How about my Kansas State Wildcats? For those of you who are living on Mars or have been serving with Advisors Without Borders in Uganda, the K-State football team finished 11-1, ranked No. 7, won the Big 12 title and was set to play Oregon in the Fiesta Bowl. And the icing on that cake is that our quarterback—Collin Klein—is currently a finalist for the Heisman Trophy. Of course, things may end badly (let's hope not), but it's still not bad for some kids from the sticks.
I tell you this not because my car is K-State purple (well, OK, it's partly that), but also because the success of our football program under head coach Bill Snyder holds some valuable lessons for small business owners and how they run their firms. Perennially at the recruiting disadvantage of a relatively small state school (total enrollment: 24,000 students) in the not-so-glamorous outback of Manhattan, Kan. (the "Little" Apple, as we call it), and with no national championships to our credit, Coach Snyder, who was the unanimouis choice for AP's Big 12 coach of the year, has excelled by building a program that creates blue-chip players out of prospects who go unsigned by the larger universities. It's a model that I've found works for advisory firms as well.
Since 1993, Kansas State has won 148 games, which is an average of nearly nine games per season, or just under 75%—one of the best records in all of college football. During that time, Coach Snyder has produced 108 All-Big 12 players, 51 All-Americans and had 70 former Wildcats play in the NFL. Oh, and he turned one-time wide receiver and the 106th ranked quarterback recruit in the country, Collin Klein, into one of the country's three Heisman finalists.
As impressive as those stats are, the way Coach Snyder, 73, achieves that success is even more striking. The foundation of the K-State program is how Snyder and his staff prepare their players to learn about and play football. This preparation begins with Snyder's "16 Goals," which outline the way in which he expects his players to approach the game and their lives. "The 16 Goals form the foundation for success and create the work ethic and discipline that goes with them," he's been quoted as saying. "With players and coaches from all backgrounds, having a single set of core values unifies them under one vision. If each adheres to the goals as individuals, then team success will follow."
As you might expect, those goals include a smattering of team-oriented ideas such as unselfishness and unity, but most are personal qualities that will make one successful on and off the playing field: Self-discipline, enthusiasm, personal responsibility, consistency and leading by example.
In my work, I have found that most advisory firms have a lot to learn from Bill Snyder about recruiting employees and preparing them to succeed. Unfortunately, the idea of hiring star talent still exists in many firms. I see this every day in my consulting firm and also when I give my human capital P4 speeches. Owner/advisors are fighting for the top talent and overpaying to get it.
I suspect that this is at least in part because many advisors still haven't grasped that they are small businesses, often located in small towns or suburbs, competing for top talent with large institutions such as brokerage firms, insurance companies, accounting firms and banks. The reality is that they are Kansas States recruiting against Alabamas, Southern Cals, Stanfords and Michigans. To get these young star advisors, firms have to offer competitive compensation packages, which more often than not is more than they can afford to pay. Then they have unrealistic expectations about the impact these blue-chip employees will have on their firms. When the recruits fail to live up to their expectations, most advisors turn up the heat, which results in even lower performance by an increasingly unhappy employee who usually leaves for a higher paying job, saddling their former firm with another round of high recruiting expenses and lost productivity.