Diamond Effect - Strategies to Scale Your Service Business as a Sellable Asset

EP # 230 - The 7 Steps to a Self-Running, Scalable Service Business Team

• Maggie Perotin • Episode 230

Share episode

Send us a text

How to attract, hire, and lead a high-performing team—so your business can grow without you.

What does it really take to build a team that can run—and even grow—without you? In this episode, Maggie draws on her deep corporate experience co-scaling teams from 80 to 450 and translates those lessons for small business owners who want to build a business that’s both scalable and sellable. Whether you’re hiring your first team member or leading a growing group, you’ll learn the practical steps and mindset shifts needed to create a high-performing, self-sustaining team.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

  • Why building a business that can function without you is the key to long-term growth and eventual exit
  • How Maggie’s corporate background shapes her approach to leadership and team-building in small businesses
  • The real value of delegation—and how it creates space for you and growth opportunities for your best people
  • Why making yourself “replaceable” is a mark of great leadership (not a threat to your value)
  • The 7 steps Maggie uses to build and turn around high-performing teams, including:
    1. Defining and intentionally curating your team culture
    2. Attracting and hiring the right people (hard skills, soft skills, and common sense)
    3. Creating a strong onboarding and training experience
    4. Leading with connection, trust, and clear boundaries (and why micromanaging kills innovation)
    5. Building real relationships and loyalty by caring about your people as humans
    6. Coaching your team for growth, giving honest feedback, and rewarding what you want to see
    7. Not tolerating behaviors that go against your culture—and why sometimes letting people go is necessary
  • How to avoid desperate hires and why they rarely work out
  • The importance of fun, safety, and innovation in team culture
  • Lessons from large-scale change management and how to apply them in any size business

Key Takeaways:

  • High-performing teams don’t happen by accident—they’re built through intentional culture, great hiring, and strong leadership.
  • Delegation is essential for growth and for keeping your best people engaged.
  • Make yourself replaceable so your business can thrive (and you can step back or sell one day).
  • Never tolerate behaviors that poison your culture—even if it’s uncomfortable to address.
  • Don’t rush hiring decisions out of desperation; the wrong hire can set your team back.

Connect with Maggie:

Resources:

EP 230 - Building a High-Preforming Team

[00:00:00] Hello everybody. Welcome to Diamond Effect podcast, episode 230. Today I want to talk about building high performing teams. Then tell you a little bit of the background how I built high performing teams in a way that they could function without me. I think it's relevant even if you're a small business, if you're growing and scaling, because that's what you want to do, right?

You want to build a business that can function without you, so then down the line you can sell it, and it ultimately comes down to having the right people. In place. And then once you do that, of course, having the right processes and technology and support system that allow those people to function. And even though my experience in building high performing teams comes from corporations and my teams [00:01:00] were big, sometimes very big, it's still relevant because the foundation of.

How everything works is the same, whether it's a corporate department that's a business within business that's nine figures. We are 450 people. Or whether you are a smaller business, a startup that's growing from one to five, five to 10, 10 to 20. And before I get into the topic, I just wanted to share a couple things that made me think I should probably do more of those types of podcasts.

Trying to think about my corporate background and everything I learned here and bring it and translate it into small business and how it can help you. And it comes from couple of events that happened in the past month or so. The first events were me, speaking in front of small business owners in [00:02:00] person in two different occasions.

One, it was more in depth training onto business scaling. I should probably do it maybe once here in the podcast. And then the other just a 10 minute presentation about what I do and how I help people. And that after each of this. And after both presentations, it really made an impact on the participants to the point where even I was surprised how well.

It went and how it resonated with people that I had people coming up to me saying, oh my God, it's such a breath of fresh air. It's been a long, long time when I've seen somebody with such depth and experience like you. I could really relate to it and so on. And then the second. Event with somebody pitching me on LinkedIn and I get pitched all the time on LinkedIn, which actually I don't mind.

And I [00:03:00] love reading the pitches just because of my profession, right? I'm a business coach. I teach my clients sales, marketing, and all those things, I like a good pitch. I like to see what's out there, what people are trying on social media. Sometimes on emails, I get a pitch still and I got this pitch from a person, a business owner who does authority building, so personal branding and really building authority, especially in coaches for coaches and consultants,

what it says. And of course I take it with a grain of salt because it is a, sales marketing pitch. But the first part of his message was, hi Maggie, I pause on your profile because of the specific weight of your background scaling operations from 80 to 450 people. Technicians at BJS, which was my previous employer, is serious operational, heavy lifting, most.

