Here's the hard truth that most CEOs don't want to admit. Your talent strategy can either make your company invincible or powerless.
Having founded multiple companies and led teams of tens of thousands of people over the past 25 years, I can tell you that the biggest mistake leaders make is believing their talent strategy can be imitated. They read books, hire HR consultants, and assume there is a universal strategy for managing people. there is no.
At Simpro Group, we see this every day. The success of our commercial and residential trade customers depends on our ability to successfully attract, train, retain and develop skilled talent.
Your talent strategy must be as unique as your business model. Anything less than that and you'll lose your competitive edge. Here are six principles for building a talent strategy that actually works.
1. Build on reality, not best practices
Every company's talent DNA starts with one thing: The business you are actually involved in.
When I was leading Kaseya, our customers were small and medium-sized business owners. Their livelihood was personal, and if their business had a good month, their families felt it too. If something was bad, they felt it too. This reality has shaped everything about how we build our team. We needed someone who could build relationships over years, not quarters. Employees who treated every customer's success as if their paycheck depended on it.
The same goes for trading, and we're all feeling the effects. If technicians are unable to access service in time, the world will be without the basic comforts we all rely on, such as electricity, plumbing, and cool air. And when these companies don't pay salaries on time, families suffer, businesses suffer, and ultimately modern society suffers.
Those lessons shaped Kaseya's culture and remain the driving force behind Simpro Group. Most software companies allow 25% sales, but that model would have destroyed Kaseya. At Simpro, that lesson continues. Our success depends on building a team with a deep and true understanding of the industry: the electricians, plumbers, HVAC technicians and service professionals who keep the world running.
For other businesses, such as retail stores or express outlets, constant sales may actually work. The point is not that our model was correct. What's important is that it's unique to us and that it works for you.
2. CEO becomes Chief Human Resources Officer
Let's be clear: If you're a CEO, you can't delegate talent strategy to HR.
If human capital is your greatest asset (and it is), then it's your job to lead with that capital. Delegating that responsibility is the same as saying, “Finance can take care of profitability. I'm too busy.”
In the 1990s, most companies treated IT as a cost center. The CIO was not at the table. Fast forward 20 years: Technology teeth The CIO is just as important as the CFO.
The same transformation is occurring in companies' human resources strategies. CHROs will become the new CIOs and strategic drivers of competitive advantage. And if CHROs aren’t designing an AI-enabled workforce, the company clock is ticking.
AI is rewriting the description of every job on the planet. If your team isn’t “AI-first” in how they work, you’re already falling behind. CEOs who don't personally lead that change will end up running companies that can't compete.
3. Build your own talent pipeline – don't rent
When I started building a technology company in Miami in the early 2000s, everyone said, “You'll never find the talent.” They were half right. There weren't that many ready-made engineers or product people.
So we built them.
Kaseya has partnered with Florida International University and Miami-Dade University. These two universities are filled with hard-working first-generation Americans hungry for opportunity. These students do not come from privileged backgrounds. They came with something better: guts.
We invested in them, trained them, taught them business. And guess what? They turned out to be the best people we've ever hired.
If you want loyalty, don't buy it, build it. “Grow yourself'' is a competitive strategy.
4. Prepare for a shockwave a thousand times stronger than AI
Every knowledge job in the world is now being reshaped by AI.
This is not another “efficiency tool”. Not emails or spreadsheets. This is a thousand-fold leap in ability.
I've seen this movie before. In 1992, during my first internship at Lockheed Martin, the entire finance department had one personal computer. I ran a Lotus 1-2-3 report for 10 people. 4 years later, everyone I had a computer, but if I didn't know Excel (which replaced Lotus), I couldn't get hired.
AI is transformation on steroids.
Salespeople will soon be managing armies of AI co-pilots. Developers orchestrate AI-driven build pipelines. Marketing teams generate and deploy entire campaigns in minutes. We are already seeing this at Simpro Group. Our engineering team develops platforms that streamline our customers' workflows and turn complexity into profit.
If you're not training your people for this now, you're handing market share over to your competitors.
5. Stop pretending you can protect everyone.
Maintenance is important, but let's be real. You can't keep everyone, and you shouldn't try.
Just like in sports, business also has a “salary cap.” You can't keep all your superstars forever. Smart companies build deep benches. They know who's next.
Succession planning is a survival strategy. Whether you have 20 or 2,000 employees, at some point someone will quit, get sick, or burn out. Hope is not a plan. You need a playbook for every key role, including temporary coverage, the hiring pipeline, and the onboarding process.
6. Make talent strategy a daily habit
A common excuse I hear from CEOs is, “I don't have time to work on talent strategy.”
That's the same as saying you don't have 20 minutes a day to exercise. Everyone has time. They just don't prioritize it.
Spend 20 minutes a day thinking about your people. Who is performing? Who is at risk? Who is the next leader? Who needs coaching? If you do it consistently, you'll build an unstoppable culture.
Talent strategy is not a quarterly endeavor. It's daily leadership. The companies that dominate the AI-first era don't necessarily have the best products or the biggest budgets. They have the best people who are aligned, trained and ready to break through walls because they believe in what they are building and who they are building it with.
AI creates thousands of new benefits. But none of them matter if you don't have the talent to use them.
