When running a business, it is incredibly important that you remember your people: what training do they need, what is the most critical application in your business? Is it time tracking, is it document management? In our business every year we look at where our people need to get the most training, and we plan our training budgets. Whatever I pay in salary, I allocate 20% on top of that for each employee for training. Training is not cheap, training is extremely expensive, and it’s also extremely profitable for us.

One of the things we’ve discovered is that our clients who have the most revenue and the most profits have very, very highly trained staff and they take to staff training with ferocity. They have their employees going to conferences, reading books, going to vendor training, and more. They encourage and foster staff communication skills. I think that’s an opportunity most businesses overlook. Because when you’re training your staff to communicate effectively, they communicate more effectively with you, with their colleagues, with your clients, and they make you a better firm.

I don’t look at employees as cogs in the machine, I think that’s an old modality. I think our employees are our biggest assets and our biggest threats, and we have to treat them accordingly. As a business, look at yours, look at mine, look at most businesses, our people make the difference.