From Failed Hires to Profit Gains: The Contractor's Guide to HR ROI

🔗 LINKS

Learn more about People Processes and connect with Rhamy

Visit the episode page at for more details and a transcript of the show.

Get Profit First for Commercial Construction--OUT NOW!

ℹ ABOUT THIS EPISODE

Labor is your biggest expense but least understood profit driver. Wade Carpenter sits down with HR expert Rhamy Alejeal to reveal the hidden costs of poor hiring practices that are bleeding your construction business dry. 

Discover the three critical metrics every contractor must track: turnover rate, time to hire, and time to productivity. 

Learn why McDonald's takes 21 days to hire a fry cook and 41 days to get them productive - and what that means for your skilled trades. 

Stop treating your workforce like expensive lawn ornaments and start maximizing your labor ROI.

Subscribe to get notified as soon as new episodes go live.

⌚️ Key moments in this episode:

• 00:19 Meet Rhamy Alejeal: People Processes
• 02:16 The Importance of Labor Productivity
• 07:04 Key Metrics for Labor Efficiency
• 13:36 Strategies to Improve Hiring and Retention
• 23:03 The Value of Outsourcing HR
• 28:16 Conclusion and Contact Information

Join the Profit First for Construction community!

Find all episodes and related links at ContractorSuccessForum.com.

Join the conversation on our LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/CarpenterCPAs

FIND US ONLINE
Wade Carpenter, CPA, CGMA | CarpenterCPAs.com
Stephen Brown, Bonding Expert | SuretyAnswers.com

Transcript

Wade Carpenter: [00:00:00] Labor's like an excavator. When it's running, you're moving dirt, making progress. When it's down, it's nothing but an expensive lawn ornament. Payroll, subs, crews, if they're not producing, they're just eating margin and most contractors never put real numbers to it.

This is the Contractor Success Forum. I'm Wade Carpenter with Carpenter Company CPAs. My partner in crime, Stephen Brown with McDaniel Whitley Bonding and Insurance couldn't be with us today, but I am fortunate to have Rhamy Alejeal with People Processes to join us and kick around why your company may not be as profitable as it could be.

I've gotten to know Rhamy over, say, the last five years or so, and have meant to have him on the show many times. I've dropped the ball a few times on him, so I appreciate him joining us today. I was lucky enough to hear him speak again this year. Loved his topic on labor productivity, and think all our contractors out there really need to pay attention to this one.

So, Rhamy, thank you for being on the show today. Can you tell us a bit more about you, People Processes [00:01:00] and what you do?

Rhamy Alejeal: Sure, sure. Thank you for having me on. It's a pleasure. It's exciting. Like you said, my name is Rhamy Alejeal. I'm the CEO and founder of People Processes, and today, the day we're recording, October 1, is our 16 year anniversary. We've been doing this a good little while, and we do HR. We're an HR department for hire, a mercenary HR department for little over a hundred businesses across the United States.

So around 10,000 employees. We are the people who are designing the jobs, doing the recruiting, onboarding, training managers, teaching people about performance management, handling grievances, compliance, payroll benefits, compensation analysis, retirement. Firing a lot of people, firing people every day, but don't tell them that we're very friendly HR department, but that's part of our work.

And yeah, it's been a pleasure to be working across the US on just all kinds of businesses, tons of trades, tons of contractors, law firms, architects, medical, we kind of work in different pods with really focused people who know what they're doing, [00:02:00] and I just get to dabble around. So it's a fun time.

Wade Carpenter: Yeah. I know you and I have gotten to know each other a little bit over the years. We've kicked around some of the issues with contractors, whether they do payroll and W-2s, and subcontractors. But that's not the topic of today. I mean, I loved your topic in New Jersey.

A lot of our contractors, they're struggling to be profitable. Cash flow is always an issue. The excavators and all that heavy equipment and the materials, they can be very expensive. But as you made the point, payroll can be the largest but least understood item. And there is an expectation of return. However you define payroll, and we encourage you to do it right, whether you're using subs or you have your own in-house crew, they're basically driving your profit.

