Every employer has a fiduciary responsibility not only to their company as a whole but also to their individual team members. Part of this fiduciary responsibility is having a sense of realism about employee value within your company as opposed to the job market. Merrill Chandler makes a case for every employer’s responsibility to manage their employees’ expectations about their value in the job market. Make sure your employees know how valued they are within your company or organization, but be careful about their understanding of their market value as well. It might just be a recipe for financial disaster.
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Value Of Team Members To Company Versus Market Value
I’m thrilled that you’re either bingeing or saw the title of this and decided to check it out and see what’s up. In this episode, we’re going to be talking about value as an employee at your current employer. We’re talking about how fundability™ impacts your value as a member of your team and as an employee. This came up for me as a result of conversations that I had with one of my clients. He’s a business owner. He was one of my valet clients. He gets a little bit of time with me every month. I get to spend some time with all my valet clients. He was asking me questions about how to help his employees become fundable.
Many of you are real estate investors. You have team members. You might be a business owner or entrepreneur. We may be a one-person shop or we may have a whole group of team members and employees. As owners of businesses, as employers of other human beings, there are some things that we need to know so that we can be sensitive and we can train our team members so that they are productive, have one more reason to love their job, one more reason for them to believe in our vision and keep going. I’ve had this very experience. I have some crazy loyal team members, people who’ve been with me for over a decade, others for a few years.
They’ve been with me so long and are literally part and parcel of my vision. They make sure that everything that I want to accomplish when it comes to getting fundable, the mission and vision of being at the pointy end of this sphere, they’re the ones who make it happen. This is with respect to them. This is to help your relationship with your team members and the people who believe in your vision, whether it’s one or 500 or more. First, let’s talk about the value of a team member and how to translate that value to team members themselves and how fundability™ comes into this equation.
A good leader or a good employer always looks out for what's best for their people #GetFundable Click To TweetA good employer, a good leader wants the best for their people. The first principle I want to discuss is how we create an organization that supports them wanting to stay here. As employers, we also want to shape and manage their expectations because people who’ve been here for a long time also want to be compensated. Their value is intrinsic to the business. Let’s cover this. The principle comes down into a simple sentence. The value of an employee or a team member to you is higher than it very well may be in the marketplace.
This depends on the type of position they’re in. I’m not diminishing any roles, but if it’s a receptionist and that receptionist literally just answers the phone and that receptionist does certain simple administrative duties as part of their position, there may be a fixed level at which their value is to the organization. They may be there for years. You have tons of benefits, 401(k)s, health insurance. There are great reasons for them to stay. Because of the simplicity of the job, there may be a fixed level at which they are compensated.
I’ve run into over and over with different members of my team. I like to take care of my people. I’ve always warned my team members to make sure that they live within their salary and let all of the bonuses that they get, whether it includes a quarterly profit share, whether it’s some revenue share, bonuses for their positions, whatever it is to not include those bonuses inside of their monthly expenditures, as part of their monthly budget. I’ve gotten pushback before about this. My podcast, my belief system, I’m just sharing with you what has helped me over and over.
Employee Value: As an employer, you have to be able to shape and manage expectations about value.
Agree or disagree, but at least we’re having a conversation about it. When somebody comes into my organization, regardless of what it is, I invented fundability™ optimization. My team is the one who translates that fundability™ optimization into the real world, into the client experience, into taking care of our students and making sure everybody has the highest chance of success possible. While I may be leading this charge, I’m not the one implementing it with boots on the ground making the difference in your life. I tell one of my team members to live within your salary and save, invest or take care of everything else with your bonuses because if for some reason your spouse moves, you need to move.
We had one of our team members, one of my partners moved to Texas, for heaven’s sake. Her husband had a great job and a promotion as a result of that move. I’m all in, but if somebody has to move and they can’t stay with your organization, the value to your company exceeds their current value to the marketplace. I teach and warn my team members all the time. Let’s say somebody is making $4,000 a month. On top of that, they’re getting bonuses, referral bonuses and other perks and bonuses that come with the job. If they leave my team and they need to go out into the marketplace, the value to the market may be very different than the value they work to meet.
