Blue Collar Culture

Business Results the Old Fashioned Way

Ryan Englin

Stop Making Your Insurance Broker Rich! With Steve Tusa

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BCC 57 | Insurance Broker

 

Increased risk comes with growth, which also means an increased financial burden on the organization. Insurance is supposed to help ease that burden, which means you need an insurance broker, right? Well, in this episode, we shatter that and several other myths about insurance. Our hosts Ryan Englin and Jeremy Macliver sit down and tackle the thorny issue of insurance with Reseco COO, Steve Tusa. Steve answers the important questions head-on and gives an insider’s look at what you need to know when it comes to business insurance and risk management. Listen in to learn more about how insurance policies can be made to work in your favor.

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Stop Making Your Insurance Broker Rich! With Steve Tusa

We spend a lot of time talking about business growth and what we are doing to hire and engage the right people so that they can go out and take care of our customers. One of the things that is a by-product of growing your team is that it comes with increased risk and a lot of times with an increased financial burden to the organization. I am excited about our guest here because he is in the business of helping you protect your business, that asset that you have created over the years. I would love to welcome to the show the Chief Operating Officer of Reseco Insurance Advisors, Steve Tusa. Steve, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much.

I am going to hit you with the same question we ask everybody because there is so much talk and misinformation out there about different industries. What is the biggest myth about your industry that you want to shatter for us?

Interestingly enough, the biggest myth is that everybody has an insurance broker because you need an insurance broker typically to procure your insurance. That broker, usually, the response back is, “They are a nice guy or gal. I have a great relationship. I trust them and they respond fast to anytime I send them an email or make a phone call. I am good,” and/or, “I have met a lot of brokers and you all do the same thing. You over-promise and it all sounds great. When it is time to deliver, it is the same thing. Why even have a conversation?”

As we jump into this, Steve, I thought, as you are sharing that, how many times I have heard that and believed it. The only reason we are bringing you on and willing to bust that myth is that I first learned about you through a couple of my clients who were not getting that stuff. They were getting something completely different. I remember being in session with one of them and they were like, “Our insurance guy and none of what you are telling me is insurance,” as I was thinking about what they were telling me in the session. It is proactive. It is changing their culture and some amazing stuff. What should we be looking for if we are looking for good service and not a fast reply when we call you?

I didn’t go to school for insurance. I graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Electromechanical Engineering. I am all about solving problems and issues. I found myself taking the insurance job for advisory-type reasons. What you should be looking for is a true advisor, someone who enables your business to scale while managing risk, but someone who is going to have life experiences and a team of professionals that can collaborate and bring advice. The goal is not to give more money to insurance carriers. Unfortunately, when the client’s insurance goes up in price in my industry, the broker makes more money. It is a flawed economic model.

The more challenging a business gets or grows, people like me make more money. We have turned that on its head. You need someone that is going to give you good business improvement advice, have a method to analyze the financial spend, benchmark that spend, and then bring true resources to bear to start managing that more effectively, so you flush less money to the insurance company and keep that capital in your business. If your insurance broker is not doing that for you, they are earning a lot of money to renew your insurance policy, and there is a waste. My team loves attacking the waste.

When you say waste, what do you mean? What kind of waste? Is it more premium or are there other things that you are talking about when you say that?

Yes, more premium specifically and/or more claims. As companies get bigger, they might be in a risk-sharing model where they have a higher deductible. They might be contemplating a captive insurance program. As you take more risk, in addition to more premium, you also have claims. The challenge with claims is they are never fully insured. The carrier will pay like for a workers’ compensation injury. They will pay the medical. They will pay a percentage of the lost wages, but when your employee is injured and out of work, let us say they are put out of work for two weeks.

What happens to your business when that happens? Do you have to put people on overtime? Do you have to move someone from one job to the next? Do you have to hire temp workers? All this uninsured cost, which is a drain on profit that occurs temporarily until the next event happens. Unfortunately, there is this unmeasurable component. Fortunately, at Reseco, we have a proprietary way of quantifying that. That is what I mean by waste, lost profit. We call it financial leakage.

Deliver what you promise. Exceed expectations. Click To Tweet

You are looking at it more than just the ends, loss, and premium, but all of the effects that go on in the real world. I heard you say real experience there. That is where you are coming from is recognizing that, “There is a lot more that goes into this when we are hiring somebody, replacing, overtime, all those kinds of things, and factoring those in.”

This is not a new concept. When I was early on in my career, insurance carriers and other brokers call it indirect costs. They may have shown a picture of an iceberg and say, “The top is what the insurance company pays. The bottom is what you pay.” Here is the difference. We quantify it for our prospective clients and clients. We then build a strategy to change culture, influence performance and do that deliberately on a 1, 3, or 5-year strategic plan to produce year-over-year improvement, resulting in fewer insurance dollars out the door. That is the strategy behind it. It is proven expertise that we deliver in various areas.

You are creating a 1, 3, and a 5-year strategy to change, particularly one of them that I am aware of their safety culture, which is going to ultimately change their insurance premium because they have a safer culture, fewer incidents, losses, leakage, and all these other waste areas. That is how we are going about it and turning it from the email response to a proactive one. Do I understand that right?

Correct. You mentioned safety. That is one component of it. It is what you exactly said, Jeremy.

What is the biggest thing that is holding business owners back from leveraging this area of their business?

It first boils down to what we discussed. I have a nice guy or gal. I trust this person. I have known him for twenty years. In some cases, they become a friend of that CFO or business owner. Maybe a friend of their wife or husband. That is a barrier. They also have been promised things in the past and over-promise, under-deliver. That is what consultants are known for. I carried the name consultant for years and that is the stigma. Ideally, the biggest barrier is, if we can show a business the opportunity to save money, the whole insurance model is predicated on five years of prior claim experience. It is much like your auto insurance. If you have never had an auto claim in the last five years and are driving a minivan, taking a low risk, and you are in your 40s to 50s, your insurance cost is going to be good. You need to live in the right neighborhood.

BCC 57 | Insurance Broker
Insurance Broker: The biggest myth is that everybody has an insurance broker because you need an insurance broker typically to procure your insurance.

 

Let us take that to a business. If you are in a moderate business with not a lot of risk and your claim history for five years is good, your insurance cost is probably not going to be a problem. If you are in a riskier business, say, construction-related, transportation, warehousing, distribution, high-volume, and your history has claims in it, that underwriter is going to price your insurance at what they believe the future will hold. If you do not have a 1, 3, or 5-year strategy, the price is the price, but most prospective clients believe they are a nice guy or gal and what they are selling is insurance leverage. “I have a lot of insurance carriers. I will leverage that market and save you money,” when they are delivering increases year-over-year.

What they say is, “It could have been 15%, but I got you 5%.” Somehow, I am a business owner. They think they saved you 10%. The way I look at it is they flushed 5%. The barrier is, they don’t think and believe there is a better way. They believe the myths they have learned year-over-year from someone they trust. I get it. Ending a relationship with someone you trust, we can all think back, it is not easy, but it is amazing. Insurance is the last frontier when it comes to this. Everything else in your business, you evaluate the ROI. Why don’t business owners evaluate the ROI on insurance? No one has been able to prove that. We can quantify our ROI and show that to our clients quarter-over-quarter. We align it to their 1, 3, or 5-year plan and establish goals aligned with the business model. If we don’t deliver, it is going to stand out like a sore thumb. We deliver. It is that simple. Deliver what you promise and exceed expectations.

I love how you are quantifying it. Some of these things that we are talking about are intangible or they feel like they are intangible. It is the same thing that we run up against when we are talking to companies about hiring, turnover, culture, and those kinds of things that feel like, “Business is hard. It can pinpoint daily actions,” but putting it on a P&L and saying, “This is what is going on. It can be a little bit challenging.” We are looking at it from a number’s perspective.

When we look at some of the same concepts, I think of one company. This is a larger one of them. They increased revenue by $17 million in one year by lowering turnover and getting a whole recruitment side to their business. It is the same thing you are talking about where I hear from this insurance side. We look at all of these little risks and things. We are holding onto a relationship, but it is causing something inside our business that is holding us back. I love how you are challenging it. I could truly testify to some of the proactiveness I have seen there.

Thank you.

With that, what are some actions that people can do to break through this wall and start looking at this piece of their business for some opportunity to grow or be better?

We start the conversation with an interactive 45-minute discovery process. That discovery process is unlike most conversations you will ever have with an insurance broker. We operate an independent consulting practice, too. We are very consultative in our interaction. We want to get to know our potential clients what the vision, mission, and values are. We do our homework and determine, “Is this a client that we even align with from a values perspective?” Core values are extremely important. That 45-minute discovery always ends on time, but it usually carries over.

The discussion is many a time around culture, attracting and retaining talent, their financial performance, safety, healthcare trends, regulatory compliance, or brand protection. Those are some areas where we have impacted our clients. We end the meeting at 45 minutes, learning a lot about that business, what is the top couple of things keeping them up at night. If we can help, we go deeper into the area they need the help. In that first discovery, insurance comes up many times, but it is not the primary issue on top of mind. However, amazingly enough, you mentioned attracting and retaining talent. It is one of our areas of strength and culture will do that. We had a much deeper discussion with a client and turned that into tangible action.

We delivered our financial leakage report and value report. For them, it was like we increased their sales by 10%. This is a $50 million company. Our value delivery was $5 million in sales and we are an insurance brokerage firm. That is what we love to do is make the business healthier. Our core purpose is, “Better businesses, better lives.” We do that in a lot of different ways. It is our guiding purpose. We are all results-driven at Reseco. We want to get our clients the results they want to earn and then we want to leverage that.

Better businesses, better lives. Click To Tweet

I love that when you are out there talking to people. You are doing a holistic look at the business. I know so many people in the insurance space and it is like, “We are going to talk about insurance.” They said, “How does that impact your business?” “I am not quite sure, but we are at least going to make sure you are protected,” is a lot of the times the response that I hear. When we are working with clients on helping them attract and hire better people, I hear this all the time, “I can’t find any good people.”

When I ask them what they mean by good people, it is never, “I can’t find someone to do the work.” It is always, “I can’t find someone that wants to do the work, fits my culture or behaves in the way I want to behave.” The solution to the problem is always so much deeper and bigger than what it looks like on the surface. It sounds like you are in that same space where they might come to you with one problem, but you find out that it is something completely different. When you look at that root cause, you are able to help them with that.

You mentioned talent. When we are in discovery, it comes up a lot, “Can you find more people for us?” When you dig deeper, it is not more people. It is the right people in the right seats. If you are an EOS implementation organization, there are strategies behind that, but many organizations don’t know how to do that. They don’t have a recruiting strategy and a proven analytical way of screening people before they interview them. They don’t have a way to align and determine if the role that is available is aligned to what the person’s skillsets are. We have the ability and the proprietary tools to do that. In some cases, we have partnered with the best in the business.

We also have an HR senior advisor who would engage on the client’s behalf as part of us being selected as the insurance broker. Why would we want to invest time and money at no additional cost? It is to make the client have a better business, impact lives, get a better outcome, and drive lower insurance spent. That is where we make the investment at Reseco. Our competition invests in more marketing people to go out to the market to quote insurance and we do not quote insurance. We will not do it. It is not our client’s best interest. That is not our approach. It is very different. You can interview 100 brokers. If you said, “Do you quote?” They said, “Of course, we do.” We would say, “Of course, we don’t.”

I don’t come across a lot of businesses where the owner was the one creating all the risks. It is almost always someone you hired that is causing the risk of being out there and creating some issues. Having that approach where you are helping them with the right people and thinking about, “Are we protecting the company by getting the people in the right roles? It is right up our alley. We love that.” One of the questions I have for you comes up a lot, especially with smaller businesses. When I say smaller, it is probably under a couple of hundred employees. One of the things they always tell me is, “I can’t find good people because I don’t have good benefits. I can’t afford benefits. The benefits we have aren’t very attractive. That is the reason we can’t get good people.” What are your thoughts on that?

That is a valid thought and it comes up very often. The biggest thing we ask when that comes up, “What are you trying to accomplish with your benefits program?” If they say it is to attract and retain talent, we have a methodology to say, “Do you know if that was part of the reason someone selected your organization?” Our clients that have been clients for a while will know if benefits were an attraction, a detractor, or neutral. We have the largest benchmarking study in the United States, bigger than the big boys, millions of lives on benefits. We can drill that live real-time down from the United States to region, state, city and compare their offering to others.

