Of particular concern is keeping the employees you’ve spent so much time, money, and energy recruiting and training ...
Talent acquisition and management is a constant challenge for any organization. Of particular concern is keeping the employees you’ve spent so much time, money, and energy recruiting and training with your company. Employee churn, employee turnover, employee attrition—whatever you call it, losing an employee you’ve spent time and other resources on building up to be part of your organization can hurt your bottom line. What is employee churn rate? What is the cost of employee turnover? How can you prevent employees from leaving? What is employee churn rate? A company’s employee churn rate is a measure of how many employees leave the company in a given period of time. This metric is often expressed as a percentage. For example, if a company has 150 employees, and 15 of them leave in a month, the employee churn rate would be 10% for that month. One of the challenges of dealing with employee turnover is that it can be variable by industry and job role. Some jobs, like working in a call center, have numerous stress factors that contribute to employee churn. The hidden costs of employee churn What is the cost of employee churn? The answer varies depending on the employee in question and other factors. Studies cited by organizations like Peoplekeep “predict that every time a business replaces a salaried employee, it costs 6 to 9 months’ salary on average.” In other words, if an employee making $90k a year decides to quit, it could cost between $45k and $60k to replace them. While the “6 to 9 months’ salary” figure might seem a little high at first glance, there are numerous costs associated with replacing an employee. In fact, for some roles, the potential impact of the hidden costs of high employee churn could be even more dramatic. Aside from direct costs like marketing a job opening, onboarding the new employee, and providing training (and pay during said training), there are also hidden costs to consider, like: Lost productivity. Unfortunately, an employee’s departure doesn’t make all of the work they were responsible for go away. In many cases, the loss of an employee, especially one with hard-to-replace skills, means a significant loss of productivity. If an employee is the only person in the organization with a particular skill or knowledge set, then all of the work they were responsible for may grind to a halt until a suitable replacement is found. Even if there are other people with similar skills, taking on the workload of a missing employee on top of their own will still result in delays. This lost productivity can have a direct negative impact on your bottom line. Lost customers. For some employees and job roles (such as sales), losing the employee could mean losing access to their list of clients or the relationships that they had built up with customers. Even with a no-compete clause, there’s always the risk of customers leaving if their preferred team members leave the company. Additionally, a new hire might make mistakes that the old employee would not have—souring the customer experience and costing the company business. Negative workplace culture. One of the potential impacts of a high employee churn rate is that it could create a hostile workplace culture—one that can impact both productivity and worker health. As noted by Quartz, “Studies find that workers who fear being laid off are less safety-conscious, more likely to get injured, and less likely to report injuries.” Employees who have issues with job insecurity (from frequent layoffs, poorly-structured stacked ranking systems, and other issues) are also more likely to engage in reckless or questionable behaviors that cause problems for the organization. High churn rates can contribute to a hostile work environment that leaves employees feeling disengaged and makes people even more likely to quit. Where the direct costs of employee turnover, such as training, marketing open positions, and onboarding employees are relatively easy to calculate, the hidden costs can be more difficult to prove without really good analytics and data. For example, one way to estimate lost productivity would be to compare the new hire’s performance against key performance indicator (KPI) benchmarks set by their predecessor. This could provide a rough idea of the lost productivity caused by the loss of the original employee. A KPI tracking tool would be ideal for this. 6 ways to avoid the costs of employee churn So, how can you avoid the costs of high employee churn? Here are a few ideas: 1. Look for common issues that may cause employee churn. The most direct way to prevent the cost of high employee turnover is to prevent said turnover in the first place. A good starting point for this process is to try to identify common factors between each of the employees that left the company. For example, did the majority of them work in the same department or have the same direct report? Were they putting in a large amount of overtime? Were their KPI goals specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely? If many ex-employees have something in common, then that thing could be the cause of the high turnover rate. By identifying such issues, you can take steps to resolve them and (hopefully) prevent future employee attrition. 2. Check out what other companies in your industry are doing. What are your competitors doing to keep their employees? Are they doing anything to retain their top talents? You can check what others in your industry are doing to keep their best people then use that information to one-up them—either by offering an improved version of the same benefits or by covering gaps that they don’t address. This can help motivate employees to stay with your company. 3. Weed out the “bad eggs” fast. It may sound counterintuitive, but being able to quickly fire a bad employee can be crucial for reducing overall employee churn. Why? As noted in an article feature on Inc.com, “if someone is not carrying their weight without consequence it sends a negative message to the other employees.” Bad employees can negatively impact your corporate culture and lead to more widespread disengagement. If an employee is actively malicious towards their coworkers, then they may make good employees leave. Plus, by eliminating bad fit workers quickly, you can minimize the disruption and resource waste they cause by leaving. 4. Offer opportunities for employees to change roles or advance. One way to keep employees (and attract high-quality talent) is to focus on providing career development opportunities. Basically, this means offering to help employees learn new job skills so they can be promoted or move laterally into a new role if they want to try something different. This can help to keep employees motivated and engaged with their work. Additionally, it can reduce churn by giving employees who would otherwise leave to discover new career opportunities a chance to try something new without having to change employers. 5. Revise your recruitment and onboarding processes. How does your organization currently handle attracting new employees and getting them up to speed? Are there issues in the onboarding or recruitment process that might be giving potential hires the wrong impression about the work? Are the people being attracted through your current recruitment efforts a good fit for your company’s culture? Reviewing your current recruitment and onboarding process to make sure that it helps set the right expectations of new hires (and attracts the right people) can be critical for reducing employee turnover in the long run. After all, if you hire someone and their expectation is to work 9 to 5 as a software developer, but is expected to work 8 to 6 and do copywriting, graphic design, and business process optimization, they may quit in frustration if they weren’t prepared for the actual expectations of the job. 6. Provide ample recognition for major accomplishments It can be frustrating for employees to work hard to accomplish things, only to not receive any recognition or rewards when their efforts go above and beyond what’s expected of them. Employees who routinely exceed their goals may stop trying so hard after weeks, months, or years of not getting recognition for their results. Being able to track what employees are doing and rewarding those who exceed expectations can be an effective way to increase engagement and retain top talents—and saying “thank you” to a hard-working employee doesn’t cost a thing! This is why providing recognition is a goal management best practice. Are you ready to reduce your employee churn rate with BrightGauge? What does BrightGauge have to do with reducing employee churn in your organization? Using goal setting and management tools like BrightGauge can play a key role in your employee recognition and retention efforts! By using a KPI dashboard and tracking tool, you can easily monitor which employees are going the extra mile to deliver results. This, in turn, makes it easy to provide recognition for people who are generating genuine results. Additionally, by tracking KPIs for everyone in a given job role and taking a close look at the results, you can more easily identify goals that need revision. For example, if 98% of all sales reps in your organization are failing to meet a goal like “close 25 deals worth $10k each in a week,” then you might need to revisit that goal and make it more realistic. On the other hand, if everyone is meeting that goal with room to spare, then you might need to make it more aggressive. By accurately documenting real performance and process metrics with BrightGauge, you can show employees where they need to improve in greater detail. This can help with your performance improvement plan (PIP) creation so you can improve productivity without having to onboard a new employee from scratch. Are you ready to step up your employee retention and performance management? Reach out to the BrightGauge team today!
