The Curse of Skilled Labor on a Small Team

On the previous, Mark shared a recent experience about letting an employee go. Not long after, another team member left for a great opportunity at another company. On a small team like Mark's, the loss of two employees back to back poses a big problem, as the workload gets spread to the remaining employees (a BIG increase) and some institutional knowledge is lost. Even with great systems and documentation, there's always some amount of institutional knowledge lost when an employee leaves, not to mention it takes time for their replacement to get up to speed.

This experience of picking up the slack, including both high and low skill work, got Mark thinking -- the curse of a small team is that skilled labor can leave for better opportunities, in which case the remaining skilled labor ends up doing a blend of low and high skill work. Ultimately, the business ends up paying skilled wages for work which is not entirely skilled, cutting into margins.

With this new revelation, Mark describes his plan for moving all low skill tasks in his business to lower skilled, lower wage employees, and why it's critical that businesses strive for this efficiency.

Mark Butler, Virtual CFO

The Money School: https://moneyschool.works

https://markbutler.com

https://letsdothebooks.com

YNAB

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