Business quote coaches, and he puts that in, quote, have never managed a [00:04:00] team larger than a va, which, it's probably an exaggeration, but there is a lot of coaches out there and there are some coaches that haven't managed the teams. And he's right that I come from the background where I did help scale operations truly from 80 people to 450 technicians serving multiple clients.

Thousands of buildings in Canada and US to North America, and my own teams were as large as 30 plus people, which were in a way our operations. So team within a team was about multiple seven figures, maybe even eight. Don't remember exactly. So there is a depth in my background, serious operational depth that not every business coach carries, and I want to dive into it more and more and bring it to the [00:05:00] small business challenges and small business solutions to help you guys grow and scale.

Okay, so let's start with how I thought about delegating, because that's the first challenge where. Business owners start thinking about hiring and outsourcing certain things. They don't know how to delegate. They're scared. They say, my business is my baby. I've grown this, and what if somebody can do as good of a job as I am?

Very quickly into my career, I realized. Is that as a leader, I had an opportunity to do a few things or to achieve a few things through delegating. First of all, because there was always more work to do than hours in a day, and I'm sure you can relate that.

I realized that if I delegated certain task that I didn't wanna do [00:06:00] anymore because maybe they felt to me repetitive or I didn't like to do them, I created space. To learn and grow for myself as a professional, as a leader, right? So delegation allowed me to carve out space to do more of things that I wanted to do.

So for you as a small business owner, delegation. When done right will allow you to carve out time and mental space and energy to then focus on being more of a CEO and move your business forward even more. Another thing that I realized is that it kept my best people engaged because. Your best people, best employees will wanna learn more.

They are self-driven, they are proactive. They don't like to stagnate in the same job, doing the same thing over and over and over. So [00:07:00] once they got comfortable in their positions, and I knew that they were hungry. I realized that when I delegated the tasks that were repetitive to me, those tasks were new to them.

It allowed them to learn something new, prepare them for new position, promotion, or even just learning something new, and they loved it. The best people will love it as long as of course you provide them with proper training and don't overload them to the point when they don't have time to breathe and have to stay extra hours and you're not paying them for it, right?

So there is, you have to be cognizant of that, but it's a great way to keep your best people engaged. And then

of course delegations help you. Not drown with work, right? So sometimes we take on more than we can chew or we think that we have to do it all [00:08:00] alone as business owners because it's our business and it's faster and so on. And then we drown ourselves with tasks and work, not because. We couldn't get help, or we have people who have some capacity to help us, but because we don't stop and think to realize that there is options, right?

That we don't have to drive ourself to the ground. Through that process, I, in a way, in every position, I made myself replaceable in a sense where my bosses weren't so scared of losing me that they would stymie my promotion or they would not want me to move on to another thing because I was the only one who knew the business, and if I left, everything would crumble.

True leader empowers their team to be effective and run the business [00:09:00] and they make themselves replaceable. So then somebody else can step in, right? So when you're selling the business, somebody else can step in or they can move up or they can do other things they wanna do.

So that would also allowed me to get promoted, move from position, and leave. On really good terms with my previous teams because nothing was crumbling when I left.

And not because I wasn't doing important things, I was, but because I created teams and I had great people who could handle my responsibilities for a period of time, if I left until let's say the replacement was found, or, until, my boss has figured out how to re reorganize the team if they needed to.

And ultimately, personally, whenever I was leaving a position, I never wanted to leave in a critical moment where me [00:10:00] leaving would put the business in danger and at risk. So I remember when, I burnt out and the company realized that, they made some. Mistakes in the way they run the business for a short period of time, and they changed leadership.

And the new VP who came, realized that, we were in trouble as a department and that he needed help to get the team out of travel. He came to me, we had a good relationship. We knew each other from previous roles, and he knew I could help to fix it. And because I cared about the people that were affected by that, myself included, of course, I was burnout out at that time.

I said, yes, but I had some conditions, so I gave him my conditions. He accepted, he apologized on the behalf of the company. I actually got a promotion and we started turning the things [00:11:00] around. So we turned the things around. We rebuilt the team. We prepared them for further growth, so we kept scaling, right?

We kept scaling and before I left, we did this huge. Change in technology and it was really like enterprise type of technology where it was, the change affected 450 people in North America. And for some of them it really changed their jobs, like 80% of what they were doing. And for some it was maybe 20% of what they were doing, but it was huge change management, undertaking that.

It was a crucial part of course. I didn't do it alone. Let's be real. In such projects there's a lot of people that come together, but it was a crucial part of it. So as my team went through it, we implemented the technology through [00:12:00] COVID, trained everybody through COVID, spread across North America, and then stabilized it.

