How to survive when your team walks out
Three resignations. One day. £30,000 in monthly commitments. My team fell apart almost overnight, and I had to act fast. This is the story of how I survived - and thrived - through a business crisis.
Welcome to a free edition of Start Up To Grown Up: Your source for ideas, insights and tactics to take back control of your business and scale it sustainably and profitably by Heather Townsend, award-winning author of The Accountants’ Millionaires’ Club and Founder of The Accountants’ Growth Club.
What do you do when most of your fee earners suddenly leave? This happened to me last October.
I’d been in the US delivering the launch of a leadership programme. While I was away, my Head Of Growth, who had returned for 4 weeks after nearly 2 months of sick leave after struggling with poor mental health, was meant to sack our new Growth Expert.
It didn’t happen.
What actually happened was I got a phone call to tell me about the resignation of another good Growth Expert. I managed to put this resignation on hold.
I flew back to England, and then the House of Cards collapsed. As planned, the dismissal conversation happened with my new and underperforming Growth Expert. That’s one down. Then the text came through, and I wasn’t able to save the resignation of the good Growth Expert. That’s two down. Then, my Head Of Growth chimed in with his resignation. He wasn’t sure what he wanted and needed from his career going forward. But it wasn’t working for me in our business. That’s three down. And all in one day.
That left me with my two most junior fee earners. They looked after our outsourced marketing work. One of whom was on sick leave with severe anxiety and likely to be off for months. On top of that, there was £30,000 in monthly recurring revenue from coaching to deliver, and it was just me.
Oh ****
I was reminded of this situation when a number of my members of The Accountants’ Growth Club found that key teams had collapsed in the space of a week.
The question is, what did I do to recover? And what do I recommend if you ever find yourself in this situation?
Don’t panic
At this point in time, it is only natural to think that you and your business are doomed. After all, it felt like that 14 months ago. But I’m still standing, the business is still standing, and we’re regrowing. No word of a lie; it’s been a really tough 14 months. And not one I want to do again, but it has made me a better leader and owner of a business as a result.
I remember my business buddy saying something simple when I was sharing how much had gone wrong:
You’ve just been given a gift, what is it?
Looking back, I can see I was given a gift. But it was initially like a turn in an ice bath. Like an ice bath, it was intense and multifaceted. There was the initial first moment of immersion that shook my whole body with that painful coldness that squeezes the last breath out of your body. Then the thoughts came:
I can’t do this
It’s too much
But then the intense cold transitions to a dull numbness. To endure the cold, I then entered a state of intense mental focus.
What am I going to do?
How will I survive?
These thoughts kept going around and around my head. I became withdrawn - almost like that feeling of being in a trance when in an ice bath. I needed to get out of panic stations as quickly as possible. That meant getting my mind under control and working for me rather than against me.
Move from emotionally flooded to rational thoughts
As the thoughts went around my head, I kept asking myself the following questions again and again:
What gift have you just been given?
What will you know in 12 months that you will know now?
These two questions forced my brain to move out of panic mode into a more thoughtful, rational mode.
This is where you need to get to.
At this point in time, I started to consider everything that was wrong with our previous resourcing model. And there was a significant amount wrong! This was my gift. It was a chance to take a white sheet of paper and completely reconfigure how we resourced our coaching work without having to change anyone’s job description.
How often do we get this chance in business? Particularly with a growing business that has been going for a few years? It’s like winning the lottery big time.
Once I got to this point, the initial angst went. The introspection went. Replaced by a sense of euphoria - this is going to be OK. Not easy, but I reminded myself I had got through the pandemic, so I could get through this.
All I needed to do was get through the first few months with the right resource and structure now in place. But before I could do this, I needed to start the right conversations with key stakeholders in my business.
Communicate transparently
Of course, I wasn’t the only one panicking in this situation. I had a number of team members who were staying and were thinking, what’s she going to do? Is this it? Do I have a job going forward?
Even if you don’t have a clue how you are going to get you and your business through this situation, you have a duty to key stakeholders. Who needs to know what? And by when? As I had two notice periods to work with, I had some breathing space to work out what we were going to do before I needed to tell our members. But I needed to talk with our staying team members to reassure them that we’d all be OK. I clearly remember the next morning after the resignations, waking up and speaking with my ops manager and saying:
As long as you are with me we will find a way through this
At this point, I was honest with my remaining team members. I don’t have any answers yet, but this is an opportunity.
We all then started talking. But first we needed to work out what we all wanted and needed in the medium-term when we had fixed the current crisis.
Dealing with the medium-term
It’s very tempting to go straight into action when this happens. After all, there is client work to be done, decisions to be taken and all that jazz. Diving straight into short-term fixes could lead to hasty decisions that haunt you later. Our members can forgive me once, but not twice. It will be the same for you and your clients.