And so I loved your message. Can you tell us more about, there's a lot of things you talk about failed hires, turnover, that kind of stuff.

Rhamy Alejeal: I think people business owners in particular, right? You know, we go on this journey from being good and learning a trade, whether that's changing tires, laying [00:03:00] concrete, being a technician or an analyst. These sorts of things are all trades. We learn and then we go through that entrepreneurial journey, right? I can do this, I should start a business about it.

 Once we find our product and our service the real struggle that a lot of businesses go through to get to that first million, 2 million is operationalizing or systematizing their processes, their operations processes.

If you were talking to a young business owner and they were like, man, every other job I have to go out there and rework it. Every other job I go out and it's not done the way I want. And I've told this and that and none of the materials work the way I thought and the machines break down, you would say, all right, you've got a process problem, right? You don't have appropriate QA checks. You don't have the appropriate training or the investment or all that kind of stuff. And it's this really tough journey for a lot of businesses to go on. A lot of them fail and are stuck forever at that small shop. But figuring out your operations is a key part.

What I find is that business owners trades in particular though, they don't apply that same brain to their [00:04:00] people operations, their people processes as we call it, right?

So if you were to have one in three jobs fail, not achieve the goal, right? Not make the money you want out of it, be a disaster cause you a ton of headaches and stress, and you would go and look at those jobs and where you made a mistake in the lifecycle of that job, right?

Maybe you marketed to the wrong person. Maybe you didn't sale correctly, you overpromised, or you didn't qualify correctly when you closed the actual business. Maybe you didn't provide the appropriate scope or timeline. Then when you were actually doing the work, maybe you had failures in how you executed, or heck, maybe you just didn't bill them right. There's a lot of things that could happen, but you go through and you fix those.

Employment often doesn't get that same treatment, right? If you hire 3 guys and in 12 months, one in three are gone, which is not even that crazy to think about, in fact, a lot of you listings like one in three would be great, [00:05:00] right?

You're probably not doing a great job at being an employer. At the process, the systemization of attracting the appropriate employee, qualifying them, onboarding them, making the appropriate offer so that the promises that you can deliver are in line with what they expect.

And then operating as a manager with them, giving appropriate direction, follow up performance review, paying them appropriately, providing appropriate incentive. These are just the same things that you do with your client and you know the effect of wowing them. You know the effect of plusing up your systems in your operations and your delivery. My argument is if you put that same effort or expertise in to the people journey, you will rapidly see a huge increase in your ability to attract and retain people, and that means a huge increase in productivity.

Productivity is inputs to outputs. So if you can turn your million and a half dollars in labor or $500,000 in labor you got that labor pool, and right now it [00:06:00] generates you $3 for every buck you put in. If you can turn that into $4 or $5, you're a profitable company. Labor's your biggest input a lot of times.

So being better at that is just like being better at marketing, right? You change out how you do it, you do some better ways, you put in better processes, you hire better experts, and suddenly for every 30 bucks you're spending over there, you get a call as opposed to every 60. It's the same with labor. You can get to where you're spending the same amount, but it goes a lot further. And that's what we focus on a lot.

Wade Carpenter: That's absolutely what I would love to talk about here. Because whether it's having the right crews and them producing and getting the job done. A lot of these things can go wrong in a job and is it something that you're actually looking at? Are the crews part of the problem?

If you've got some equipment that can be sitting on the job an extra week or two, that can eat up your profit in a heartbeat. So what I was hoping to talk about a little bit was you talked in New Jersey about the time to productivity, time to hire somebody, revenue to it per employee.

I know you brought up a great example like McDonald's [00:07:00] hiring fry cooks, but can you talk about some of these metrics that matter to a contractor?

