Canadian SMBs – Listen to Springsteen: “You spend your life waiting for a moment that just don't come. Well don't waste your time waiting.” [Badlands]
Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) are taking a wait and see approach to hiring and investing in growth drivers, according to the CFIB. Until the economy shows stronger signals. But as a SMB leader it’s important to recognize that’s not going to happen for many years, according to IMF and OECD forecasts. It conjures up Einstein’s definition of insanity, doing things the same way and expecting different results. Or perhaps a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Waiting is clearly not a viable option. So what alternative path can your SMB take to drive ongoing superior growth and financial results? It’s a more creative path, enabled by 3 cost-efficient ingredients, and not overly technology-dependent: a flexible talent strategy, a reliable proven talent pipeline, and dynamic access to that talent.
What’s it costing your SMB?
Your SMB, and millions of others, deferring actions, delayed or avoiding hiring, enduring sub-optimal results. Facing higher residual risks, missed opportunities (new products, categories, markets, international business), lesser competitiveness, lower productivity.
What’s this all costing us, not just on a macroeconomic, nationwide level, but at the company level, your company? The multiplier effect that sees your SMB spread wealth – or not - through your owners and investors, employees, suppliers, customers, and communities.
The Talent Sourcing Challenge to Driving Growth & Profitability
As a SMB leader you know only too well about the difficulty of finding the right talent at the right time at the right price. In fact, 84% of SMB leaders are concerned about talent shortages, 3 times as many as CEOs of large companies. Statscan has referred to the knowledge worker shortage as more of a talent mismatch – meaning the talent is out there, just not easily found.
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“With the skills shortage a perennial concern, 84 per cent of SMBs expect their organization to be impacted by labour market shifts—specifically the number of employees who will retire and the lack of skilled workers available to replace them. By contrast, only about a third (28 per cent) of CEOs share similar concerns.” (Source: KPMG) |
Talent acquisition approaches often remain stuck in decades old models – either hire employees, pay large expensive consulting firms, or hire an independent consultant from within your network. In today’s challenging operating context, demanding you be nimble, none of those seem to be ideal approaches.
Predictable, Recurring, Knowable Key Issues
SMB challenges tend to come from one or more of about 10 key issues, related to financials and financing, market intelligence and marketing, technology, sourcing, and productivity. The fact is there are many proven businesspeople out there who have experience relevant to your requirements. They have been too hard to find and access.
Be More Creative in Deploying Talent
There is a better, more efficient path to sustaining higher performance of your SMB. It comes from the conditions created through the combination of 3 ingredients - not entailing high risk, high cost, or lots of time – in fact it dramatically lowers those:
- Adopting a flexible talent management strategy
- Tapping into a reliable, proven talent pipeline
- Having dynamic, on-demand, self-serve access to that talent.
1) Your Flexible talent management strategy: Contingent Workforce Management
There is a growing, but still uncommon, use of external talent to complement employee capabilities, from independent consultants, contractors, freelancers, and fractional (which collectively are called contingent workers). This approach doesn’t need to entail an onerous and time-consuming strategy development process. And doesn’t need to be confined only to senior finance and marketing roles.
In fact, SMBs can be more nimble than their large competitors, by deploying the approach on an ad hoc basis, where you forecast your short to medium term knowledge requirements, not just project lists. And you inject this knowledge transfer from proven experience in small bites or larger portions. There are many benefits to this approach, such as cost-effectiveness, innovation, revenue growth, and risk reduction– especially when enabled by the other 2 ingredients. We will explore each of the 3 ingredients in subsequent blogs.
2) Tapping into A Reliable, Proven Talent Pipeline
Age 45+ businesspeople have several decades of experience with massive changes and adopting new technologies. The specifics may change, but the people process remains evergreen and applicable. They are not aging like their parents did, so are enjoying extended years of productivity. They create value for you in 5 ways, beyond subject matter expertise to knowledge, judgement and wisdom, more developed soft skills, boosting multigenerational team productivity, and cost-effectiveness.
Far from being a negative, age 45+ means a porfolio of strengths for you to tap into.
But the talent your SMB needs may not even be where you are looking. Certainly it can be lurking be well beyond your network. In fact there is no correlation between how easy talent is to find and its value to you. Age 45+ talent may not be social media stars, be signing up for the latest AI tools, nor be creating significant online consulting presences. But they do have the experience you seek. Think of the millions of people aging up, who currently disappear into the cracks. Suppose they were to be aggregated, creating enormous value for you, in the “network effect” – the power from accumulating proven cost-effective talent into a reliable pipeline, and making them easy to access for a myriad of your requirements.
3) Dynamic Access to Proven Talent
Contingent talent can be much more quickly initiated, since the due diligence process is less than for employees, and they can be easily terminated if not delivering. You can maintain that time advantage through quickly and easily engaging talent, through a lean, pre-qualified, curated pipeline, therefore getting to your shortlist efficiently, through on-demand and self-serve access.
Combining the 3 Ingredients: Your Perpetual Agility
You can create the conditions to enable what we call “Perpetual Agility” through the synergies of these 3 ingredients. It becomes possible for SMBs to seamlessly use proven talent more proactively, more often, more easily, and more cost-effectively, to improve and sustain higher company performance.
Next Steps: SMB Awareness
We seek to nudge SMBs out from their concerns about talent shortages and their hesitancy to take proactive steps, and toward enabling them to create the conditions for your SMB’s Perpetual Agility.
Our next blog posts will do that, as we will expand on each of the 3 ingredients for creating the conditions for Perpetual Agility and the turnkey solution for doing so.
About the Author
David Y. Smith, an executive with large blue chip companies & a leader or advisor for 4 tech startups, in the USA & Canada. Started 4 businesses. Consulted for many small, medium, large organizations in North America & internationally.
Perspectives informed by hiring talent – staff & consultants, by providing consulting services, by being a SMB leader and owner and by being a member of an untapped talent pool.
He launched Elderberry.work to match age 45+ proven experience, and the 5 ways they create value, to businesses of all sizes. All functions, seniorities, industries. For consults, contracts, freelance, fractional.
In tandem with your business’ embrace of a flexible workforce strategy, Elderberry.work helps you create the conditions for what we call Perpetual Agility, guidance that we capture concisely in our free Playbook.