From Weekly Resignations to Zero Turnover: A Case Study in Team Transformation

Brandi Starr [00:00:00]:
What happens when your team is so broken, someone quits every single week? That's the crisis Lorraine Ball walked into as the new VP. She inherited a marketing department in free fall. 48 people and not a single week without resignation. 18 months later, zero turnover, K saved in recruiting costs and a team so efficient they had to find new work to fill extra capacity. This is more than a cultural win. It's a masterclass in how leadership, alignment and team design can directly impact revenue. Stick around. You'll want to hear how she pulled this off.

Brandi Starr [00:01:11]:
Hello, hello, hello and welcome to another episode of Revenue Rehab. I am your host, Brandi Starr and we have another amazing episode for you today. In traditional therapy, we learn just as much from others breakthroughs as we do from our own. So today we will explore how Lorraine Ball transformed a marketing department plagued by 100% turnover into a high retention, high impact team. What she changed, how she did it, and what every marketing leader can learn to drive alignment, momentum and measurable business results. Lorraine Ball is a entrepreneur, author and speaker who traded corporate red tape and bad coffee for a mission to help small businesses thrive. As the host of the podcast More Than a Few Words, she brings decades of real world marketing experience, practical tips and creative ideas to every conversation. When she's not speaking or strategizing, you will find her behind a camera or or planning her next travel adventure.

Brandi Starr [00:02:21]:
Lorraine, welcome to Revenue Rehab. Your session begins now.

Lorraine Ball [00:02:26]:
Thank you so much for the invitation. I'm really looking forward to the conversation.

Brandi Starr [00:02:30]:
Yes, I am excited. And before we dive in, I'm an avid traveler as well, so I have to ask, what's been your favorite destination so far?

Lorraine Ball [00:02:39]:
So I always tell people that wherever I am is my favorite destination. But we just recently got back from a trip to to Spain and Portugal and loved that we went down the coast, we rode bicycles and I'm going to tell you, the big cities are great, but the big cities are crowded. And if you can get away from the cities and get to some of the smaller villages and historical cities along the coast of Spain. My favorite was Obidos. It is a medieval village, there's a little castle, there's all of three streets, fabulous restaurants, beautiful views and a 500-year-old guest house. It Was fabulous.

Brandi Starr [00:03:24]:
Ooh, sounds amazing. I'm gonna have to add that to my list. And I know I could sit and talk, travel all day. But let's start from the beginning of your story. So tell me, what challenge were you facing and how did you know you had a problem? So.

Lorraine Ball [00:03:40]:
So when I was interviewing for the job of VP of Creative services, the executive VP alluded to the fact that they were having some turnover issues. And I was like, well, that's okay. I've worked with teams before. I've turned that around. She did not tell me that every week, every single week, somebody quit. There were 48 people in the department, and for a year and a half, one person a week at least was quitting.

Brandi Starr [00:04:13]:
Wow. Yeah, like that. That is one of those, like, I've dealt with high turnover before, but wow.

Lorraine Ball [00:04:21]:
Yes, yes. So, you know, I came in on the first week and I'm, you know, chatting with people and I'm talking to my right hand guy and David was fabulous. And if there's one key learning, you gotta have somebody in your number two spot who will be honest with you, who will call you on the account. And, you know, when we started making progress and we'd get to like Wednesday or Thursday, and I'm jumping ahead, but I'll come back. But when we got to like Wednesday or Thursday, I was like, hey, nobody's quit yet. He's like, it ain't Friday. So, you know, you gotta have somebody who like, yeah, Lorraine, it ain't all sunshine and roses. You ain't fixed this yet.

Lorraine Ball [00:04:57]:
So I knew pretty much on day one that I had a problem. And, um, it. It was a little overwhelming because I had signed up to fix it, but I hadn't realized just how big it was. And the thing about turnover, and the reason I wanted to talk about it with you on revenue rehab is turnover is expensive. It is expensive because every time you have to look for somebody new, you're taking your people away from productivity and putting them back at the interview table. And every time, we were paying recruiters at probably 10 grand a pop to fill some of these jobs. So we were out a lot of recruiting money and we just in general had this horrible lack of productivity. And so the, I mean, so for me, the first thing is, why are they leaving? What? I mean, that was.

Lorraine Ball [00:05:55]:
That was. And you know, you would think that that was the really hard question. It really wasn't. We had a culture where people were interchangeable, where management looked at each of the people in my department as if they were A peg that they could just move around the board. I was running a team of creatives. They're not the same. You know, I don't want to insult my peers in accounting, but accounting is. Accounting is accounting.