Rhamy Alejeal: Yeah. So here's some of the drivers of your productivity return. So if you think about it this way, just like if it's like machine operating hours, right? How much time are you spending that you have this incredible machine in actual use, right? There's a capacity, and then there's how much are you actually getting it? Or if you think about a tech, you're paying them 40 hours a week, how much are actually billable? How much are actually in the field? Are they sitting around, drinking coffee in your office 20 hours a week?

So similar to that, three key metrics I want you to maybe take a look at.

The first one is a very simple one, and it's the baseline for all of your people operations. If you had a machine out in the field, every time it breaks down is an occurrence, right? In HR we think of turnover as that occurrence.

Another thing to think of it is simply having to hire somebody, because it's the same work. It's just like having to buy a new machine. Yeah. You need the machine. So there's a period there where it's like, I wanna buy it, but I don't have it yet. Anytime you have the need for someone and you don't have them, that's an event.

That percentage of how [00:08:00] many people you have to hire every year is called turnover. All right? So let's say you're going from five people to six people. You didn't lose any of the five people, but you had to hire a sixth person. Believe it or not, we still would call that one sixth turnover, right? 16% or whatever. Because it's one person you had to hire, right?

And that's a bit of a reach, but I want you to think about turnover. Take your headcount currently, number of people you had to hire over the last year. Different industries have different turnover benchmarks. But in general, nationwide, 3% of people quit or are fired every month. So across all industries it's about a third. It's about 36%.

Now back during COVID for about three months there, that was close to zero. Nobody was quitting, but getting fired happened a lot. And there have been times where that number's gone a lot higher. If you've heard about the great resignation, there was a time where that number was approaching 5% per month, where we were literally turning over 60% of the country in a year. That's your average numbers. Industries are different and you can't just lump blue collar together. There's a big difference between artisan contractors in a [00:09:00] long-term commercial project versus day laborers and guys doing more transactional work. So it's hard to know.

But you actually don't really need a benchmark, because a benchmark doesn't tell you much. All you need is your number, and you need to track it over time. And this number tells us if the things we're doing in the people processes all the way from job scoping and design, to recruiting, to making the offers, to onboarding them, to training them, mentoring, providing career paths, benefits, compensation, all of these pieces, these are all levers that we pull. When we pull one, does that turnover number go down? If it goes up, we may be doing something wrong. Not necessarily, but it's a pretty good sign, right? So that's a turnover.

And here's what I want you to think about. Every time you turn over, you have to hire someone new. So from the moment, Jeff, the guy who works for you, been working for you for two years, he comes to you Friday morning and says, I'm out. Goodbye. I'm not working anymore. From that moment to when you hire a replacement for Jeff is another number that we look very closely at. We call it [00:10:00] time to hire.

If you have a million dollar payroll, right? That's maybe, let's call it 15 people, okay? And you're doing $4.5 million a year. 15 people, $4.5 million a year. Every day that one 15th of your company is a human. The cost for them when they're not there isn't the 1.5. In fact, that person quits and your expenses go down. So it looks like you're more profitable for a week.

But you need that guy. He's there for a reason. He's there to generate you money, to accomplish work. So the cost of him being gone is actually one 15th of your 4.5 million. That's his productivity rate, right? It's like when a machine's down, when it's not being used, you're not losing. You're not like, oh, I'm not using the machine. It's not costing me gas. It makes me money now. No. You need the machine to bill. And that's how people are.

So every day an employee is missing, that's a day of missed productivity and that's a huge cost. And you don't see it on your Profit and Loss. You don't see it there. You just see it as lower revenue, [00:11:00] okay?

And you're thinking, oh, that's only for sales guys. But no, your guys have to do work and they're worth something. If you wind up losing too many, I guarantee you, your gross revenue's gonna drop like a stone because your quality of work's gonna go down, your speed of responsiveness. You're gonna have the other guys all working overtime. You're gonna have a foreman doing basic labor because he's gotta make up the spots.

So those missing days, we call time to hire. Every one of those days is costing you one day of your 4.5 million, not whatever his salary was. So take a look at your time to hire.

