Q: How do you determine if an employee is worth what you’re paying them?

Rodney Davis: That can be a subjective conversation point, but it doesn’t have to be. The job of a good finance person is to isolate the cost components and understand how they affect the bottom line. Only after that can you layer on the more human, subjective side.

That can be a subjective conversation point, but it doesn’t have to be. The job of a good finance person is to isolate the cost components and understand how they affect the bottom line. Only after that can you layer on the more human, subjective side.

Q: How can you compare employees with the same job description? How do you financially measure performance?
Rodney Davis:

If I’m making jam, there’s a role for the oil, there’s a role for the fruit, there’s a role for the sugar. It’s the same principle. If I’m dealing with people, there’s a role for the salesperson, there’s a role for the marketing person and there’s a role for the finance person. The measurements for each of those people are associated with the inputs and outputs that we derive from each of those people. So in the case of a salesperson.

You assess the controllable and the uncontrollable outputs that come out of them doing their job and then form a set of metrics. Sales is a good one because you can measure how many leads they get, how many people they convert, how long it takes them to convert, what’s their average sale value, and so on. In the case of marketing, how much money did you give them to spend? How did that translate into dollars earned? In the case of manufacturing, how many units came down the line and how many of those units came out defective? So, you have different measurements for different job functions, and the job of finance in that conversation is to identify the inputs and outputs and the controllable vs uncontrollable and assess that individual against it.

Q: How can the finance guy help the senior management team have a conversation about staffing?

Rodney Davis:The baseline of every good budget has two components that are typically broken out from the rest. One is revenue and cost of goods sold associated with that revenue, and the other is staffing. In any good budget, staffing is a completely separate component, broken down to the individual number of positions in each of the different functions and all of the associated costs with each of those positions. So, when finance is having that conversation at the senior management level, they typically speak in terms of the staffing costs of the various functions and how those translate as a percentage of organization, in terms of cost or revenue. And of course they’ll provide metrics against those same functions in other organizations, so that you’re having a real conversation about the effectiveness of that team in carrying out their job. It’s often quite easy to get metrics that you can compare them to.

Q: What’s your point of view about sharing financial performance with employees of the company?

Rodney Davis:I believe that at a high level, sharing financial information with the organization can be a good thing, depending on your objective. Sharing it as a means of demonstrating to the team their effectiveness in achieving the company’s overall objectives, is usually not a bad thing. But I’m not sure it’s particularly useful to share it for sharing’s sake. If you don’t underpin it with KPIs, it’s not a useful conversation.. In all the reporting I do for companies, if you don’t bring ‘cause and effect’ to the conversation, your conversation ends up incomplete. So if you tell your employees how profitable the business is without telling them what drove that profitability and what could cause that profitability to disappear is not going to give them the right perspective.

Q: How much information about the financial health of the company should we be sharing with our employees?

Rodney Davis:I think it’s a situational call. There are varying degrees of information we should be sharing with varying levels of employees within the organization. I say that cautiously because if you’re unable to have a complete conversation and provide context, then sharing that information could be harmful. I have a rule in business that I followed for 25 years: Anybody in my organization that makes hiring decisions has a responsibility to see the results. Because if they’re making decisions that affect the results of the organization, they should see the results of the decisions that they make so that they can be held accountable. I’ve seen many organizations where the person making the decision isn’t even aware of the ultimate outcome of the decision they had made. That is a real error in an organization when dealing with senior managers. Senior managers must be accountable for the decisions that they make and the KPIs they choose to measure will enable them to see the associated costs or benefits of the decisions made.

Q: When an organization is doing well, how do you determine a bonus? What metrics should be put in place to help entrepreneurs determine bonuses?

Rodney Davis:I tell every one of my clients, if you can’t calculate the bonus or total compensation independent of your judgment, then there’s something wrong with your compensation plan. Interestingly enough, it’s fairly easy to ascertain what the right bonus levels are within your company or industry. They should be tied to the target compensation for that position.

Rodney Davis:Typically a company will say, “I want X percent of their compensation to be fixed and Y percent to be variable, and that variable compensation is achieved if they hit their target performance metrics.” For example, let’s say we’re talking about an executive. I think the target compensation and the competitive environment for an executive of that level is $100K and I want their compensation to be 80% fixed and 20% variable, because that’s consistent with the industry. I might say we’re going to give them a base salary of $80K, with a bonus objective of 25% as a target, and really drive home how important it is that they perform. We have an upside that’s tied to overperformance or we have a ratchet that’s tied to underperformance. Some companies will make that all-or-nothing, which I don’t think is the right move, because if you’re 80% into the year and you know you’re not going to get your bonus no matter what, you may take your foot off the gas. If you know that there’s something at stake, you’ll keep driving all the way to the finish line. So target earnings is one way you do it. The other way is this: you might say that the company has a return requirement of X, so we want a return on equity or return on revenue of X. If management does their job and they make that return, then the pre-bonus is higher, because they’ve either done cost savings or they’ve blown through on the revenue numbers. Then they might say, “We’re going to give management a share of everything above that target return on revenue.” In that case, you know that sky’s the limit. So, you might say, “If our return on revenue target is 13% and they’ve achieved 17% pre bonus, we might give them 50% of that, and 4% of that return,” which could in some cases be significant.

I’m very specific and very clear with senior management that there must be a predictability to compensation. And that has to be something that an executive can actually calculate. If your executives have that ability, invariably you’re going to find that they’re going to perform better, because they know the rules, they know where the goalposts are, and therefore they can shoot for the stars where they can determine how much effort they’re going to make to get there.