Lorraine Ball [00:06:22]:
There's a right answer, there's a wrong answer. That's not the way it works in graphic design. That's not the way it works in writing. You have different skills, and you got to recognize and acknowledge that. So the first thing was, before I did anything else, I had to get to know my people and figure out what they were good at, because that was when I started talking to them. That was the thing that kept coming up over and over again. They just moved me onto this team. This doesn't make any sense.

Lorraine Ball [00:06:53]:
I'm not good at this. I was good at that. They should have left me where I was. Well, but they had three people there, and they only had one person here, so they had to move somebody. Yeah, but not me, because I'm not going to stay, because this is not what I signed up for. So, number one, figuring out what was. What was really underneath it. And because we were paying good money, we were paying incentives.

Lorraine Ball [00:07:18]:
If you brought one of your friends to work for us, we. We bonused you if they stayed three months. I mean, we. Money. We were throwing money at the problem, but the problem wasn't money.

Brandi Starr [00:07:30]:
And so it sounds like that this was a leadership challenge, and so did you. Was this a situation where your predecessor created this environment, or was it more structural in the organization where that kind of motion was just the norm?

Lorraine Ball [00:07:50]:
It was actually structural throughout the organization. And so the first thing I had to do was figure that out. And then the second thing I had to do was wrap my people in a bubble. I had to put up walls that sealed my people off from not so they couldn't do their job, but I had to literally go into battle and get in between my team and the senior VPs and my team and the other department manager and be that interface, because that. That energy, those expectations, all of that was weighing us down so much. And it was really spiraling out of control. So creating buffers, finding the people on my team who had a little thicker skin, who had a little more flexibility. And the only way to do this was to spend time with my people.

Lorraine Ball [00:08:47]:
I had 48 people on my team. I got an org chart with everybody's names on it. And then I walked around the floor and would look at name tags and go, you're Derek. Okay? You're Derek. They told me that There were executives that they'd been there a year, year and a half, who had never learned their names, that were giving them projects that they were working on that these people had never bothered to learn their names. They were so impressed that I was making an effort. To me, this was common sense. So the first thing, figuring it out and then really diving into, okay, let's start getting people in the right departments.

Lorraine Ball [00:09:29]:
What else can we do to make things more pleasant? Well, one of the things that we had was a very rigid structure. Everybody had to be at work from 8 to 5, got an hour for lunch. Again, that works for accountants, it works for people in the IT department. You can't tell a graphic designer that they have to be creative at 8:01. Sometimes they're not. And so I sat down, you know, team by team, and I said, I'm not making any promises, but if you could set your working hours, if you could come in when you wanted, if you could leave when you wanted, you got to work the eight hour, you know, hour for lunch, we got to do that. But tell me, tell me what your hours are. Tell me what works for you.

Lorraine Ball [00:10:18]:
And what I found was I had a couple of people who had husbands who had early jobs or wives who had early jobs or had daycare issues. I had people who wanted to be at work at 7 in the morning. I had my young riders who liked to party a little bit and really didn't want to stroll in until 10. And so I went to my boss and I said, look, I got an idea. I'm going to add four hours a day to my team's capability and it's not going to cost you a dime. I'm going to have writers and designers available at seven in the morning and at seven o' clock at night because, let's face it, the execs don't get around to reviewing stuff and needing stuff. And we're paying overtime and we're making people stay late when they don't want to stay late, and we're making them come in early and make arrangements for their kids. What if I could just plan this and it doesn't cost you any more money? And my boss went, well, number one, that's impossible.

Lorraine Ball [00:11:20]:
And I said, no, it's actually not. Number two, if you don't mind, I'm going to do this. And she was like, okay, give it a shot. And so now the second sticking point, that I'm disposable, I'm in the wrong job, nobody respects what I do, and I gotta be here at the wrong time. All of that vanished. And so we started getting a little bit of, a little life came back into the department. People started enjoying what they were doing again. There was a little more energy and it didn't solve all the problems at once.

Lorraine Ball [00:11:55]:
But we noticed that at around. It took 12 weeks, so three months. Every Friday morning, I'd walk into David's office, if it hadn't happened yet, and go, it's Friday and he's not, it ain't 5pm and finally there was that Friday where I walked into his office and I'm like, hey, I'm going home and I expect everybody's going to be here Monday morning. And he's like, I think you're right. And once we got over that hump, we held that department for 18 months. We didn't have a single person leave. So now, now we could actually start working because now we, we could get creative, we could do some, some interesting things. Because suddenly I didn't have a team of rookies.