We've talked about two metrics, turnover and time to hire. It's not uncommon on a company like that for time to hire costs to be in this case it would be three times their wage every day that they're missing. So if this is a person who makes 25 bucks an hour, that's $200 a day, you're probably missing out on 600 bucks a day of productivity. That's the real cost. So you wanna take a look at time to hire.

Wade Carpenter: I think that's one of the hidden costs of turnover. You lose your supervisor, your project [00:12:00] manager, your estimators, and it's not just the fact that, hey, we're not paying their salary, we're not getting that work done. I relate it to my business too, or even your business. I mean, when you have somebody that is less productive or finding that right person, like an accountant that doesn't really know construction, and so work with them for six months or two years and find out maybe you've outgrown them or whatever. It's not just the cost of their salary that it's doing. So that's a great point. 

Rhamy Alejeal: That's the investment. You wouldn't hire the accountant if it didn't make you more money. You wouldn't hire the tradesmen in your organization if they didn't pay you more to have them than not have them. That's why you do it. So you're losing out on that top line revenue.

And there's no place on your expense report for that. You don't see it. But I can tell you this, if you got 15 employees right now, how much money would you make if you had zero employees? The answer is very little, right? So it starts down there. More employees doesn't always mean more money when you do it stupidly, but they're there for a reason. And that time to hire metric is a [00:13:00] really easy one.

If you're in construction right now and you're out there working, and it takes you two months to replace any sort of skilled labor, if you can cut that in half to 30 days by investing a bit more in your structure, your pieces of stuff, we can talk about how to actually make that better. But if you actually make those processes better, you will get many more days of productivity out of your same labor cost.

 That's the win. Now you're making 5 million on 1.5 million in labor, just by decreasing your time to hire. Of course turnover would help a lot too. A lot of levers on that.

The third metric I want you to think about is time to productivity. That's a really important one. So here's the truth. You hire somebody. Day one, how useful are they to you? They're not. In fact, most of the time, total productivity goes down hiring someone compared to not having them. Day one is zero and it costs a manager some time to orientate them. Other coworkers have to listen to them [00:14:00] and get to know them, and even a month in someone else has gotta be double checking their work and making sure they're not screwing stuff up and teaching them about how this client works or what we're doing on this side or where that thing is stored. Productivity actually starts negative on a hire most of the time, and then it takes a while for them to become of average usefulness.

I ask most business owners in the trades, how long from when you hire somebody to win their good, right? I'm either gonna get two answers. One is gonna be a guy who goes five years. They're no good till they've been here five years, you know, and it's gonna be that grizzled guy, right? And the other guy's oh yeah, we've got them out in the field in three days and they're making me money.

Wade Carpenter: Yeah. 

Rhamy Alejeal: Neither one of those numbers is right. Okay. It's somewhere in between there. 

Wade Carpenter: Can you give everybody that statistic you were talking about with McDonald's fry cooks and stuff like that, I thought that's great example.

Rhamy Alejeal: Yeah. So if you think about, all right, how long does it take me to hire somebody, right? That time to hire position. From the moment someone leaves to when they start, I want you to be the best in the industry. But being fast isn't everything. Being good is [00:15:00] important, right? What is it you get? What's the triangle, right? Fast, cheap, or good, right?

Wade Carpenter: You don't get them all.

Rhamy Alejeal: It's the same in HR. It's not just about being super fast, it's about getting a decent person. But no matter how low your standards are, lemme give you this number.

McDonald's, to hire an entry level position, right? This is a fry cook. This is someone with no degree, no high school degree, criminal records, fine, no skills needed. I vaguely need you to show up sober. That's the line, right? Still takes them 21 days to hire them. So from the moment a fry cook is empty to when they have a new fry cook is three weeks, okay? On average.

Wade Carpenter: Yeah, and I know you were saying like the training time was like-

Rhamy Alejeal: Yeah, then I was about to say, now for your business, it's gonna be a bit longer. You probably require a bit more skill than that. Now, once they're hired, McDonald's also publishes their time to productivity. So how long from when you hire a fry cook to when they are producing fries and burgers at the same average rate as the company?

