18 years into SEO, team of ~40, and still learn new things about entrepreneurship all the time.
For years, when my COO and I get together one topic that always came up is how to we dial in the team even more?
- Any promotions in responsibility?
- Consolidate any B-players for one A-player?
We’d always think “yes!” Always sounded like a perfect idea to maximize more. Then the action items were vague.
Next quarterly meeting enough time had passed to be excited about a company review. Next meeting team would come up. Excitement would follow.
Actionable items on the table, and were hard to crystalize with clarity. But, we’d “put it in motion.”
Then this week’s meeting I realized… at what cost?
Then, him and I did the math.
- Quarterly meetings = 4x annually.
- 4 meetings x 2 people = 8 net persons.
- 8 net persons x net hourly average of his cost and mine = $500/hour.
- $500 x 8 = $4,000.
If we can make one improvement, totally worth that until you add in him or I talking to HR to communicate the hiring needs of maybe one person.
HR making the listing, filtering applicants, talking to few, likely repeating this cycle multiple times to get a decent candidate.
- Interviewing.
- Giving test tasks.
- Reviewing test tasks.
If we find someone (IF!), training them, integrating them… to maybe (MAYBE) consolidate 2 players for one A-player.
And that one change maybe adds a single digit percent of efficiency on the grand scale of the entire company’s operations.
But… at what cost?
What could we have accomplished in between all that time had me, the COO, HR, and the department and team supporting the hire’s integration just kept moving forward as-is? Across months/years of forcing the discussion of we “must upgrade” the team.a
Finally realized… not worth it.
We’ve probably spent $100,000 in time and resources on this for tens of thousands of dollars an improvement.
We don’t have a “need” to replace anything. The idea of “better” just sounds attractive.
That doesn’t mean we don’t continue to always optimize the team. The team is rockstars as-is. Just realized now we don’t force the team optimization, and do it as the need arises.
