Although hiring for positions like sales or engineering has historically been more challenging due to fierce competition for top performers in these roles, businesses of all types (and particularly those in the marketing tech and services sector where we spend the bulk of our time at ScaleHouse) are struggling to hire due to labor shortages.

These labor shortages are becoming increasingly problematic as demand for professional services bounces back post-pandemic. A report from Korn Ferry finds that by 2030, more than 85 million jobs could go unfilled because there aren’t enough skilled people to take them.

If you’re an employer looking to hire, what can you do to attract top talent?

Inflation has been a popular topic of conversation lately, and rightly so. Over the last few weeks prices of various raw materials and commodities have surged and show no signs of slowing down.

At ScaleHouse, we focus a lot on business optimization. Whether it’s introducing new methods, practices and systems that reduce turnaround time, or optimizing your organizational structure, it can often be a lot easier for us (as external consultants) to identify opportunities for optimization because we’re not working IN the business every day. In essence, optimization is the art of reducing costs while improving performance (and profitability!).

Service based business are notorious for revenue volatility, and that played out to the extreme in 2020 when, for a period of time, business came to a standstill due to COVID and many ad hoc projects were put on hold.

I’ve worked with all kinds of CEO’s and C-level teams since launching ScaleHouse in 2015. Some were amazing sales leaders and understood how to engage and convert high value prospects. Others….not so much. Although I often encourage the C-suite to get involved in sales and marketing activities, in truth this strategy can either drive, or kill, deals.

Although there are over 100,000 results on Amazon if you type in “business growth book”, one of my top growth reads is from Tiffani Bova, Global Growth Evangelist for Salesforce and her 2018 book “Growth IQ”.

One of my favorite quotes is from Nolan Bushnell who said “the true entrepreneur is a doer, not a dreamer”. Bushnell knows a thing or two about the difference between dreaming and doing: He founded Atari in the ’70s and is considered one of the founding fathers of the video game industry…before going on to start the Chuck E Cheese pizza chain.

Back in 2019, Wharton’s J. Daniel Kim published research that the average age of the most successful entrepreneurs is…..45. This bucks the long-held belief that to be an entrepreneur (or at least a successful one), you need to start a firm in your teens or 20’s– and because the stories of entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates get so much media attention, it’s easy to think of their stories as the norm rather than as the exception.

With so much uncertainty surrounding us (pandemics, elections, trade wars…even murder hornets), it’s easy to get caught up in what feels like day to day survival and forego annual planning. That said, when it feels impossible to plan for the future it becomes even more important to ensure you have guiding objectives and strategies linking the company’s future to the present day.

The pandemic has revealed more fissures than we’d like to count including a major gap between the sales haves and have-nots. In the early stages of the shutdown, new business opportunities all but disappeared. The most resilient companies were those already clued into the importance of relationship based, personalized sales and service experiences. The good news is, it’s not too late to learn this important lesson. Whether you’re a newbie to the world of personalized sales or you’re ready to leverage personalization through your entire customer lifecycle, here are three ways to drive better connection.