Only then I left. Okay. Because I cared about my people too much too. I just leave them in the middle of, a messy transition of technology, which always is messy. I left when I knew that I also had managers in place who could lead the smaller SAP teams that overall were under me and.

They could function without me for months and months and end until my boss decide if he wanted to replace my directorship position or whether he wanted to, just oversee the team as it was. Because it was so good and self running, that wasn't a lot of, burden on him, which he ultimately did.

And then, when a senior [00:13:00] manager that was part of the team was ready, they got promoted to my directorship position. That didn't happen until I think a year later, which I did tell my boss, they would be definitely ready at some point. So I have for you. Seven steps.

So anyhow, I have for you about seven points of seven steps. How I built teams that were really high performing or how I turned around teams throughout my career that maybe when I joined. Or when I was hired as a manager of their teams, they weren't high performing, but then through those steps, they became high performing even though the same people worked in them.

And only as we grew, we hired new people. So the first thing is you have to be clear on what type of culture you want to build. What do you [00:14:00] want your team and with it your business to be like, like the vibe the.

The experience that the team members will have with each other, with you, with other people in your business. If you are at the point where you have maybe multiple departments. And with your clients, right? So if your team members are the ones that are interacting with your clients, you need to think about the client experience and what is the internal culture that needs to be put in place for the client to have the best experience ever.

So for me, there's a key few things that. Always a non-negotiable in a culture. And of course then you can take that and then still make it your own, depending on your company values, depending on the industry you're in and so on. So the first and foremost is respect. On the basic human level, the way we communicate with ourselves, the way we handle things, the way [00:15:00] we give feedback, the way we resolve conflict, always with respect.

The second part is professionalism, right? So we communicate in a professional way. We don't reply to him as reactively angry, because somebody is pushing our buttons or we think they are, but we're not really, don't know their intentions, right? So professionalism. The third thing is no victim mentality.

Always look at yourself first before pointing fingers to others. So anytime I would have an employee coming to me saying but Maggie did this and this person is this, I would always turn it around and say, what about you? Are you doing your best? Are you doing this or that before? Pointing fingers at others.

Now that's this. I wanna say that this is not to say that there were really true challenges and somebody [00:16:00] was coming to me to tell me about those challenges because they had trust in me as a boss to mention them. It doesn't mean. I wouldn't take them seriously and then investigate and so on. That's not what I'm talking about.

But I did have employees who were like a little bit in that gossipy mode where they would, point fingers or. Decent employees who were doing good things, but they were like focused on what they were themselves doing, right? So you need to be a good judge of heart to, to understand like when is an employee bringing a real issue to you that you'll need to investigate and address, and when is it a little bit of cat fighting?

And that has to like, you can't have place for that, right? You have to stop it right there and turn it back to them. No pointing fingers at others. Next thing in culture is everybody doing their best with the skillset that they have, the information they have, [00:17:00] really caring about the success of the team, about the goals that the business has, and then asking for help when they need it.

So having that safety in a team where people can come and say, I don't know how to do it, or You know what, I think I could handle this problem this way, but what do you think? And they're not. Scared thinking that they're expected to have all the answers and thinking that they can't come and brainstorm and seek for a good solution.

And also feeling safe to do, bring any issues, whether they're maybe client issues or the patterns that they're seeing or team issues, right? So they have to be that safety where everybody wants the best for the team, they're doing their best. And they're not scared to ask for help. The next thing for me is having fun.

Like sometimes we get so focused on results and the challenges that are happening in the business that we forget to have [00:18:00] fun. And unless you're maybe in human life saving industry that were maybe, when there was some emergency.

Service-based businesses, it's not that you're not saving lives on an emergency basis. You can definitely have fun, which brings out the humanity, right? So being human and having compassion for your team members and learning more about them than just the job that they're doing allows you to have fun.

It's so important for the culture, right? We spend way too much time in our professional lives not to have fun and not to be with people that we respect, that we like. We don't have to be best friends with everybody. We don't have to pretend that we're a family, but we can also genuinely enjoy each other's company and working together, solving problems and so on,

people wanting to contribute, people [00:19:00] proactively seeking solutions, looking outside of the box, outside of their role, let's say, as prescribed. And if they're seeing things, they're not just pinpointing them, but also trying to have solutions, right? So bringing their ideas and best fit forward.

It does take certain personality, but also like it's a culture. You can create that culture within the team. So number one is really creating a culture that you want, being specific on what you want and intentionally curating it. Number two is of course, you have to have a process to attract the best people.