It’s important to have goals—both in life and in business. Goals give people something to strive for so they can exert their maximum effort and achieve success. Countless organizational management books stress the importance of goal management—the art of setting goals that encourage people to maximize outcomes for the business. But, which goals should your business track? What are the three types of goals that you should be tracking? And, how can you make tracking employee goals and business goals easy? What are the three types of goals? Business goals can generally be sorted into three different categories: Process Goals. These goals define processes that should be followed to encourage quality outcomes. These goals typically focus on doing something rather than achieving an end result. Process goals are (barring outside interference) usually considered wholly under the employee’s control to meet. Performance Goals. These goals define a standard that should be met or achieved. These goals are used to set benchmarks that employees or teams need to meet and are mostly under their control. Outcome Goals. A strategic type of goal that defines an ultimate outcome with a clear pass/fail condition. These goals typically require the efforts of many people to meet, so they’re not under any one person or team’s sole control—one team/employee could do everything right, only for the shortcomings of others to cause them to fall short of the mark. All of these business goal types are important. However, many organizations get so mired in their immediate process and performance goals that they neglect their more strategic outcome goals. Why you should establish a goal setting system to accomplish business goals: Every business should have a goal setting system. Why? Here are a few reasons. Setting Business Goals Creates Alignment. Getting all of the “moving parts” in an organization aligned is crucial for success. Setting outcome goals that define what your company considers “winning” helps get everyone in the proverbial boat rowing in the same direction. Setting Business Goals Helps with Long-Term Planning. “Where do you see yourself in five years?” This isn’t just a question for new hires—it’s a critical question that businesses need to answer as well. As noted in an article featured on Inc., “When your goals have been defined, you can develop a deeper understanding of the effects of tactical decisions and how they play against [your] strategic goals.” Setting Business Goals Facilitates Accountability. Who is responsible for the success of an initiative? How does each person contribute to achieving a specific business outcome? Setting goals helps organizations track how people contribute to their success—increasing accountability and enabling appropriate reward systems that encourage further productivity. However, it’s important to make sure that employees are only held accountable for meeting the goals that they can directly control the outcomes of (such as process and performance goals). Setting process goals vs outcome goals Let’s use a hypothetical example of two new start-up companies in the same industry to highlight the importance of setting long-term outcome goals versus just focusing on process goals. Both of these organizations have similar budgets, products, services, and team sizes—the only major difference is in their approach to setting goals. Company A. This company focuses solely on process goals for its employee goals. Instead of having an idea of what they’re working towards, each employee focuses solely on getting tasks done. Once finished, no further effort is put into achieving strategic goals. Company B. This company adds performance and outcome goals and makes its employees aware of their progress using goal setting frameworks and reporting tools. Each employee has an idea of what success looks like not just for themselves, but for the company as a whole. They also know what criteria contributes to their personal success and the company’s success—enabling them to focus more effort on the things that matter. In this hypothetical example, which company do you think will do a better job of achieving long-term success? Odds are that it’s Company B. Why? Because, as the BrightGauge team has seen from real clients, companies that set and track goals for outcomes as well as processes and performance tend to outperform their competitors. Remember this: goal management isn’t an either/or proposition. Every kind of goal—process, performance, and outcome—is important to your company. Just setting one type of business goal won’t produce the right results! Best practices for tracking outcome goals It isn’t enough to simply create a big, aggressive outcome goal and call it a day. To make that goal mean something, you need to be able to track it! And, you need to track it in the right way. Here are a few best practices for tracking outcome goals: Examine Other Companies’ Outcome Goal Examples. How do you know if an outcome goal you’re tracking is the right one for your company? One way is to examine what kinds of long-term goals other successful organizations in your industry are using. You can often find long-term goals or plans listed right on a competitor’s website or in their social media. Leaders from these businesses may also share their outcome goals when discussing their business in TED talks or other social gatherings. Try to Break Larger Outcome Goals into Smaller, More Manageable Chunks. Let’s say your business usually does about $75 million/year in revenue and you have a big goal of “Hit $100 million in revenue this year.” Breaking this goal up into smaller outcome goals of “Hit $25 million in revenue this quarter” can help give your people a short-term goal they can target aggressively and keep them motivated. Find Employee Goals That Support Outcome Goals. To keep employees aligned with your business’ outcome goals, it’s important to set the right process and performance goals. For example, if your outcome goal is “Hit $25 million in revenue this quarter,” then you should be tracking employee goals like “Close $25,000 in new deals each month” and “Make X sales calls per day” (where “X” is a number based on the average talk time with a prospect over the phone) for sales people. Customer service goals like time to resolution or successful customer issue resolution rate can contribute to customer retention—making them worthwhile goals to track for supporting a revenue outcome goal. Use a Goal Setting and Tracking Solution. Employee goals are meaningless if there isn’t a reliable and accurate method of tracking them. Using a goal tracking software to set and track employee progress towards their performance and process goals can help you keep your business on track for meeting its outcome goals. Being able to share goal information with employees in real time can help keep them motivated and enable them to course correct if they fall behind on a particular goal. Set the right outcome goals (and track them with ease) through BrightGauge! Since using a goal tracking solution is a best practice for monitoring your progress towards your outcome goals, BrightGauge is an ideal tool for businesses. With BrightGauge’s online data dashboards, your can easily put your business’ most important outcome goals (like revenue targets, total number of customers, customer satisfaction goals, etc.) in a central view pane that everyone in the organization can see. You can also pick and choose role-based employee goals that support your desired business outcomes—then let your employees see how well they’re meeting those goals. This helps keep everyone rowing the boat in the same direction to produce real results! Don’t wait – Reach out to BrightGauge now to get started on tracking your mission-critical business goals!
