This week’s HR Consulting Success story is with John Beane, President of Staff Development Services. Staff Development Services provides clients with:
- Hiring Assessments
- Coaching Assessments
- Executive Coaching
- Organizational Assessments
- Training to Improve Hiring and Promoting Practices
- Human Resource Consulting
- Process Improvement
- Management Training
To listen to John’s interview, download the .wav file by clicking the link: John Beane Interview.
| The HRVA: | Well, we start our conference series today with John Beane President of Staff Development Services, and John, welcome to our conference. How are you this morning? |
| John: | Very good, Donna. Thank you for having me on your podcast. |
| The HRVA: |
It’s my pleasure, and as I told you earlier, you are the first person we’re interviewing so you get to be at the head of the line. |
| John: | I like that. |
| The HRVA: | Great! Let’s get started. I’ve looked through your website; it was very informative, and I was very impressed especially with your bio, but I’m the one who knows who you are and what you do, but our readers may not, so tell me a little bit about yourself. |
| John: | Well, I began my interest in human resources years ago when I had a business where I actually had to hire people. I quickly discovered that I wasn’t very good at it. My theory at that time was you take a warm body, you stick them in a job, and if they’re successful great. If they’re not, you just find someone else. I’ll have to admit that at that time I had about 200% turnover a year. As I began to recognize the costs associated with that turnover, I said well, there’s got to be a better way. I was kinda dumb; I hadn’t heard about human resource people and all that. My company was not really big enough to have a human resources professional on board, so I began to do some research to improve how I hired people. So that was really the spark that, you could say, got me interested in human resources as perhaps a career or business or whatever, but it was mainly self-preservation as a businessman. That literally took my turnover from about 200% a year, with the last couple of years that I had that business, to zero. Because of financial circumstances and things transitioned from that business into starting a training and consulting firm. At first I did general things, just kind of making a living, and over the years slowly specialized more and more on human resources. For about 10 years I worked for a national firm that did seminars and became their sort of HR specialist. If they had a need for interviewing, training, or human resource issues training, I conducted that sort of training. I guess the epitome of that was I was invited into the U.S. Senate to do a training session with some of the leadership of the Senate at that time in how to interview and hire good employees. So that has been my career over the last 25 years as a consultant and previously doing training. I traveled many, many millions of miles doing that sort of work. So that just gives you a little bit of an idea of where I came from and how I got to where I am. |
| The HRVA: | That sounds like a route that most HR Consultants don’t take into the field, from what I’ve been able to gather. Most of them go to school and learn how to be HR consultants, and they don’t get their real world experience until after they get out of school, so I’d say that probably makes you very valuable as an HR consultant to have gone through the school of hard knocks, so to speak. |
| John: | It has because in most cases the scenarios I run into, I have seen and had to deal with some variation of that scenario previously, so it gives me some insight that I would probably not have gotten had I not had to learn how to do this on my own many, many years ago. |
| The HRVA: | Right, and you said you’ve been an HR consultant for about 25 years now? |
| John: | Just about 25; yes. I started doing the training and some of the typical types of training such as time management, supervision. I began to focus more on the supervision and management training. Really, that kind of led me into the human resource area because one of the things I discovered as I tried to train people is quite often the company or the organization had hired badly in the first place, and my job was to try to train people, who weren’t really suitable for management, but tackling it in reverse. I began to realize that I could be more effective, as a consultant, if I helped those folks hire the right people who had character traits that would permit them to fulfill the job effectively and then the training could be beneficial. You’ve probably heard the old saying, “you can’t turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse” and yet that’s what many, many companies try to do. They take people who just aren’t really suitable for the job and try to make them capable of doing it, and most people are unable to make that type of transition. |
| The HRVA: | I’ve worked in a lot of high tech companies where they hire engineers because they’re good at engineering, and then they promote them into management positions, and they flounder because they don’t have the background or people skills to manage or supervise others. |