Especially over the long haul, people make more and more. All of a sudden, they may be priced out of the market. My recommendation, what this podcast is about is that to protect your team members’ fundability™, we need to make sure that wherever they’re working, whether they’re working for you or they’re working for another outfit after you, that they are able to meet the financial obligations and commitments that they have made to their credit card issuers, their auto loans or mortgages, whatever else is happening for them financially. I keep coming back to that. My team is far more valuable to me than they are to the market.
Your team is generally far more valuable to you than they are to the market #GetFundable Click To TweetI have a fiduciary responsibility. I’m the employer. Fiduciary responsibility is where you, the more influential person or organization in an agreement, in a contract, have the responsibility to take care of the less influential party in the contract. Since I’m their employer and they depend on me for their wage and I depend on them for the activities that are going to grow my vision, I need to take care of them. That’s what fiduciary responsibility means. I need to make sure that I have at least train them or coach them on making wise financial decisions.
While they become more and more valuable to me, there’s a spread between that and Salary.com and what they can make when they go out and start over with a new company. That changeover, going from working for me to a new company, may create a disparity between what they’re making now and starting at a new organization. For me, I’m the only one who does this. They can’t transfer from here and go to another fundability™ optimization firm. I love compensating my team and rewarding them for their contribution to a unique marketplace.
If you’re doing the same thing, whatever your market is or however your team members relate, make sure that how you’re compensating, especially the longer-term ones who ultimately need to leave for whatever reason, make sure that they understand that financially they want to take care of themselves within what the market is for an equivalent position somewhere else. Everything above that, invest, save, pay down debt or leverage. As entrepreneurs, as business owners, as people who have team members, we don’t want them to be walking out on the limb that gets cut off behind them.
Employee Value: Encourage your employees to go out and see how much a person in an equivalent position to theirs makes in the market.
We want to encourage them. They get to do whatever they want, but we want to encourage them to find out what the equivalent position is somewhere else in the market if it’s available. Mine is difficult because credit advisors or fundability™ advisors, you can’t look that up on Salary.com. Find out what that is. If they moved from here to a different position in another organization, that they’re living on that plane. Anything that they’re making above and beyond that because they’ve created value for your company, my team has created value in my organization, that they’re preserving those funds and keeping them differently than budgeting it for house payments or auto loans.
We don’t want our people out on a limb because even if it’s been a few years and they have an X salary, but they have Y bonuses. We want to make sure that they don’t have to take a hit on their fundability™ where none of their payments are at risk. Nothing is negatively impacted if they have to make a change and do a difference. Remember the principle as there is a difference between someone who has long-term value to your organization and perhaps what their value is to a brand-new organization that needs to train them and get them up to speed.
That disparity, that difference between those two is vital that we teach, train and support the team members that make our lives and our businesses work. We want to make sure that there’s a cushion, a barrier so that they don’t have to harm their fundability™ or harm their finances by making a switch. We do not do anyone a disservice. I believe what we put out, we get back ten-fold. Another way to say it is what comes around goes around. I want to take care of my people so that I’m taken care of by all the people who take care of me.
I wanted to do a shout-out to everybody on the Get Fundable team, all of my professional funding hackers, the ones who coach you, the ones who nurture you through your process, the ones who support you in the bootcamps, the ones who support you as clients. I want to tell you how much I love and adore them, their support and their commitment to the vision. I couldn’t do any of this without them. Advisors, enrollment team, bootcamp crew, you guys light up my world and you make everything we’re doing rock. Thank you for taking care of the people who are barely learning about what we do. Thank you for being so valuable to me. I want to make sure that you’re taken care of. Ultimately, whether or not you’re with me or you need to be somewhere else, I want you to feel you are the superstars that you are. Take care of your people. Take care of partners. Take care of your team members. Take care of your employees. Make sure that they feel the value. They know that they’re valuable in every possible way as they help you build your visions. As you take care of them, make sure they don’t have to take any negative hit to their financial world by investing in you.