Many companies might see marketing as a “nice to have” item instead of a mission-critical part of their business. Marketing, especially traditional marketing methods like TV commercials and radio/print ads, tends to have a high cost and an ambiguous return on investment (ROI). For example, according to fitsmallbusiness.com, “a 30-second spot broadcast nationally averages around $115,000 in 2019… 30-second Super Bowl ads can go for upward of $5.25 million.” This doesn’t count the cost of actually writing and filming the commercial! Worse yet, the returns on these ads are diminishing because many people simply ignore or skip them. However, not all marketing has to be a big and expensive TV spot that most viewers will skip. Digital marketing has created a new dynamic for advertising a company’s goods and services. To measure the success of digital/online marketing efforts, it’s important for businesses to track their marketing key performance indicators (KPIs) and use that information to modify their marketing over time. What are key performance indicators? Key performance indicators are data points that are used to assess how well an entity is performing. They are expressed as some kind of value and measured against a goal for that KPI (which is usually based on past performance data). Tracking key performance indicators is a pretty common practice for all kinds of businesses. However, not every KPI is created equally for every job and role. There are many different kinds of key performance indicators that companies may want to track that may or may not be applicable to a particular team or department. For example, the KPIs used to track the efficiency of a manufacturing team (parts made per hour, rejection rate, machining equipment uptime, etc.) would not be applicable for a sales or marketing team. Why should a marketing team track their KPIs? What are some good marketing KPIs for a business to track? How can businesses track digital marketing KPIs? Why should marketing teams track KPIs? There are numerous reasons that businesses should be tracking their digital marketing KPIs. Here’s a short list: Because it helps establish marketing ROI. One of the bigger challenges of marketing efforts is determining their ROI. If the ROI for an activity is unknown, it’s difficult to determine whether that activity should be continued or cancelled. Tracking marketing performance metrics like total lead generation, cost per lead, and customer lifetime value can help marketing departments determine whether the ROI of their efforts is positive or negative. To determine what does and doesn’t work. Tracking the performance metrics of a particular marketing campaign is crucial for determining if it’s working. Digital marketing often makes it easy to track engagement with a marketing campaign by monitoring email open rates, clicks on call-to-action (CTA) buttons, and even webpage visits for any given campaign (assuming, of course, you have the right tools to collect that data in place). This can be useful for modifying future marketing efforts based on what did or didn’t work. To identify issues causing potential customers to leave. Is there any particular point in a marketing campaign where an abnormally large number of leads unsubscribe or stop engaging with the company? Identifying these critical failure points, and the reasons for the loss of customers/leads, is crucial for ensuring future marketing success. In short, knowing which marketing metrics to track and then monitoring them can help companies improve their marketing efforts. 11 marketing KPIs your team should be tracking So, what are some examples of marketing metrics that businesses should be tracking? Here are a few digital marketing KPI examples to keep in mind: 1. Customer lifetime value. How much is a customer worth to the company, on average, over their life with the company? This can help companies regulate their marketing spend. 2. Cost per lead. How much does the company spend on marketing efforts versus the number of leads generated? Generally determined by dividing the cost of marketing by the number of leads generated. 3. Total number of leads per day/month/quarter. How many leads does the company generate from digital marketing efforts over a given period of time? This can provide a general sense of how appealing the company’s marketing is. 4. Leads by source. How many leads are generated from email, online ads, social media, the company website, blog posts, etc.? Shows which channels are the most successful for generating leads. 5. Website traffic. How many unique IP addresses visit the company’s website each month? This can be sorted by traffic source for more detail (organic, direct, referrals, ads, emails, etc.). 6. SERP rankings. How highly does the company’s website pages rank on search engine results pages (SERPs)? This directly impacts how likely people browsing the web are to find the company’s website. 7. Featured snippets. How many “featured snippets” does the company website have in SERPs? Featured snippets provide viewers with answers to basic questions and are shown at the top of SERPs—even above the #1 ranked post for a search. 8. Number of backlinks. How many other websites are linking to the company’s website? Having more backlinks indicates a site with high-quality, authoritative content that Google and other search engines will rank highly. 9. Email opens. How many people open the emails the company sends out? Provides an indication of the quality of the company’s email list and the subject lines individual emails use. 10. Email deliverability. How many emails get sent successfully to a targeted recipient versus being sent to spam folders or simply failing to be delivered because of bad email addresses? Failed deliveries can negatively impact future email marketing, so any email list needs to be regularly scoured for bad/defunct email addresses. 11. Ad cost per click (CPC). How much does each successful click on an online ad cost the company? Cost per click can help establish the ROI of online ads while helping marketing departments stay on-budget. The examples of marketing metrics listed above are just a few of the KPIs that may be valuable for a marketing team. There are many more that a company might use depending on their marketing goals and the specific types of digital marketing they focus on. Easily monitor your marketing KPIs with BrightGauge How can your business easily monitor its digital marketing KPIs? There are a lot of tools that you can use to collect data, but how can you easily keep track of varying datasources like ConnectWise and others? BrightGauge is here to help! Our digital dashboards give BrightGauge’s customers easy access to multiple data feeds—allowing them to track their marketing KPIs in a single convenient place. Timed reports allow users to easily collect weekly, monthly, or quarterly marketing KPI data for easy reporting. Bring your marketing results to the attention of the board (or others) to showcase the ROI for your marketing efforts. We think that our dashboards and reports can be a real game-changer for marketing teams. They save time, increase accountability, improve transparency, and make marketing efforts more efficient by showing what is or isn’t working. Want to learn more about how you can track your marketing metrics and other important KPIs and improve your business? Reach out to the BrightGauge team today!
