We were lucky to catch up with Janneh Wright recently and have shared our conversation below.

Janneh, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you talk to us about your team building process? How did you recruit and train your team and knowing what you know now would you have done anything differently?

For more than half of the life of PRIMUS, it was one of man show. Just me doing consulting one-off projects for clients. As the workflow started to increase and the demand for my time increased, I knew I could not sustain the work if I did not get help. I battled with the idea of bringing on a partner to share in the revenue instead of hiring an employee. However, that did not work as entrepreneurship is not for everyone, and the people I wanted to partner with were not ready for that type of risk.

So I hired an assistant, a very smart young lady who had no expense in consulting, nonprofits, or accounting. This also did not work because I did not know how to use her. In my head, instead of taking time to train her, it would be easier if I just did the work myself. So the majority of the time, she was sitting around doing nothing.

In hindsight, I have learned from those experiences that I, like most entrepreneurs, view employees as expenses instead of investments. I know now that there is an absolute link between revenue and staffing.

Today our hiring process is much more robust. We are not hiring just for a body but for a coworker with the skills and abilities needed to be successful. We have developed job descriptions that highlight not only the desired position but also the culture and expectations of the organization. As we are not a remote organization, we have expanded our employee pool nationally.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

The year 2002 was the beginning of something excellent! Janneh K. Wright, our founder and CEO founded JK Wright LLC to leverage his newly minted degree.

Before graduation, he intended to interview for openings at the World Trade Center, but he took a different direction following September 11th. In Brooklyn, he started with basic bookkeeping jobs for small local businesses and learned he was making a difference. However, he began to see the challenges these business owners faced.

Janneh’s ability to grasp corporate finance quickly led him to the top level of business management, but he still worked with the local small business owners and helped them. He learned of their pain points and worked to solve their issues. He was inspired to serve others and began to play significant roles in nonprofit organizations.

Janneh began thinking about expanding his business to include outsourcing functions. Clients called him with concerns ranging from employee issues to setting up their websites, though he was only contracted to manage their books. If an employee didn’t show up for work, clients would call Janneh to take care of it. That’s when it sparked the concept of bringing multiple services to one place.

Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?

The majority of my clients come from referrals for other clients of people that we have worked with in the past. Understanding that people use services they are referred to means we must concentrate on the organization’s reputation. So the most effective strategy for the growth of my clientele is to concentrate on our services.

Our mission is to enhance the capacity of our clients by adding a high level of value that enables them to set new standards of excellence in their respective industries.

We do this by focusing on our processes and procedures, the delivery of our services, and always going above and beyond for our clients.

Once or twice per year we survey our clients to see how we are doing and ask them for testimonials and referrals. This allows us to get a lot of hot leads and content to use will be speaking with prospects.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

We lost a very large client a few years ago. The client represented more than fifty percent of our total income. The loss of this client meant I had to let some people go and shrink the organization’s size. I was unsure how I would bounce back from that lost client and realized that we had to do things differently in the future. So first, we had to analyze why the client left. We found some of the wholes in our services and did not just patch the mistakes but took the time to work on the process and revamped the way we worked.

Next, we need to reevaluate our client matrix; no one client will ever be fifty percent of our income again, so we developed new outreach plans and strategies to increase the pipeline of potential clients.

We focused on the evaluation and training of our employees. We set up new standards for continuous learning and training and mandated a certain amount of training per year to ensure that our staff always have the knowledge needed to support our clients.

Finally, we developed a strategy to survey our clients; we will never be blindsided again about a client’s satisfaction with our services.

Utilizing these processes has allowed us to double in size in the last few years, and we are continuing that growth today.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.primusco.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/primusbusinessmanagement/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PrimusBusinessManagement/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/primus-business-management/mycompany/?viewAsMember=true