| John: | If you kind of think of a funnel, I started out at the very broad end of the funnel. Over the last 25 years what I’ve done is focus more and more intently into a very narrow area of human resource consulting that’s behavioral based. What it’s permitted to do is manage my client base better, if you will. What I mean by that is when I was a generalist, just doing any kind of work, whatever I ran into I was gonna say, “sure I can do that”. Well, I never became very good at any of that. By focusing almost laser-like on a narrow area of human resources, it permitted me to become a much better expert and better with my clients, helping them solve whatever problems they were having. It means that there’s a lot of things I don’t do anymore. |
| The HRVA: | Well, I would guess there are enough HR generalists out there to pick up the slack, but finding your niche is very important for an HR consultant because instead of just throwing darts indiscriminately it just helps you to narrow your focus for your marketing efforts. So congratulations getting that done for yourself. |
| John: | Well, I wish I could take credit for it, but I really can’t. In the past, I’ve been fortunate to have people who decided they wanted to mentor me and gave me the benefit of their experience or advice. I don’t know whether I was smart enough to take it or dumb enough to just not know any better, but I was able to listen to what they told me. Over the years, and, this is the absolute truth, I was able to reinvent myself in order to stay an independent contractor rather than having to look for work, which quite often happens to consultants. |
| The HRVA: | Right and along those lines do you have any advice for someone just starting out as a human resource consultant? |
| John: | When you first start out, I think it’s important to be more flexible, before figuring out where you are most comfortable. It doesn’t hurt to say :I think I can do that: and to embrace different areas of the human resource field, so that you can find an area where you say I’m good at this; I like doing this. If you’re going to do something for many, many years you need to love to do it. Basically that’s what I’ve been able to do. I’ve been able to find which area that I have a passion about, and I can do my work with a great deal of passion even though I’ve been doing this part of it for 20+ years, and that’s important. |
| The HRVA: | Yeah, it is; it is. That’s very important, and that’s fantastic. It usually takes people forever to figure out what it is they enjoy doing and pursue it so you’ve short circuited that one, and you’ve gotten where you need to be. That’s great! |
| John: | I will tell you that technology in today’s world has made what I do feasible, whereas it would not have been as feasible as when I first got into this business. I’m an early advocate of computers. When I bought my first computer, years ago, a 10 MG hard drive cost $10,000 so in those days it was a thousand dollars megabyte. Today it’s just unbelievable when you’re practically talking pennies per gigabyte. Computers were used in that early business, and as I got into my consulting work, I continued to recognize it was important to stay up with current technology. Actually what it has permitted me is to do most of my work without having to travel. I’m a little bit unique in that regard. I seldom go outside my office to do my job. |
| The HRVA: | Ahhhhh, okay |
| John: | I was just going to say that in the 10 years of working for a national seminar company, I was a lot like the guy up in the air. I was up in the air about 40 weeks a year and got to the point I’d had my fill of all that travel, and started to look for a way of modifying my consulting business where it can be done like this by phone, email, or voicemail, if necessary. I don’t really care much for voicemail, but it’s made it feasible to make a good living without having to spend half of my life in an airplane or in an airport. |
| The HRVA: | That’s fantastic. Do you run into difficulties with clients perhaps not appreciating the technological aspects of your business? |
| John: | Not actually. Most of the people that I deal with are at least somewhat fluent in technology, and so I actually have clients that I’ve worked with for years but I’ve never physically met. |
| The HRVA: | Okay. |
| John: | All of our work is done by phone or email, and it’s made it, in one respect, enjoyable because it makes me very efficient. On the other hand, there are times when you talk to people for years and years, and you’d really like to meet them. You’d like to see them face-to-face for a change, but its just not feasible in many cases. |
| The HRVA: | Right, right. All that travel can be very wearing on someone. |
| John: | Right, and about the only time I travel now is if I go give a speech at a meeting/convention, marketing meeting, something like that. |
| The HRVA: | Ahhh, and do you give many speeches at conventions, marketing meetings, whatever? |
| John: | I know this is gonna sound strange; not if I don’t have to. When I got into this current work configuration, I did go to a number of meetings as a speaker and picked up a lot of clients that way. I haven’t done as much of that in the last few years mainly because the types of things I get into are typically by invitation only. I’ve spoken at a lot of them so many times that I’m old news now. They’re looking for something new and different, and a lot of the people in those meetings are my clients so it’s not as necessary for me to go to those meetings. |
| The HRVA: | Ahhh, okay. |