They go by many names: Performance reviews, employee reviews, quarterly reviews, 1:1 meetings, personal reviews, employee assessments—the list goes on and on. Whichever name your organization uses for them, odds are that performance reviews have long been a cornerstone of your employee performance management. However, employee review time can be a stressful experience for both employees and employers. Employees may be left wondering how their assessments work, while managers may have a difficult time providing objective and actionable feedback without it getting personal. Why are performance reviews so crucial for managing employees effectively and maximizing results? How can you improve the performance review process? Why are performance reviews valuable? When done right, employee performance reviews are a crucial tool for helping both employees and employers identify opportunities for improvement. For example, is there a particular performance metric that every employee is struggling to meet? That could be an indication of a systemic problem in the company or department. On the other hand, if one employee is consistently missing a performance goal that others are hitting, then they may just need some additional help or training to fix a specific issue that they’re having. In short, employee reviews are an invaluable tool for identifying opportunities for improvement. When done well, a performance review can give your employees the tools they need to better themselves—and provide some motivation to do so. However, when employee reviews are not done well, they can easily become a source of dread for employees. Poorly-handled quarterly reviews can feel unfair to employees and even lead to active disengagement amongst the workforce. 5 best practices for conducting more efficient and effective performance reviews To avoid the potential pitfalls of a poor performance review process, it’s important to follow a few best practices. Here are a few performance review tips to help you conduct better reviews with your own employees: 1. Apply a consistent performance review template for ALL employees in a department The perception of fairness is paramount for an effective performance review process. To help ensure fairness, it’s important to have a consistent performance review template and criteria for everyone in a given team or department—and to make sure everyone knows what they are! Creating a performance review template that applies the same criteria to every employee working the same role can help ensure that the process feels fair and consistent. However, it’s also important to make sure that the performance metrics you measure in that template are relevant to your employees and the work they do. 2. Try to highlight both achievements and areas for improvement Here’s a bit of advice from Forbes, “Don’t just list all the negatives and hope for improvement. It’s important to explain to the employee what they are doing right, as well as what facets they need to develop.” One common problem in the performance review process is that many reviewers focus primarily (or even solely) on what employees did wrong. While it is important to go over what each employee could do better, it’s just as important to celebrate their “wins” so they feel that their efforts are being recognized and rewarded. Recognizing major achievements and milestones is crucial for engaging employees and showing them what they need to keep doing—just as addressing flaws is important for improving performance. 3. When setting performance review goals, make sure they’re SMART Quarterly review criteria for employees need to be well-chosen. Asking employees to meet vague or irrelevant goals in the performance review can be extremely counterproductive—if the standards they’re being held to feel arbitrary or unfair, employees can quickly become disengaged with their work. In many cases, using a goal-setting framework like SMART can be incredibly beneficial. SMART is an acronym for: Specific. Goals should be clear and easy to understand while providing a clear course of action or a desirable result. Measurable. Goals should have an objective and easy-to-measure value to simplify tracking progress. Achievable. Goals should be aggressive, but achievable to keep employees motivated. Impossible goals can lead to employees giving up before they begin. Relevant. Goals should be related to an employee’s key role and responsibilities—it isn’t fair to hold software developers responsible for sales numbers or sales reps responsible for a product’s user experience. Time-Based. Goals should fall within a specific and realistic time frame that employees can work in. Ideally, the time allotted for a goal should be long enough to allow for progress towards the goal without being too short. For example, a sales team member might have a goal to close 20 deals per month or to make 40 sales calls in a day. The specific numbers here give the employee a specific goal to work towards in their sales activities, these goals can be easily measured, they are relatively simple to achieve, relevant to their primary job role (selling stuff), and have a set time frame to be achieved that isn’t so long that the goal becomes some distant concern. 4. Create a detailed performance improvement plan with specific steps It isn’t enough to tell a struggling employee to “just do better” when they fail to meet performance goals. If Bob from the service center knows he’s supposed to have an average time-to-resolution of five minutes for customer calls, but it takes him at least 10 for each call, he’s already aware that he needs to “do better.” It’s important to recognize the underlying issues that cause poor performance. For example, is Bob being tasked to address particularly complicated customer issues? Is he going above and beyond to provide a solution for customers that keeps them satisfied? Is the whole service department struggling to meet that five-minute goal (indicating that it needs to be revised)? Investigating the causes of poor performance may require more time and effort, but it will help produce better results and employee engagement. Giving employees a detailed performance improvement plan (PIP) or making necessary changes to company processes will do more to increase performance in the long term than simply telling people to do better without giving them a clear-cut way to do so. 5. Give employees a chance to provide their own feedback Performance reviews shouldn’t be a one-sided interaction. There may be issues that are keeping employees from realizing their full potential. However, without the ability to voice their concerns, employees may never bring these problems to your attention. If you don’t know about a systemic problem, then you can’t fix it! So, it’s important to provide employees with an opportunity to provide feedback about their work environment, challenges they face on the job, and more. It’s also important to enforce an expectation of honest and open communication because many employees may simply assume that their comments and concerns won’t really be addressed (or they may be punished somehow for sharing them), causing them to not provide feedback when given the chance. You can help encourage employees to provide feedback by actively showcasing examples of when feedback was used to make change within your organization, or to even provide completely anonymous feedback channels, like a suggestion box, and highlight the best suggestions from time to time without calling out any names (even if you have an inkling of who provided the feedback) or ridiculing the suggestion. If you act on these suggestions, it can go a long way towards building trust and engagement amongst your team! Transform your employee reviews with BrightGauge! So, how can you collect and organize the data you need to conduct efficient and effective performance reviews? Many business leaders choose to use specialized performance review software that helps them keep track of their employee performance metrics during their 1:1 meetings. One tool that many leaders use during their performance reviews is BrightGauge (specifically, the Dashboards feature). With BrightGauge’s reports and dashboards, managers can pull in data from their other performance management and monitoring tools such as ConnectWise, Autotask, QuickBooks, Customer Thermometer, and many others. All of this data can be put into a single convenient view that’s easy to reference during a performance review. Outside of performance reviews, the BrightGauge dashboard will update in real time so team leaders can actively monitor performance outside of their quarterly reviews and provide timely feedback—or recognize major achievements and milestones when they happen. Additionally, managers can make these dashboards visible to team members. This can help encourage some healthy competition between team members to see who can achieve the best scores for certain metrics. This keeps employees motivated to achieve goals and drives long-term results. Another useful feature of BrightGauge is our proprietary goals system. This tool makes it easy to set and track employee goals on an individual level—increasing accountability and helping employees know which areas they need to improve upon. This can be immensely useful for keeping employees on task and improving performance across the whole team. Are you ready to make your performance reviews more productive? Learn more about how BrightGauge can help you improve your employee performance review process today by scheduling a live one-on-one demo now!
