How to keep employees when you can't pay them what they want
In this episode, I tackle the challenge of keeping employees when you can't meet their salary expectations.
I share insights on defining appropriate pay based on revenue metrics (around 20-30% of total revenue) and reveal secrets to motivate and retain talent without relying on money.
The focus is on fostering a strong connection between a business's purpose and employees' drive for loyalty and dedication, even in financially constrained situations.
Tune in for actionable strategies to create a thriving work environment in unconventional industries.
00:01:12 Finding superstars in a sea of part-timers.
00:04:08 Motivating and paying employees: what's fair?
00:06:23 Not sacrificing for others, but also not paying excessive salaries.
00:11:26 Undercover men investigate sex trafficking in Philippines.
00:13:50 Storytelling brings people in, creates purpose.
00:18:18 Your story and unique personality differentiate you.
00:20:14 Learn to be authentic and sell it.
00:23:01 Self aware, self reflective, intentional leadership.
Find me on Instagram or LinkedIn or email me at hello@lesliedlyons.com.
As Mentioned In Live Coaching: Learn How Your Boundaries Impact Your Leadership Skills
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Transcript of Live Coaching: Dealing with Dummies
Hey, boss. I am Leslie Lyons, your embodied leadership and sales coach, and this is Pleasurable Profits. This podcast is ideal for owners and leaders of tattoo shops, cannabis businesses, movement studios, sex toy shops, and other industries too often left out of the leadership conversation. If you're looking for no BS approach to defining your strengths and values, designing a business that supports you, and creating a soul driven and, of course, a pleasurable plan for profitability, then let's get started. Hey, party people. Welcome to this week's episode. This is episode 91, and I am delivering what I promised in the previous episode because I think this is an issue that a lot of small business owners are contending with and really don't know how they should be addressing it. And I'm not saying I'm the guru of gurus when it comes to this by any means, but I can share what I know works for me and for other people who have done this.
And that is the issue of how do you find your superstar in a sea full of part timers? If you listen to last week's episode, you know, I brought up the fact that a lot of the ways that corporate, big corporate clients, so Fortune 100, Fortune 500 companies, traditional corporate environments get loyalty I'm putting that in air quotes from their customer, from their customers, from their employees, is by paying them a lot of money. And I know because I've had these conversations with small business owners, like, I can barely afford to pay myself a living wage. How could I pay my staff a living wage? Like, you only work 10 hours a week. I could not pay you $70,000 a year. And you work 40 hours a month, right? So what does that look like to motivate a team? How do you attract talent and keep talent when this is just a part time gig for them? And I say just a part time gig, guys, not from the standpoint of like, this don't mean nothing. This ain't nothing. But it is truly just part time work. They're only working a few hours.
Well, let's talk about it. One of the beautiful things about my background, and I truly believe that the Lord has us. He wastes no experience, he wastes no tear, he wastes no dilemma. You're in. He uses it all for his purposes and for your good. And so by me having a ministry background, for those of you who are not Christians, don't turn this off. I'm not getting ready to preach to you. I'm just getting ready to give you an example.
But when you are in ministry, you have to convince and I'm just using that term for a lack of a better word, you have to motivate that's a better word than convinced. You have to motivate volunteers to do very hard, arduous work. Okay? So we're talking about getting paid nothing but a thank you here on Earth, but eternal rewards. Yes, but a lot of times we're dealing with human beings who think about the now. So I'm asking you to do very difficult work, or I'm asking you to volunteer your services that you could get paid thousands of dollars for. I'm asking you to give it to the church for free. So I got very skilled in learning how to motivate people to do things for free. So that has paid off for me in my small business ownership journey, where I can't afford to pay the receptionist $70,000 a year, I would love to be able to pay her $70,000 a year.
I'd also love to be able to pay myself $700,000 a year. But the truth of the matter is we can't. So how do we motivate these people and what should we be paying them? So there's two different things, as I'm talking about this that I want to address in this episode is number one, what should we be paying them? And then number two, how do you motivate them? So it's no secret, especially if you've worked with me before, that I use Profit First in all of my businesses. So when I ran a traditional studio, I use profit first. I use it in my coaching and in my speaking business, in my training business. Now, I use Profit First, and I'm not going to get into all of the intricacies of that because first of all, I'm not a profit first professional. And second of all, you could pick up the book and read it if you want to learn more about it. But here's the piece that I do want to pull out of it for this conversation, and it talks about your salary compensation being no more than 20% to 30% of your total revenue.
So that means if your business on average makes $500,000, your salaries for your team should be no more than $50,000 total. Okay? And the truth of the matter is, if you're going to get to $500,000 and you are going to hire someone you want to step away from the day to day, you could spend $50,000 just on one full time employee, right? So if you want to be fiscally responsible in your business, you really do have to keep an eye on those salaries, which is why I don't understand. Well, I do understand. It because people just like to be angry, and they like to hold people to standards they don't hold themselves to. It's the hypocrisy of humanity and also immature people is to expect people to sacrifice, sacrifice, sacrifice as you lay yourself out on the altar as other people prosper. And I don't know about you all, but I'm not doing that for my employees. I love them. I want the best for them.