Most companies have a benefits guide put together in a regionalized and centralized format by their broker. It spells out the costs and offerings, but employees don’t know how to leverage that. Year-over-year, benefits rise by anywhere from 5% to 7%. Brokers come in and say, “It would have been 15%. I got you 7%.” What did they do? “You got to increase the copay. You got to decrease your spend. The people have to pay more.” Year-over-year, employees are used to showing up for benefits. The service quality goes down, the price goes up, and people are not happy. The HR or your office admin takes the brunt of the complaints and your broker takes your commission.

BCC 57 | Insurance Broker
Insurance Broker: Look for a true advisor, someone that enables your business to scale while managing risk, and someone that is going to have life experiences, and a team of professionals that can collaborate and bring advice.

 

There are so many variables at work there. I love how you say, “Do you know is that the reason that you are either not getting or keeping people?” A lot of times, it is easy to hide behind that because benefits have become less affordable. A lot of people hide behind that and it may not even be a reason. We have clients all the time that are able to hire frontline and office talent. They don’t even offer a lot of benefits and rarely are they even employer-paid, especially for the smaller businesses. Yet, they are still attracting great people. I know it can happen.

Also, in those smaller businesses, there are creative offerings. A client of ours doesn’t need to jump in two feet and whole body in the water. If they have never offered benefits before, we have the ability to strategically allow them to offer what would make a difference in the hiring decision. I can gladly give you a good example of a client that we are in year two with and how it impacted their business if you like it. It has led to them not only attracting talent but increasing their workforce. The enrollment has been 98% in their benefits offering.

Let me ask this. I know there are people out there going, “I have a small business. I have talked to my buddy who is doing my insurance. I talk to him once a year. He doesn’t have anything like that for me.” How do people learn more about what you do? What is it that they got to do to set up one of these 45-minute discovery sessions? Is there any pre-qualification? Can you give us a quick intro on how someone can get a hold of you and start opening up the dialogue on some other options for them?

You packed a lot into that. First, if they are open to having a conversation and sharing what is currently working well within their offerings of whether it is risk management or employee benefits, we are willing to listen. That 45-minute discovery is simple. It is simply a request for a person within our organization. We will schedule that discovery meeting based on the type of business you run and your goals, whether employee benefits, property-casualty, or consulting. We will have a senior advisor reach out to schedule that discovery session.

I would always say, too, “When was the last time someone other than your buddy, good friend, or trusted confidant has analyzed what you are offering and how you are performing?” If the answer is, “More than 2 or 3 years ago,” if they are open to some analysis there, we are more than willing to do that. I would say, “What do you have to lose in a 45-minute meeting that might yield less financial leakage in your business, more profit to fuel growth, more profit to reward your top performers, and it will stick to 45 minutes?” If there is nothing there of substance that convinces or motivates to move the ball forward, it is a 45-minute investment.

Ninety percent of the time, we are having second meetings. Ten percent of the time, things are so dialed in that they are good, which is fine. If they are not, 9 out of 10 times, we move towards the next step to dive deeper and make a difference. With our clients, it is all about year-over-year, quarter-over-quarter, and month-over-month improvement. If the organization is about being better and moving that flywheel faster each day, that is what we are all about. It is focused on where we are going and moving that flywheel to pick up some momentum and the culture. Better businesses, better lives are what drives us. It is as simple as reaching out to my quarterback on the team and getting scheduled for that discovery meeting.

You mentioned work culture, which is something that is in our name. It is in our DNA of everything that Ryan and I do. I want to highlight that as we get towards the end of the show and talk about that. We got this guy who is a business owner listening. I could see myself being in that spot. I had a good friend for twenty years, but I would like to learn more about some of the stuff you said you do around culture and safety and hear about that. You are open to that meeting, even if I got my good guy?

Absolutely. In some cases, it could even be on cybersecurity or we will engage as a consultant first because we have had clients not willing to part ways. We have been hired specifically to improve safety, culture, and performance, but not do the insurance. We are fine with that and here is why, better business, better lives. Over time, it is common that at some point that business owner asks the question, “What would it look like if we did the insurance and the safety or if we did the insurance and you did our cyber insurance more than the best practice assessment on some improvement of some of our practices?”

Talent is not about more people. It’s the right people in the right seats. Click To Tweet

What it would look like is an integrated approach where we, the consultant or advisor, can tell the story to the future insurance carriers and say, “You are looking at their claims five years ago. Look in the rearview mirror 20% of the time and you won’t wind up in a ditch. Let us tell you through the windshield the improvement this client and organization has made. Let me tell you what the safety culture looks like now. Let me tell you how 98% of their supervisors are engaged in coaching their people every single day, changing behavior, improving outcomes, operating safer and why you shouldn’t look at five years ago or their experience mod, which is four years old, and base your financial quote or proposal on five years ago. If you do that, we are going to find someone else that will do it for less because we have a proven process when it comes to safety culture and it is 64% sustainable improvement on average.”

What is that 64% sustainable improvement mean?

It boils down to is fewer claims, incidents, people getting hurt, vehicle accidents, equipment damage, and theft. You name it. It is all the things that cause the business to pause, regroup and spend more money. On insurance, your cost is your cost on a lot of insurance programs. Once a year, you are going to renew it, but everything that happens between your renewal periods affects the future costs. If you have a workers’ comp claim that costs $50,000 in 2021 to the insurance company, you are going to wind up paying an insurance company more than $50,000 over the next three years to compensate for that. It is the way insurance works. I have been on the insurance carrier side for the first half of my career. I know how insurance carriers compensate. I also know what their focus is and their investment income. There is nothing wrong with that. It’s just not good for small business.

Tell me the methodology of how you go about doing this.

Most consultants or advisors have a boilerplate template on how they go about business. If it is a safety culture improvement process that the client is after, we diagnose before prescribing anything. Through an interactive best practice assessment, we will quantify strengths and opportunities for improvement based on over 100 years of experience. It results in red, green, or yellow light report that will bring back to that prospective client and propose a game plan. Our proven process is a four-step process. It is with senior management, phase one. Why and where do you want to take your safety culture?

BCC 57 | Insurance Broker
Insurance Broker: We clearly define what is expected and build accountability around it, which is simply defining, measuring, and recognizing and rewarding people when they do it right.

 

If the client wants to move forward with our proposed strategy, it is simply three steps. First, we work with a team of clients, people at all levels, to design the system. We have a highly effective launching process with managers, supervisors, and coaching modules to enable the supervisors to become good coaches of safety and create positive habits versus conventional safety. It is a bunch of rules of what not to do. We clearly define what is expected and build accountability around it, which is simply defining, measuring, recognizing, and rewarding people when they do it right. It is very different but highly effective. I have done it for years and have a lot of success stories there.

Steve, I have enjoyed this. If they want to reach out to you and your team because I know that you have an extensive and qualified team there, for a 45-minute truly financial leakage discovery and not anything else there, what do they need to do? Where do they need to go?

It is simple. They can contact Deanna Hughes. It is [email protected]. You can call, if you prefer, if you are a phone person, at (603) 753-4267. If for some reason, you would rather have a conversation first with me, I would welcome that. I will provide my email address, which is [email protected]. For my phone, the best number is (602) 402-2210. I will be happy to chat first if that person prefers that.

I hope that you have enjoyed this episode here as we have brought to you Steve and everything about looking at your insurance as a strategy and as a way to take care of that last frontier of your business. With that, Steve, thank you so much for being here. I look forward to seeing you in the future.

Thank you, Jeremy and Ryan. I appreciate the time.

Important Links:

About Steve Tusa

BCC 57 | Insurance BrokerSteve is the Chief Operating Officer of resecō Insurance Advisors, an analytic commercial insurance brokerage firm. He provides vision and operational leadership for a team of highly skilled Risk, Safety, Claim Management, Human Resources, Information Technology professionals. Steve specializes in strategic cultural improvement by engaging all levels of your organization to design a system that focuses on critical behaviors, shaping good habits, critical supporting activities, positive feedback and coaching.

The team’s entire focus is to significantly reduce our client’s financial leakage, returning it back as revenue. We significantly improve our client’s EBITDA, profitability, business valuation, and operational agility. Additional key services include implementation of accountability systems, behavior safety processes, and performance management systems that integrate solid risk management techniques into core of an organization.

In his downtime, Steve enjoys traveling, sports and spending time with his wife and two children.

It’s Time To Go To Owner’s School With Matt Michel

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BCC 53 | Owner’s School

 

For a lot of business owners, there’s nothing more important than getting on top. Ryan Englin talks with the founder of Service Nation, Inc., Matt Michel, on some of the most common challenges faced by business owners in the trades. Matt is an internationally recognized and highly acclaimed motivational and informational speaker on the significance of learning the craft of the business and going back to the owner’s school. While many business owners fall into the trap of focusing their end goal on success, Matt points out that they are forgetting the basics, including the goal-setting process that is highly significant in order to start walking the path to success. Join him as he reveals more insights every business owner needs to know.

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It’s Time To Go To Owner’s School With Matt Michel

Our guest is very involved in the trades. His organization has over 5,500 member companies. Everybody from electricians to plumbers to HVAC contractors, remodelers, people in solar and even in the construction space. He is no stranger to what is going on, what some of the challenges are. He’s got some great insight on how to overcome some of the most common challenges faced by business owners in the trades. He believes that community is one of the most important things business owners can have now, whether it’s local, online or even in one of his groups. I want to take a moment and welcome to the show, Matt Michel from Service Nation.

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Welcome to the show, Matt. One of the questions I love to start with is what’s the big myth in your industry? What’s that one thing that everybody believes about your target market, the skilled labor guys or anybody in the trades? What’s the biggest myth that you want to shatter for our readers?

I don’t know that it’s a universal myth because we’ve got a number of people that have disproven it in our group, but I think the biggest myth, probably overall, is that you can’t make money in the trades. You can make a lot of money in the trades. You can become very successful. You can build a great business. The millionaire next door is a contractor. I know a lot of millionaires and not very many of them went to college. They learned in the school of hard knocks. The tuition that they paid was the tuition of mistakes, failures, getting better and improving, but if a person wants a great career, I think that there are very few places that are more accommodating than the service trades.

Having grown up around the trades, I see it. I know a lot of people that love getting their hands dirty. They love being out there building, creating, constructing, fixing and they did well. Especially when they start operating a little bit more like a business, then you start thinking, “I need more hands than just mine to go do something impactful.” What do you think is the number one thing holding business owners back? I know a lot of guys that get their first truck. They go, “This is great. I’m selling it. I need some extra help.” Maybe they hire a friend or a buddy, a brother-in-law or something. They start growing their business, but they still hit these plateaus where they can’t breakthrough. They can’t seem to make it more than just a job. They can’t find that millionaire-next-door status like you’re talking about. What do you think is holding them back?

It’s themselves. We’ve got guys who know how to turn a wrench, they don’t know how to turn a profit. They may have been to trade school, but there isn’t an owner school. Fortunately, there are resources out there that can help them now, but they’ve got to trade their craft for the craft of business. As much as they enjoy getting out and working in the business, as Michael Gerber says, “They’ve got to start working on the business.”

Until they do that, they will never be able to get out of their own way. Another part of this is guys got to understand that growth is a good thing. I talked to probably 40% of the trade and they don’t want to grow. They want to run a lifestyle business and that’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with running a lifestyle business, but you need to understand what your sacrifice is. You need to make sure that you have accounted for your family in case something happens to you and you can’t work. The single truck operator, the most independent guy in the world, is also the most selfish because if something happens to him, there goes the business, customers, income and maybe the house.

If you want to be successful, find five other successful people and associate with them. Click To Tweet

Growth is incumbent upon people. The thing that most contractors can’t see, and when they do see it, that’s when it becomes amazing, is when they build a business that can exist without them. Until that point, they don’t have a business, but they have a company or they have a job and it owns them, they don’t own it. When they build a business that can run without them, every business owner has things that they don’t like to do, things that they hate doing. They can delegate those to somebody else. They can hire people to do the things they don’t like and aren’t good at and they can focus on the things that they want to do.

