A key to success: Understanding your staff

Knowing your staff’s strengths and weaknesses can make all the difference in your business. It was a lesson 30-year MDRT member Donald F. White Jr., CLU, ChFC, learned well when the IRS started calling him.

White’s assistant for about 30 years is Kathy Walsh, who he credits with making his Stuart, Florida, business successful. But he’s got a story about her and how he found out early in his practice that she’s not a good bookkeeper.

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In early years of his business, White and Walsh did everything. When his business was smaller, that worked. The practice grew, and White pushed more and more paperwork Walsh’s way, including all the bookkeeping. “I thought, ‘She’s good with all this paperwork stuff, so she’d be good doing the books,’” White said. Except Walsh, as a former music major, was not trained as an accountant. White knew this. He really understood what that meant, however, when he started getting letters from the IRS asking him to pay his back taxes. “I went to Kathy, and she said, ‘Oh my gosh! I completely forgot,’” he said.

One of White’s friends advised him to fire her. White saw it differently. “It was my fault. I asked her to do a job she wasn’t properly prepared to do.”

By letting Walsh know this, “it created a loyalty between her and I that will never be matched,” White said. “To this day, I’m convinced it’s the single most important event that happened in our lives because she understood I respected her. I wasn’t going to hit her over the head because she couldn’t do something she wasn’t really good at it. It also allowed us to know where the boundaries were.”

White now has a full-time bookkeeper, who is excellent at her job. Walsh still works for him, doing an outstanding job running the office. White, who has gone on to have 18 Top of the Table qualifications, firmly believes the incident highlights the lesson of working on strengthening your strengths and hiring other people to take care of the areas where we’re not as strong.

• Learn more how staff can make a business successful by watching the video, “Creating a Dynamic Staff.”
• Listen to more from White about how to run a high-performing office in the videos, “How Hiring Staff Can Make You Money” and “Build a Lasting Business.”

These videos are part of MDRT’s Inside High-Performing Offices series, which are all on MDRT’s Resource Zone.