No B.S. Ruthless Management of People and Profits: No Holds Barred, Kick Butt, Take-No-Prisoners Guide to Really Getting Rich

by Dan S. Kennedy

Characters signing autographs, parades, happy music, and every employee—right down to the store clerks trading collectible pins with kids and the street sweepers who initiate helpful conversation with anybody looking confused—authorized and empowered to t...

Each highly successful company has a different kind of clearly understood covenant with its

customers.

Your management role is to translate that covenant into clearly defined standards for how your business operates,

Finally, your supervisory role is to enforce your standards. No exceptions, no excuses, no creative deviation, no improv.

Not just teach (although you must teach), not just reward (although you must reward).

Enf...

This is the responsibility nobody likes; just about everybody neglects it and desperately rationalizes the neglec...

The problem is, everything else you might do right and get right is sabotaged by lack of supervision and enforcement.

Every investment you make reduced in value. Every customer you acquire at constant, high risk of loss. Every grand idea, every noble policy, every clever marketing strategy castrated.

Thought for the Day: Every morning, all the stupid people you know get together and plan ways to make your life more difficult.

All businesses succeed or fail, prosper or struggle based on the same short list of critical factors.

all—other businesses win or lose based on executing or failing to execute the same basic game plans.

the sooner you’ll be able to “borrow” best practices wherever you find them,

from diverse businesses outside your own tin...

This gives you a big competitive edge because all your competitors have the s...

Create Better Jobs So You Can Demand More (and Fire Faster)

“Companies that grow people, grow profits.

Companies that shrink people, sh...

pay to have employees’ uniforms cleaned for them;

provide a good working environment;

Create jobs people really want

and that good people won’t want to lose.

Why should you do ...

Not to be a generous soul. Not to be liked. Not to win some award. So that your bloody axe is feared and you ...

Never go to bed with a woman whose troubles are greater than your own.”

One of my clients has five inside sales positions he must keep filled with profitable employees at all times.

One woman has been there, in her position, for nearly ten years. She is extraordinary. She loves her job. She likes the high income. She appreciates her autonomy, flexible hours, nominal supervision, and ability to schedule her own vacation time. She meets or exceeds the minimum quota necessary for her to be profitable 100% of the time.

To keep the other four positions functioning, each at about 70% of the profit she produces, requires hiring and having quit or firing 16 to 24 reps a year.

find clones of her,

My client suffers slumps in profitability from time to time because he wearies of the revolving-door hiring and firing task,

And to make the several-million-dollar-a-year net income he makes from his business, it’s an acceptable “ugly”—because no exceptionally profitable business is ever entirely free of “uglies.”

His management job is as much about managing his own emotions about this “ugly” as it is a...

Personally, in my entire career,

I, however, am cross-trained, and my own business is these days a very, very simple one.

When I left that company, I took them with me to my newer, smaller, leaner business and struck a new deal with them: salary rather than hourly wages, no time clock, a workspace all theirs alone to do with as they saw fit, and only one imperative: The required work had to be done and every order fulfilled and shipped by the end of each week. Some weeks they might work a lot, other weeks little. They outfitted their space with a refrigerator and microwave; she brought food and cooked meals. Some days they were invisible but came in at night, with their young toddler, and worked into the wee hours. Essentially, they job-shared. I paid them above-average wages and left them alone.

I could not have let that Hispanic couple function as they did in a bigger operation with 40 other employees.

But in my smaller business, I could, I did, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

Sometimes force-fitting an exceptional person into a “hole” drilled out for ordinary people either ruins or drives off the exceptional person, who could be the most profitable person you ever had.

Fairness Be Damned

“All animals are equal. Some are more equal than others.”

Two-time Super Bowl coach Jimmy Johnson told me this: “If Emmitt Smith puts his head down on his desk and dozes off in a team meeting, we get him a pillow and have somebody stand next to him, to be sure he doesn’t fall out of his chair if he wakes up suddenly. If a third-string lineman who missed four blocks in last week’s game dozes off, he wakes up traded to Buffalo.”

You should be the highest-paying employer of your kind to top-performing people.

A fourth hung on by a thread.

She was often grumpy and barely worth having in the office. Finally, she quit.

The fifth lost the car immediately and was underperforming in every other way, and as soon as she lost the car, she became bitter, irritable, and uncooperative and had to be fired.

So it all worked out perfectly. It forced him to fire the bottom 20% (1 out of 5) again and again and again, every 6 to 12 months like clockwork. It caused the next wors...

I instituted a very simple bonus plan, featuring $100.00 a month for perfect attendance.

It reminded me of the old quote attributed to the great college football coach Bear Bryant: “I’ll beat you with my team in the first half, then we can switch, and I’ll beat you with

your team in the second half.”