Abraham Maslow, the behavioral psychologist, came up with this Hierarchy of Needs. A lot of people have seen it. It’s like a pyramid. At the very pinnacle, when you’ve satisfied everything else, you’re self-actualizing, which means you’re working on the things that you enjoy, the things that make you happy. That’s where I live as a business leader and that’s where a number of contractors I know are. When you’re at that point, that’s when a business truly becomes fun.

What are some things that these guys can do to get there and realize that and have a business that they own versus a job that owns them?

One of the things they need to do is associate with other successful contractors. Jim Rohn says that you’re like the five people you surround yourself with most. That’s absolutely true. If you want to become successful, find other successful people and associate with them. Here’s the irony. Most contractors think that the most successful guy in town won’t have anything to do with them and won’t share anything with them. That’s the guy that’s the most likely to share.

Successful people are the most likely to give back to others. They’re the least fearful of you taking something from them and hurting them. Nobody’s going to take your customer from you unless you screw up. That’s the first step. The second step is to listen to podcasts. If you’re in a truck a lot of times, you can learn a lot from podcasts, which are free, from audiobooks, which you can download by joining Audible.com. You can get them from the library.

There are a million ways that you can turn that windshield time into productive learning time. You can transform yourself. I also think it’s important to go to events where contractors are. Get involved with your local trade association. Go to national events like the Service World Expo. Those types of events are where you will run into people from all over the country, even all over the world, who have been there, done it and have a closet full of t-shirts.

BCC 53 | Owner’s School
Owner’s School: There are a million ways you can turn that windshield time into productive learning time. You can transform yourself.

 

What you’re doing right now with Service Nation and all of the different products and groups that you have is giving people a platform for that. Is that correct?

Correct, and one of our core values is community. We’re all about community, we create environments where communities thrive and relationship building begins and grows. Business is all about relationships. Businesses grow on relationships. We put contractors together, whether it’s in the Service Roundtable, which is about 5,500 member companies from around the world or the Service Nation Alliance, our best practices group, which has roughly 500 members, but this is an extremely intensive group. We also hold events like the Service World Expo and the Barefoot Roundtable in Clearwater Beach, Florida. It’s going to be outside under a tent. It is going to be on the sand and shorts are required.

If I’m thinking about joining a community and I want to be a part of people that have leveled up their business and have gone to that next level. I agree with you on what Jim Rohn says about the five people you surround yourself with. If I want to be more successful, I need to hang out with people that have been to the mountaintop and that has seen that success. I see it a lot to where often people are afraid to share because they think they’re going to lose customers. I don’t know about you, but I don’t know any single contractor that’s got more than 5% market share in any market. The ocean is vast. There is a lot of fish out there. There are a lot of customers just waiting to be taken care of. What do I need to look for if I’m looking to join a community? What are some things that you’ve seen work or don’t work?

It’s the attitude. There are a lot of contractor groups that are out there. Some of them operate more like a country club. Everybody tries to one-up the other person. It’s one where you see more of an attitude of service and it’s, “You’re a member? Come on over to my shop and let’s talk.” I don’t know anybody in the Service Nation Alliance, for example, who can’t call up another member, drop in on them and visit them. That’s the great thing about contractors. I don’t know an industry where people are more giving and more open to helping each other than the contracting community. I’ve worked in high tech and I did some marketing consulting with major corporations. None of them are as challenging or have people that are as down to earth as the contracting world.

How to get started in either looking to join your community or maybe even finding a community that maybe it’s a better fit for me? What’s one of the things we can do?

Most groups have some type of recruiting event. We have successful days. We hold them around the country and several of them every month. There are other groups that have those as well and you can search for those online. The Service Roundtable is a very low barrier to entry. It’s self-service that’s $50 a month and you can engage people online through it. It’s getting involved with those but also come to the national events like Service World and Barefoot Roundtable. It’s there where we’ll talk to people who are in different groups and at your local trade shows. These are going to start back up and we’re going to get away from the virtual world, which is great.

Millennials are hard workers if you can find the right environment for them. Click To Tweet

I was at the Conditioned Air Association of Georgia’s annual meeting. They had a couple of hundred people and it was great to be back face-to-face. When you talk to other contractors, you ask them what works for them, “What are the things that you like?” They’ll tell you and be honest with you. Every group has a reputation. They’re not hard to find. You can go to the online forums and there are online Facebook groups and people will share those with you. What you have to find is somewhere where you feel a fit and you feel comfortable. When you find it, you’ll know.

A lot of the work that we do is helping contractors hire better people faster. It’s no secret hiring is, and probably will be for a long time, one of the largest challenges for contractors to find good people. We help them focus on fit. I can teach you to turn a wrench. I can send you to go get another certification or something like that but what I can’t teach you to do is to be the right person for our team to feel like you belong here and make a difference.

I would say that finding the right people is not one of the greatest challenges. I’d say it’s the greatest challenge. That’s where most contractors struggle with. You want to hire people that fit your culture. I didn’t get culture for the longest time. I knew we had a culture. I just didn’t understand it. I knew it was there but I didn’t realize that you can design a culture. I went to the Disney Leadership Institute and it changed my outlook and it blew me away.

At Disney, they believe that culture can be designed because culture is the shared values. These values drive behaviors that drive results. There are certain behaviors that you will or will not do based on a value system. If you identify what those values are, you can see what the behaviors are and the behaviors drive results. This is why Peter Drucker said that culture eats strategy for breakfast. A great strategy has to be executed, but a great culture is self-executing. An important part of the hiring process is identifying your values. What are the values that are important to you, your company or your organization and develop questions? I’m assuming you can help these guys do that.

Identify the underlying behaviors that are consistent with that value. Now you’re bringing people into your organization who share the value set you have. There’ll be less conflict, more harmony and productivity. You’ll have a better organization. When the pandemic first hit, we asked a number of our members who were seeming to get through this without much of the struggle to get on a webcast with us. The thing that struck me listening to these guys describe their experience after what happened in March 2020 was they all mentioned the culture of their company. They had strong cultures that got them through. If anything, COVID has brought out the importance of culture to a business and the need to make sure that you’ve got a strong culture.

In a couple of things that you said, one of them I like is that the values are the behaviors you’re looking for. It’s what drives the behaviors. We tell a lot of people, “Your values should be a verb.” It should be something you can do, not just be something that you are, because you want to see that show up in the actions when you start executing that strategy. I liked that piece. The other thing too is COVID made it so that a lot of people said, “We’ve got to figure out how to do this remote workforce thing.”

BCC 53 | Owner’s School
Owner’s School: COVID has brought out the strong importance of culture to a business and the need to make sure that you’ve got a strong culture.

 

The thing that most people don’t realize is that the trades have been doing remote workforce since ever. They were the first ones that were remote. Whether you’re working on a job site because you’re constructing something new, you’re doing tenant improvements or you’re out there servicing something. They’ve had a remote workforce. I think to your point that culture is what’s going to help you bring the right people together. The more intentional you are about that, the easier it will be to find the right people and keep them because that’s the other big challenge. It’s one thing to find them. The other thing is being able to keep them. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard somebody tell me, “I lost Jimmy for a quarter more an hour.” Jimmy didn’t leave for a quarter more an hour. For a lot of other reasons, the quarter is the excuse he used. That’s what helped him justify it. Let’s talk about this learn to craft the business. Go to owner school.” Can you elaborate on that a little bit for me?

The first thing that we start with is goal-setting. You need to understand the goal-setting process and how you set goals that are out of reach but not out of sight, so you have to stretch for them. We do an annual success plan. The goals ripples through the organization. It goes into manpower, planning and looking at available days and making sure that you know, you’re looking at what type of production you’re going to need through the year and that you’re going to have enough bunch of trucks to be able to fulfill that. You can work on it in advance. Too often, a contractor waits until Jimmy is gone and now, “I’ve got to find somebody.”

You should be working on this. We advise that the business owner should be working on recruiting 30% of his time year-round. Do you have a recruiting brochure? I have a recruiting brochure just like you have a company brochure that promotes your company and the benefits that you offer to prospective team members. If you don’t have a recruiting brochure, you’re not serious about that. Work on building relationships up. A lot of times, we’re interested in the trades because we’ve got all these people that think they have to go to college, and I don’t think they do.

There’s also a group of people out there that are willing to work hard but aren’t going to go to college. It’s not because they aren’t smart or bright, they just aren’t going to do it. How do you identify them? How do you find them? Go to the Catholic Church and talk to the priests about some of the Hispanic kids that may be looking for the trades as an opportunity or go to an African-American church and talk to the pastor and say, “Who’s coming up in the youth that might find this as a great career?”

That’s something that we’re negligent in doing. We need to be doing more than that. We need to be doing more of reaching out to the high schools. This is incumbent upon every contract. That’s all part of it. We’ve got some contractors whose path is they hire an apprentice for every truck. After two years, the apprentice gets his own truck. They are constantly building and growing and doubling. It’s a slow approach, but it’s a steady approach and it works. Let’s talk about the need for good retention programs. That’s huge. We’ve seen contractors lose their entire team before. How does that happen? One of the things is they are meeting the technician’s or the plumber’s needs.

In the past, we’ve always been good at tech trade. We were good at technical skills. We do a lot of training in that. In the previous years, we’ve gotten pretty good at soft skills training. That’s standing up straight, smiling and looking people in the eye, the whole deal. The knock on the door, step back, hand a business card and put on sheet covers. All the soft skills, we’re better at that than we have been. We’re finding that the training is not just technical skills and soft skills, but we also need life skills. Why does the guy leave for another dollar an hour? Because he’s broke. Why is he broke? He’s paid well. How is he broke? He’s broke because he doesn’t know how to manage his money. Why didn’t he know how to manage his money? Nobody has ever taught him. We’ve got contractors who are out there teaching and we created a course for our members to use with their guys that teaches them personal financial management. Once you start to get control of your personal finances, you’re less likely to leave for an extra dollar an hour. It goes beyond finances. It’s character. It’s how to be a good dad or husband. It’s all kinds of things that people don’t learn anymore and they used to learn growing up. The guys that do this and do it well, they select.

If people in the company aren’t growing, then the business won’t grow. If people are growing, then the business will grow. Click To Tweet

One of the things that we coach our clients through is everybody has got a joke about a Millennial. There’s somebody that’s got something bad to say about Millennials. I think of two things. Number one, some of the hardest workers I’ve ever met are Millennials because they know why they get out of bed in the morning. The other reason is that Millennials have the greatest economic buying power in this country. You better learn to like them. They’re around. They’re not going anywhere.

One of the things that we found out a while back was that, to your point, life skills, these guys don’t come to work because they want to turn a wrench. That’s all they want to do. They want to earn a good living. They want to take care of their family. Sometimes, we have clients who have gotten into this mindset of, “We need to finish raising them a little bit. We need to give them the life skills that the schools let them down on or that their parents didn’t teach them because they were too busy out pursuing their careers and doing their own things.”

One of the jokes is, “Millennials never show up to work on time.” They talk about that all the time. I was like, “There’s software out there that you can get, that will send a text message to him that says, ‘It’s time to get up and get out of bed and get to the job site.’” It’s those little things that we can do to coach this the next generation and help them with life skills. Help them understand how to be more give more of a contribution to not just the company but also their family.

We also have to change the way we manage because I grew up in a Theory X environment, “What do you mean you don’t want to do that? I’m your boss, do it. What do you want? I give you a paycheck.” We’ve got to manage Millennials like we manage a group of volunteers. I don’t know if you’ve ever managed volunteers, but the way you manage volunteers is you thank them for showing up. You give them lots of pats on the back. You tell them, “Good job.” You celebrate them. You have pizza. We’ve got to start doing some things like that with these guys. The thing about Millennials is that they are hard workers if you can find the right environment for them. Let them know what they’re doing is important. Show them their value they’re providing.

We went through 60 hours without electricity at 0 degrees in my house in February. We had a pipe burst. When the plumber shows up. He is a hero and a savior. He’s allowing us to live in our house. It’s the same thing for the air conditioning guy when he comes to work on the broken furnace or the air conditioner and it’s 100 degrees outside. What guys in the trades do is important. That’s why they’re all essential workers. They keep homes cool in the summer and warm in the winter. They make sure that the toilets flush and the showers are hot. They make sure that the lights come on. They help rebuild homes to make them more livable. This is valuable stuff. They are some of the tradesmen to be looked up to, not looked down upon. A lot of them have gotten the attitude where they look down on themselves and they shouldn’t do that because they’re providing a vital role. Frankly, you’ve got to work with your head and hands.

