Kirk Enright, on Nov 11, 2015 10:47:53 AM
What are your employees really worth?
For a lot of us, when we're happy with them they're priceless; when we're not, they're worthless.
Unfortunately, that kind of gut-level assessment isn't very objective.
That's why we analyzed performance data from over 1000 professional services companies (law firms, ad agencies, architects, engineers, accountants, etc.) to see if there was a better benchmark for productivity.
Our findings?
For most companies, a good target range is between $150k to $200k in revenue-per-employee.
That's not to say that there weren't industry differences — law firms, for example, average a bit more than accountants — or regional differences — coastal cities were higher than Midwestern suburbs — but most fell into that range.
Why?
Kirk Enright, on Nov 9, 2015 11:59:56 AM
Do followers and connections make a difference?
Maybe.
After analyzing data from about 2300 companies (mostly professional and financial services, but also retail, manufacturing and healthcare) we noticed an interesting link between fast-growing companies and the social media footprints of the owners and executives behind them, particularly in terms of LinkedIN connections.
When we looked at Twitter, Facebook and company pages on LinkedIN, high-growth companies usually had a more robust presence than slow- or no-growth companies, but the difference wasn't nearly as pronounced as when we compared the # of LinkedIN connections among owners and executives: High-growth owners/executives averaged nearly 2.5 times the connections of slow or no-growth companies, 500+ vs. <200.
(We ignored Google+ — sorry, Google — and are still gathering info on Instagram.)
It's important to note that correlation is not causation, and the link didn't hold 100% of the time among the companies we sampled.