| John: | Quite often a lot of my clients come from people going to those meetings that don’t know me, and they hear about me at the meeting because people are talking about using my service, and they will contact me after those meetings. |
| The HRVA: | Yes, the best marketing going is word of mouth, so you’ve established that – great. |
| John: | It really is. As a matter of fact, in a lot of cases, I market myself two ways. One, as a company name, and one by my personal name. Many times people will use my name, and I’m not that good in English, but I think they use it like a verb like “you’ve gotta John Beane them”.They’re referring to an assessment I provide clients, and they just use my name instead of the assessment’s name. |
| The HRVA: | Well, you know that’s good; you are the brand and that’s practically all you need to have a brand that stays in people’s minds. |
| John: | And I’ve been very fortunate in that regard, in that my name brand has stuck. I also use Staff Development Services because most of my marketing today is email and having a web presence, so I want people to use that name as well. If I were ever to sell my consulting practice, it’s kind of hard to sell your own name. |
| The HRVA: | Right. |
| John: | So, that’s part of my reasoning behind that. |
| The HRVA: | That’s excellent reasoning and not to skip, hop and jump through questions we’ve spoken about previously, is that one of your future plans to market your consultancy and go retire to Baha or someplace else? |
| John: | Probably not. I like working. I really do have a passion for what I do. I don’t know that I would be as happy if I didn’t have the work to do everyday because I do enjoy it. I’ve been able to develop a lifestyle that’s fairly flexible. As a matter of fact I’m probably a little too obsessive about my work. What I’ve tried to do is set it up so that I don’t have to work all that hard. My work is in my home so I get to enjoy my home. I might retire someday, but I don’t have any plans to do that anytime soon. |
| The HRVA: | If you’ve developed a business style and a life style that gives you an opportunity to work from home and the flexibility to take time off when you want it or need it, I can understand why you wouldn’t be looking at retirement. You’ve built what everybody dreams of. |
| John: | Well, it’s like you being a Virtual Human Resource Assistant; I’m a Virtual Human Resource Person because as long as I have Internet access and cell phone service I’m good to go. My son got married at a Sandals this past summer, and my clients never knew I was packed.It was wonderful! I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a Caribbean Beach Resort but they can certainly be lovely. |
| The HRVA: | Oh, yes they can. Many, many, many, many moons ago, before I bought the money drain that I call a house, I used to take some really fantastic vacations down south and it is very,very beautiful down in the Caribbean. |
| John: | (laughing) Oh it is, and so that’s the nice thing again about the business I’ve developed. It is very flexible from that vantage point and that has made that a habit. It couldn’t be feasible 20 years ago, but it’s certainly feasible now. |
| The HRVA: | Right, and speaking of technology, in my wanderings around the world wide web I often see a lot of HR consultants that aren’t heavily into technology. Is this something that differentiates you from the rest of the pack? |
| John: | It seems to; I’m virtual like you. I don’t interact a lot with other HR consultants but it does seem that a lot of folks still are more face-to-face. They feel like they gotta go meet people first, which I’m not against; it’s just not a driving force in my practice. |
| The HRVA: | Right, right. In your early days as an HR consultant, did you find clients had misconceptions about what it is you do? |
| John: | Constantly. The most difficult thing to get across to people is what you do and how you can help them. I never will forget one time, when I was fairly new in consulting, I had a businessman basically look at me and say, “you’re too young; how can you help me?” And I looked at him and I said, “You know I think you’re right; I don’t think I can”.A person’s gotta have an attitude that you can work with, if they don’t there’s no sense in wasting your time. |
| The HRVA: | Right, right; I agree. In the Virtual Assistant business, they hammer at us all the time that there’s an ideal client and there’s a not so ideal client and that you want to run away from the not ideal client as quickly as you can, and those are the ones who don’t place any value on what it is you do or what you can do for them. |
| John: | That is absolutely true. One of the questions you asked me a bit earlier was if you’re starting out as an HR consultant it’s important to realize that you can’t help everyone. It is a partnership between you and the client, and you have to be able to explain to the client what it is you do, how you do it, and how it’s going to help them. If that’s suitable to them, then you have a good relationship. If someone contacts me about working with them, the first thing I say is “we’re a partnership”. :I can’t do any better for you than you permit me to do. What I need from you is information. Your information will tell me what I need to know in order to be of help to you.” If we don’t have that sort of relationship, then things generally have not worked out well with those clients.Quite frequently, during the conversation, I’ll come to the conclusion this is probably not gonna work, and I don’t pursue the client. |
