I was speaking with a friend and fellow business owner yesterday who’s going through some growth transition issues.  He’s improved his customer service practices and a key employee just couldn’t embrace the changes and keep up.

After waiting too long (his words) he reluctantly made the needed change and replaced a long standing employee with a new person.  He has a small business with only 6 employees so any personnel issue has huge ramifications.  All in all he did a great job smoothing the exit of the employee and allowing for the relatively easy entrance of the replacement.

About a week into things he called the new employee in and gave him a ‘project’. The mission was simple, pay very close attention to the business process, work flow, communication both with clients and in the office and look for problems, issues and bottlenecks.  This is a great idea for any of us.   He basically recruited his new employee to function as an internal consultant looking at his business with ‘new eyes’.   Now realize that this is not a witch hunt…the job is to look at practices and policies not to spy on fellow co-workers and then tattle.

I suggested that he expand this practice one more step and I shared with him an idea that I’ve used, as a consultant in company after company that I’ve worked with but also as a technique that I’ve used to grow my own businesses.  

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