In 1992, I was just a kid enjoying my summer in Miami, when all of a sudden we were facing a Category 5 hurricane. I remember that time quite vividly, but there are a few key things that stick out about living through Hurricane Andrew: The beautiful weather on August 23rd, making it hard to believe that a hurricane was actually about to hit The winds whipping through the house after all the windows shattered (and the crazy sounds that brought with it) The 17 days after August 24th when we were without power (in Miami's notoriously hot and humid climate) In 1992, staying connected meant something different than it does today. I was just a little girl, so I have no idea how companies picked up the pieces after Andrew completely destroyed our city. Now, it’s almost impossible to imagine being without power for 17 days and the catastrophic implications that would have on any business’s profit margins. Today, 28 years since Hurricane Andrew hit Miami and with hurricane season in full swing, it’s a good time to think about how you will prepare for and recover from a disaster. With a little work, you can ready your business and support clients who operate in affected areas. Put your business continuity plan to action If you've got a business continuity plan, now is the time to make sure you're ready to roll it out. If you haven't developed yours just yet, there are still ways you can prepare your business and customers to weather the storm, but you should make it a priority to create your ongoing plan. Have a communications plan. Make sure all of your employees and clients have updated their contact information so you know how to reach them. And let everybody know how they can reach you throughout the event and in its aftermath. If you’ve got a main phone number where you’ll be pushing out recorded messages with updates, make sure all your contacts are aware of that number and how often messages will be updated. Create “if/then” scenarios. If/then scenarios help manage both employee and customer expectations around when services or work will resume normal operations. For example, if one day after a hurricane makes landfall road conditions are safe, then clients can expect on-site visits within a week or as needed. Communicate these scenarios to anyone who is affected. Consider extending support hours. As long as it's safe to do so and you are capable of doing so, consider offering extra support before, during, and after a crisis. Your clients may have more concerns and questions than usual and could benefit from reaching you outside of normal hours. Not to mention, this is a powerful way to build up trust and loyalty amongst your clients. Protect your data You've been hearing about the cloud for so much time now, but natural disasters make a very powerful case for making the switch. There's no real reason to have your important data centers on-premise, as it is expensive and risky. And if you have clients who are in natural-disaster-prone regions, they really could benefit from cloud hosting. As a hurricane approaches, business owners and clients will be really worried about servers, devices, and data whether the office environment is remote or a hybrid. Every place of employment should have a standard process for how to secure devices when a storm is approaching. Living in Miami, this is a natural procedure in every place I've worked. If a storm is coming, we know what to do. Make sure your employees know what they have to do (either at home or in the office) and offer advice to your clients for doing the same. Finally, when it comes to backup and disaster recovery, take every opportunity you can as an MSP to shed light on how a BDR tool, like ConnectWise Recover, can be a game-changer in the event of a hurricane or other natural disaster. Without living through any major event, it may be hard for your clients to imagine why they would need to invest in a BDR tool. But, hit them with the truth. Remember, after Andrew we were without power for 17 days. If that happened to your client, everything they’ve worked so hard for could be lost. But a BDR can paint a vastly more optimistic picture as far as restoration efforts are concerned. Hurricanes are scary and nerve wracking, but they certainly don’t have to wipe out your business. A little preparation and the right tech stack can go a long way.
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Key metrics and accompanying formulas to help MSPs skyrocket growth and success!
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Knowing where your company stands financially can give you a whole lot of insight into your business. It’ll tell you whether you’re profitable, whether you can hire additional resources, if you’re growing or not, which areas of your business you need to invest in, how much debt you are in, and so on. Obviously, this is incredibly important and useful data to know, and it’s not just about having the right numbers, but also interpreting those numbers in the right way. Every department in an organization is going to have a set of unique metrics that relate to their goals and efforts. We’ve recommended top key performance indicators (KPIs) for your Project Team, Service Team, and Sales Team. When it comes to your Finance Team KPIs, we believe there are four you should be keeping track of. Top Finance Team KPIs It’s true that our list of metrics to track is not a complete list. You’re going to want to have a holistic view of your finances, which may include several additional metrics other than the ones listed below. However, we think these four should never be left out. Cash in Bank This number quite simply tells you how much cash flow you have on hand. It’s important to know that because if you ever find yourself in an unexpected situation, you’ll know how to handle it without getting into deep financial trouble. Past Due Receivables Amount Accounts Receivable is an important one because it tells you how much payment you’re expecting to receive from clients within the next 30 days (or other given time period). Being aware of which accounts are past due will help you reconcile with your clients and ensure that you’re getting the payment you’re due for. Client Efficiency Index (CEI) The CEI is actually a metric that we created internally to give our teams an idea of overall company performance as it relates to each customer base. You can set an internal benchmark for your CEI (ours is 60%) and it will give you an idea of which customer accounts need to be addressed versus which are in your normal threshold. To calculate CEI, you’ll need to gather your total revenue by client, all direct costs (like licenses, software costs, etc), and your fully loaded labor cost per account. The formula for each client account is broken into two parts: (Total Revenue - Direct Costs - Fully Loaded Labor Cost) / Total Revenue = Gross Margin Per Client Gross Margin Per Client + 40% = CEI (adding 40 percentage points normalizes the metric to 100%) EBITDA You likely know this one, but this metric gives you a clear idea of your organization’s profitability and financial health. EBITDA stands for Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization. Lots of companies use this metric to determine employee bonuses and raises for the year, so keep an eye on it. An easy way to view your metrics Wouldn’t it be great if you could have visibility into your financial picture at any given time instead of waiting for your accounting team to send you a report once a month? BrightGauge makes it really easy to do just that. Our software integrates with many popular tools on the market, like Quickbooks and Xero, and it pulls important data from those tools and puts it on a dashboard for everybody to see. Your dashboards are comprised of various gauges, so you have the freedom to create one dashboard that shows your cash flow, CEI, EBITDA, and any other metrics you care about. BrightGauge dashboards sync often, so you’ll be looking at real-time data anytime you glance at your screen. We like to recommend that you display your dashboards on flat TV screens around your office so that all employees have visibility into your key KPIs at all times. Other BrightGauge features include the ability to send custom, interactive reports to your clients or your internal teams as a way to build trust and transparency, and the functionality to set and track individual employee goals, which sets a precedent for accountability and motivation. If you’re ready to see how BrightGauge can help you run a better and more efficient business, schedule a live one-on-one demo today.