And for them it's 41 days. That's a good pile [00:16:00] of days. It's a little over a month. It's like five weeks. So from the moment someone quits to three weeks, plus five weeks, eight weeks later, they are in a productivity hole. Now it is likely, I hope your profession requires slightly higher hiring standards than a fry cook at McDonald's and I think it probably has a bit more skill involved.

So if you're looking at these numbers and you think, hey, yeah, I think I can get a person of average productivity up in three weeks, either you are just the bees knees and I'm so proud of you, or you're probably not asking enough outta your people. The average productivity across your company is probably trash, right? Everybody's only been there four weeks. Nobody knows what they're doing, and you can get them to average pretty quick.

But those numbers are important to keep in mind because those costs are quite high. Then now you're talking about for McDonald's, every time someone quits, it costs them two months of missed productivity basically there, right? Where they're replacing them and bringing them up to speed. Two months of what McDonald's produces outta that person.

For you, let's say it's three, maybe four [00:17:00] months. This is a very minimal, I mean, this is like you're really good and you don't require high skill and so on and so forth. So that means for every three people that you're having to hire and bring on every year, you're missing the productivity of an entire full-time human.

 So on 10 employees, you could get the work done of 11 if you only didn't have to replace those three during that time. It's that simple. So these are very basic metrics: turnover, time to hire, time to productivity, but again, minimal work if you've never turned your attention to it. Just like if you've never turned your attention to quality checking or checklists on how you operate, how you deliver your service, marginal attention to that can give you huge results, right? It's like, oh my gosh, we have half the amount of rework.

If you're in an organization right now that hasn't spent much time on these things, you could probably cut that turnover rate significantly. If you're going from nothing to a mature system by 50%, if you look at your time to hire and the boss calls his friends and hopes somebody shows up on the [00:18:00] job site, that's your recruiting plan, going from that to a structured program with advertisements, interview guides, specialized recruiters, et cetera, you're gonna more than cut that in half.

Wade Carpenter: Yeah.

Rhamy Alejeal: And it'll make your turnover better. Because you'll get better people, right? So you get more and more, they, they all build on one another.

And then your time to productivity. If it takes somebody six months to really learn the ropes in your organization, and the way they learn the ropes is they go to the jobs and they do what the other guys say, and they have no training, they have no formalized performance management where they know what they're trying to get to, no scorecarding, they don't know what's going on. Putting in place some of those basic comprehensive onboarding, cultural indoctrination, storytelling, trainings, et cetera, could lower that from six months to three.

And now people are more skilled, faster, you have less rework. People feel more progress in their jobs. You're gonna have lower turnover. Everything builds on itself, right? And they just compound into significantly more profitability.

Wade Carpenter: Yeah. I was actually just talking with a contractor yesterday that had a [00:19:00] project manager that she ended up having to fire. They were not showing up on the job. And this guy leaves and goes somewhere else and pulls another project manager. So, she was stressing because she's the salesperson and she had to jump back into managing jobs and stuff like that. Multimillion dollar company.

And you know what's sad is it's not just the cost of losing that salary. What are they producing? What's the constraints? Because this is really constraining her business. And she's not really able to maximize her return and she's actually worried about her pipeline.

She needs to replace some of her pipeline, but right now, she's so busy dealing with these things. So I guess my point is, you've already talked about some of these things, but what are some of these solutions? What are these metrics? How can they be thinking about this thing? What can we do to maximize the return on our hires?

Rhamy Alejeal: So, of course, just like any trade, there's a value to experience and there's best practices and ways of doing things. And of course, companies like mine, People [00:20:00] Processes bring that experience and expertise and depth and specialization to organizations across the United States. You don't have to work with us though. You guys are business owners. You can figure it out. That's the whole job.