Never waste a good crisis
You’ve been given a gift here. If you need to make major repairs, what else could you fix while you’re at it? After all, in for a penny, in for a pound!
Between my ops manager and myself, we worked out what we wanted our resourcing to look like going forward. We knew we had struggled to find a business coach who:
Wanted to be employed rather than work as a freelancer
Was great at all this: sales calls, building strong relationships with members, leading online training sessions, facilitating group meetings and being a top-notch coach.
Could stay organised to get everything done
Recognised when they needed to swap in another Growth Expert to coach their member
If I am honest - with the benefit of hindsight - the club had never been able to scale sustainably. It had been two steps forward, two steps back all the time. Our revenue had been on a rollercoaster ride. This was all due to having the wrong resourcing model.
To counteract our historical problems, we deliberately split the Growth Expert role up. We decided to have a Relationship Manager to bring in new members and give them that red-carpet experience. The Relationship Manager would do their quarterly reviews and help them get the most out of the club. But most importantly, they wouldn’t - beyond quarterly reviews and putting together a Growth Plan, coach them. They would then match them with their Growth Expert for coaching.
Once we knew the medium-term picture, we could then focus on the immediate needs of the short-term.
Secure the workflow
It rather focuses the mind when you realise you are shortly going to have no cover for nearly £30k of monthly recurring coaching work! I knew I had to make quick decisions.
The first step was analysing our client portfolio. Who didn’t we want to lose? What was business critical to keep? How were we going to prioritise their work? Who did we actively want to lose?
It was at this point that we realised I would be back on the tools again. I’d never come off the tools, but I was going to be taking on a significant extra load of client work if we were going to survive as a business. This meant we:
Analysed my workload
Looked at what was non-core and could go to our non-fee earners
Looked at what of my chargeable work could be done with our current freelancers
Guarded my time ferociously (this is still happening)
I knew that going back to the tools and working long hours was only going to be a temporary situation for the next 3-6 months. Forget work-life balance and all that jazz; sometimes, as a business owner, you just have to do this.
Redo your business plan and cash flow forecast
When you know what you are going to do, it’s time to capture it on a business plan accompanied by a cash flow forecast. For example,
What are your key objectives?
Who is going to deliver what?
What needs to happen by when?
How will you maintain enough working capital to finance the transition in your business?
When can you afford to bring in that new pair of hands to take the weight off you?
How much client work do you think you will lose?
Once you have your business plan, it’s time to start working on it and keep the momentum up. You now need the structure to make this happen.
Set up the war room
As a team, we started the war room. After all, our business was now on a war footing. We had daily battles to win, and we were gunning for long-term survival. Our war room was a daily and weekly conversation to move everything forward. For us, this meant:
Hiring three freelance Growth Experts
Hiring a Relationship Manager
Transitioning the host of our Special Interest Groups and Daily Power-Ups from our previous Growth Experts to members in our newly formed role of Club Hosts
Micro-managing the exiting team members to ensure we got them to deliver right up until a handover had occurred.
In my experience, people love pulling together during a crisis. Our members came good both with the gift of time for us to sort ourselves out, and also with offers of help. And yes, your clients will also offer to help. My tip? Say yes to offers of help if they match with your short- and medium-term plans.
One year on
As I look back over a year, when we reset the business, I feel a sense of pride but also tiredness. It’s a deep tiredness that goes right to the bone. In fact, yesterday, most unlike me, I binged on a box set for most of the day.
We’ve had our second-best year revenue-wise - only down 5-10% from last year. Our profit has gone through the roof. However, this is because I’ve been far more hands-on, and we have ‘right-sized’ our payroll to our revenue. We also now have good signs of a regrowing business. Our pipeline is well stocked, and new members are joining again at the right pace for our business.
12 months ago, I thought we had a plan to fix all our woes. But as is the way, there are often far more problems going on than you realise. You can’t fix everything at once. At the back of my mind, I realised there were problems with our marketing team. But, it was not enough of a priority to fix the problems 12 months ago. Realistically, I didn’t have the bandwidth to investigate or even consider dealing with the marketing team. This decision came back to bite me. The last 5 months have had me stepping in to lead our marketing department and bring in a team of freelance experts to support me. But that is a story for another day.
Your action this week.
Restructuring your business - even during a crisis - is a rare opportunity to rebuild better and stronger. I am not suggesting that you artificially create a situation where you HAVE to do this. But your action this week is to take a long, hard look at your business model and resourcing to service your client work. If you lost over half of your fee earners in one day, what would you do differently? How would you change the roles?