Our organization, X5 Management, was founded in 2006. We’re proud of that. We always say we’re in the people business. That’s why we get up in the morning: serve organizations to help them by aligning leaders and teams to achieve. The conversation around this book that we collaborated on over the last year, How to Stop the Revolving Door, discusses the importance of people in your business. The Revolving Door is preventable, although you can’t eliminate it, and some turnover is natural. There’s a big difference between having a 5% turnover and a 40% turnover. Again, for us being in the business of helping organizations become better, more effective, we felt that our background and our experience, and some of the tools and techniques that we’ve used over time could be put that to paper and become a presentable tool. Our book is intended to provide that to our clients, prospective clients, and anyone in the business.
We always say we can work with anyone that has people. The reality is every organization, big and small, has people. That’s incredibly important, and that became the catalyst. Writing a book isn’t easy, but it has become a passion. We’re proud to collaborate. We have similar styles with different perspectives. Kris and I have known each other a long time, so collaborating on this book is something I’m proud of at the same time, and I welcome Kris to chime in on maybe her views of her passion behind the book as well.
Mike’s the ideas person, and we always chuckle about that with each other. Mike has the ideas, and I tend to execute or implement them. When Mike first suggested it, I thought, again, a great idea because we have a lot of experience collectively, and we love to collaborate. We have a lot of experience in business. We hear straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, what some of the common workplace issues and challenges are. We thought of putting something together as a tool, and the idea is that that tool serves an entire organization, not one leadership person. We distribute quite a few books during our training, and we always find that a group with the same material makes a good topic for group conversation. And we thought, again, this with the strategies we’re offering that can positively impact employees, and ultimately when that happens, the business results improve, it would be well received.
Utilizing This Book to Improve Your Organization
Sharing our experience and knowledge and solving the common problems we see on paper is rewarding. Our passion comes in here, and we’ve written several books. It’s very rewarding because when you’re an author, people stand back and say, “Wow.” So many people want to write a book, and many have it as a goal or a dream for many years, and many don’t even get around to it. It’s stepping up to the plate and showing people that if you put your mind to it and you have something to share that’s helpful for others, then lead by example and go ahead and do it.
The other aspect we take pride in is simplifying something that may seem complicated. There are a hundred things you could do to improve retention. Still, we’re starting with our five strategies, and we’ll have some anecdotes within the book and stories, to make it a readable, digestible takeaway. You could argue that great retention strategies are not rocket science, but we must all remember the simple things. The little things make all the difference. We want to capture that so that it’s simple enough once you understand it, but it’s hard to do. It’s hard to sustain it as well. When you put that to paper and refer to it, our strategy of writing this book and co-authoring it together, which we’re both excited about, is not a money maker in writing the book. We can support clients, and if they utilize our services, wonderful.
But we’re in the business of helping businesses and people. That’s what we do. With an organization like X5 Management in our primary market of Edmonton, Alberta, and by early 2024, having five published books in the marketplace that we’ve happily contributed to over time between the two of us, there’s a lot of pride and experience that we felt was worthy of sharing. We hope that some leaders pick up on a tip that can make a difference for them. But that ROI is never measured. That’s not why we wrote this book. As much as anything, we wrote the book because we’re helping business leaders.
Your Passion is Your Strength
We wrapped up the book with a chapter about our personal experience following a passion. One thing that we’ve realized is we always feel bad for people who don’t have a passion. It doesn’t mean you wake up one day and you have it. Sometimes, you fall into a business or a particular role, or you’ve had a varied career, and you realize that you’ve fallen into something that you’re good at, and that becomes a passion. It was a good way to wrap up the book and demonstrate to readers that if you can look around you and recognize where your passion is, it’s probably in an area of strength. You may not have tapped into it. If you can tap into it, you’ll be very successful at it.
We’re in the people business, and it does become a true calling. It is a calling, and some days can be stressful. The stress in our business is our client’s stress, and the challenges they’re dealing with. That’s difficult, and we’re in the solution space, so we need to be able to figure out a solution. How do we collaborate? How do we think win-win? How do we improve the organization and the experience of the employees and the customers? Not an easy task, but that’s what we get up in the morning to do.
Our Encouragement to You
There are lots of great books on the marketplace. Take this book, for example. It’s designed to be a simple read that you can get through and depends on how fast you read, two and a half, three hours, that you take something away and, more importantly, implement it. You execute an idea or validate, “Hey, we’re already doing this idea, and it’s working.” That’s the takeaway. And, of course, we’re in the business of supporting organizations. If we can be of benefit, X5 would welcome the opportunity to support your business. That’s our purpose for getting up in the morning because it’s a privilege for us to help organizations that want to improve their business. That’s something we really care about.
Our vision, when the book is distributed, is hopefully, the reader will have a copy full of highlighted notes and post-it notes for future reference because, like anything else, you can’t read something once and be an expert in it. This becomes a guide. In some cases, if that particular strategy has already been tapped into, hopefully, readers will ask themselves, how can I learn more or improve in this particular area?
We thank our readers in advance; hopefully, they will gain valuable takeaways. We want to get this in the hands of as many leaders, managers, business owners, supervisors, and recruiting firms as possible, whoever that may be. Those are the key items that we want to look at.
Give us any feedback on the book, and maybe we’ll hear some success stories down the road of what you had as a takeaway and how that potentially benefited your organization or your culture, ultimately improving your retention and key employees.
Sincerely,
Mike Mack and Kris Schinke
