Strategic Discipline Blog

Would you allow pets and children in your work environment?

Unlimited vacations?

Watch this video from NewsChannel 5, Nashville, Is this the Best Place to Work in Nashville. 

Malham's emphasis, “Leverage - less doing more living.”

Pay Employees to Read

We’ve noted in this blog several times, A Players (Topgrading) read 24 books or more a year.  Mark Cuban, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg are insatiable learners. 

What can you do to motivate your people to read?

Malham’s a big believer in reading and he pays his employees to read books.  It’s why he created the Better Book Club.  You can even start for free with up to 12 users!

“Stop telling your people what to read, let them read what they want to read,” Malham advised.

CJ Advertising pays employees to read $25, $50 $75 $100.  Malham feels when you reward them – more they know the more they know for your business. 

It’s a Win-Win.    

Watch the video (from 2014) to learn more on why, and how you can get involved in achieving similar results.  

 Outsourcing

Malham is a believer in outsourcing.  He recently bought a virtual assistant company, “we can do anything!” Malham confidently states.

Malham feels most companies make a mistake with outsourcing, “People look at outsourcing as first step.  If you give a bad process to someone else it’s still a bad process.

Automate, optimize, then outsource it.  Then give it to someone else.”

CJ Advertising practices what they preach as well.  They recently started doing podcasts for their customers.  The first time they did one it required 8 hours.  They hone it, refined, it documented, automated, and then optimized it.  It took a couple of weeks, but they’ve already improved it to just 3.5 hours. 

Malham is Michael Gerber-ish (author of E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It) when he speaks about systems in his business, “When define a process so well it doesn’t require training. When People own their processes, you scale easily.”

Bonus Plans, Billing & Millennials

Malham had some innovate and interesting ideas.  Here’s just a sample:

“People complain about millennials, at cj Advertising they work more hours than others.  Millennials just need immediate gratification” In The Dawn of Impatience – Increase Positive Reinforcement, we shared Aubrey Daniels emphasis on positive immediate reinforcement with anyone born after 1984.  Malham’s learned this lesson will with his staff of millennials.

Do new employees struggle with knowing what to do and where things are in your business?  At cj Advertising they’ve created a 60-Day checklist for each new employee to completed.  It’s filled with things that even current employees might say, “I didn’t know that!”  Current employees need to know what’s on the list to since new employees will ask them for help completing the checklist.

How do you offer unlimited vacations?  At cj Advertising everyone can have unlimited vacations…. As long as you get your work done.

cj Advertising bills their customers by the second.  Talk about detail.  Internally their people and their customers share the same time report. That’s transparency!

Finally, cj Advertising operates a unique bonus program. Employees complete a bonus application process –  with the potential of earning 40% of what they made as a bonus.  if Should an employee feel they deserve a bonus they simply apply for it.  Malham reviews each one individually, then decides on the size of the bonus.  With this system, Malham feels he’ll never neglect a deserving employee. He’s done a video to inform everyone how to apply.    

Malham’s presentation was so quick, entertaining, and insightful, I ordered his book, Worth Doing Wrong.  I’ll be sharing insights from the book in a future blog.

As always, if your business needs help to innovate, grow and build Winning Habits, contact me dwick@positioningsystems.com to have Strategic Discipline Scale Up your business.

Future of Workspace – Next Blog

Learning, Space, and Technology are the three critical components of your Future Workspace. Jeanne Meister, Co-Author The Future Workplace Experience: 10 Rules For Mastering Disruption In Recruiting And Engaging Employees, our next speaker at the San Antonio ScaleUp Summit, provided research results, questions to help improve your workspace, and trends in education you’ll want to join me for next blog.