Lorraine Ball [00:12:41]:
I wasn't, I wasn't spending a third of my day. And all my senior team leaders were not spending X number of hours every week interviewing people. They were spending the time mentoring their younger employees, the new employees, and they were learning and they were getting better at their jobs. And you know what happens when you get better at your job? You get faster. And all of a sudden we realized we might have too many people because we had never, in all that time, because we were always filling positions, we had never had full capacity. I mean, we had never been fully loaded. Well, once we were fully loaded, fully trained, people who'd been doing their jobs, people who had time to educate, we started looking at some other functions and pulling people and saying, hey, we have an opportunity to do this. Would you be interested? Not, we're going to move you to this, but this opportunity is available.

Lorraine Ball [00:13:43]:
If you don't want it, somebody else will. And now people could see that there was opportunity again. We were already paying them. We were paying them well. The working conditions physically were very nice now they had flexible schedule and they could start looking at interesting assignments. But I wasn't done before.

Brandi Starr [00:14:05]:
You keep going. I want to back up because you've hit on a lot of key points that I want to dig into. One of the things that, that is really key here is it's clear that you had the chutzpah to battle because, you know, when you think about when you're going against peers, seniors, and trying to go against the grain, that can feel like A battle. And that is something that I see. I have seen multiple leaders, not in the exact same situation with turnover, but in a situation where they saw the problem, that the real issue was more structural within the organization. But they've taken the perspective to say, I'm not willing to fight this battle. And they will try to have, you know, figure out workarounds or do what they can within their own bubble. And so I'd love to hear you talk more about how you approached that piece of it, because it sounds like.

Brandi Starr [00:15:07]:
Like this is one of those things that it was very much, you know, a little bit of ask for permission, but a lot of more of the ask for forgiveness and not permission. So talk to me a bit more about that, because that is something that I see a lot of leaders struggle with.

Lorraine Ball [00:15:23]:
So I was very fortunate. Very early in my career, I had. I worked for a company that did a psych profile. And they let me read the profile, and it said, she's very smart. She's gonna get things done, but she's gonna do it her own way. And I was like, excuse me, did they read this? Did they know what they were hiring when they read? And he said, yes. And so from very early in my career, I had a little bit of permission to be on the edge. And so every job I interviewed for, I was very clear.

Lorraine Ball [00:16:02]:
If you're looking for somebody, and this is hard, when you're looking for a job and you're willing to say anything to get that job, if you want to be happy in that job, you need to draw a clear line. Everybody teaches you how to negotiate for salary. Nobody teaches you how to negotiate for your working conditions. And that was something I always did. I always went into the conversation saying, look, I'm not going to do it the way everybody else does. If you want someone who does it the way everybody else does, there are three people behind me that are looking for this job. If you want to fix the problem, if you want to move ahead, if you're looking for innovative solutions and you're okay being uncomfortable, then I'm your girl. And so by the time I got this job, I was comfortable with that.

Lorraine Ball [00:16:53]:
Now I pushed the edge and got my hand slapped more than a few times in this job, But I also got really good results. And so my boss went, the more I succeeded, the more she'd go to bat for me. And that's the other thing, is that if you see a really big problem, that's not the one you tackle first. It's not. Because if you fail, you got no place to go. Pick a smaller one, get that win, build your, build your network. That was really hard for me. I had gone from a company where I'd been there for eight years and I had a ton of relationships throughout the whole company.

Lorraine Ball [00:17:35]:
So I had a lot of resources to draw on. When I had a crazy idea moving to a company where I didn't have those allies, I had to take a little time to build them. But I think negotiate for your working conditions, make sure people know who you are and the good side of why they should bring you to the table, even if you're crazy.

Brandi Starr [00:17:58]:
I love it. And the other point that I wanted to dig into is I think you hit on a really key thing that I want to make sure people caught. Because it's not always obvious when you are dealing with, with people problems and where your team is not functioning at its best. They're like you are essentially overspending on human capital. And you know, a common theme now everybody's talking about how we're having to do more with less. You know, it's, I think do more with less comes up as often as AI does in conversation. And this is one place where I don't think people always recognize that when you're trying to do more with less, that efficiency and having a high performing team, having people working the way that is best for them, because I'm one of those, I don't start my day till 10pm or 10am people because I'm not a morning person. So working when they're most efficient, working on things that they are passionate about, having the flexibility to structure their work in a way that makes sense sense.

Brandi Starr [00:19:10]:
You get everybody hitting at that higher level that you talked about to the point where you're like, we've got extra capacity, technically our team is too big. Where my guess is when you had the someone leaving every week, it felt like you didn't have enough people, couldn't get enough work done.

Lorraine Ball [00:19:30]:
Is that a statement that Absolutely true? Absolutely true. You know, it doesn't take a lot of to make that shift to go from we're absolutely swamped to man, everything's getting done. And a lot of times it's just having people in place long enough to figure that out.

