Army of Entrepreneurs

Creating an Engaged and Empowered Workforce for Exceptional Business Growth

Jennifer PROSEK

• Publisher: AMACOM
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780814436967
• eBook ISBN: 9780814416747
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Learn the key for any company to building a workforce dedicated to generating new business, creating new products and services, and sustaining growth.

As a young entrepreneur who turned a small PR business into a highly successful international communications firm, author Jennifer Prosek experienced firsthand the power of instilling an “owner’s mind-set” in every employee.

In Army of Entrepreneurs, Prosek teaches you how to:

• motivate, train, and reward your employees;
• provide everyone--from interns to executives--with the skills and support they need;
• and refresh and evaluate programs and systems over time for continuous results.

Great businesses aren’t built by a single leader or rainmaker. Having a pool of employees who act as though they own the business results in increased motivation, increased productivity, and a supercharged desire to succeed. Army of Entrepreneurs shows how to transform any workforce and reap the rewards.

Part I

Taking a New Approach to Building Your Business

CHAPTER 1

Creating a Commission for Life

SUPPOSE I TOLD YOU THAT THE SMALLEST PROFESSIONAL ACTION on your part could result in a lifelong payday. Suppose I told you it didn’t matter what your rank in the company or the terms of your pay package or the vitality of your social network. Do this one, basic action, and you get the check. Would you try?

The answer is yes. I already know that. Because what I’ve just described to you is a system I call Commission for Life™, and it became the first building block of my new management model—the cornerstone of an Army of Entrepreneurs.

Not only would you try, but everyone in your company would try, from the interns to the executives. I’ve seen it happen. In this chapter, I’ll introduce you to the Commission for Life system. I’ll tell you how I came to it, how it works, and why it is the powerful motivational force that makes change and growth possible.

How the Army of Entrepreneurs Started

I can’t say there was a “light bulb moment” for me in creating the AOE model. It was more like an evolution in my thinking.

I was always one to think big. As a child, I developed board games and sent them off to Parker Brothers. I made up advertising jingles, tag lines, and slogans and tried them out on the school bus. While I never sold any of my early ideas, that was okay. I was always fascinated that ideas, words, or images could change behavior and motivate people. Public relations was a natural fit for me.

When I graduated from Miami University in Ohio with a degree in English, I had my heart set on a job at a sexy, prestigious New York firm. But it was 1991 and there was a recession, and I took the only job available to me. I became the third employee at Stratford, Connecticut–based Jacobs & Associates, a fledgling agency that had only recently moved from the basement of Dan Jacobs’s house. Still, I took the job seriously, down to the very smallest details. For example, after telling Dan for weeks that we needed a cleaning service to come in so the bathroom would sparkle for clients, Dan had only said he’d look into it. Finally one Saturday morning, I donned yellow rubber gloves and took on the job myself.

In my early years at the company, this all-in strategy worked well for me. I was emerging as a natural and prolific rainmaker. I brought in a new client between my job interview and my first day, a referral from my stepfather. Shortly after, I sold a video project to an existing client, an ambulance company. Dan came into my office with $1,000 in cash as a reward. It was a lot of money and, even more important, it was terrific recognition. I felt great. I knew I had found my calling. I loved thinking creatively about a challenge. I also discovered I had a real talent for media pitching and client relations, two pillars of public relations. Perhaps most significantly, I also figured out pretty quickly that generating new business was my ticket to an almost limitless future.

By the time I was twenty-five, Dan had made me a partner. I turned down a job offer from a prestigious New York firm to put my heart and soul into growing Jacobs & Prosek. But soon that proved less than fulfilling. I persevered through five years of steady but single-digit growth and felt totally stuck. We were growing—but not at the rate I thought we could achieve. I wanted world domination, damn it! I grew increasingly frustrated with my colleagues and staff. I had come to the conclusion that there was very little motivation and natural entrepreneurial talent around me. I didn’t understand why, but my coworkers just didn’t seem to “get” the business. More than once I found myself wondering, “Why didn’t he see that opportunity to expand the account?” or “Her dad is best friends with the CEO of Xerox. Why didn’t she suggest a meeting?” We had incredible practitioners to execute the work, but comparatively few to generate that work. I felt like the responsibility of generating new business fell largely to me.

Something had to change. I tried talking with other PR firm owners and small-business entrepreneurs. I sought out CEOs in a range of professional services businesses. What I found was lots of understanding and sympathy but few practical solutions. That’s when I began to realize two things:

1. My crisis was not unique.

2. My crisis threatened everyone at the company, not just me.

I recognized that I was close to burnout, and I began to learn how prevalent and dangerous this situation was to companies. The business world is full of studies showing how entrepreneurial burnout can kill a good company. In the early 1990s, Case Western Reserve professor Richard L. Osborne studied twenty-six entrepreneurial firms and found that overwhelmed owner-managers often lead to stalled growth. In the early years, Osborne noted, these individuals invest Herculean amounts of time and effort into making the business a success. But that level of energy is tough to sustain. When the owner-manager finds himself or herself frustrated by the eighteen-hour days, the exposure to risk, the absence of family time, and the single-minded lifestyle, he or she may falter: “[W]hen the entrepreneur’s vision dims and the impulse to achieve diminishes, the company frequently experiences a rapid, sometimes tragic, power failure.”¹

I recognized I could not allow this sort of power failure to happen at CJP, not after all I had invested, working six and seven days a week and even scrubbing the toilets to make it a success. And yet it was clear that I could not go on the way I was going—feeling like I was the only one responsible for generating the company’s growth.

