So, how we do it.
The first rule that we all know in business is if you can’t measure it you can’t manage it. The trouble is, if you only look at the financial aspect of it, you’re looking mono-dimensionally, and as the old adage goes, “To the man with the hammer the whole world is a nail”, because you just batter one thing. Everything else is just subsidiary to that.
Well at Webmart we don’t measure just the finances.
We measure three things: the Intellectual, Emotional and Financial return of the business.
If you measure those three things at a business level, you’re maximising your comparative advantage, you’re enjoying it and you’re making a full return on your labour employed. You’re ensuring you’ve got that balance in it.
Intellectual is first, and I’ll explain how we measure that later, then Emotional and Financial.. And this is powered, right in the middle, by those core values of trust and transparency. If you get those two right, everything works. If you haven’t got that you’re screwed, because nobody will want to work with you. So the more trustworthy you can be, the more transparent you can be, which is the easier way of doing it, and it’s cheaper! If you’ve only got one version you don’t have to keep all those different levels of information within it.
At an individual level, this is what it means. If I can be an employer that maximises what you’re good at (Intellectual), what you love doing (Emotional) and pays well (Financial), then to be honest, you aren’t going to want to go anywhere else.
I’ve got loads of mates, and I’m sure you have too, who are here (doing what they’re good at and what pays well). Rich but bored. And they’re at 52 going “oh my fucking god, what did I do? What did I do for the last 30 years?” They’re typically accountants, and they followed the professional classes that their mums and dads said was a very good career, and because their heart and soul wasn’t in it but they got money, they thought that that was enough – and it isn’t.
For young people, they want the three. And this is where, if you think of a business as a bag of people (because that’s all it is, there’s no need to look into it more than that – there’s no such thing as a business, it’s a bag of people in a place), then, by doing that, you get the best competitive advantage you can as a business.
