You probably often hear the “feast or famine” theory when people talk about business and sales. It’s true for me at least that most of the time it seems like we have too much business and are frantically trying to keep up or nothing is going on. For us, feast or famine is much more related to staffing than sales. Fortunately, the “famine” side doesn’t happen to us all that often. The “feast” side though is not uncommon. I often wonder if this is a management style thing or if it’s just the nature of the beast.
It’s possible I’m too reactive with situations in business. I’ve never been a big planner, I tend to make decisions and move forward and while I have the ability to plan it’s not my natural reaction. So maybe if I was better at planning we wouldn’t end up in a feast state so often. On the other hand, planning in this case mostly means hiring. There’s a delicate balance with hiring staff if you don’t yet have the hours for them and making sure everyone has a reasonable amount of hours. Having a bit of a cushion is smart, it gives your people the chance to take some time off or just have a shorter day from time to time. Even just not teetering on the brink of lateness all the time because their schedules are too stuffed is so good for everyone’s mindset; dog walkers, managers, me. So proactive hiring is super valuable. That said, I don’t want to hire so much that no one is making the money they need to make. That means good people are going to leave. So where do I go from here?
Our staff tends to be fairly stable and then see several people (2-3 which is over 10%) leave around the same time. Best I can tell this isn’t related to any policies or changes. Usually they all have a good reason (back to school, family situation changed, graduated and moving on, etc). For whatever reason though, this always leaves us on our heels. This most recent time, we knew 2 people were leaving and we spent a month trying to hire to replace them and we did! We hired 4 people, one broke her leg, one thought he could do walks whenever he felt like and not at their scheduled time, one is great! and one didn’t work out for other reasons. While hiring these people another dog walker left to take care of family. So now we find ourselves short staffed again and are running around trying to fix it. And we will, we’ll get there. Every time we’re short staffed though, business slumps. I assume it’s because it just takes us longer to get back to people because we have to make sure we have the staff to cover them. We’ve reached a point where we’ve decided to make it a goal to hire two people a month (after we’ve fully staffed up). We know that not everyone we hire will stay forever. Our experience tells us that a lot of people take this job because they think it’s fun and easy. It is fun and it is simple but it’s not easy. While we try to give them reasonable expectations sometimes it doesn’t get through and sometimes even if we and they do everything right it just doesn’t work. Adding even one person a month will hopefully insulate us from some of these dramatic changes a little without overwhelming us with staff. We’re also hoping it will give us the space for rapid growth.
It is so hard to balance the staff scales. Business size doesn’t seem to matter all that much either. It’s certainly harder when you’re very small and one person may be doing half the work the business needs to run. Replacing that person can feel impossible. At least now for us we are usually able to absorb one dog walker’s schedule into others if we lose just one person. There are some core people though where that would be hard, doable , but hard. What have you done to keep your staff stable. Turnover, especially in an industry like mine, is inevitable. How do you keep good people and how do you stay ahead of the curve without driving people away?