I can’t agree with you more on that. The thing that many people don’t realize about the younger generation and frankly, the modern workforce, and I know Gen X-ers feel this way. They’ve stepped away and changed their mindset about what work is about. Work is no longer about a paycheck. Work is now about a purpose. We tell people all the time, “The Millennials traded a paycheck for a purpose. They don’t care about the extra dollar an hour. They want to know they’re making a difference. They want to know that the work they’re doing is contributing to something bigger than themselves.”

BCC 53 | Owner’s School
Owner’s School: Successful people are most likely to give back to others. They’re the least fearful of you taking back something from them or hurting them.

 

I see many owners that don’t know why they’re in business. They’ve forgotten that they did this to create a lifestyle, take care of their family or contribute to the community. They’ve forgotten that and it’s all become about, “I’ve got to get the next job. I’ve got to reduce expenses and increase profits.” They’re focused on that that they forgot about their purpose, the reason why. If you can align people on that, if you can give them that sense of belonging and right now more than ever, as human beings, we want to feel like we belong to a group whether it’s a company or a group like yours.

What’s the higher calling? What’s the mission? What’s the bigger purpose? What’s the vision? Everybody wants to be a part of something bigger than themselves. Every morning since the pandemic started, I post a short motivational video on a Slack channel for my company. I usually write some messages. I ask a question at the end of it, “Tell me why this day is going to be a great day? Tell me something good.” I took some Jim Rohn and some Doug Hanson stuff. I used a motivational speaker that we had in one of our meetings. Doug Hanson said, “Everybody works on a to-do list and that helps you get things done, but what you also need is a to-be list so that you’re working on yourself. What do you want to be because you can become more than you are?”

Jim Rohn echoes that message, “It’s the sense of purpose that’s got to go beyond just the company, but what are we doing to grow ourselves?” Look around in your backyard. Everything is either growing or dying. It’s the same way with a business and people. If people in the company aren’t growing, then the business won’t grow. If people are growing, then the business will grow. This fits in with what we’re looking for in Millennials and Gen X-ers. They all want to grow. They all want to become more. Here’s the cool thing about these kids. They don’t see a dividing line between work and life. They don’t go home and just turn it off. They’re interwoven and interlinked. If you’re flexible with these people, then they will be loyal to you.

We used to work with an HVAC contractor. They all have GPS tracking in their trucks. At the end of the day, they would pull the reports to see where the guys went. If they made a stop at a Home Depot or something, they would reprimand them. They’re like, “They’re doing side jobs.” Their turnover was ridiculous because of that level of scrutiny. I love that modern workforce. The Millennials, especially. There’s not a difference between life and work. There’s not that work-life balance. They don’t understand that concept. I remember when I was in corporate, there were all these initiatives about work-life balance. I’m like, “I work 90 hours a week, then you give me 90 hours a week of home life where I’m sleeping and recovering.” That’s not balancing but that was the way it worked.

They don’t see the difference. A lot of Millennials clock in at 9:00 PM after the kids have gone to bed and start working a little more. How do we put these two takeaways into practice? What are the things that they can do now? Those reading are like, “I’ve got to go do something with this.” Associating with successful contractors and learning the craft of the business, what are the things they can do to put that into action?

This is self-serving but I think the first step is joining the Service Roundtable and committing to come coming to the Barefoot Roundtable. Everybody wants to get out, go somewhere, do something and see people. That’s a good place to start. If you go to ServiceRoundtable.com, you can learn about the Barefoot Roundtable. If they want to try us out, we’re $50 a month, but I’ll give them three months for $75. No harm, no foul. If they don’t like it, they can quit and leave. We don’t handcuff you. There’s no long-term contract. We have to win our members’ business every month.

Everybody wants to be a part of something that’s bigger than themselves. Click To Tweet

Email me at [email protected]. Mention it and I’ll have someone get in touch with you. That’s a good starter. If you have a local trade association, go and get involved with the local trade association. Business is building relationships. Start building relationships and the craft of the business. Start reading the books that are essential. If you’re an air conditioning contractor and you haven’t read Ron Smith’s HVAC Spells Wealth, you’re not serious.

Read The E-myth. You’ll see yourself in the pages of the E-Myth. There’s The E-Myth HVAC Contractor that Gerber wrote with my friend, Ken Goodrich. Ken is a guy who started by sitting outside of the supply house. They told him to wait while they were taking care of their good customers. He’s sitting there with his mullet, as he describes it, mad, scratching out stuff on a legal pad and setting goals for himself, and he got so mad that he went out and started achieving those. He built a $100 million company. After that, he did it again. Now he is in the $200 million range. He was growing hand over fist. The guy has his own jet.

Another book I’d love to add to that is Profit First for Contractors. It talks about the craftsman cycle, “Go out and get the work, go out and do the work.” It’s this roller coaster of, “I’m busy doing these jobs. I can’t go sell more.” It’s like, “You have to always be selling so that you don’t have these ups and downs in revenue.” Those are fantastic books and I’ve read HVAC Spells Wealth and I’m not even a contractor. It’s a fantastic book. You have the best practices group as well.

Service Nation is the company. We run the Service Roundtable, which is our large self-serve group. We have the Service Nation Alliance, which is our Jesuits or Marines. These are the guys who are serious about success. Every one of them joins, then they get placed on an advisory board with other contractors and a consultant who guides them. They meet weekly, they go over KPIs, they go over their personal goals and hold each other accountable. The success and the growth that these guys have attained are amazing. They’re helping each other become more than they all can be as individuals. It’s the old adage of, “The smartest guy in the room is not smarter than everybody else in the room.” If you can take advantage of the insights that everybody in the room has, you’re going to be way ahead of the game.

I love that piece about accountability too. For a lot of guys, it’s lonely at the top and they’re only accountable to themselves. You probably know this, but I’m the hardest person to hold accountable. Getting involved in a group that can hold you accountable is fantastic. I’ve enjoyed our conversation. I’ve learned a lot. I’m sure our readers have learned a lot. Reach out to Matt. Take advantage of that Service Roundtable offer. It’s a fantastic group. They’re doing a lot of great things and great value is coming out of it. Matt, thanks for being on the show.

Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity.

Important Links:

About Matt Michel

BCC 53 | Owner’s SchoolMatt Michel is an internationally recognized and highly acclaimed motivational and informational speaker. He has spoken about marketing, branding, sales, pricing, leadership, strategic planning, and goal setting from Istanbul to Australia and every place in-between.

Matt founded Service Nation Inc., which operates the Service Roundtable (the world’s largest contractor alliance), the Retail Contractor Coalition (a contractor branding and marketing program), the Service Nation Alliance (an elite contractor best practices group), Roundtable Rewards (the service trades’ largest contractor buying group), and the Service World Expo (the service trades’ largest residential conference and show). Previously, he founded and created the Aire Serv Franchise System, which is the oldest continually operating HVAC residential franchise network.

Matt is the 35th and youngest person to be inducted into the Contracting Business Hall of Fame. The Air Conditioning Heating & Refrigeration NEWS presented Matt with the 2018 “Legends of HVACR” Award. Contracting Business Magazine named Matt one of the 22 most influential people in the history of the residential HVAC/R industry. Contractor Magazine named him one of the 18 most influential people in the history of the plumbing/hydronics industries (Matt is the only person to appear on both the Contracting Business and Contractor lists). The Air Conditioning, Heating & Refrigeration NEWS named Matt one of the top five business advisors in the HVAC industry.

Matt is the inaugural recipient of the HVAC Golden Toolbox Award, presented by North American Technician Excellence and Contracting Business Magazine to “recognize industry leadership and support of technician certification.” He has also received the Significant Sig (distinguished alumnus) Award from the Sigma Chi Fraternity.

Service Nation has been named to the Aggie 100 (“The 100 fastest-growing Aggie-owned or Aggie-led businesses in the world.”) six out of eight years entering it. Service Nation has also been listed in the Dallas 100 and has made the Inc 500|5000 six years running, including a ranking in the top 300 for Business Products & Services.

A popular writer, Matt is published more than 60 times per year as a featured columnist for The Air Conditioning, Heating, & Refrigeration NEWS, Contracting Business Magazine, Contractor Magazine, Contracting Canada, Plumbing & Mechanical Magazine, Southern PHC Magazine, and CB Hotmail. He also publishes the popular Comanche Marketing blog.

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How To Double Your Ability To Hire With Anne Pfleger

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BCC 52 | Ability To Hire

 

Construction touches everything. In this industry, you have the ability to hire women of various strengths. They can be business owners, tradeswomen, architects – the list goes on! Today’s guest is Anne Pfleger, the National President of the National Association of Women in Construction (NAWIC). Joining Ryan Englin and Jeremy Macliver on the show, Anne shares her strategies in attracting and recruiting women into construction. Oftentimes, women may see a position and refuse to apply because they think they’re not completely qualified. Reaching out to NAWIC and setting up conversations with these women and their employers help showcase their capabilities. Tune in to get more valuable insights!

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How To Double Your Ability To Hire With Anne Pfleger

We are so excited about this episode’s guest because, as many of you know, hiring good people in construction is a challenge. It has been for a while, and it’s only seeming to get harder. Our guest has a little secret for you. In fact, she’s been in construction for most of her professional career, estimating, safety, HR, IT. She has done it all. She’s got this internal purpose and passion to not only improve but to support and guide other women in the construction industry to do the same. She is the National President of the National Association of Women in Construction. She wants to get the word out on how to double your ability to hire by attracting and recruiting women into construction. I want to welcome my guest, Anne Pfleger.

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What’s the biggest myth about the construction industry?

The biggest myth is that women are not welcome in the construction industry. That, more than ever, is incorrect. I said something about being about 10%, people still call it a male-dominated industry. It’s not. It’s male populated. Women are making a difference in the industry.

Why do you think that myth exists still?

As women, or even men, are coming up in the construction industry, they aren’t seeing the women and what they’re doing. What we’re trying to do is become more in the forefront so that you can see us. When people see women working in these roles, then they will say yes, we are indeed welcome to work in construction with everybody else.

One of the questions I’d love to get answered. A lot of the work I do in the construction industry is helping fill frontline positions, find craftworkers and laborers. Every time we got to fill out an EEO report, there are always the questions like why aren’t more women applying? As much as I wish I had a real answer for that, what do you think is going on?

What I think is going on is that women will not apply for a position unless they meet 100% of the criteria in that position. Whereas men are 60%, 65%. What’s happening is, women may see a position, “I’m not completely qualified, so I’m not going to apply.” What we need to do to help correct that is reaching out to associations like NAWIC and other women in the community to try and get somebody’s resume, and then set up a conversation with them. Women shine when they’re in the interview, they can show a potential employer what their capabilities are.

The biggest myth is that women are not welcome in the construction industry. That, now more than ever, is incorrect. Click To Tweet

Women bring a different perspective to the workplace. For a lot of employers, that new perspective can be a breath of fresh air because it’s different. It’s things that they’ve never thought about. I have one client, they got 130 people in the field and one woman. She’s on pace to be their next superintendent. She approaches the problems differently. One of the myths I hear a lot about is, “The men don’t want to report to a woman.” At least watching her go through what she’s going through, the men are like, “I’ll follow her,” because she makes it easier. We get done faster. The boss isn’t breathing down our neck. There are so many differences that come with having her in that position.

That’s a great point. Seeing women actually doing that. The men are seeing how she is moving up to become a superintendent. What we also all need to remember is that when a person is put in a position, they’re put there for a reason, for their knowledge and expertise, but we are all also human and continuing to learn throughout our entire lives. When we ask questions, it’s not because we don’t have the knowledge or the expertise, it’s because we’re trying to learn, be more productive, and make it a better project or help out on the team, whatever that may be in the situation.

I imagine that you talk to a lot of business owners about women in construction, their recruiting efforts, and everything else. Big picture, not just recruiting but what do you think is holding most business owners back? Construction has a lot of challenges that they’re dealing with. What do you think is the number one thing holding them back?

