It’s David Wolfskehl and I work with business leaders and the owners of small businesses and I’m here today to share some insights that I’ve gathered from working from these leaders. Today’s economic times really are different and many business owners have to d something that they’ve never had faced before and that is to make reductions in staff. Not because people are not performing well but because the economic conditions forced them to do it. But for large businesses, there’s no personal connection.
For small business owners, these are people they know, they care about and they see every single day and those issues make it very difficult for the small business owner to take the steps that are necessary. So today, I want to show you the steps, I want to share the importance of doing it and to help you make the decisions that need to be made.
There’s a number of reasons why people delay but it’s important that you take action and you take action quickly when necessary. By taking action quickly, you actually make your company stronger so that when times become good again, you’re not the debt, your credit line is intact and you’re ready to aggressively move forward before many of your competitors will be able to. Also by deciding early and by doing it quickly, you will not put yourself into peril. So lets talk about some things that you can do to decide how to do it.
First of all, work with your budget, what are your sales, what are your expenses, how much do you have to cut, think about who those top performers are, who the core of the company is that you wont want to cut and then start thinking long and hard about those people that you need to. And again, you need to make the cuts to protect the core of your organization so that you can move forward. This also is a time to be able to clean the house. If you’d mistakes in the past, if there’s people who are in your organization that shouldn’t be there, this is the time to make those cuts. So, how do we do it?
First, meet with your key staff. These are the leaders. For some organizations, it’s really only the CEO. In other places there is a management team. Meet with them and talk about what reality is. This isn’t the time to bit about the bushes, this is the time to discuss what it really means to be able to move forward. Set a date to do it. Make a commitment of when you’re going to do it and let me tell you, there’ll never be a good time, there’ll never be a time when this is happy and unfortunately I don’t believe that the economic conditions are going to change that you can hope that things will get better quickly. So, set a date.
Two, make a list, make sure that you are cutting the right people.
Three, talk to your lawyer. Some states are right to work states. Check your handbook. Make sure that you’re not doing anything that’s going to cause illegal issue moving on. Then, when you actually do it, you want to meet with them individually and do all the layoffs on one day and this is very important. You want to get all the bad news out of the way and the way you do it, the people who are staying are going to be watching. They’re going to be seeing how you do it. So make sure that you do them all in one day and then make sure you meet with your team after that day to let them know that you believed this will be the extent of it. Share your vision about the positive things in the future. Let them know that these are tough times but you have made the decisions necessary to keep this company moving forward.
So, if your facing a situation where business is slow, set that date, meet with your team, do what you need to do, meet with the employees that are going to be affected individually and then meet with your team to share the future and let them know how important they are to help get you there. These are unhappy times to do this. There’s not one business owner who doesn’t think about it, feel uncomfortable with it and feel bad about it but the consequences of not moving forward, the consequences of not doing this are significant and you can be putting your whole company at risk because of your unwillingness or inability to take care of this difficult issue. My name is David Wolfskehl. I help business owners do what’s necessary, do what’s difficult and do what as well is possible.
To contact me, please e-mail me, wolfskehl@hottmail.com. Thank you.
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