| The HRVA: | And I assume that if you decide that it’s not gonna work and you don’t pursue the client you don’t waste time and energy thinking “oh my god I just let a client go.” |
| John: | Exactly because again, the type of human resource work that I do, where I basically focus on helping clients hire people, has also been very beneficial for me to use at looking at my own business even though I don’t hire people. I look at it as if a client is going to hire me then I need to be the right person to help them. And so it’s really been very beneficial in that regard. In the early years I took on anybody and would bend over backwards trying to make the relationship work, mainly because I needed the money. It was very stressful, and it was very difficult. I probably wasn’t a very good consultant for the client. By finding my particular little niche, what’s happened is the clients that I do work with really appreciate the efforts I make for them. It makes my job easy. It makes it easy for them because they’ve developed the trust that I’m going to give them 120% when they need me, but I’m not going to bother them all that much when they don’t have a need. |
| The HRVA: | Right. That sounds fantastic, and it sounds exactly what the VA industry preaches to the Virtual Assistants, so that’s great. I hope that any new HR consultants that are listening to us make a note in the back of their head to do a little bit of a mind-set change so they can stop running as hard as they’re running and maybe become more successful by focusing in on what works for them. |
| John: | Exactly, and you know sometimes your information comes from the strangest sources. Like what prompted me to focus my consulting practice the way I did was a book that came out in 1995 called “Emotional Intelligence”. I read the book, and I still say it’s the best book in all the books that have been written by emotional intelligence. What it pointed out to me was that what was being discussed in the book was what I was doing at the time.I just didn’t call it what the book called it. I realized that’s where my passion had always been even back in the old business when I was learning how to interview and how to hire people, I had almost by accident fallen into what he was saying what you had to do to be successful with emotional intelligence. It so it kind of let me build the practice around it. Now I will say that I don’t think of the same ideas of emotional intelligence and then apply them to clients. Most of the people who’ve written all these books about emotional intelligence, and the reason for most of the emotional intelligence books that have been written are designed to sell training. We will train you to be a more emotionally intelligent person. What my research has come to show is that we have a very narrow range of emotional intelligence and what emotionally intelligent people do is they figure out what that is and they find the right job that lets that flourish, but they don’t try to change themselves into something they cannot be.And interestingly enough, although I started for many years in my practice as a trainer, I have really come to the conclusion that most training dollars are wasted because they’re trying to change people into something they cannot become. |
| The HRVA: | Right. That really resonates with me that its really a waste of time and money to twist people inside out trying to make them what you want them to be. |
| John: | Exactly. A very simple one is if you are not a good time manager, I can teach you all the tools to manage to time, but unless you have a desire to do that, you still will not be a good time manager. |
| The HRVA: | Right, right; exactly. Well, this has been a fantastic conversation, John, you just really roll with it, and said things that were totally unexpected but really valuable. Is there anything else you’d like tell us about or anything else you can share with us before we wrap this up, and I let you go back to your virtual consulting? |
| John: | I’d just like to leave people with the thought that everybody has passion, and it’s your job to find whatever your passion is in life. If you don’t, you’re probably going to be somewhat miserable with your life. When you find your passion, things will tend to flow much easier; life tends to be better. I’m not saying that you don’t have problems, but they’re problems you can deal with more easily; a lot easier than if you’re trying to be something that is not really you. That’s how I’ve learned to approach life. I think the more people do that and take responsibility for themselves – their success – their future, they’re going to find their lives to be a much, much happier time than many, many people get to spend on this old earth. |
| The HRVA: | Fantastic! Well, thank you John. You’ve been a great leading interview. I can’t wait to get this transcript up on my website and issue the press release and having millions and millions of people shouting your name from the rafters. |
| John: | Well me either, Donna, and thank you for inviting me on your podcast, and I look forward to talking with you again sometime. |
| The HRVA: | Great, Fantastic John. |
| John: | Thank You. |
| The HRVA: | Bye, Bye. |
| John: | Bye. |