And what I would tell you is look at the employee lifecycle from beginning to end, just like you do the customer lifecycle from acquisition or attention, interest, decision, right? AIDA. Anyway, old sales movie. If you're looking at how you start all the way back there, and maybe even a step further back than recruiting all the way to job design. Like how are we positioning ourselves as employers and what is the thing we're trying to attract? But think about that whole cycle from the job to the advertisement, to the interviewing process, the skills checking to the pre-onboarding.

That's things like background checks, physical testing, et cetera, reference checking, onboarding, or before you get to onboarding the offer letter, how do you sell people on the job? Great, you did all this work. Now how do you get them to accept it and be excited about it? Then think about the actual process of onboarding.

Just like if you got a [00:21:00] big, giant client and the only thing you sent them was a bunch of ugly off center copies of your contract in the mail that'll arrive in the next three weeks. That's not exactly the wow experience that is gonna generate a customer for life. Think about that with your employees.

How do you onboard them? In that onboarding, are you giving them appropriate expectations? Are you exciting them? Are you teaching them the guardrails and the behaviors that you want to see? Did you screen for those in the first place? And then how are you guiding them that first a hundred days, 180 days, to move them to a skilled, trusted professional. So that's your kind of onboarding process.

In the long run, how do you keep your old hands from just becoming bored at work and kind of clocking in? So we call that performance management or long-term career planning. So how do we keep those in?

And then there's just the basic block and tackle. Are you compensating correctly? Do you have appropriate benefits? Do you have appropriate retirement benefits? Are you efficiently compensating in terms of tax benefits? Those are all ways of making the labor spend go [00:22:00] further, right? So there's a lot of pieces to that.

You can replay this video, write them down. Pick three, make some improvements, and you'll have increased your labor productivity. Okay?

That's all labor return. There's also a big pile of risk involved in labor, as you guys know, right? There's lawsuits and department of labor issues and I nine issues, DHS issues, all kinds stuff going on there.

Those are things that are like deferred maintenance in your organization. It's like you can just ignore them for a while and nothing happens month after month, maybe even year after year. But the bigger you are, the more projects you have going on, the more employees, the more states you operate in, the more agencies you interact with, the more and more likely that'll blow you up too.

So while labor return is a big part of it, mitigating that labor risk is also an important piece. You may want to take the time to talk with an expert, do your own research, whatever, and make some plans to mitigate some of those bombs in the long run too, because you can do everything right on making people happy and getting a great, amazing labor return.

But if you're doing it all illegally, that doesn't get you very far in the long run. It'll get you [00:23:00] blown up. So those are the places I'd recommend people take a look.

Wade Carpenter: Okay. Again, like I say with accountants too, the time to get somebody up to speed, whether it's accountant or we have these, and I won't use any payroll company's names, but they all plug in their HR department. It's so disconnected. And I know you've worked with Profit First Professionals, the organization as well as many of the members, and just like me, I mean, I know you guys can jump in and do the work.

So tell us just a little bit more about, I know you sort of already did, but I believe that there's a lot of value in versus trying to hire somebody in house to do what you do. 

Rhamy Alejeal: Yeah. Well, Look, if you're a US based business. I don't do Canada, don't do Mexico. Gotta be in the US. And you've got 10 or more employees. Okay, yeah, I can do eight, seven, whatever. And you wanna learn more, go to peopleprocesses.com/csf. And on there you'll learn a little bit about what we do. You can book a free 30 minute meeting with me and we'll talk about what you got going on, right?

Learn about your business, see if there's ways I can help you put [00:24:00] together a proposal if we want. Just pick my brain. Spend that 30 minutes and we can look over your people processes and get you somewhere.

What I will say is that I think at that 50 or fewer employee range, there's just no winning in hiring HR internally because you only have two options. Either you're gonna hire someone some office manager who does HR or some recent college grad for 40, 50, 60,000 a year, and they're gonna spend 80% of their time doing data entry, following up on paperwork, just the day-to-day crap, the transactional part of HR. And then when you actually need somebody to move these metrics, the strategic work or the compliance and legal work, they're completely unqualified. So you're not gonna get much progress. You'll feel like I've hired HR and all I do is push paper around. So it doesn't go very far.