They’re not having conversations with their employees, especially the female employees. I’m sure that everybody has heard that it’s got to come from the top down. That’s true, but the top also needs to be following up and making sure that whatever policies or opportunities that they’re giving are across the board for everybody. It’s important for employees, and it’s not women, that they’re being heard. The owners need to take that extra time and listen to what their employees are saying.

That’s one of the things that has been different from the work that I do in the construction areas. A lot of times, we’ll come in and we’ll start talking about the labor shortage. You know nothing about it, you’ve never heard that. The construction industry has had a labor shortage for 100 years, it’s never gone away. I hear so many people complain about the lack of good people, “There is nothing but bad people out there,” and all this other stuff. One of the different approaches that we take is we say, “These are human beings with personal dreams and goals. They are not a cog in a machine.” It’s amazing what a conversation can do about what’s happening in their world versus thinking about them like, “No, they’re a pair of hands. When those hands don’t work, I go get another pair of hands.” A lot of times, owners get so distanced from the field, they forget that.

That’s a good example.

What is NAWIC doing to help business owners change that and take a different approach towards the way they communicate with people, bringing awareness to women in the industry, and those kinds of things?

BCC 52 | Ability To Hire
Ability To Hire: The top needs to follow up and make sure that whatever policies or opportunities they’re giving are across the board for everybody.

 

It’s been a goal on our strategic plan for a while. We have a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Standing Committee in the association. One of the things that the committee is working on is information for employers to be able to recruit and retain female employees that we can then share with the companies. Also, many of our members want to talk to the owners. We can attend if you have business owner conferences. Having NAWIC members come and talk at those conferences also helps because then they’re hearing from the women that are working in the field, or maybe they’re on the administrative side, even a project manager and an engineer. You’re hearing from them, the people that are actually putting the projects together for the owners.

Boots on the ground, frontline. They know what it’s like if they’re having that. That’s great. These business owners are struggling because they’re not on the front lines. NAWIC is saying, “Let’s bring people from the front lines, have those conversations, and open up the dialogue.” What are two actions that owners can do, things that they can do to help them break through that?

Having conversations one on one with their employees, especially their female employees. My boss, every day he’ll come down usually in the morning with his cup of coffee, and asks how I’m doing, what I’m working on, is there anything I need help with, or do I have any ideas? That’s the other great thing, have them ask, “Do you have any ideas?” As you mentioned about how women have a different perspective, they have a lot of great ideas that could help the company grow. That’s something that NAWIC supports. We launched our new tagline, “Leading builders. Building leaders.” We’re helping our members to be able to be supportive and grow their companies that they work for.

I heard you say that bringing women into the conversation is partly how they can do this. We’ve got a construction company, 50 men in the field, no women. It’s hard to do that if you don’t have any women on the team. What do you see working for some of your members to attract women into construction, to bring them into the industry?

We have a lot of different initiatives that we are working on to educate women about the construction industry and how it is a viable career. Starting as early as grade school, we have programs to get them interested in construction. It’s been interesting because, in the last years, high school guidance counselors are allowing us to come in and talk about construction. It’s finding all the niches where females and young women are to encourage them to look at the construction industry. In addition, I would suggest that owners reach out to the local NAWIC chapters to come and talk to those 50 men that are working in the field. Maybe they can understand a little bit more and get to know what work women do in the construction industry and how we can be part of the team. That will encourage women to want to come and apply to companies.

One of the arguments that I could see coming up is, “I get it. We want women in the industry but they want the office jobs. They want to work behind the computer.” Help me break that one down because I’ve heard that said before.

Women have been, in the past, were supposed to be in the administrative part of the careers. That is not how women are now. We want to get our hands dirty. More women are wanting to do that because especially with our size, women make good electricians. There’s a lot of times when we have to get into small spaces. Also, we’re more towards the tendency of not being colorblind, which is important when you’re an electrician.

Women have a different perspective, they have a lot of great ideas that could help the company grow. Click To Tweet

We have programs set up to encourage girls to work with their hands. We have camps called Camp NAWIC. It’s a week long for junior high girls to get together, they learn about construction. They’ll do masonry. They’ll do plumbing. They’ll do electrical. They’ll work on equipment. That’s another great field that women enjoy, equipment operators. When you work it out on the roads, I bet if you watch, you’ll see women working in those fields as well.

I’m starting to see more and more women get into the fields. They’re usually more in the supervisory positions. How do we get them into the skilled labors? You said electrician, so if I’m an electrical contractor, I’m sitting here thinking, “I think I’d go to four years of school.” That’s a long time to invest in that. What are some things that we can do to help solve some of the issues that contractors are feeling?

With the four years of training, if you’re working in an apprenticeship program, you’re usually working and going to school. You are getting paid as an apprentice. Most times, when you’re going to college, you have to pay to go to college. You’re probably not employed. That is something that’s different about the construction industry. Yes, you are going through training, but you’re also working on the job, getting hands-on experience, and being paid for the work that you’re doing.

It’s educating the schools. We’re seeing more panel discussions. They’re asking us to come in and talk to their students to encourage them to get into these fields. Unfortunately, until we regularly get into the schools, which we are doing, there is going to be a little bit of a gap. We’re going to see a huge push of women in the industry in the next 5 to 7 years because we have been working so hard reaching out to those girls that are in junior high school.

I was working with someone a few years ago, a plumbing contractor, and they wanted to bring women to the industry. It’s a women-owned third-generation plumbing contractor. It was in the roots of the family, and they started this competition. It was an annual competition where they would go to the high schools, and they would bring the girls in, and they would do a plumbing competition where they’re sweating pipe or installing a toilet.

It was a fun thing to bring awareness to them but we found that a lot of the girls weren’t interested. How do we make these industries more interesting for them? I get you say bring women into the workforce. It can help change the culture, it can make recruiting easier, and it can fix a lot of these things. How do we do it? How do we get down to it? I get awareness and education, but what have you seen work?

Women seeing women. The young girls seeing those of us working in the construction on the field, and promoting that wherever we can. Showing them that you could do this too. Letting them know about the pay availability. There are a lot of single moms out there and they can make enough money to support their family by themselves. That’s why I said it’s going to be probably 5 to 7 years before we start the increase from the work that we’re doing because we are seeing more women seeing women working in the industry. It’s like a trickle down.

BCC 52 | Ability To Hire
Ability To Hire: One thing that sets NAWIC apart is that it’s not so focused. It’s not just women in roofing. It encompasses the whole construction industry.

 

We got to get through those years to get those girls graduated from high school to do that. We also need to continue to educate them. Once we give them a taste of it, you got to keep that in the forefront with them so that when they get to the graduation stage, they’re ready to do it. I’m sure that everybody knows, women are known for changing their minds. If you keep that construction right there, that encourages them to get into the field when they graduate.

That goes with anything, you got to keep your people engaged. A lot of times, that comes from the human connection element, for sure. One thing I also want to echo what you said was, yes, we can train people up through an apprenticeship program. I can’t tell you how many times I talked to people, they’re like, “We have an apprenticeship program.” It’s like, “We send them out with this guy over here for a week, they learn the ropes, and then we turn them loose.” That’s not an apprenticeship program. If you don’t have one, find out how to get your apprenticeship program accredited and make it a real thing so that these people get the skills they need.

That goes to what I was saying about follow through. You can have any program in writing, but unless you enact it, stand by it, and continue it, you won’t get what you need out at the end of it if you’re taking shortcuts, or not taking the time to educate the new people about their jobs.

If you had one piece of advice for our readers, if you want to get more women involved in your company, or even in the local community and construction, what would you tell them to do? Something they can do quickly. What would you tell them to do so that they could actually make an impact here?

Reach out to the local NAWIC chapter and start the conversations with those women that are local.

Partner with NAWIC. Get to know your NAWIC chapter. You got chapters all over the place, right?

Yeah, we have 117 chapters across the country in almost every state. We’re chartering more. We’ve already chartered two in 2021. We got at least two more that will go. It’s exciting. If they’re not sure what their local chapter is, they can always go to our website, and we can help you find your local chapter. The women across the country are always excited to talk to anybody about encouraging women to get into the industry.

Women have been, in the past, more into the administrative part of their careers. That is not how women are now. Click To Tweet

What would you say are the 2 or 3 industries that need to hear that? You see women starting to get involved in the industry, you see them advancing through the industry, who are the people that we need to reach? You already said electricians, I would put that as one because women can get into places sometimes. What are some other industries that need to hear that message and get in front of your local NAWIC chapter?

Plumbing pipefitters is another one that women are attracted to. Believe it or not, ironworkers and welding. That’s another that has a higher percentage of women working in the field. Those would be my other two.

Between Jeremy and I, we know a few ironworkers out there.

The way that I’ve seen a lot of great ironworkers and welders, they have a set of skills for precision that is impressive. Definitely seeing that.

Give us your website so that people can learn more about you.

It’s www.NAWIC.org.

Lots of great content, connections, and learned about the impact that women are having in the industry. As someone who’s always recruiting, we’re always looking for how do we attract new people into the industry. It’s no secret that most of our field workers in construction are going to be aging out soon. There’s a lot of older generations in the construction industry and we got to start attracting the younger generations. We are going to have a more difficult time finding people so.

The message here is don’t discount women. They’re good at this stuff, and they can do amazing things for your company and your company culture. Anne, thank you so much for being here. I’ve enjoyed our conversation. It has given me a different perspective. I’ve got some people that we’re going to be calling on to say, “Reach out to your local NAWIC chapter,” because there are some opportunities there, especially to get more involved with women in construction.

BCC 52 | Ability To Hire
Ability To Hire: One of the things that the committee is working on is information for employers to be able to recruit and retain female employees that it can then share with the companies.

 

That’d be great. Another way is companies can also sponsor events of NAWIC chapters to get the word out about women in the industry as well. That would be another opportunity for companies to do.

What are some of the events that you are doing?

We have our camp NAWIC, it’s usually a week long. Not all of our chapters do that, but some of our chapters do, and they’re always looking for sponsors to get the materials for the young girls to work on. We also do programs. We have a Legos competition for grade school. We have a build a shed program for junior high. We then do design drafting for high school and early college levels. We’re always looking for sponsorships for those programs for the students.

Thank you, Anne. We enjoyed it. Thanks for being here.

Thank you.

Important Links:

About Anne Pfleger

Anne PflegeExperienced Estimator/Project Coordinator with a demonstrated history of working in the construction industry. Skilled in Project Estimation, Pre-construction, Contract Management, and Process Scheduler.

Strong operations professional with a Bachelor of Science (BS) focused in Business Management from University of Findlay.

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It Isn’t Blue Collar Anymore With Jeff Fleetham

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BCC 51 | Blue Collar

 

When it comes to the blue collar industry, many people tend to associate it as a dirty t-shirt, dead-end job with no career opportunity. But this is so far from the truth. In fact, many people who have grown up in this business have magnificent careers. Jeff Fleetham, the Director of Arizona Registrar of Contractors, greatly knows this to be true. In this episode, he joins Ryan Englin and Jeremy Macliver to dispel the greatest misconceptions and myths when it comes to construction and the trades. He shares how we can attract great young people to the industry, tapping into topics on education, construction science technology, and more. This isn’t blue collar anymore. Blue collar is what academic elites do to put people in their place. It’s time to break up this biased notion towards those who work in construction and the trades and shed a clearer and much truer light. Follow along to this conversation for more.

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It Isn’t Blue Collar Anymore With Jeff Fleetham

I’m here with Jeremy Macliver.

I’m excited about our guests and hearing the way Jeremy has so much in common and much passion about the trades and blue-collar companies in general. Our guest was appointed by the Governor of Arizona to be the Director of the Arizona Registrar of Contractors. He is so passionate about bringing new people into the trades that he is involved with tons of grassroots initiatives and schools in and around the valley. I want to welcome the show, Jeff Fleetham, the Director of Arizona Registrar of Contractors.

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Jeff, thank you for being on the show.

Thank you, Ryan. Thanks for asking me.

One of the questions we’d love to start with is to talk about some of the misconceptions about the industry. I know you’ve got a ton of thoughts and you’re super passionate about this. When it comes to construction and the trades, what is one of the biggest myths that you want to shatter for everybody?

