That One Person

A client of mine ran a business with fourteen staff and a problem he couldn't name. Revenue was fine. Margins were fine. But every week felt like pushing a boulder up a hill he'd already climbed twelve times before.

Then he hired an operations manager. Cost him more than he wanted to pay. Six months later he told me he finally understood what “working on the business” meant, because for the first time in nine years, someone else was working in it properly.

Nothing else about the business changed. He hired one person, and the whole thing changed shape.

That's the story every business owner needs to hear, and almost none of them believe until it happens to them.

The Four Tiers

Most owners rate their people on one axis only: how well do they perform. That's half the picture, and it's the easy half to measure. The other question, the one most owners never formally ask, is whether the person actually believes in what the business is trying to become, and whether they add to that culture or just quietly draw down on it. Put those two questions together, performance on one axis and alignment on the other, and you get four kinds of employee, not two.

The A player scores high on both. They deliver, and they deliver in a way that reinforces what you're actually trying to build. They don't just hit targets, they hit them in the way you'd want copied by everyone else on the team. This is what my client's operations manager turned out to be, and it's why one hire moved a business that hadn't shifted in years. The only sensible response to an A player is to get out of their way and hand them more of the business, more scope, more decisions, before someone else does it for you.

The B player is high on alignment but hasn't caught up on performance yet. They believe in the business, they'll stay back late without being asked, and they're the ones who actually enjoy the Friday wrap-up meeting. What they're missing is skill or experience, both of which are fixable. This is the one quadrant worth investing coaching time into, because the hard part, actually caring, is already done. The job here isn't to be patient and hope performance catches up on its own, it's to actually train them properly and then hold them to the standard you trained them for.

The C player is the dangerous one, because on paper they look like your best asset. High performance, low alignment. They hit their numbers, sometimes spectacularly, while quietly working against the culture you're trying to build, undercutting teammates, cutting corners nobody else would cut, or treating the business as a vehicle for themselves rather than something they're actually part of. Owners keep C players around because the results are visible and the damage isn't, until it is. The mistake is managing a C player on performance, when performance was never the problem. The conversation that actually needs to happen is about whether they believe in what you're building at all, and whether they're willing to change that, because no amount of coaching on the job fixes someone who's optimising for themselves.

The D player is low on both, and they're the easiest call an owner will ever make, which is exactly why so many owners still don't make it. There's no programme for a D player. The correct action is to remove them from the business, and the only real debate is how long you let it take.

Most owners can only see the vertical axis. They know who's hitting targets and who isn't. They've got no read on the horizontal one, so they genuinely can't tell an A from a C until the C has already cost them three good B's who got sick of covering for someone the owner kept praising in the monthly numbers.

Why You Don't Believe It Yet

Most owners have never actually had an A player on the team, only B's and C's, so they've got nothing to compare against. They think their current team is “pretty solid” because solid is all they've experienced. It's like never having tasted a proper flat white and assuming servo instant coffee is what coffee tastes like.

You don't know what you're missing until someone shows you, and by then you've usually spent years underpaying for a room full of C's and calling it a bargain.

The Maths Nobody Does

A C player costs you their salary. An A player costs the same salary but does three to ten times the work, without the constant management.

Meanwhile the C player costs you something the payroll report never shows: your attention, and eventually your best people. Every hour spent redoing their work, having the same conversation again, or talking a good B player out of quitting is an hour not spent growing the business. That's the real cost, and it never shows up on a spreadsheet.

Where Owners Get This Wrong

They think A players are expensive and C players are affordable. It's the other way round. C players cost you twice, once in wages and once in your own time fixing what they miss, plus the culture cost you never bill against anything. A players end up cheaper once you count what they free you up to do.

The other mistake is assuming A players want more money than they do. Mostly they want to not be managed by someone who's still doing the job themselves, and most owners can't offer that because they haven't built anything an A player could actually step into.

That's the real lesson. You don't attract exceptional people by paying exceptional wages, you attract them by building something worth joining. A business that runs on your presence will only ever attract people who need you there. Once it runs on process and clarity instead, the calibre of person willing to work for you changes completely.

The Question Worth Pondering

Not “can I afford an A player.” Ask instead: what is my own mediocrity, disguised as thrift, currently costing me?

Most owners I meet already know the answer. They just haven't done the maths.

Matt Fitzsimmons is a business coach who's spent 25+ years helping owners build businesses that don't need them standing over every shoulder. If this one hit close to home, you know where to find me.