Invest in Your People and Your Business will Thrive

RCS Influencer Charles Antis says that people should be your biggest cost of doing business.

When thinking about the biggest cost of doing business last year, I can tell you a couple of things, but before I start, I'm going to tell you that I believe if you're going to be relevant in the world we live in now, where purpose and intention matters, your biggest cost should be your people.

Editor’s note: You can watch Charles respond to this month’s question below or scroll down to read the transcript.

Video Transcript:

One of our biggest costs in time and in expenditures last year was the implementation of Salesforce. Not just Salesforce CRM, but Salesforce's entire ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system where all of our communications go through this system of a Salesforce Suite.

We think that's a great investment, but on top of the investment of purchasing the software and installing this, there is a huge investment in the training of our people and then supporting them.  When you switch your ERP system in a company, not providing that training and support is the single greatest failure of companies trying to blow past the $10 million or $20 million-dollar mark.

I want to tell you about an area where I'm super excited and it’s our people. It's always our people. It's also more than just our people. It's also our stakeholders and our community. It's our supply chain. It's our partners in the community. One of the ways it shows up is on our community giving. Antis Roofing last year gave away $354,000 in grants and $140,000 in non-profit scholarships. We gave six summer interns positions in job shadowing. We also gave away $200,000 in roof giveaways and donated 1,400 volunteer hours. That's not a company expense, but we also pay for a lot of work to get done on our jobs. We believe we know why we exist, and that is to keep families safe and dry.

When you have a team that puts your people first, when you have a team that talks about the good you're going to do, it creates alignment, and then you retain your talent, and you attract top talent. That's what we're about at Antis Roofing, about putting our people first and our other stakeholders first, and that is our biggest expenditure year after year. Thank you.

Charles Antis is the founder and CEO of Antis Roofing. See his full bio here.