I'm going to invest in them, but I am not going to suffer so that they can feel like they're prospering. That's modern, especially for those of you who have feminist proclivities the thing that we rail against is the fact that women are expected to be in service to others all the time and to sacrifice themselves for other people. That's what we rail against. But these same people will turn around and tell a small business owner that's making $500,000 a year that they should be paying $300,000 in salary. And then when you have no money to pay any of the other operating expenses, like the rent, marketing, other pieces of the business, and now you have to go out of business, they turn around and blame the leader still and say, well, you just wasn't a good leader. You didn't plan well, what the hell? What is the leader to do? So for me, I follow those rules. And so I am not going to pay more than 30% of my top line revenue and salaries. I'm just not going to do it.
And so because of that, I have to say I'm not going to be able to compete. Like if you are a receptionist at our company and you are making minimum wage, but there's another company that's a Fortune 100 company that is paying you $50,000 to do the same job because they have the revenue to do it. I'm not going to begrudge you if you decide that you need to do that. Because the first thing is and if you guys are taking notes, write this down. You as the owner, the founder, need to have a mindset shift about the opportunities that you're providing people. If you recall from last week, I said that minimum wage jobs are not designed to support families. They're designed to fill a gap or to be a stepping stone to something else. So that means I don't expect my receptionist.
And guess what? I have an amazing receptionist, an awesome receptionist, and I want the best for her. I don't expect for her to stay in a minimum wage job forever. This is fulfilling a purpose for her right now. And my job is to fan the flame for her to want more and then to go out and get more. Because guess what? She does deserve to make money, right? But I can't pay her any more than I can pay her. So that's the first thing you guys need to understand is get a handle on your financials. Hire a bookkeeper, hire an accountant, and figure out what you can afford to pay people. But I can assure you, you ain't going to ever be able to compete with a Fortune 500 company or Fortune 100 company on salaries.
Okay? Let that rest in the space for a moment. Like just literally say, yeah, you're right, I can't afford to do that. So that leads us to the second question is, well, I know I can't put golden handcuffs on them, so to speak. I know I can't afford to pay them what a larger company would pay them for that role. So how do I keep these people motivated to work for me? I'm so glad you asked. You guys ask such intelligent questions. I love it if you know me, you know that I'm getting ready to say, you must hire people who are in alignment with your values. That's the first thing.
You as the owner, you as the founder, you have to get really great at telling stories about your vision. You have to get really great about getting people to buy into what it is that you do so that they feel good about doing it. And the money is just a byproduct. The money is just something extra. I'll give you a great example. So if you guys know anything I support sex trafficking organizations that help people, number one, be rescued out of those situations and aftercare, I support them with my time and also with my money. And I was at an event recently that was put on by IJM, and the speaker, who was an executive inside of IgM, he started the conversation by sharing a story. I'm going to share a little bit of the story with you now just so you can hear the impact of a story.
He said, I want to take you guys to the Philippines and imagine three guys going into a seedy sex bar at 1130 at night. And their job is to blend into the environment. So they have to drink, smoke, cuss, act like they're really there to purchase child sex night after night, but they're really there to count how many people are there selling sex. And they're trying to determine who's selling sex of their own will and proclivities and who's been trafficked. Like, are there children there? Are there minors in the place? And they're manually counting that. He's like and then every night, they come back to the home office at 203:00 in the morning after being immersed in that environment for four or 5 hours. And they give that count to someone who has to manually enter that data into a spreadsheet. And then after they've given all that information, those same three men get together and they pray.
They pray, they confess anything that they may have done that was sinful or they didn't feel comfortable with. They pray that the Lord would change the situation and use the data that they're getting because it feels so small compared to how the problem is. And he just went on and on. But the point of it was and the point that I'm sharing this story is that he brought us into their mission, right? He could have just been like, yes, there's over 100 million people in Southeast Asia that are in slavery of some kind, and our goal is to rescue 10% of them a year. He could have gave us facts, right? But he didn't. He gave us a story. He made it real. I could see those men, and it made me think about how uncomfortable I would have been sitting in a bar pretending to want to purchase children for sex and how disgusting that would be.
Like, how that the weight of that for me. Right? He brought it in with the story. You have to have a story that brings people in, a mission, a vision that people want to be a part of. Why does your business exist? How are you making people's lives better? And I know you're probably thinking, wow, well, we're not saving human beings lives necessarily and the way that Igam is, but maybe you are saving people's lives through what you do, and maybe you just haven't thought about it that way. I remember when I first got into coaching outside of my original industry, I was working with an esthetician, and she was an esthetician who would just put up pictures of lashes, her techniques, and brows and all the time. And it was my job as a consultant, as a sales trainer with her to go in there and find out what's the real story behind why you do what you do. And in speaking with her, her mother was a survivor of domestic violence, and her face, especially her eyes, were often battered. And she remembered it wasn't just the abuse, the actual physical pain that weighed her mother down.