Try attract the people you want, and to be able to hire those people. Not only in a way how you write the job postings, but your hiring process that allows you to filter and find these people i've developed a three step process, depending on the, on a [00:20:00] position, but let's just say on average, on the three step process from back when I was mentored by my very first boss, who was really good at picking people and judging people's character, but also their skillset, in a very short time that you get to meet them during the interview process

it helped me be right most of the time. I don't think you can ever be right a hundred percent of the time. I always tell my clients, even if you're really good at hiring, you'll probably be right about 80% of the time. But I developed the process over hundreds of hires that I've done over my career and thousands of interviews and, resumes that I went through.

That is pretty simple and it really tracks for. Two types of skills. So hard skills that are required for the given job, right? So let's say if you're hiring a technician, there are certain hard skills that they have certifications and so on. If you're hiring even an office employee, maybe you want them [00:21:00] to be grade at Excel or maybe in certain other things, business analytics and one.

So there's, you need to check for that, but also soft skills. So communication. And emotional maturity and things like that. And also, of course, attitude and common sense. Common sense is one of the things that I think is one of the most important things you need in higher ed, especially.

In small business, because in small business, you need people who are versatile, who can do more than a very specific job that maybe in corporations you need more of because corporations are so big that they have enough work to. Have the job is very specialized. Whereas as a small business, a startup, an entrepreneur, you might have enough work for a certain special job, but having people who can do more than that is can be very valuable for you.

And the one thing that indicates if they [00:22:00] can do more is that common sense. And I have some ways to check for that because as we know, common sense is not as common. I would say the attitude, soft skill and common sense would be equally, if not more important than hard skills. So personally, I would always take a person who maybe wasn't as good in certain hard skills, so needed a little bit more training or more experience and great in the other skills that I mentioned.

Over somebody who had like perfect hard skill resume and were lacking in soft skills, attitude, or common sense because my experience tells me it usually doesn't work out. Then the next thing you need to create a team that's high performing is have proper onboarding and training of the new employees.

Onboarding is all about [00:23:00] your new employee experience and you need to. Treat them like your clients. Their first impressions matter. Think about it, you have a new person who's super excited to do the job, and then let's say their first expression suck because they come in for the first day and the boss is not there for a week, or their equipment is not ready, or they're wondering for a week because they have no idea what they're gonna do because nobody has time for them.

This is like the worst and the fastest way to. Disengage a new employee to leave them disillusioned when you have them in a very great space when they're still excited and like really like a child who's curious about discovering the world. So make sure you are onboarding is on point. And capitalizes on that attitude.

And then of course, training, like even the most skilled employee will not know much about your company, will not know about [00:24:00] the culture and the processes and how we do things, especially if you have some custom software, they might not know that. So give them enough opportunity to train and the proper person to train with.

As a director very often, I wasn't probably the best at training at most of the positions, but I would always spend the first day at least, or the first half a day with an employee that would not even report to me directly, but to one of my managers, and then I would pass them on to. Their direct manager and then the manager would handle the training with the senior employees and so on.

If it was my own employees who, somebody who would report to me directly, I would spend pretty much the first few days a week or whatever they required for them. So depending on the position, sometimes training was more intensive than others. They do need time. Okay, number four. Is that [00:25:00] as you have the team and now you have employees working, you want to lead them.

So not just leave them to their devices, never check in with them and once a year, maybe tap them on the back to give them a raise. You want to have a connection with them so then you understand them. You know their strengths, you know the things that they need to work on, and you can play to their strengths.

Playing to people's strengths is. Great. And when you understand your team, then you can always balance that, right? You can also then understand as you grow the business, if you need a new employee, you can always think about, what do I need based on the team that I have, right? So you're always filling, it's like a puzzle when you're always filling skill sets and certain things that you don't have that will make the team so much stronger.

And as you play to these strengths, you need to allow your [00:26:00] people to shine. Micromanaging, kills innovation. It kills people. Drive and being proactive and caring. Micromanaging really tells people you don't trust them. And as human beings, when we feel like we're not trusted, we lose interest, motivation, and we become helpless.

It's okay, what's the point of me trying if my boss will fix everything or they will just do it over, or whatever. Giving your people space to shine is super important. And of course there must be certain boundaries through to certain frameworks, processes within week which they operate.

So certain structure, and again, it all depends on your business and where you are, but it's so critical.

Even with dispatchers. So we had people who would dispatch and route the technicians right to optimize [00:27:00] the route. So the technicians were not spending most of their day in the tracks, but actually on site doing work. And there were different types of jobs that the technicians will be sent to and different types of clients and buildings.