Brandi Starr [00:19:51]:
And so you've talked a bit about the outcomes, but I wanna just really allow you to talk about the measurable impact. So you went through, you solved it. You, you got to that point where you could go home on a Friday and expect everybody to still be there on Monday. But thinking about the organization as a whole, what was the measurable impact of you solving this?

Lorraine Ball [00:20:17]:
Well, the first measurable impact is we were probably spending about $10,000 a month on recruiting fees. So right off the bat, we were saving $100,000. So that's pretty measurable. The second thing was, oh, this is a whole story in and of itself, but I'll give you the short version. When we were in the insurance business, and in the insurance business, you don't have a tangible product. You have a brochure. So if you don't have a brochure, you can't make a sale. When I was in a situation with a department with 100% turnover, our out of stock stock was out of control.

Lorraine Ball [00:21:01]:
We were 300 items on any given day. And the shipping department told me, if I could get that to 100, I would be a hero. Well, once I solved the issue of the team, now we could take on that challenge. And again, that whole process, everything we did, everything we brainstormed, all the little changes we made in our process, we got to 100 backorders. I gave the team a deadline of September 1st, and we got to 100 backorders by about August 20th. We actually got to zero backorders one day in December because we got that far ahead, you know, so the financial impact for that is harder to qualify. But if I'm not out of literature, I have the ability to make sales. And so that was the second thing.

Lorraine Ball [00:21:58]:
And then the third thing was a little bit of revenue and a lot of employee satisfaction. We had too many people. We could have laid somebody off, or we could go looking for other work. And we started doing graphic design work for the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, the Indianapolis Zoo. We did some work for the Indy Starr. So my designers, who were very talented and my writers, who were very talented and committed to what they were doing, were also a little burned out on insurance. So if I could give them a product with cute animals or racing cars, and they could tap into a different part of their creativity and a different part of their brain, and we could get paid for the work, it's not a bad deal. So I think those are the three kind of big impacts of resolving the people issue.

Brandi Starr [00:22:55]:
As I say, well, that is so amazing and so impressive. One of the best parts of learning from others is understanding what really made the difference. So before we wrap up, let's let our listeners walk away with a little insights they can use right away, because I do think you've given a good blueprint in how to approach these things. So. So I'll ask, if you had it to do all over again, what's one thing you'd do differently?

Lorraine Ball [00:23:21]:
Maybe ask more questions in the interview?

Brandi Starr [00:23:24]:
I've been there for sure.

Lorraine Ball [00:23:25]:
Yeah. No, I think maybe just kind of. I kind of knew what I wanted to do. I think I had a really good team of senior team leaders. I didn't know it at the time. And I think the one thing that would have made it better, smoother, faster, is, is if I had sat down more with them in the beginning rather than taking this, I'm going to fix this because that's my style. I think if I had engaged them a little bit more, we might have moved through it faster. I don't think we would have done anything any differently, but I think we would have cleared some of the pain points maybe a little faster.

Lorraine Ball [00:24:09]:
David had been around the company for quite a while. He knew where all the bodies were buried. And I should have maybe spent a little more time looking at some of that before I. I went forward.

Brandi Starr [00:24:21]:
Okay. And that is a really good lesson for all of us. I think we especially get caught in that trap when we're coming into a new role. You know, you have to make your mark and, you know, be amazing and all of the things. And there generally are people who can be of value and usually are willing to as well.

Lorraine Ball [00:24:43]:
Yeah.

Brandi Starr [00:24:44]:
Well, Lorraine, every good session ends with a plan for progress because of course, talking about success won't make it repeatable. Before we go, tell our audience how they can connect with you.

Lorraine Ball [00:24:55]:
So the best way to find me is either a, I'm on LinkedIn. If you look for Lorraine Ball, I'm going to pop up. You can find my podcast more than a few words wherever you listen to podcasts. And I'm doing a little experiment, experiment right now. So I'm not even sure you'll be able to find me there, but I'm experimenting with substack. I just, I'm intrigued and I'm enough of a geek that I want to find out, but LinkedIn is probably the best place to go.

Brandi Starr [00:25:22]:
Awesome. Well, we will make sure to link to your LinkedIn as well as your podcast. So check the show notes wherever you are listening or watching this podcast so that you can connect with Lorraine. Lorraine, again, thank you so so much for joining me. I have truly enjoyed this discuss.

Lorraine Ball [00:25:41]:
It's fun for me too. Thanks for having me.

Brandi Starr [00:25:44]:
You are welcome and thanks everyone for tuning in. I hope you have enjoyed my conversation with Lorraine. I can't believe we're at the end. See you next time. Bye. Bye.