When it comes to the industry itself, many people think it is a dirty T-shirt, no end, low brain power, and no career opportunity. It’s a fallback. If you can’t do anything else, you can go into the construction industry. That’s simply not the case. I grew up in the business. Other people have grown up in this business and have magnificent careers. There’s nothing about construction that doesn’t involve Science, technology, Math, and engineering. Any skill you can imagine is involved in construction, vision, art, and the whole thing. There’s a wide variety of areas you can go in. It’s only not being an electrician, a plumber, or a guy in a ditch. It’s a variety of different things. It’s an awesome way to drive down the street, look at something like I have done many years ago, and going, “My dad and I built that. That is an awesome thing.”

A blue-collar is what academic elites do to put people in their place. Click To Tweet

I love that you use that word technology when we start talking about this because there are so many people thinking, “Technology means I have to be a coder. I have to do computer stuff.” That’s not true. I was working with a client and they’re using robots to build bridges. It’s cool. These guys are still ironworkers and still in the trades but now they’re learning to operate these robots and apply technology to this. It’s amazing what they’re doing.

Ryan, those things have been going on for a long time. It’s becoming more apparent today that we see those things. In social media, you can see those kinds of things. I like to use the word Science as well. Science is an old word that means to know and technology is a new word that means to build. Thusly, that’s where I came up with construction science technology professionals because that’s what we are. We’re professionals.

Jeff, you couldn’t be speaking more of my language when it comes to this stuff. I love the passion. Honestly, we started having this before we even got onto this show. I’m looking forward to jumping into this. We talked about this, we talked about the words, and we talked about all of that marketing. I know you’ve been involved with AZBYF. I was involved with it from the beginning, going to a lot of the tours looking at that. You talked about some of those mindsets that are around hiring these young people. What do you think is the biggest thing that’s holding back the trades from attracting great young people to it?

I don’t think there’s one thing specifically. We do things that we think are the right things to do. One of the things we did with part of the AZBYF Effort was Arizona Commerce Authority, the registrar and once you start handling the material yourself and doing it. We talked a little bit about the visual understanding of what’s going on in a project that can only happen when you’re there.

It can only happen. I love that higher price education. Is that what you said?

I didn’t say it exactly that way. I don’t call it higher education. Personally, it is not. It’s other education. It is additional education. My one son-in-law is a pipefitter and during his training, it was online stuff with Purdue University. Had he gone four years to Purdue University, he would have had to come back out for four years to learn his job. However, while he was doing that, we call it Earn While You Learn. I mentioned to Jeremy earlier that my first job when I was a little kid was pulling nails and straightening nails but I also understood what nails do.

BCC 51 | Blue Collar
Blue Collar: Blue collar is primarily anyone that has a tactical, practical, boots-on-the-ground type of workforce.

 

It wasn’t long after that I realized that a 2×4 on a bearing wall at sixteen-inch on the center only holds 1/55 of its total load capacity. Why would I need to know that? What’s the difference between a standard size footing and a monolithic pour footing? Why is one wider? Why is one deeper? All of those things are all Science and technology. Those are things you learn while you’re there. Am I going crazy, Jeremy? Am I doing okay?

You’re doing fine because we’re so passionate. I didn’t share my story but I was a straight-A student in high school who graduated as a junior with a 4.14 GPA and decided not to go to college. My teachers pulled me aside and gave me the dearest and sincerest pouring out of I was going to be a failure at life because I was choosing the trades. I was making over $100,000 by 23. I don’t think that’s a bad wage. My passion was in the trades. My skillsets were there. Understanding how all that stuff works, I enjoyed being around that stuff. I knew that the other education, as you called it, was not going to be the right one for me.

You and I are almost preaching to the choir here about it but so much of the marketing around this has been, “You’ve got to do this to be successful,” which you don’t. You and I both know that. We had plenty of people there. I would like to take this into the business world here a little bit. You’ve seen this. You and I are 100% aligned that we should be getting more people into the trades. What are some things that you’ve seen businesses do that you’re like, “That is spectacular to attract the right people in and to help get the youth in?” I know you serve EVIT as a board there.

A couple of different places. I’m on the school board at East Valley Institute of Technology. I am in the Advisory Council at Estrella out of West-MEC on several different boards or committees like that in workforce Arizona.

What are some things that you might have seen that you thought, “That is fantastic. That’s a great way to message to the youth and attract them?” What are some good stories there?

There are a variety of different things that I’ve seen that seem to create some excitement. One of the things that are fun is what we did on one of the construction career days. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with this. A few years ago, I was involved with that before I was with the register contractors with the Arizona building officials. In the first year, we were there. We showed hourly wages. Some of the kids looked at that. We started thinking about that and we started going, “Let’s talk about not how much you’re going to make now for an hour. Let’s talk about your career, what that means, and where you can go.”

Going to university isn't higher education at all. It's other education. It's additional education. Click To Tweet

We put together storyboards of, “Here’s where you start and here’s how much you make per year.” That’s more impressive. When you tell somebody $20 an hour, they go, “Oh, well.” When you tell somebody $42,000 a year to a young person that’s 18 or 19 years old, stepping into this stuff, that’s a little more impressive. One of the things, Jeremy, you and I know this, if you show up, you’re ahead by 50% of your competition. Show up when you’re supposed to. If you’re supposed to start at 7:00, don’t be there at 7:15. Be there at 7:00.

Those were some of the things. We started doing that. The Build Your Future website and SkillsUSA uses that. A variety of people are using the total income and career path understanding. Everybody starts at the beginning but so many of our young people now, it’s not their fault. They haven’t been taught or told that you start at the beginning. You don’t start in the middle. We tell the true story. This is what you can do and this is where you can go. Think of this. When you’re in 6th and 7th grade, you think this is cool. You see this video by Arizona Build Your Future. It shows kids doing this stuff and it shows a guy that job site with the hand control controlling a drone or controlling some crane device. You see that and you find out, “I’ve got some of these skills already. Where do I go from there?”

It’s not everybody but more are doing that where they’re showing people those things. There’s a group that uses that in the Madison School District. They got some junior high kids and they let them build something every year. They paint it and they build it. They built dog houses or whatever but they’re showing them how to do these things. One of the things that we do as an industry that destroys us, and we say, “This is an industry for people who love to work for their hands.” No, it’s not.

It is for people who want to make a difference, who want to create, and build things. I don’t like working with my hands. I like seeing something, seeing a piece of dirt and going, “I want to build this thing here and this is where I need to go with it. This is what I need to do. I need to make the building square.” It’s Pythagoras’ Theory. Where does that all come from? All of those kinds of things and think about it.

I’ve got a question about that line of thinking. When I’m working with clients, my focus is entirely on helping them solve the number one issue of every construction, manufacturing company, and home service contractor in the country. It’s finding good people. That’s my entire focus. You said something that I thought was interesting. You started talking about, “We’ve got to let these kids know.” We’re talking about the kids of now. We’re not talking about borrowing a season guy from someone else. We’re talking about getting new people into the trades. You started talking about the money and how there’s some good money these kids can learn. I love how they can earn while they learn. They can get all this experience and have no debt. There’s a lot of benefits there.

You shifted gears and you started talking about this sense of purpose. I don’t build my hands, I build something. I drive by it and I go, “My dad and I built that years ago and it’s still there.” They’re excited about what they’ve built. I find that most companies struggle with this. They want to pay an extra dollar because that’s the only way they think they can get people to come to the trades but then on the other side, they’re like, “No, you need to think about this long-term. Think about getting to build the infrastructure of America.” There’s this huge sense of purpose. I find that those two things conflict with each other. We can either drive money or we can drive purpose. How do we reconcile that? How do we get people to dig deep into that?

BCC 51 | Blue Collar
Blue Collar: Construction is not an industry for people who love to work for their hands. It is for people who want to make a difference and who want to create and build things.

 

It’s a multi-faceted problem. You can’t attack one side. You have to understand what you’re looking at. To be quite honest with you, some small businesses are small enough and they’re busy enough that they don’t have time. It’s almost like you don’t have time not to do it.

If you can’t get guys, you’ve got to put the time or you’re not going to grow your business.

We have to remember this is a private industry. Also, another thing is the shortage of the construction workforce is not new. It’s bigger. In the early ‘70s, my father and I couldn’t find anybody to work for us. All of a sudden, everybody was out of work. There was nobody. You’re either damned if you do and damned if you don’t. You’re either too many people or not enough people.

What’s the solution then? We talk about this. We’ve got that with the Workforce Initiative here in Arizona with the Greater Phoenix Chamber. We’ve got Build Your Future coming into Arizona. We’re going into the schools. We still have a shortage. People have been talking about going into the schools and getting the next generation into the trades for decades and we’re still here. What are we going to do?

I’ve got you, Ryan. Talking about something is not doing anything. You’re just talking about it. You have to take action. Here’s what happens. I might get muted by some of my team. Firstly, Ryan, the government isn’t going to fix it. The solution is at the front of it is teaching. Teaching kids how to code is a great thing but who’s going to build the building that they’re going to code in. A construction site technology professional. Going into a higher education place is good but who’s going to build this massive building that you’re in. A construction science technology professional. Who is going to do these things?

Those of us in the industry have to start talking to young people early but not everybody wants to do this. Not everybody ever is going to want to do this. We have too many people in the workforce to do the work, unemployment is going to be there and we’re going to have a problem. I’m starting to get a little circular here. In construction, once we got into the production of homes, one would think that would be the way it needs to go because that makes sense. You get into a production mindset and you do all these things. You bifurcate crafts. A carpenter isn’t what a carpenter used to be. The carpenter used to build your house. You get the mason to build the walls. The carpenter probably finished the concrete, did the other stuff, hung the drywall, and did all this stuff. You start bifurcating.

There's nothing about construction that doesn't involve science, technology, math, and engineering. Click To Tweet

We don’t have carpenters framing houses. We have framers. We have a guy that lays out the framing and we have the guy that all they do is pull the nail at the end of the nail gun. That’s where the shortage is. That is not a skill position. That is Henry Ford’s wrench. We’ve got a few different things. We need a bunch of people to pull the trigger on the nail gun but we need to pay them enough to keep them there so they can learn more and they fill the void in that leadership role. We talk to the young people. That’s a challenge. That’s why I said you have to start at the school boards.

One thing I’m hearing that you’re saying, Jeff, and you dragged it to Ryan and me. I want to expand it to the entire audience reading here. We need to be active in the school boards. We need to be participating out there at the grassroots where this is coming up. I’d love to challenge all of our audience to go out there and to participate. I am active in it with running Arizona’s Welding Advisory Board and leading the SkillsUSA State Competition for Welding. I’m doing some of those things and being a part of these different advisory boards. It’s so imperative that these kids get to hear from real people that are having real success because for none of us probably reading, it’s not a big thing for us to believe that you can be hugely and wildly successful in the blue-collar space.

With that, I would love to dive a little bit deeper into how the ROC is affecting that. You’ve got a ton of great contractors. You’re attracting and holding them to a higher standard. I believe that the entire industry is rising to a new level that, quite honestly, the world has not recognized yet. You and I were having a little bit of discussion about the word blue-collar. To me, it’s a point of pride. I know, internally, we can say that but the rest of the world hasn’t quite seen that. I know the ROC has the big stuff that they’re doing. You’re running one of the most well-known ones in the country. Tell us a little bit about how you’re removing those barriers.

Thanks for asking, Jeremy. Firstly, the way it works is I’ve got an amazing team and you’ve met some of them. They’re an example of the rest of the crew. I’m overhead here. They’re awesome. I have a ton of experience in consumer products by mistake. In the mid-’70s, construction was bad. I took a part-time job that ended up twenty-plus years in consumer products but we learned a lot about customer service there. When I came to the Registrar of Contractors, my goal was to turn this into a customer service operation. Our goal was to find reasons to licensed people and let people know that being a licensed contractor in the State of Arizona is a marvelous career. We have a theory or a belief here that we’re going to find reasons to license people, not reasons not to license them.

We began on the task of taking a look at a variety of different things that were required to become a licensed person in the state of Arizona, from our application size to specific requirements about things. We started looking at some of these things and finding out whether they made a difference. Do we need to know this for you to determine whether or not you’re a qualified contractor? The answer to a lot of that stuff was no.