So certain jobs were more urgent than others and more critical than others. We gave them codes like there was code red that was really an emergency that could potentially, affect the wellbeing of the building occupants, code yellow and code green, and within the code red there were certain things that were, we created prescription to how they had to be handled to avoid.

Emergency becoming a bookmaker emergency, things getting worse, and potentially, risking the company for millions of dollars in fines. But then outside of those exceptions that were very prescriptive, there were things that the dispatchers had. Freedom to decide [00:28:00] on and route and so on, which then allowed people to think for themselves to see like they were contributing and really bring in innovations through their ways of doing the work that they were entrusted to do.

Okay. The fifth step or the fifth area of building high performing teams and really. Growing and developing true relationships with your employees and it's not to say that you have to be best friends and family with each other, but you have to go beyond. Just work level. You need to know your people as human beings and know what's important to them and what they love, and learning some details about them, whether it's about their family or their passions or their friends, or whatever it is.

So you have those moments, whether they're just simple CHS on a Monday or on a Friday afternoon, or as you're making coffee, or [00:29:00] the first, five minutes of a meeting you have with them where they feel like they matter to you beyond the role that they were hired for or beyond the tasks that you've given to them.

That care creates unbelievable loyalty. It creates attachment where people will. Go above and beyond for you very often without you having to ask too much and so on, because they feel connected with you. Because they respect you, because they like you, because they believe in the mission that you have and the vision.

They love the team they're working with. They love, they just love their work environment. And you as a leader, you're responsible for creating that. The six part is coaching your team members. This is really how I developed my coaching skills by [00:30:00] coaching my team members over the 15 years. It probably was hundreds of people to helping them get better.

Ultimately, not only in their current role. But better as humans, better as professionals, which then help them also progress in their career. Because I think we owe that as leaders to our people. We see them in a way that they don't see themselves, right? As human beings like we, we see ourselves.

Yeah, with all kinds of prejudice or limiting beliefs or our negative brain that tells us we're not good enough and so on. And when you have people reporting to you, you see them for their full potential or you can see them for their full potential. And when you show them that and you believe in them, that will be reflected not only in their performance and their loyalty to you, but it also in how they.

In the [00:31:00] results that they create. So giving them respectful, yet honest feedback

if they handled something that wasn't the best, doing it in private and respectfully and helping them improve and also. Pausing and making sure that you re reward behavior you do wanna see. And by rewarding, I don't always mean, oh, every time they do something great, you have to give them a gift or throw a party, or give them a raise.

But acknowledging that is important and. Doesn't go unnoticed. And then the last thing, which is connected to coaching and culture is do not tolerate behaviors that are not aligned with your culture. Even if they're small, even if they're like, it's sometimes easier because you're busy to say, Ugh, it's fine.

And most of the time. [00:32:00] Leaders like let those behaviors pass because they don't want to feel uncomfortable approaching an employee. And addressing it. But those behaviors, like I call them like little poisons, they can spread really fast and they will spread more exponentially and faster than you rewarding the positive behaviors just because as human, again, our brain is, has a tendency to focus on negativity more often.

Because when you tolerate things that should not be part of your culture, this is how you drive away your best people. This is really disrespectful for your best people, who, let's say, don't engage in that behavior, but then they feel like they're not appreciated, that they're not seen so don't be scared to stop the behavior, that it's not in alignment with the values, with the culture that you wanna create. And sometimes you need to let people go, not [00:33:00] because they're bad people, but because maybe they're not the right fit for the job or they're not right fit anymore. Maybe they were, and then something changed in their attitude and one, and they're not happy in the job right now.

So letting people go is unfortunately part of building a team, a high performing team, and, a high performing business, and it never feels good, but that's normal. As human beings, we care about other human beings and we know that being let go. It's not a great feeling, so it never feels good, which is okay, but you still might need to do it from time to time.

Hopefully not too often, but it will happen. And one last piece of advice that I should have talked about when hiring never desperate hires. So sometimes when you let people go and it leaves a hole right in the responsibilities that they were handling and tasks your brain will want to hire quickly. So that the load that the [00:34:00] current team has to pick up doesn't last too long, but desperate hiring never works.

I've done it in my career and I've always regretted it, so

don't do it.

Okay. That's it. I hope it was helpful. If you have any questions, any specific questions about growing a team and building high performing team, feel free to reach out to me. You can connect with me on LinkedIn or on Instagram. I will leave those links in the show notes.

I'm happy to help. All right, talk to you next week. 

Head Shot

Maggie Perotin

Host