For years I have been saying the #1 profit maximising and growth strategy available to any business, in the mid to long term, is investing in its people.  Today, as has been the case for decades, ‘people’ account for more than 65% of the variance in organisational success.

Yet most businesses don’t get this investment right and do not develop their people effectively – those that do, are outstripping their competitors on financial metrics.

Many commentators believe the way to fix this people development problem is the adoption of large-scale learning management systems (LMS) and digitised or virtual training programs, that is, adopting e-learning to enable remote sessions, greater learner numbers, on-demand participation and cheaper unit costs.

This approach aligns perfectly with the adopted strategy of consulting businesses everywhere – cut costs, increase margins and scale like crazy!

It may sound overly optimistic and naïve but we at People At Their Best don’t want to be a digital or virtual learning and development business.  More bluntly, we are not a technology company, dabbling in the people space; we are a people company that uses technology to help our clients.

Here’s the thing: Scaling only makes sense when it doesn’t destroy a business’s competitive advantage or reduce the value of its service.  And, we do not believe it’s possible to automate or digitise the value of face to face, human interaction when it comes to personal growth and transformation.

What’s more, wedo not measure success based on our ability to scale; we measure our success based on the impact we have on our clients. So, we are not about scaling for scale’s sake, not if it is means our clients experience lower engagement and impact.  Here, scaling might be a win for us but not for our clients.  Instead, we are about stronger engagement, higher impact and greater value for our clients.

This means our margins are reduced, our internal costs higher and our profits lower but at the same time our value to our clients is higher and our impact on their businesses is more positive.

The cost to us is OK because we are not about being the best ‘business’, we are about helping our clients to be their best business. We evaluate our performance not on our bottom line but on the ‘impact’ we have on our clients – for a consultancy, this should be the only metric that matters.

Our value proposition resides in our time, care and devotion to our clients – scaling is anathema to this and we will not sacrifice what delivers value to our clients, even though this means we’re likely to remain small.

This year, I have had conversations with leaders of 3 large, successful companies, who have told me they have implemented a world-class LMS platform which they described as ‘brilliant’ except, their people ‘don’t appreciate or value it’.  The truth is that this is the nature of digital learning systems and by definition, they cannot be ‘brilliant’ if they are not valued by the participants who use them.  Such systems might be good for compliance objectives but they are not a good return on investment.

Tech platforms, in general, are great for telling you WHAT to do and WHEN to do it, but People At Their Bestenables the discovery of HOW to do something and, HOW to do it WELL. Most importantly, our work connects learners with the WHY of doing something.  Until people nail this, the rest doesn’t matter all that much.  Understanding the WHY and doing it ‘WELL’, is the foundation of performance.

Quite simply, transformation doesn’t happen by osmosis on some tech platform, it is a personal experience, born of trust and immersion.

To bastardise the words, Benjamin Franklin: To sacrifice a little client value to achieve a little scale, will, in the long run, deliver neither and cost both!