There’s a reason why automation is such a highly regarded business practice. It can save MSPs a ton of time and allow you to get back to revenue-generating tasks that will move your business forward. When you automate something like the generation and delivery of consistent KPI (key performance indicator) reports, it’s a win-win: you save time on a really important, but often tedious task and you build trust and transparency with your clients, which ultimately leads to repeat business. With BrightGauge, all integrations come with default report templates that are ready to customize and send out, or you can create your own templates and schedule them to send out on a recurring cadence based on your preferences. The set-up time is minimal and the pay-off can be really rewarding. We’ve had partners report that BrightGauge saves them 8-10 hours per week in comparison to using spreadsheets to generate KPI reports, which is really time-consuming and clunky at best. Just ahead, 5 BrightGauge reports that you can start using this week to save you hours and strengthen your transparency practices. Internal Weekly Service Report You may already be accustomed to holding a weekly service desk “stand-up” with your team, where you review the prior week’s numbers and see where adjustments are needed to get the team on an optimal track. It’s important to make sure your team or even individual techs are hitting goals for average response time, kill rate, SLAs, and so on, which are the KPIs that should be evaluated during the stand-up. An internal report highlighting these KPIs can reinforce what was discussed and serve as a visual reminder for what’s working and what isn’t. As a bonus, being able to refer to those reports over time can indicate trends and patterns that would be worth knowing about. Here’s an example of an Internal Weekly Service Report in BrightGauge that you can recreate yourself using this buildout key: Executive Summary Report (or End of Month report) This is a good report to share with key stakeholders and decision makers to show the value of what you’re doing and how you are helping clients remain successful. You should cover the KPIs that are most important to your client and give them a report that will take no more than a few minutes to look over, while still making a big impact. It’s up to you and your client to decide how often to send this type of report, but generally, at least once a month is a really good idea. Here’s a look at one End of Month report example that focuses on tickets, devices, and networks: To recreate this report for yourself, see this buildout key. Finance KPIs What business owner or manager is not interested in the health of their finances? Knowing crucial finance KPIs such as gross profit margin, monthly recurring revenue, cash on hand, and so on can help MSPs make informed business decisions that shape the future of their companies. An automated Finance KPI report makes it easy and a no-brainer to stay on top of those metrics and act upon them before they become an issue. You can present these Finance KPIs to your executive team in dashboard form, as shown below, or select “Convert to Report” from your dashboard menu to get it into a report format. See this buildout key to recreate these KPI gauges for yourself. Project Updates What’s the status of your active projects? How much time is spent completing those projects? What’s coming up in the next month or so? When it comes to keeping your clients informed on what’s going on with various projects, it makes sense to send a projects KPI report that shows metrics and data pertaining to the projects relating to that client. Your Project Management KPIs can be shared as a dashboard (read about sharing BrightGauge data here), or you can select “Convert to Report” from your dashboard menu to share it as a report. See this buildout key to recreate these KPI gauges for yourself. Sales KPIs This will likely be more internal than client-facing, but will be of equal interest to sales managers and internal stakeholders. Sales activities are a good predictor of future revenue and business performance, so it’s important to keep an eye on KPIs such as opportunities in the pipeline, deals won, and monthly recurring revenue. Again, feel free to share your Sales KPIs as a dashboard or convert it to a report if you prefer! Either way, here’s a buildout key to recreate these KPI gauges for yourself. See more dashboard and report examples here. To learn more about how BrightGauge dashboards and reports can save you hours each week and give you a better understanding of your data, contact us today and we’ll be happy to chat.
As many managed service providers (MSPs) are placing a heavy emphasis on customer retention in addition to customer acquisition, it’s becoming increasingly important to understand how to track and manage sales activities, opportunities, revenue, and more. Having a solid grasp on these activities can make a real difference in how efficiently your business is run because if these critical metrics fall through the cracks, it can have a negative impact on the business decisions you make, thus causing a ripple effect. The key is to hone in on a specific set of metrics and track them in real-time. Just ahead, we cover 7 key performance indicators (KPIs) you should be tracking and how you can automate the monitoring process. 7 Sales Activity KPIs to Track Net New MRR - the reigning champ of all sales metrics. This is one that every sales manager is sure to prioritize, as it is a valid indicator of how well (or not) your company is growing. Essentially, Net New MRR is the amount of monthly revenue generated by new customers and comparing this metric over time is essential in understanding your typical periods of high-profits versus churn, how your growth is trending, and how to plan and forecast your financial performance. Quotes Won - quite simply, this is a number that tells you how many quotes have been closed in any given time period (likely per month). It serves as a quick check-in to make sure sales performance is at an acceptable level. A number that is below your specific threshold can indicate that it’s time to dig deeper and find underlying causes for that level of performance. Percent Gross Margin - this may be the oldest KPI on the block, but it’ll never not be important, as it is another solid indicator of a company’s financial performance. It basically is a calculation of your total revenue minus your cost of goods sold (aka, Revenue - Expenses). The higher this number the better, as that shows you’re bringing in more than you’re spending - in other words, you’re making a higher profit on each dollar being spent to run your business. Top 10 Accounts by Revenue - which of your clients can you credit with bringing in your largest chunk of revenue? And why is it important to know this? Well, it is known that it is more economical to retain existing clients than to attract new ones. So, if you know who your top performers are, you’re going to want to focus on nurturing those accounts and making sure those clients have what they need to stick around for the long-term. Quotes Leaderboard - in this time of global unrest, remote work, and many “unknowns” it’s increasingly challenging and important to motivate and incentivize your team members. Leaderboards are an effective way to do this from afar because they rank performance for all to see. Creating a sales leaderboard based on who has closed the most quotes can inspire a little healthy and friendly competition between team members and can effectively keep motivation up. Reward your winner with an Amazon gift card or something simple. Profitability - the best way to track profitability is to understand how it fluctuates over time. What are the trends associated with this number? Are you generally becoming more profitable over time (awesome!) or are you wavering back and forth? When calculating this metric, you’re likely taking revenue, costs, and gross margin into account and comparing what they do over time. Understanding this will help you plan for the future. Count of Quotes Won - yes, we already covered this one, but here’s a different way to analyze this metric. Take a look at this number over time - for example, for each of the last 6 months - to understand when you’ve got momentum and what you can attribute to that momentum. You may notice trend lines that can drive your sales processes in the future. Automating KPI Tracking It’s easy to understand the need for and importance of tracking data, but doing so can be a full-time job in and of itself. This is why it pays to invest in a tech stack that works for you. Have reliable tools that support your business and can automate time-consuming, yet critical tasks for you. Any sales manager should be using a sales tool, like ConnectWise Sell, to manage quotes, proposals, contacts, opportunities won, and more. This is just an absolute must if you want to keep your sales processes and communications with prospects or partners organized. Because you’re likely be using several tools across your company (your accounting team may use Quickbooks, service team may use ConnectWise Automate, marketing might use SmileBack, etc), it also makes sense to bring in a tool that can consolidate all your data into one place, like BrightGauge. Adding business intelligence like BrightGauge to your stack can give you that real-time, high-level visualization of your KPIs at any given moment in time. Having the ability to glance over at a dashboard and see your important metrics can be a game-changer for stronger and faster business decisions. Plus, it makes it easier to share KPIs with internal team members, key stakeholders, or your clients, which gets everyone on the same page and working together to meet goals. No matter the datasource you’re integrating with BrightGauge, you’ll have access to pre-built dashboard and report templates, meaning you’ll get right to that data you need from day one. As an example, if you integrate ConnectWise Sell with BrightGauge, you’ll automatically have access to a Monthly Performance Report that pulls in all the KPIs we listed above. Month-to-month you can review this data with your team, dig into why the numbers are where they are, and make a plan for the coming month. Doing this ensures everyone is optimizing productivity, efficiency, and accountability and it fosters relationships built on trust and transparency. To learn more about this ConnectWise Sell Monthly Performance Report or to ask a question about BrightGauge, contact us today. For more KPIs that MSPs should track, plus their accompanying formulas, see 70+ Metrics for MSPs.