The timeframe for a small business person to get licensed at one time was someplace in the 3 to 4 months range. When you’re trying to start a business, that’s a long time. You’re trying to start a business so you can pay your bills and do those things. Jim brought this up to me. We were asking for financial statements. You’re a new business and determinations were being made that you didn’t have a whole lot of money in the bank, so you couldn’t get your license. You go, “Are you kidding me?” Decisions were being made about how you, Jeremy, could start your business by someone who had never signed the front of a check or never understood that. We start looking at those things from those ways and chipping away at those little burdens and barriers.

BCC 51 | Blue Collar
Blue Collar: Teaching kids how to code is a great thing, but who’s going to build the building that they’re going to code in? A construction site technology professional.

 

Trust me, there are licensed contractors and potential licensees that still don’t think we’re doing what we need to do but we’ve removed a lot of things. I’ll give you an example. When I first got here, one of the things that hit my desk almost immediately in the first week was denial for a young man who wanted to get his landscape license. Everybody seems to be a kid to you when you’re older, this young man was in his late twenties and he had had a DUI when he was nineteen. A couple of years before and his license was denied because of that. Here’s what’s interesting.

Statutes say that we could deny a license for felonies, not for something that you did years ago. We started looking at those things. That didn’t make any sense. We license about 80% and close to 85% of felons that have applied for licenses here. I’m going to probably get into some area where some people don’t like it, and that’s okay. There are six felonies. Years ago, there only used to be three. Some of these felonies are for minor things that get piled up. In America, you’re not guilty for the transgressions once you pay your debt to society and these are people that we are able to get licensed. I’m going to go on and on about some of these little things like that.

There are a couple of things that you’ve said in this that resonate. First of all, you acknowledge you had a great team. Partially, we wanted to have you on the air because we knew that you had a great team. I work with a lot of companies helping them to get more out of their people. Ryan helps them get more people. I help them get more out of their people. When they’re not getting enough from that. They’re not as efficient and not profitable but a lot of that has to do with how they’re leading that team, how they’re delegating, and managing all of that. Like everything else in the world, construction and the trades have got so much more competitive. The stakes are so much higher and customer service is a critical thing.

I was GC in a job and we had a superintendent out there. We recognized fast if we had made a bad subcontractor hire or not. It was simple. The first day that sub showed up at the job site and the crew jumped out, looked around and within about two minutes, we could tell you if we had a bad sub or a good sub. That foreman will walk up and say, “I want to get the lay of the land. The materials aren’t here. That’s weird. Let me call the office.” We have a good sub. If they’re like, “The materials aren’t here. They’re a bunch of clowns.” They go on cussing and we’re like, “We’ve made a bad sub.”

Customer service starts all the way at the top of how we’re taking care of our team and how we’re building a culture. When we start building that momentum, I see it started attracting a lot of great people to that because great people want to work with great people. One of the reasons I want to call out to the audience that we wanted to have you on is we noticed that our clients are knocking out of the park. We took the ROC, their licensing, and took their certifications seriously along with everything else that they were doing in their business. It raised our respect for the ROC in what they’re doing.

As we look to raise the blue-collar world and the image of what it is, we realized that the ROC and what you’ve done to put customer service into it, build a great team, support it, and find ways that enable successful entrepreneurs that have a scientific construction mindset to enable them to go out and do something, that’s what we’re looking for. It’s been an honor having you here. I know that you guys have a cool project. We’re excited to share with the team and everybody is reading out there. I’d love to hear a little bit as we bring this to a wrap-up here about the Hard Hats Contest that you got going because that is cool.

Customer service starts all the way at the top of how we're taking care of our team and how we're building a culture. Click To Tweet

We had to cancel a few things that we had set up. We had a deal set up with the Diamondbacks and dozens of companies that were going to participate. It was a career fair at Diamondback Stadium that was all set up for baseball and COVID hit. We had to cancel that. We’re involved in a variety of other things that we had to cancel. The team, Breanna being part of it, and Jessica here, we’re all talking about some things. They came up with something to get the young people at least get a little bit of juice as well. They came up with this Hard Hat design. That’s not a big deal. Maybe it’s not a big deal. I don’t know, but it’s pretty cool.

Any kid, 9th grade to 12th grade, can participate in the ROC Hard Hat design, they can go to our website ROC.az.gov and there’s a Hard Hat link there for the Hard Hat contest that gives the requirements and the rules for it. We will pick from that and we’ll pick up the top ten. We’ll do that at the office and we’ll put it on social media for the social media to vote on it. Breanna came in and they came up with an idea over the holidays. They came up with a gingerbread house thing. The deadline for this is April 5th, 2021. That’s one thing to keep a little bit of what this is in front of the kids now that perhaps aren’t in C10 and J10. Maybe they’ll get a look at the registrar site and they’ll take a look at that.

I want to thank you for letting me here. You mentioned something about great careers. One of the best things that helped me here was using Collins’ book, Good to Great, that we use in our career here to get everybody started. It’s also a book on trust that any business person in construction should have as well. I’m not sure how many audiences we have when we talk about those things but we try to pass on any gem that we have during our contractor forums. We have contractor forums for people who are wanting to become licensed. We have forums for brand new licensees and we have ongoing forums for licensees. These forums are where we add new Q&As. We’ll give updates on the registrar and we’ll open it up for free flow questions.

Everybody should be joining. How do we register for those?

If you’re a licensed contractor in the State of Arizona and you provide your correct email, you’ll be getting an email from us to notify you about that. You’re notified when those are and everybody is welcome to sign up. That’s where you’ll get an update on what’s going on with the agency. We’ll open it up and answer the questions that we can. If there are some things, we can’t answer in an open forum like that, we will connect the participant with the proper department head and they’ll get an answer.

Thank you so much, Jeff, for being with us. I know your time is highly valuable and highly requested, so we’re honored to have you with us. For everybody that’s out there reading, make sure that you encourage the students to go out and compete against the Hard Hat thing. Join what the ROC has going on because we all know that we’re passionate about raising the bar and raising that to the next level. Thank you all for reading. Thanks, Jeff, so much.

Thanks for having us here. Thank you, Jeremy. Thank you, Ryan. Thanks, everybody.

Mentioned in this episode:

About Jeff Fleetham

BCC 51 | Blue CollarGovernor Doug Ducey appointed Jeff Fleetham as Director of Arizona Registrar of Contractors (ROC) effective February 9, 2015.

Prior to his appointment, he owned 12-88 LLC, a residential project consulting and dispute resolution company, licensed as a B-3 General Residential Remodeling Contractor. His background includes construction, consumer products, consulting, and dispute resolution in both public and private sector industries. Director Fleetham also worked as an investigator with Arizona Registrar of Contractors from Jan. 2007 to Sept. 2013.

Director Fleetham’s background in the industry has made him an enthusiastic proponent of cultivating the industry for future construction science technology professionals. To that end, he proudly serves as Governing Board member of District #401 of East Valley Institute of Technology School District (EVIT); is a member of the Energy and Industrial Technology Advisory Council of Estrella Mountain Community College Energy Institute and Arizona Department of Education’s Construction Advisory Council (ADE-CTE / ACTEAZ); is a Steering Committee member of Arizona Construction Career Days (ACCD); and serves on the Greater Phoenix Chamber Foundation’s (GPCF) Construction Workforce Collaborative.

He actively serves on several councils and boards, including on the Board of Directors for the National Association of State Contractors Licensing Agencies (NASCLA); is a member of Arizona Building Officials (AZBO), where he was named Member of the Year 2013/2014; serves as a board member and Performance Excellence Committee member of the Governor’s Workforce Arizona Council; is a member of the Central Arizona Chapter of the International Code Council (ICC), where he holds multiple certifications; is a member of the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) and Arizona NFIB Leadership Council; and of the National Association of Bunco Investigators (NABI).

Director Fleetham came to Arizona when his father moved the family and business from Oregon in 1959. In 1962, Fleet Construction was founded and licensed in the State of Arizona until 2015. He attended Tavan grade school and graduated from Arcadia High School in 1970. He has three children and four grandchildren.

Joe Soltis | Happy Employees Lead To Happy Customers

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BCC 50 | Happy Customers

 

You can take your pick of any marketing strategy you want, but at the end of the day, happy customers will drive the most revenue to your business. For excellent customer experience to be possible, however, you need to ensure that your employees are in top form. They need to be engaged and happy to be doing their jobs. They need to experience the wins of their hard work and be compensated accordingly. Joining Ryan Englin and Jeremy Macliver in this conversation, marketing specialist, Joe Soltis, shares how he applies this principle in his own firm, ChoiceLocal. He also talks a bit about the unique business model of his marketing firm, which focuses on helping franchisees dominate their market by giving them the same level of service as the company’s Fortune 500 clients have received.

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Joe Soltis | Happy Employees Lead To Happy Customers

I am here with Jeremy Macliver.

Welcome back, everyone.

I’m excited about our guest. He’s got an amazing story, which I am not going to do justice. I’m going to give him a minute to catch us up on that. He owns and manages a marketing company that is focused on franchise brands and helping them dominate in their market. One of the things about franchise brands is that there are usually a lot of locations and it can be difficult sometimes for these smaller businesses to compete. Even though they’re part of a larger brand, they are individuals by themselves. He started his company years ago. He’s already grown it to 75 people. This guy knows what he’s doing when it comes to marketing. Joe, I want to let you share your story but I want to welcome you to the show, Joe Soltis.

Ryan and Jeremy, it’s great to be with you. It’s great to be on the show. I’m very excited. A brief background, I worked at a company, top-ranked in advertising agency magazine, a 180-person firm and we served Fortune 500 companies. Late into a pregnancy, while I was working there, my wife and I lost a child. I always said, “I want to be successful so that I can help people.” It was always, “I want to be successful so that I can help people later.” I can use that as I sell people. When we lost Ben late in the pregnancy, it was how do we help people now? We created ChoiceLocal with a mission to help others. That’s what we do. We take 10% of our profits out of the company, roughly to help kids in need.

In 2021, we’re doing a donation to Habitat For Humanity, which we’re excited about and a bunch of other stuff we’re involved with. Our mission goes beyond that. It’s helping our customers succeed, which we call partners. It’s helping our employees succeed, which we call teammates. It’s the giving back piece as well. The other thing we did is we’ve had customers like FedEx and CVS and multibillion-dollar brands as customers. I said, “How can we help small and medium-sized businesses be wildly successful with the same level of customer service and the same level of strategy and results that we’re giving to these Fortune 500 brands?”

The small business owner isn’t getting served the way they need to. What we learned, what we found is that you can do that in the franchising space because of the replicability of it. We’ve also found you can do it in verticals as well. We’re going aggressively after concrete, standalone businesses, every concrete contractor in America, as well as in the home care space and franchise systems as a whole. We’ve had a lot of success doing it. It’s been a lot of fun.

It sounds like you and I are serving the same market. I know Jeremy is serving the same market as well, so we’re excited to have you here. To that end, what is the biggest myth about your industry? What do you want to dispel for our readers right now?

That it is science-based. Digital marketing, people are like, “It’s a magic box. It’s a bunch of hocus-pocus. I don’t know what works and what’s not.” The truth of the matter is it’s very easy to figure out if you have the right approach. Google is powered by an algorithm, an algorithm that can be reverse-engineered. We reverse-engineered for our customers to figure out how we get them to the top of the search engines. It’s not just guesswork. It’s not wait and see. There’s a concrete plan. There’s a concrete way to do it so you can accomplish those results. For example, Google does hundreds of changes to their search engine algorithm every year and then it does several big ones. When it does a big one, all we have to do is we have hundreds and hundreds of client partners to see who went up, who went down and what’s the difference between the two. By doing that, usually, we can reverse engineer that algorithm update within a couple of days. We take that and then use it to move everybody forward. It’s not a black box.

The lesson though is don’t do this alone because if you do it alone and you don’t have that professional expertise to dig in, understand the changes that are going, it can feel like a black box. It can feel like voodoo and black magic. Here working with a professional, working with an expert, that’s what’s going to help you get the results from your digital marketing that you need. Is that right?

Tie a KPI to everything. People need to know when they’re winning. Click To Tweet

That’s right. They also have to put up the goods. If it’s dragging on for more than three months and you’re not seeing a lift, they’re not doing something right.

Let’s talk about that not doing something right. What’s the one thing that you see in the work that you’re doing that your team sees with your partners? What’s the one thing that holds most of them back?

