I'm in the middle of a consulting project for a retailer who brought me on board to help them figure out how to increase sales and profitability. Right now we're looking at the strength of their sales team, as that tends to be one area retailers overlook.

If you have a large team, or just a few employees, you could be missing out on sales. A team is great, but not if it's filled with mediocre employees.

I know firsthand as a business owner how difficult it can be to find even mediocre employees, so the last thing you want to do is fire someone who's doing OK. But while my old mentality was that it's expensive to find new employees and train them (and who knows if a new employee would do better than the old one), my new one mentality is the opposite.

Three years ago I decided we needed a change in one department because the sales had only modest growth and I thought we could be doing much better. I fired the employee, and in only a month, the sales had tripled. And this growth trend has continued for the past three years. If I had kept that employee on, it would have cost me as much as $500,000.

What are your mediocre employees costing you?  If for example, a mediocre employee sells $250 a day and a fantastic employee sells $750, you'd be losing $184,750 a year.

I used to feel guilty about the time it takes to hire the right people. I was concerned that I was spending a lot of time on hiring when I could be focusing on other aspects of running my business.

Now I know it's worth the time to find the best people.

Hire the best-of-the-best employees and you'll get the best-of-the-best results!