What if every employee in your company could double—or even quadruple—their productivity?
It’s not wishful thinking. With the right approach, you can radically improve profit per employee and create a culture of consistency where every team member contributes at their highest level.
Here’s the challenge: most employees don’t truly understand how their work ties to profit. They’re often trained by average performers, unaware of which customers drive profitability, and unsure of how operations roles directly impact the bottom line. Left unchecked, these gaps stall organizational growth.
The solution is a focused, three-step framework:
–Refocus efficiency: Stop chasing cuts. Drive profit by aligning people to the most profitable activities.
–Clarify top 10% activities: Every job has critical actions that define elite performance. Identify and train for these.
–Prioritize high-impact roles: Start with your biggest revenue drivers, such as sales, for fast, measurable gains.
The result? Employees feel like superstars, efficiency ratios plummet, and profits soar—all without the destructive cycle of cuts.
Your organization already has the potential for breakthrough performance. The key is showing every team member exactly how they connect to profit.
Watch now.
What if every one of your employees doubled their productivity?
Sound far-fetched? Buckle up, because I’m about to share with you a process I’ve used over and over again to not only double—but often quadruple—the profit per employee within a few years. If you’re the kind of executive who feels like your people are already performing well, you’ll be delighted to see that often these people are the fastest to double or quadruple their productivity.
Or maybe you’re one who believes some of your people are on corporate welfare and you’ve had it. Per facto. Because you will now have a process to make sure none of your people hang out as tourists on the trip to more remarkable results. Or perhaps you are one who has some extremely high performers and some…well, not-so-much performers.
If that’s the case, you’ll love knowing that you can bring up the consistency of performance for all. Where there are solutions, there are problems. In this case, three recurring challenges get in the way of helping people understand how they are tied to profit.
First, new employees tend to get trained by the person who had the job before them. That person was not likely a top five percent performer for that position. As a result, your high-potential person is not realizing high performance. They weren’t trained for it.
Second, if your team members are normal, they don’t really understand which customers provide all the profit. When we work with community banks, we’ve found that 50–140% of their profits come from their top 100 customers. Every industry is similarly impacted. Since most team members don’t understand who the most profitable customers are—or how to identify your next most profitable customers—they have no plan for how to best spend their time and effort to get and keep more of those top 100 customers.
And third, your operations people probably don’t think they have a role that ties to profit. They don’t understand that they too need to do their job better, and by doing that, they can substantially move the profit needle.
Every organization seems to have these same challenges that keep them from even higher profitability.
So, I’ve come up with these three steps that will help you get some traction over the next few weeks on aligning each of your teammates to profit:
Step one: Unlike so much of what is taught as conventional wisdom, the best way to improve the efficiency ratio is not tightening salaries, laying off people, or cutting marketing, travel, or training expenses. You can lower your efficiency ratio by over 20 points in a few short years—which drives profit up—by getting your people to do the most important, most profitable things, and doing those things in the most effective way.
Step two: In contrast to thinking that the next gadget, software, or tool will lead to more profit per employee, realize that there are top 10% activities for every job in your organization. If people knew what they had to do to perform their job in the top 10% of performance, your efficiency ratio would plummet, you’d see a miraculous impact on profit, and your people would feel great about themselves because they would go home each night feeling like superstars.
Step three: Unlike most attempts at employee performance improvement—where there’s a big project rolled out all at once—start with the fastest path to the money: the highest revenue-producing jobs. Give these people the skills and clarity of what success looks like in their position. If a salesperson can increase their sales from $15 million to $35 million of new business per year and also command premium pricing on that business, that’s a massive impact move—and far more impactful than improving the quality and quantity of lower-level positions, such as those in operations.
To sum up with clear action items:
- Stop cutting travel, salaries, and marketing expenses—the things that will tank your future potential. Instead, help people clarify what really matters and how to do each of those things.
- Help each team member understand what their top 10% activities are, and get them the skills to radically improve how they do those activities.
- Start with those positions that can have the most profound impact on profitability fast, so you can drive improved profits within a quarter instead of a year.
In the next video, I’ll show you that without the proper visibility system—one that doesn’t create guilt and shame—you can’t ever achieve sustainable accountability to what matters. Critical data you don’t want to miss.