Align your team to meet your company objectives

Photo: patpitchaya/iStock / Getty Images Plus/Getty images

As PCO Bookkeepers has grown from a few number-crunching accountants into an industry resource, with dozens of team members providing accounting, data analytics and technology enabled scorecard reporting, we’ve experienced the same issues that many of our pest management clients experience in terms of aligning our team to live our mission, practice our core values, and win together.

To move us forward, a few years ago my partner Anthony Pepe attended a program at Harvard
Business School. It was led by management guru Dr. Robert Kaplan, co-author of The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action. Dr. Kaplan drove home the point that not only do you need a strategy, you need to share it with your team to maximize company performance. Otherwise, you have a bunch of people who come to work, punch a clock, and collect a paycheck.

Dr. Kaplan recommends creating a Strategy Statement. It should be 50 words or fewer, and include your:

• Objective (number of clients, desired revenue figure, number of routes, etc.).
• Scope of business (the types of business you will or will not pursue, to create boundaries for your team).
• Advantage over your competitors (a specific expertise, such as knowledge to perform your service for high-end food processors).

Once you’ve defined and shared your strategy, the next step is to execute it. This is accomplished through a Strategy Map, which provides a framework for managers and employees to follow. The four components of a business Strategy Map are:

1. Financial perspective, which describes the outcomes of the strategy in financial terms, such as revenue, profitability or other financial ratios.
2. Customer perspective, which outlines your target client’s value — maybe it’s quality or innovation.
3. Internal process perspective, which names several essential processes that are expected to have the greatest impact on your business strategy.
4. Learning and growth perspective, which identifies the intangible assets (jobs, systems and climate) that are most important to your strategy.

CREATE A SCORECARD

Dan Gordon, CPA

The Balanced Scorecard is how you translate strategy into action. It connects the Strategy Map to measures, targets and initiatives. Having balance provides longer-term stability. It makes a company less susceptible to competitive and market changes.

For example, from a financial perspective, a pest control company may set goals around — and measure — profitability and revenue. In the customer quadrant, pest control companies may establish indicators around client surveys like cancellations, referrals or a Net Promoter Score.  When it comes to internal processes, companies may measure route efficiency, windshield time or customer response times.

Finally, for learning and growth, a pest control firm may track and measure continuing education units (CEUs) or other employee training endeavors.

All of these indicators are monitored with actuals vs. targets. Ideally, managers always can see how they’re doing in these four areas on a monthly, quarterly and/or annual basis.

USE ACCURATE DATA

PCO Bookkeepers has had tremendous success implementing the Balanced Scorecard approach. If you are thinking of implementing a Balanced Scorecard initiative, the most important aspect, once all the groundwork is complete, is data consistency and accuracy. People must trust the system. The data all comes from your routing, accounting and other sources, and must be reported accurately so there is no doubt about the numbers used.

The post Align your team to meet your company objectives appeared first on Pest Management Professional.

from Pest Management Professional https://www.mypmp.net/2022/06/24/align-your-team-to-meet-your-company-objectives/
Sacramento CA