It was looking at herself in the mirror and only seeing pain through her eyes, only seeing the hurt that she experienced. So she started to associate her eyes with not beauty, but with pain. And she was like, I wanted to give my mother a sense of dignity again. Whoa, whoa. Right? Like, the power of that story. So this ain't about you getting these lamb chop lashes. I'm trying to lighten it up because you all know some of folks be looking like they have caterpillars on their eyes with them lashes, child. And this estician didn't do that kind of work.
But still, it wasn't just about cosmetic. It was really about restoring dignity. And when she would tell people that story once we got it together and how do you tell that story in your marketing? How do you tell that story to your staff? How do you use that to explain why we do what we do? This is why people need something to believe in. And when you can give people something to believe in, because everybody wants to know that their work matters. Everybody wants to know that they matter. Everyone wants to be a part of a bigger narrative. It's encoded in us as humans. Like, we long for peace and good.
That's encoded in us. And so when you as a leader or as a visionary, when you can paint that picture, that's how you get people to stay with you. That's how you get people to bring their best to work every day, even though they're not making tons of money or any money at all, because they are bought into your vision. A lot of people think that the work that I do with them around their values and who they are and all the assessments that I use from Fascinate to the Enneagram, really trying to help you unearth who you are, they think that's fluff. Like, they think that that's just a waste of time. And I can always tell those people because they just kind of skate over that we don't have really deep, meaningful conversations. They're like, Give me the marketing strategy. Give me the TikTok strategy.
Tell me how to close these deals. Tell me how to attract more people. And I'm like, you won't be able to do any of that successfully if you don't take the time to figure out who you are. Because the truth of the matter is, everybody is offering the same thing in term of a product. Like, everybody can do lashes. Everyone can be an accountant. Everyone can be a bookkeeper. Everyone can be a recruiter.
Everyone can be a poll studio owner. Everyone can do these sorts of things. But what makes you different and what stops you from becoming a commodity is your story, is your why, is your unique personality, is your special sauce that you put on the thing that you do. And that is the thing that people can't replicate. Man, I am a connoisseur of purses. Like, I like high end purses, and I got to tell you that these bootleggers now, these counterfeit purses, they look so real that even as a person who buys those purses, it's getting difficult for me to tell a real from a fake, because the scammers are getting better and better, right? So if they can replicate a $5,000 purse, someone surely can replicate. Your lash technique or gap principles are general rules that all accountants know, right? Like, that's not special. That's not unique.
But what they can't replicate is your stories. What they can't replicate is your life experience. What they can't replicate is your personality. Those things, they can't replicate. And if they do try to replicate, it because I've seen that before, where people try to change their personality to fit some other personality that they aspire to be like, but people can smell that. That's disingenuous. Like, they can tell that you're faking, and then they start looking at you like, okay, this person's a liar, and I don't trust them, and so I'm not going to buy from them, because people buy from people they know, like, and trust, so they can sniff that out. We have a radar for bullshit.
So you have to learn how to be authentic, but more importantly, you have to learn how to sell your authenticity. How do you package your authenticity? What do you do? What do you do? And so that is the work that I do with clients. That is the initial work. That is the foundational work. If you don't get that right, anything else that I can teach you about selling will only go so far, you might get some semblance of success, but you're not going to have the success you desire because your business is not an expression of you. And that is the last thing I want to leave with you. That makes us different, especially for my friends who are in corporate environments where you didn't create the vision. Even if you are working for someone else, even if you are working for another company and you're selling for them, and you're like, well, this isn't my vision, this is their vision, you have to have a why for why you're doing it.
I call this finding your story inside of their story. And leaders, you have to do that as well. You have to teach people how to find their story within your story. You have to have a why. You have to know because that is the thing that your clients are going to feel from you, not your company's passion, because the president ain't there selling it. You're there as a sales rep selling it. They're going to feel your passion. And if you're not passionate about what you're doing, if you're not bought into it, you can't expect anyone to dig into their pockets and give you their hard earned money.
So whether you're a founder or an employee who's looking to improve their sales, if you're a founder or an employee and you're looking to get more job satisfaction, either more job satisfaction for your employees or for yourself, you have to be bought into the vision. You got to believe in that vision. And if you don't, you just kind of wasting time, y'all, I hate to say it, but you're just kind of wasting time. So if you're a leader, if you're a founder, if you're a small business owner listening to this, what are you going to do this week to express to your team your bigger vision? It's going to require you to be vulnerable and persuasive. And if you struggle with any of these things, you need to work with me. Plain, flat out. Hit me up in my DM. Email me.
Hello at Leslie Dlions.com let's chat, but give this a go yourself. You don't have to pay someone to do this, but what you do need to be is self aware, self reflective, and you have to be intentional about doing this. You can't just put your values on a wall. You can't just put your vision on a wall and say it one time. That's not how people learn. That's not how you learned anything that you've had to learn. You got to keep it out in front of your people and let the vision pull them, as opposed to you being a bully pushing your people vision pulls you, immature leaders push. You can do this.
I gave you the play today. Let's run it until next week, y'all be good. Thanks for your time. Grace and peace.