Japan is a very hierarchical society. I am getting older, so I appreciate the respect for age and stage we can enjoy here. Back in my native Australia, older people are thought of having little of value to say or contribute. It is a youth culture Downunder and only the young have worth. “You old so and so, you don’t know anything” is reflective of the mood and thinking. As a training company in Japan, we have to be mindful of who we put in front of a class and in front of clients. If the participants are mainly male and older, then it is difficult to have a young female trainer or salesperson allocated to that company.

That young woman is going to be talented and effective as a trainer because our trainer development system is so demanding. She is also going to be highly skilled in sales, because we teach sales. It doesn’t matter. The HR people or the line manager complains, because the class members don’t feel young people have anything to teach them or are qualified to sell them anything.

I was reminded of this recently when trying to allocate trainers and salespeople for certain companies. We have a lot of internal trainers and salespeople who are under 35 and a few who are over 45 and so there is an imbalance. One of my senior guys has suddenly quit. He was performing both functions, so it is a double loss. As our older team members age, they have seen their kids leave the home and then have their aged parents to worry about. The life of a small business owner is always like this. There is never an equilibrium or a period of extended stability with staffing. Just when you think you have it working like a smoothly oiled machine, in goes a wrench and the whole thing comes to a shuddering halt.

The transfer of responsibilities for clients between staff is not that easy. It goes both directions too. We have staff who build strong personal relationships with counterparties and then their interlocutor is moved to another function and a replacement appears. Often, this can mean the end of the relationship with that firm, as the new broom have their preferred suppliers and you are not one of them.

You also imagine that within the client big firms there is a seamless transfer between their staff for that part of the business. Not so. I was dealing with a big multi-national and to my amazement the new person had absolutely no knowledge of what we had been doing for them in terms of training. Obviously there was no hand over of the tasks and things have been going less smoothly as a result.

Normally in Japan, we try to recruit younger people, however we have to also be flexible and look to hire older staff, the venerable grey hairs who can gain the respect of the clients. Trying to maintain the right balance between the generations is not that easy. Also, anytime we have to replace someone as a salesperson, then we can draw a big red line diagonally across each month of the calendar for the next 18 months. They will not be particularly productive for that period of time. Learning the business, really understanding the products and our methodology takes a lot of time. They also have to build their own client base and that doesn’t happen in a hurry.

It takes about the same period of time to see someone make their way through the Dale Carnegie labyrinth of trainer certification. It is an arduous, challenging process and not everyone is suited to become a trainer. The skills for selling and training have similarities but there is also that X Factor of personality needed to become accepted by clients.

The infamous and elusive Plan B needs to be dusted off and then we can move into action. The problem is we don’t spend any time thinking about negative circumstances that require a Plan B. Also, the mix of possibilities across the range of staff is so complex, how can you effectively anticipate what happens next. Nevertheless, I quickly realised I need multiple Plan Bs ready to go, in case of changes in the team complexion. I usually spend a minus amount of time thinking about those myriad possibilities, because I am too busy doing other things in the business.

I will need to do better in this regard and have an update process scheduled throughout the year, rather than leaving it to surprise announcements of staff departure, to stir me to action. How about your case? How are your multiple Plan B development scenarios going?

When we read commentary about how we should be recruiting A Players to boost our firm’s performance, this is a mirage for most of us running smaller sized companies. If you are the size of a Google or a Facebook, with massively deep pockets, then having A Players everywhere is no issue. The reality is A Players cost a bomb and so most of us can’t afford that type of talent luxury. Instead we have to cut our cloth to suit our budgets. We hire C Players and then we try to turn them into B Players. Why not turn these B Players into A players?

This is a contradiction isn’t it, because we always striving and thrusting for the best possible results. If we invest and take a B Player to A Player status, there is a very strong likelihood someone else will admire our handiwork and poach them from us. We have all heard that truism about “what if I develop my people and they leave”, countered with “what if we don’t invest in them and they stay?’. This is correct up to the point of your cash flow reserves. We are not talking about having useless people staying on, sucking up our cash resources.

B Players are very capable and are worth investing in to become even more capable. The additional investment to turn them into A players though, if they have that capability in the first place, may be a case of over investment. Having large portions of your revenue centered around a very small number of clients is recognized as a very dangerous position to be in. In the same way, having one or two people accounting for a disproportionate amount of firm income or expertise is also dangerous.

When the top performers leave it can be very disruptive. Most bosses do not sufficiently explain their departure to the remaining staff. In this vacuum, the other members of the team worry about what the A Players know that they don’t. Is the firm going down and are those most capable of getting another job jumping ship? Will an exodus of A Players introduce fragility into the business? The loss of the contribution of A Players is bad enough, but their departure can be interpreted by staff in ways bosses would never imagine. That is why no matter who leaves, leaders always need to carefully reassure everyone else, that the firm is fine and this was a personal choice by one individual. Don’t allow rumours, imaginings and guesswork to creep into the equation. We need to own the narrative every time.

I have a very carefully designed spreadsheet which allows me to track my sales team’s performance. It includes all of their costs and related costs, to give me a clear picture of what each sales person’s contribution to the company actually is. This allows me to see the amount of leverage they represent. I want to know what is the multiple of their revenue return against their total cost. The bigger that multiple the better, up to a point.

If the multiple is fantastic, but the overall income volume generated is too low, then we can go broke in short order. So there has to be a balance between raw volume of funds coming in and the effectiveness of return on their efforts. This is where B Players can excel. They produce multiples which work for the business and generate a positive profit result. The A Players can have bigger numbers, but their multiples may not be that outstanding. They also point to their big numbers and say rude things like “I want more money”. That pay rise to keep them will hammer the attractiveness of their multiple pretty quickly.

A Players are like an oasis in the desert. The vision through the heat haze can lure small business owners to invest, when that may not be the best idea. It can be better, over time, to build the ranks of the B players from the within the ranks of the C Players. This is the classis bootstrap approach to building companies. We all do it at the beginning don’t we, but then with some success comes hubris and we start to imagine we can extrapolate our genius. Before you know it, the multiples have swung in the wrong direction. For this reason, it is wise to track the multiples down to the last cent and determine to keep on tracking.

When you are small, love your B Players and hold them close. Invest in them, but don’t over invest. Where is that elusive line of demarcation? Experience watching newly minted A Players, who were once your B Players, heading for the exits and more money, helps to establish it in your mind. Monitoring the multiple components will create an algorithm indicating how much is enough and how much is too much. We won’t always get it right, but we can get pretty close if we pay careful attention to the issue. Remember this is art, but with big servings of science tossed into the mix.