Like many other entrepreneurs, I had reached an impasse. I needed help to grow the business. This is a point at which many other entrepreneurs make major changes in the way they do business: they sell a stake, or take on new partners, or involve themselves in new joint ventures. I had a different idea. I decided I would create a new culture in my company, one that would essentially clone me. I needed a firm made up of rainmakers, innovators, creative thinkers, and smart businesspeople. I needed an internal Army of Entrepreneurs.

Amassing the Army

I took a fresh look at my own staff. At this juncture—the mid-1990s—I had bought out my partner and was now looking for ways to make this business prosper. As I mentioned, I was frequently frustrated with what I perceived to be a lack of initiative. Then I took a step backward. More than once people had said, “How do you bring in all that business? I could never do that.”

What I realized was that even though I was a natural entrepreneur and it came easily to me, perhaps other people at the firm simply didn’t have the tools, context, skills, and outlook they needed to sell the business and its capabilities. That emerged as the chief problem—and the crux of the Army strategy. It was one of those moments that change forever how you view the world. I then asked myself what in retrospect seems like an obvious question: “Jen, have you ever taught them or showed them what they need to know?” The answer, of course, was no. I had talked to my staff about the importance of generating new business and opportunity spotting, but I had never gone beyond that. I had just assumed that they understood and would take the next steps on their own. Clearly that hadn’t worked. What it took was actually a change on my part to help build the staff I so desperately needed. Today, I’m a total convert. I wholeheartedly believe that everyone, no matter what their natural entrepreneurial talent, can learn and be motivated to contribute.

In addition to changing my perspective, I became a fan of what behavioral economist Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago calls the need for the “nudge.” A “nudge” is a harmless bit of engineering that manages to attract people’s attention and alter their behavior in a positive way, without actually requiring anyone to do anything at all. In other words, you unobtrusively set up the stimuli or conditions people need to act in their own best interests and for their own benefit, and they do it! A study on the creation of entrepreneurial spirit in a corporate environment found that employees are motivated by a variety of factors, including management’s willingness to tolerate risk, its support for innovation, and a culture of company pride. But all these elements require one additional item vital to creating the kind of entrepreneurial spirit I was looking for: a financial incentive.²

Introducing Commission for Life

My task was to figure out how to get my staff at CJP to make better choices, ones that would benefit them as well as the company. The answer I came up with was to create opportunities for them to make more money, either by taking on new responsibilities or earning a commission. I developed what I call the Commission for Life program, where the employee who sets up a successful new business meeting—that’s it, just sets up the meeting—gets 5 percent of the revenue from the account for the life of the business as long as they remain with CJP.

Why does this very simple incentive work? Because it encourages employees to align their own financial and professional goals with the company’s growth and success. If they help the company grow, they see a direct and substantial benefit. And while Commission for Life was developed in a privately held small business, the construct can be applied to any company, big or small, private or public. Although awarding literal cash commission may not be possible in all situations, the idea is to create an incentive that keeps on giving across the employee’s career at the company and aligns the individual’s goals with the company’s goals. It’s the nudge you need to change the behavior.

Specifically, Commission for Life offers the following advantages for the individual and the company:

It enables employees to earn money over and above base compensation, offering a competitive advantage over your competitors and a retention tool for the company.

It can be done by anyone at any level since the reward goes to the employee who identified the opportunity and booked the initial meeting. Junior folks might not be able to write the proposal or do the presentation, but they can—just like their senior colleagues—identify an opportunity and book the first meeting.

It reinforces teaching them the business, since the commission is paid only when the client pays the bill (that’s a receivable), and there is shared celebration (and shared pain) when that business moves in and out of the company.

It adds another set of eyes on the client. Even if the business generated is not managed by the person who identified it, the commission recipient has every incentive to police and support the success of that customer relationship.

It spreads the task of business and idea generation across the firm, which takes the burden off the primary rainmakers. It also decentralizes power from the primary rainmakers, who in many firms are overrewarded for their contributions, and helps to spread financial gain.

It helps identify “natural entrepreneurs” who love the hunt and can be cultivated and nurtured over time to become people who run practices within the firm.

It is contagious, and success feeds upon itself. Believe me, once the intern brings in the largest account of the summer, everyone gets on board!

And the best part is that it’s a win-win. The employee has the ability to earn money well beyond his or her base salary. At the same time, the company gets new, retained revenue generators for a relatively modest payback to the employee.

Even clients notice the difference. Here’s what one client had to say about my associate, Todd:

I don’t know what goes on internally at CJP, how it motivates its employees. But with Todd, it was pretty clear from the beginning that he had a personal stake, a real sense of ownership. Frankly, I sometimes find it annoying when vendors call and then follow up. We’re really busy; everything happens quickly and we get a lot of things thrown at us. But it was different with Todd. It wasn’t like a scripted cold call. It was unique. He was very engaging. He seemed like a very hard worker.

We’ve been with CJP for five years now and that hasn’t changed. He wants to get the work done and do a good job. The other thing that hasn’t changed is the core team, which is very unusual. Agencies usually have incredible turnover. And Todd’s performance has been very consistent. After a while, agencies start to take their clients for granted. But that hasn’t happened. I can see that Todd has a personal stake in the account and he’s still a very hard worker. I had a good feeling about him from the beginning and it’s worked out really well.

When the client says Todd “has a real sense of ownership,” she is right on the money. Todd has a literal ownership in the client’s business with the firm. And as the individual who made that first basic step—setting up the new business meeting—5 percent of CJP’s take is his.

When you talk to Todd now, even after he’s quintupled his salary and has an equity interest in the business, you get the sense that he’s still marveling at his own success and how it came about.

“The opportunities I h...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword by Darren Hardy, SUCCESS magazine
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I: Taking a New Approach to Building your Business
• PART II: Developing an Action Plan
• PART III: Putting it All Together
• Appendix A: Ten Questions to Ponder
• Appendix B: Additional Resources
• Index
• About the Author