As a BrightGauge user, you’re constantly referencing your gauges, dashboards, and reports to gain data insights that drive important business decisions. Right now, as remote work is the norm, your data is playing an increasingly important role in aligning your team members and making sure productivity stays on track. To really solidify that alignment amongst employees, you probably want to get more eyes on that crucial data on a more consistent basis. A question we often get asked is, “How can I share my BrightGauge data without adding more licenses to my account?”. There are various ways you can publicly share your data with key players without having to add more licenses, including dashboard playlists, public dashboard links, and embeddable gauges. Just ahead, we’ll cover each one. Dashboard playlists & viewer licenses You likely have several dashboards you are watching on a daily basis and that you care to share with your individual technicians or clients or board of directors. Creating dashboard playlists makes this simple. You can group relevant dashboards into one playlist, which will rotate in a carousel throughout the day, so you can easily stay on top of what matters. This is especially helpful if you like to view your dashboards on a TV or other screen other than your main computer. Here's a quick video on setting up your rotating dashboards: From your dashboard, click on ‘Present’ mode and select ‘Rotate Dashboards’, where you’ll see the option to choose from 3 playlists. Every user on your account can create up to 3 playlists, and each playlist includes up to 10 dashboards, so your viewing possibilities here are vast. Dashboards will rotate every 30 seconds, 1 minute, 2 minutes, or 5 minutes depending on the cadence you prefer. NOTE ON VIEWER LICENSES: To share these dashboards, simply give your desired recipient ‘Viewer’ permissions within BrightGauge, which means they will have read-only access to anything you share with them and will not be able to edit or manipulate data. Reminder: your account comes with an unlimited number of viewer user allowances! Pro tip: use an internal viewer license for displaying dashboards on TVs, that way you won’t be prompted to log in! For more on user permissions, read this. Public dashboards A favorite amongst BrightGauge partners and perhaps the simplest way to share data with anyone you’d like. A Public dashboard is quite simply a read-only dashboard that is shared via a public URL. A dashboard is not public by default - you can only share a dashboard if you have switched on the public URL modal. The nice thing about public dashboards is that the end-user does not need to have any BrightGauge permissions whatsoever. Everybody and anybody with a public dashboard link will be able to view that dashboard without being required to sign in or enter any information. Some BrightGauge partners have told us they’ve shared public dashboards with peers and colleagues in order to help them understand what valuable metrics they should be tracking. We love this because we truly believe that teamwork makes the dreamwork! To learn more about sharing public dashboards, read this. Embeddable gauges When you want to display your metrics for anyone to see, rather than one specific individual to see, embeddable gauges are a great choice. They are basically just what their name implies - gauges which you can embed on a public site. When you mark a gauge as publicly viewable, you’ll have access to a short snippet of code that will allow you to embed the gauge wherever you’d like. Anyone viewing that gauge will not be able to click into it to apply a filter or access the drilldown, so what you see is what you get. One popular way partners use this feature is to display their CSAT scores or their average response times right on their marketing site, which is a great way to let numbers do the talking for you. See how BrightGauge partner C SPIRE started a service library using these gauges. Want to upgrade your account or understand more about these features? Contact us today and we’ll be happy to have a chat!
For many businesses, great customer service is the key to future success and customer retention. Being able to effectively manage customers and resolve issues helps to improve customer satisfaction (CSAT) so they’re more likely to return for repeat business or be receptive to upsell opportunities. But, how can you measure the quality and effectiveness of customer service in your company? Key performance indicators (KPIs) are the most common tool for measuring employee performance. However, to get the most out of tracking customer service metrics, it’s important to use the right KPIs—ones that are measurable and specific. It should be noted that some businesses may track different customer service metrics than others or apply different terms for specific KPIs. For example, a customer support call center may track “tickets” while a high-end services provider might refer to them as “cases.” Both of these customer service metrics involve unique interactions with customers, but have tweaked names to match a specific industry. To help you track your company’s own efforts, here’s a list of some of the best measurable KPIs for customer service that you should monitor: Measurable KPIs for customer service. Tickets Opened Each Day. How many tickets/cases/customer interactions does an employee, team, or the company as a whole process each day? This is an important customer service metric to track for monitoring the workloads being handled. Individual-level “Tickets Opened” metrics allow for comparisons of productivity, while team or business-level tracking helps establish overall workload. Tickets Closed Each Day. Simply opening a ticket doesn’t mean that the issues behind it are going to be resolved. Until a ticket closes, that customer/client is left waiting. If the number of closed tickets is far below the number opened, it can be indicative of a problem (such as insufficient labor to keep up with workloads, or employees not having the right tools and training to close tickets properly). Time to Resolution. On average, how long does it take for a ticket to close? Time to resolution is an important KPI for measuring employee performance. If one employee’s time to resolution is particularly long compared to others working on similar issues, it may indicate an opportunity for improvement. First Contact Resolution Rate. What percentage of ticket resolutions occur during the first contact with the customer/client? While it may not be possible to resolve every issue in a single interaction, tracking first contact resolution rate helps highlight the overall complexity of issues faced by the customer service team. This makes it a useful measurable KPI for customer service to track. Handle Time. How much time does an employee spend on each ticket? Note that this customer service metric, while closely related to resolution time, is distinct because it is a measure of actual time spent working on the ticket—which may not be the time the customer spends waiting for a resolution. Time to Response. Once a customer opens a ticket or dials the support number, how long do they have to wait for a response? Time to response is a critical customer support metric that has a direct impact on CSAT and retention. It may also be a factor in satisfying service level agreements (SLAs) for some companies. Service Activity Metrics. Companies can track individual activities made by employees (such as number of phone calls made, emails written, etc.) in the course of responding to and handling tickets. These metrics should be filtered by specific activity type to help correlate specific activities with service ticket outcomes. For example, do employees who make more calls have a higher or lower CSAT score than others? This can be useful when planning new hire employee training so it focuses