We often hear the saying, “Your business is just as good as the people in it,” yet many businesses still fail at finding the right kind of people in their team. As a result, they lag behind in efficiency and productivity. Kevin Stoffel and Brent Hultman from Strong People Systems give an overview of the issues that business owners are currently facing when it comes to their employees. They offer some great advice, insights, and tools that help solve problems in turnover and employee engagement. Highlighting the importance of identifying the true human potential of an individual, they bring forth the need for more objectivity into the hiring process. This does not only help the company go forward towards success but it is also a service to individual employees to truly load up on who they are truly meant to be.

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Kevin Stoffel And Brent Hultman From Strong People Systems

We have two guests on the podcast, Kevin Stoffel and Brent Hultman of http://strongpeoplesystems.com/ (Strong People Systems) there in the office from up north in the Denver area. Thanks so much for coming in.

It’s our pleasure to be here.

Tell us a little bit about your business and who you serve.

We are Strong People Systems and we focus on unlocking human potential. It falls into two areas, working with small and medium-sized companies. We help companies bring some objective data into the hiring process, do a better job of getting the right people on the bus, to go along with the subjective resumes and interviews, where people look great on a resume and interview like a rock star but then turn out to be somebody else when they got on the job. We bring some objective data into that process using some pre-employment screening assessments and then working with existing staff to develop the potential of those people. If we ask the question to most of us, “Are you living up to your potential?” most people say, “Not really. There’s more I could give, more I could do, more I could achieve, if I can get out of my own way.”

One of the reasons that we typically don’t work with larger enterprises and large companies even though that’s my background is that we realized everybody says, “Our people are our most valuable asset,” but then if I ask the leader to demonstrate how they do that, I’ll catch them flatfooted. Most big companies say that but then they have a hard time demonstrating that they truly do it. We’re not willing to engage with a client that’s not serious about developing people. If they want us to go fix their people and they say, “We need you, go fix my people,” that’s a non-starter. We won’t sign a contract in that case.

When it’s a “Fix my people” attitude or mentality or thought process, I always tell people to be careful when you point the finger of blame at people because there are three fingers pointing back at you. There’s a lot of truth in that.

What’s your prototypical size business? How many employees? What kind of revenue?

We usually go by employees on that question because depending on the type of business you’re in, revenues can vary greatly. Ideally, our targeted clients are between 25 to 500 employees. We work with clients smaller than that and clients bigger than that. It’s about working with individuals or teams within those organizations to unlock their potential, the talents that are already there.

For the business owner that reaches out to you to bring you on board, what typical pain points or problems are they trying to solve when they reach out to you?

It’s one or two things, it’s, “I’m stuck. I’ve either plateaued or there are outcomes we have to accomplish that aren’t happening and they should be. If I could, I’d fire everybody and start over but I can’t,