And then on the other side, you may have said, dude, people are so important, we gotta have somebody in charge of this entire channel of how we get our labor.

So you got somebody you spend 150, $200,000 a year on, they make a real difference in your business, except they spend 80% of their time [00:25:00] pushing paper too. Doing nothing important. So you're way overpaying for strategic level work, but you don't have the scale to give them three staff to follow up on paperwork and process payroll, and check out time sheets, and talk and onboard every employee, and go do benefits enrollments and explain how these things work so your people appreciate and understand them.

All that's a lot of legwork. So my company, we provide a department. We've got specialists with a couple years experience in payroll, in benefits, in compliance, in recruiting, training, onboarding. And we've got business partners with 10 plus years experience, masters who are gonna focus on those big pictures.

You get assigned to one of these pods, your BP is your HR director. And even at a 10 person company, it's very affordable. Allows us to proactively push these items over time, improving those people processes while handling the day-to-day transactional just pile of work stuff at a more efficient way. So you can learn more about that at peopleprocesses.com/csf. And on there, if you say you came from [00:26:00] here, I'd be happy to meet with you, learn about your business, see if there's anything we can do to help.

Wade Carpenter: Okay. I appreciate you bringing that up too. And whether it's your estimators or project manager or the day laborers, whoever it is. A lot of people are not really tracking that labor productivity.

So our contractors that are listening to this, as you're stepping in 2026, how fast are you getting up to speed? Did you make some bad hires? Have you outgrown your accountant or your HR? And I would argue all day long what you were basically saying. I mean, just like us. People can hire us as an accountant and it's typically 30 to 50% cheaper than them trying to do it in house. Not to mention that we believe we give a lot better value for the money.

You originally started this, when you pay somebody, whatever that is, you expect a return on investment. And so, that's where I would challenge our contractors going into 2026, that maybe you should be looking at what you're doing and just measuring. And if you're not getting the value, the profitability that you're [00:27:00] looking for, maybe you should think about doing some other things.

Rhamy Alejeal: That's right. And I think maybe even the worst part is, again, maybe you've got an in-house accountant or in-house HR and you think, ah, maybe it's time to upgrade. At least you got somebody there. Sometimes again, in the smaller companies, it's very difficult to get that to scale appropriately.

What I find even worse than that though, is if you're a smaller business, 5, 10, 15 employees, right? And you've got an office manager who's in charge of ordering the toilet paper, opening the mail, hiring and firing, handling the books, doing your billing, I promise you she's bad at all of them. It's not their fault.

That job has depth and there's a lot that can be done with it, but it may be time to upskill. And look, I started my company, me, my wife, and my mother, 16 years ago. We got 38 employees now. But neither my wife or my mom worked with me anymore, but that was more recent, after we had kids.

But we worked together every day. And I gotta tell you, there's an upgrade from your wife doing your books, okay. They can get some depth in there and it can make a really big dissonance, and it's no disrespect to your wife or your husband, okay? Who's doing [00:28:00] the-- or your husband doing the HR and finance.

Let an expert come in and see what that unlocks. You can't see it on your P&L right now, but by unlocking those things, you'll get such insight and that number at the top is gonna grow a lot, probably without moving the expenses much at all, or even lowering them.

Wade Carpenter: Yeah. Rhamy, thank you for being on the show today. And we are gonna leave his contact information in the show notes as well, and if you have questions or comments please leave them below. And a specific question for Rhamy, be glad to make sure he gets back to you or put you in touch or something like that.

Rhamy Alejeal: I will be down in the comments. We'll have our team be watching. Anything that you have questions about, just ask away. I wanna hear from you.

Wade Carpenter: All right. Again, thank you for being with us. If you would please share, subscribe. It always helps our channel out. We do this every single week and we will see you on the next show.