on those activities that generate the best ROI. Churn Rate. One of the most important measurable KPIs for customer service is the company’s overall churn rate—or the number of customers that stop doing business with the company over a given period of time. High churn rates not only indicate a problem with the quality of customer service provided, but it can eventually cause a business to fail if too many customers leave before they can be replaced with new ones. A success team can help with keeping this KPI on track. CSAT Scores. Customer satisfaction is one of the most obvious KPIs for customer service that a business should track—but one where it is often hard to collect reliable data. Surveys are a common method of getting this data, but the results often skew overly positive or negative because only those customers who had a particularly impactful experience (one way or the other) have a strong motivation to fill out a satisfaction survey. However, even with this issue, CSAT is an important customer service metric to track. Customer Complaint Rates. How many customers reach out to complain about the service they’ve received? This is a measurable KPI for customer service that helps to highlight issues in the service team. If there are a high number of customer complaints during a specific period, it can help to review any changes made during that time frame to isolate a cause. It can also help to review specific complaints to see what they’re about. Things to keep in mind when tracking KPIs for customer service Many of the customer service metrics listed above can be measured at different levels. For example, you could track time to resolution on an individual level, a team level, or a company-wide level. Tracking KPIs for customer service at all levels can provide value in various ways. Tracking time to resolution on a team or company level provides an average to compare individual performance against. This, in turn, makes it easier to identify when someone could improve their performance or is being especially efficient. In the former case, the employee could be put through some additional training to help them. In the latter case, you could study what that employee does differently and apply that to the rest of your processes. Another thing to keep in mind is that none of these KPIs for customer service should be considered by themselves. They need to be considered as small puzzle pieces that form a bigger picture. For example, say one employee has an especially fast time to resolution. That sounds good, right? However, what are the churn rate and customer complaint rate for the employee’s clients? How often do those customers come back with another ticket to fix right after? Getting the job done fast is not necessarily synonymous with getting the job done right. On the other hand, say an employee has a relatively long time to resolution and handle time—something around 25% longer than others handling similar tickets. Based on these customer service metrics alone, it would be easy to assume the employee’s performance is subpar. However, what if the other measurable KPIs for customer service provided by this employee are all extremely positive compared to the average for the business—such as having 50% less churn among clients they handle or having 50% higher CSAT scores? In this case, it might demonstrate that other customer service team members might need to start spending more time on each ticket to provide superior service. Additionally, if they have more service activities logged to correlate to the longer time to resolution, it can help to demonstrate how much more that employee is doing to provide top-notch customer service. These are just a few of the best measurable KPIs for customer service that businesses can track. Do you need help creating a simple and effective dashboard for measuring key performance indicators amongst your team? Reach out to BrightGauge today for assistance! *This post was originally published in May 2019
Although states are reopening and people may be returning to their offices, we’re still very much at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and its resulting recession. MSP owners and CEOs may be wondering what to focus on as they work to keep their businesses thriving. Here are my recommendations for 9 areas CEOs and owners should prioritize right now: 1. Protect Stakeholder Value - This is something that needs to come from the top, as it doesn’t make sense for anyone else in an organization to prioritize this. Even though you’re likely focused on keeping your business afloat, you should also think about how to make it thrive in the future. How to accomplish this: Maintain and create business value. 2. Define Business Legacy - What are your benchmarks for success? Does everyone in your company know what your version of success looks like? Now is the time to make sure everyone in the company understands their role and how they contribute to where the company is headed. How to accomplish this: Start from the top with a vision and a high-level strategy and let it trickle down to every member of the team. 3. Manage the Balance Sheet - We are all aware of the importance of cash flow, especially now. Maximizing cash flow - whether through banking relationships, government programs, or cutting costs - must remain a current focus. How to accomplish this: Keep your company adaptable and solvent in today’s environment, but ready to thrive tomorrow (theoretically speaking). 4. Define the Culture - It can be challenging to do so, but setting an example works best when it comes from the top. An owner/CEO should guide the culture of an organization, driven by a mission, vision, and core values. How to accomplish this: Make sure core values and culture are clearly communicated to team members, especially during this time of remote work. 5. Grow through M&A - At some point, owners and CEOs consider mergers and acquisitions as a way to meet a business legacy objective. Keep an eye out for these opportunities. How to accomplish this: Be actively involved in the M&A market to pinpoint and pursue any opportunities that would make sense to your company. 6. Develop Your Leaders - Meet with your team members, get to know them, and identify opportunities to help them develop. As a leader, one of the most important things you can do is invest in your team members’ personal and professional growth. How to accomplish this: Hold regular individual and team meetings focused on skill development and growth; CEOs and owners should also make sure they’re developing their own leadership skills. 7. Acquire and Retain Key Talent - The success of your organization depends largely on the talent you have on hand. Focus on building a leadership team you have confidence in, as they will ultimately be drivers of company success or failure. How to accomplish this: Clearly define your talent needs and be proactive about filling in gaps while retaining the A players on your team. 8. Manage Critical Relationships - When owners or CEOs are directly involved in a relationship (whether business like finance or legal or vendor/supplier relationships), these relationships must be well-managed and protected. Now more than ever, as we face a complex set of challenges, these relationships are vital. How to accomplish this: Foster better and more frequent communication and interaction with key relationships at this moment. 9. Drive Innovation - Your biggest competitor is likely not another company in your industry. Instead, it’s resistance to change and maintaining status quo. To flourish and thrive in our new world, change is a must. How to accomplish this: Be open to new ideas, encourage free thinking, move outside of the box, and be an innovator. For more of my insights and thoughts surrounding our current state of work, tune into ConnectWise’s Inside the Industry podcast series.
