How does sharing the numbers with your team benefit you and your business, what made you decide to share the numbers and what was the result.
Joe Hinkens from Mainline Autobody in California learnt early on that there were two camps, some business owners who keep all the information close to their chest and then on the flip side owners that were completely transparent and chose to share it all willingly. Joe chose to be option two, which meant that he was always being asked; Your team members see your financials? They know how much money you are making. His reply was Yes, absolutely. People want to work for a company that is successful. They want to work for a company where the leadership team does a good job and can demonstrate the results of their efforts as being a success story.
Starting out with bite size pieces
To implement this, they started out in bite size pieces and started to measure things that people could understand. Over time they trained and trained, for example a two-and-a-half-hour presentation called financial analysis. One on one training for everyone in the company to understand what gross profit, net profit, direct costs, indirect costs and all those sorts of things were. Joe taught them profit target margins and what Mainline as a company must hit to be successful. Joe quizzed them regularly. What’s our target on part’s profitability, what’s our target on labor profitability and so on? They took the path to share this information because people want to know and he felt they needed to know so they can be engaged and committed to the cause, creating a successful business. It does not mean you have to bare your soul, but you do need to give them the nuts and bolts of what is going on and not overcomplicate it.
Everything from operating expenses to department margins, to profitability, invoices, and expenses, they share it all. The benefit of this is that it helps to educate people, engage them, and align them with common goals. If you have a bunch of well-meaning people in your business that don’t have a common path or objective, then it is likely chaotic and out of alignment. It is all about pulling everybody toward the same objective and sharing performance data is an essential method to do so.
Ownership and accountability
The result of sharing this is ownership and accountability which then gives you the ability, when you do achieve your objectives, to celebrate and recognize those people that contributed. It allows you to get the team together and thank them, recognize those that helped make it happen and praise those that really shined. Everybody wants to be appreciated.
Timing is important
At Mainline, when you walk around the building, you will see scorecards about every eight feet, they are everywhere. They are measuring everything, and Planning Plus is a big part of that. They measure how long it takes to check in a car, how long it takes to deliver a car, they have a long list of scorekeeping. Scorekeeping in departments and then overall scorekeeping. Timing is also important. In the book “The Game of Work”, they gave an example that if information was provided too late, it becomes meaningless, it becomes a history lesson. Imagine a stadium with 50,000 people in there to watch a game but they decided to introduce a new score keeping mechanism at the end of the field where the live audience could not see it. They said, no, we are going to put a half a dozen experts up in the tower, up in the booth, above the stadium and they’re going to view the performance and grade it on their own individual opinion. So instead of keeping score, let us just tell the players to go on out there and run around and kick the ball, do your thing and then we’ll evaluate your performance that way there won’t be any score keeping. Then a week later, after the experts have gathered and shared their opinions, they put out a newsletter and mail it to everyone in the stands that day. How long would that last, the stands would be empty. If the information you share is not done in a timely manner it is nothing more than a history lesson and it is irrelevant. You need data live, daily is ideal, hourly even better.