Spring Training

It's spring training season!

For those unaware, baseball teams train each spring before the start of the new baseball season.  It is a time for the athletes to train, but also for the coaches to figure out how to best utilize each player, and how to create a cohesive and winning team.

Perhaps it's time to start spring training your business.

January and February are extremely busy times for businesses.  Companies are working to start the new year, but they are also working to tie up a lot of loose ends from the previous year.  Price Turner CFOs has been working on completing all the year-end items for each client, including providing the financials to the tax accountant to complete the 2023 tax returns.   So, when spring comes around and those 2023 taxes and finances are complete, now is the time to refocus on training your team.

Make sure to take a look at what your employees are doing, and ask yourself if they need any new skills.  Phillies pitcher Zack Wheeler is using his spring training to add a new pitch, a Splitter to his roster.  What do your employees need to succeed?  One of our clients has a different accounting system, used for real estate, so one of our employees had to learn it.  Another employee learned law-specific software for another client.

It’s also important to evaluate your team and ask if everyone is in the right position.  For the Phillies, that means moving outfielder Bryce Harper to first base after an injury to his elbow, as well as an injury to the first baseman.  For your business, look at each of the skillsets of your employees, and as you work on helping them to learn new skills, ask yourself who would be best served learning which skills.  Who is best suited to each of the tasks on your team?  What arrangement of employees makes your team most effective?

Creating new ways of doing things can also bring innovation to your team.  In Spring Training this year, the Phillies introduced a Pickle-Ball themed game, called Pacoball, where the player uses the non-dominant hand (the glove hand) to hit the ball (a racketball, not a wiffle ball).  The idea is to add agility and communication as well as fun competition for the team.   

Spring training is also the time to work on schedules.  The MLB has released its schedule of games, so look at your schedule, and the schedules of your employees.  Try and organize your business’s schedule so that you have coverage and not too many employees are on vacation at the same time.  Also listen to advice when planning your schedule, something many on social media wish that the Phillies would do and bring back dollar dog night.  Recently, a networking golf event had to be rescheduled because it was on Halloween.  The person who originally scheduled the event had no young children, and others had to explain to him why Halloween would be a potential conflict.

There are many ways to bring spring training into your workplace.  What’s important is that you take the time to reevaluate your business, and figure out what you can do to best make a fresh start for 2024.