We work with small and medium-sized business owners. The customers that we work with typically are on the franchisee space and independent business owner space. Even on most franchisors, they are a company doing between $1 million, even $500,000 on the smaller side, up to $10 million in sales. What we see for even successful franchisees is they can’t get out of the business. They’re always in the business and they’re always doing the business as opposed to working on the business. It’s because they have great difficulty in scaling their business, they have great difficulty in the delegation piece of their business and finding the right people to make their business grow and scale. We’re at the point they’re not burning the candle at both ends. That’s the biggest challenge that we see small business owners make.

I want to go back to something you said and tie it into this. You mentioned that if the business owner is not putting up the goods or the marketing agencies are not putting up the goods in a couple of months and we need to make some changes. We’re talking about this delegating piece and talking about how do you manage, how do you lead these people from a metrics-driven perspective? What are some of the things that these business owners need to do to know that they’re getting the results they need from their team and maybe even from a marketing agency?

The first thing that you need to do is tie a KPI to everything. A KPI is a Key Performance Indicator. It’s called a KPI or Key Performance Indicator for a reason. It’s not a key performance dictator, but what it does is it indicates to you what’s actually happening and it’s very powerful. With a marketing agency, if you’re a business that generates or relies on leads for sales, the KPI should be how many leads am I generating? How many of my customers am I getting and what’s my ROI? Your number one indicator needs to be ROI. That’s the KPI. You set a goal ROI for that marketing investment and then it needs to be measured. We provide those tools so that our franchisee and business partners can measure us. It helps us retain them as partners because we deliver the goods.

On the employee side, it’s a similar thing. If you have people that are doing outbound sales for you, it’s how many calls a day are you making and how many appointments you’re booking. If you have people that are servicing your customers, like they’re pouring driveways, what’s the net promoter score? It’s the number one KPI that can be used to actually predict the future in your business. It’s how excited are people to recommend you. That’s what that number is. I can go all into that but those are some simple ideas.

If you have customers that can be with you for a long period of time, what’s your customer retention rate? What’s your referral and word of mouth rate? Those are all numbers. Every position in the company, I don’t even care if it’s office manager, needs a number tied to it so people can feel if they’re winning or if they’re losing. Frankly, you can move them. If they’re winning for you, you can help them win too by increasing their compensation and those types of things. They see a career path, they see progression, they see forward movement, but the business sees it as well. Everybody wins and that’s the type of environment you want to build.

Being able to measure people’s performance, it’s not just about making sure that they know when they’re not doing a good job but it’s also about making sure that they know when they’re winning. I don’t like playing games where there’s no score. Making sure that they know when they’re doing a good job is beneficial to the team as well. When we started talking about these KPIs, I want to look at how are we making sure that from a marketing perspective we’re getting the results that we need. Whether that means we got people in-house that are doing it or we’ve got an expert like yourself that’s helping us. I know there’s a ton of KPIs. I don’t want to get too technical on that but what are some of the actionable things we should be looking at and what are some ways that we can drive performance around them?

There are a lot of different ways that you can slice this from a marketing perspective. From a business perspective, one of the things you always want to look at is year over year growth. How many leads am I getting in February this year compared to February of last year? How many new customers am I getting? How many outbound calls am I doing? How many appointments are getting booked? How many inbound leads do I have? Those are all things. If you’re in a business that’s heavily seasonal, you need to look at that on a year over year basis. Also, anytime you do a big change in your business, whether that’s investing in a new marketing program or investing in a new employee or a teammate, you want to look at pre and post. What was it like when this person or this company partnered up with us and what was it like after? You can then measure that success in that difference. Those are super important KPIs.

BCC 50 | Happy Customers
Happy Customers: Net promoter score helps predict customer loyalty and enthusiasm. It’s such an important number because you need to make your customers raving fans.

 

The other one that I did want to talk about though was Net Promoter Score. Years ago, for example, if you turned on CNBC, they have this shows that is like a constant rerun loop. It was called The Age of Walmart. All you could do is hear about Walmart over and over. No one was talking about Costco. At that point in time, Walmart had a net promoter score of negative, meaning their customers hated shopping there. Costco had a net promoter score in the 70s. People love shopping there. What ended up happening, if you fast forward ten years later, Costco’s taking huge market share and Walmart saying, “How do we copy what Costco is doing so we can be more like Costco?”

Net promoter score predicted that was going to happen a decade before it became a reality. Similarly, Tesla has a net promoter score that’s the highest I’ve ever heard of any company. It’s like the high 90s. It’s crazy because the net promoter score can go from negative 100 to plus 100. That’s in the high 90s. In 2020, Elon Musk was the 40th richest guy in the world, now he’s number one. Net promoter score helped predict that measure of customer loyalty and enthusiasm. You need to make your customers raving fans. It’s such a critical number. You can also do that with the people in your company by measuring their net promoter score. How likely are you on a scale of 1 to 10 to recommend somebody to work at this company? You want that number to be hot. If you keep moving it in the right direction, you’re going to have people that are fired up to come into work and they’re going to do a great job at your company or your organization. It’s powerful.

The thing about net promoter score is it doesn’t matter where you’re at on the scale. The point is to see progress. I’ve talked to people that have a net promoter score of right around zero. They’re like, “We might as well give up. What’s the point?” I’m like, “This isn’t like a death sentence for you if it’s not good. Let’s move forward and let’s progress it.” We see that a lot when it comes to the employees in the company. You had talked about doing net promoter score inside the company with your employees but also with your customers. What I’ve found is if you focus on having happy employees, they’re going to do a lot better job at making happy customers. You can have a lot of influence over your different net promoter scores and your different markets, from my perspective, by focusing on your employees because a happy employee is going to make a happy customer. If your employees aren’t happy, there’s nothing they’re going to be able to do to make your customers happy.

Some companies, they check out a certain store and you literally hear them trash their employer 3 to 4 times while you’re there. Something’s not right there. It’s not you have an angry employee who’s venting. Something’s not right there. You’ve got to take great care of your teammates. It’s important.

For a while, we were GC-ing a job, as the general contractor. We could tell if we’d made the right sub decision on day one when the crew jumped out of their vehicle. Whatever that crew leader told us, the first thing out of his mouth was going to tell us if it’s going to be successful or not. If he said, “What’s the material here? This is that office. They’re always messing it up,” and he was grumbling and griping, it was going to be horrible and we messed up. We’d have ones that we get out. We’d say, “I don’t think the materials are here for that,” and be like, “Maybe I’m going to call them quickly. That’s weird.” It was going to be a good job.

If you’re talking about employee net promoter score and we’re talking about the customer net promoter score, both of those are hinged on each other. We’ve actually boiled it down. We use some work from Walt Brown on the patient organization and seven questions to dive into the employee net promoter score, making sure that we’re being strategic about the way we communicate to build raving fans. If we have raving fans as employees, there’s all the glass doors and those things out there. The real thing that matters is what are they saying when they go home to their friends because that’s what’s going to drive your employee base. I’d be curious, maybe a couple of nuggets on what a company can do to increase their net promoter score in the marketplace.

The first thing is ask. Anonymous surveys can be powerful. There are lots of different tools out there that can do this. You can even do this through Survey Monkey very cheaply. You send an email with a question once a week. We do this at ChoiceLocal and we ask the net promoter score question once a month. We ask once a month on a scale of 1 to 10, “How happy are you at work and why?” We say, “What’s one thing you would never change about ChoiceLocal? Name one thing that you’d like to see improve at ChoiceLocal.” We take that data and we use it to help us. We have a monthly team meeting where we get everybody together and we say, “Here’s what’s going on in the company,” to have celebrations.

We give lots of praise to lots of people in the company. We give updates on our financials and what’s happening, the latest things we’re doing to move forward. We celebrate promotions, people in the company and all that. We actually survey our team and say, “What do you like about the team meeting? What would you like to see that’s different? What would you like to see improved?” It’s very powerful. There are things that I’m changing in leadership as a direct result of what I’m hearing through those surveys. We’re seeing that net promoter score continues to tick in a positive direction out of the gate. It’s good. We won the best workplace awards three years running. We’re coming up on a fourth now. It’s important. The thing you’ve got to keep in mind, you can’t be all things to all people. You’re not going to make everybody super happy 100% of the time. If you’re seeing that net promoter score and you’re 30-plus, meaning you’re great compared to most companies, then you’re aiming for 50 and then you’re aiming for 70, that’s great stuff. It’s fun.

I used to run a steel company where we were growing super fast. We won 100 Best Places to Work in Arizona. I think they’re on now 6th or 7th time. I’ve lost count. Once you have that momentum of a great culture, so often people think, “You’re a marketing company.” They’ll take all that stuff but a metal company or a roofing company or a concrete company that you work with, do they want that? The answer is yes, absolutely. When they are bought in, they’re engaged. Your employee retention is up, which shows up on the bottom line.

Doing a good job sucks. You need to be amazing. Click To Tweet

Looking at external because I know you do a lot of marketing and you’re the expert in this arena, what are some things that companies can do to make sure that their customers are experiencing a strong net promoter score and they’re actually creating these 9s and 10s. What do you feel like underneath of Elon Musk’s success? I know I gave you a compound tough question there, but I’m looking for some nuggets that we can take to our companies and be like, “Can their net promoter score grow with this?”

There’s a guy I met at a men’s CEO’s group that I went to and it’s like faith-based group. One of the guys spoke who happens to own a steel mill. He brought out a book and it’s completely secular but it’s called Be Great by Peter Thomas. In the book, basically what they say is sit down with pen and paper and write down all of your values, things that are most important to you. Whether that’s integrity, hard work, good health, whatever it is, just write it down. You have a list there of 20 or 30 values that are important to you. He says, “Pick your top five and then order them 1 through 5, then write down goals for those values in your life and in your business.” That’s a powerful thing that can be for you personally, as well as professionally. In a company, that’s a long way of saying you need to hire people to believe what you believe.

Not just somebody who’s a great craftsman but somebody who believes in integrity in all things, if that matters to you. Somebody that believes in candor with goodwill, if that matters to you. Somebody that believes in amazing customer experience, if that matters to you or that matters to your business. One of the things at ChoiceLocal, we have a core value, amazing customer service. When I meet with our new teammates for their first day, I say, “When was the last time you went to a company or worked with any company that did more than they said they were going to do for you and they did it before they said they were going to do it?” There’s silence because that doesn’t happen. You can differentiate as a company, as an organization by having amazing customer service. What I always say is, “Doing a good job sucks. Being amazing is where it’s at.”

That’s how you build these promoters. You’ve got to hire people that believe that and then reward them when they deliver on that. I don’t care if you’re a company that pours concrete driveways. You need to have an amazing experience for your customers where you estimate the job will take slightly longer than it will take and you finish early. You come in under budget and you do it without making a mess of their house as much as you can with the yard and those types of things. That is a differentiating experience. People are like, “That company is awesome. They came in, they got it done early. There were a little bit under budget. It looks fantastic. When they were done, it was fantastic. The grass was in, everything was great. I love this company. You should work with them.” That’s how you build those promoters. Even if you’re a CEO who believes in amazing customer service, you’re never going to have that unless you’re working 200 hours a week and you’re on every single job all the time or you hire people that believe what you believe. You can start to scale that through your organization when you match those values with KPIs and that’s how you do it.

Joe, you couldn’t be speaking in my language more. I love that. The only way to transfer and delegate the success that got us started is through values. That’s how we’re transferring all of that internal value system. There’s not another word for it so that everybody is enacting on it. If I summed up what I heard there, the best way to change our marketplace, the way that the market views us as a company, and for us to get raving fans outside in our community is to focus internally on our employees. We need to make sure we have raving fans for employees because that’s the only way we’re going to deliver the amazing customer service.

As we dive into this a little bit more, what are two actions that you feel like our audience should go do? They already have a team, they’re already moving their company, they already got motion and they read this go, “I got my values.” They write them down on a piece of paper. Where do they go next? What do they do?

They have personal values. Now, take those values and apply to your company. Some of those values may or may not be applicable to your company. Some of them maybe, but you need to come up with those top five values for your company. It doesn’t have to be 5, it could be 3, but you shouldn’t have 12 or something. It’s crazy. Keep it simple. Once you have that, you need to find a way that you hire or fire, give raises and promotions based on performance and those core values. How do you do that? If integrity in all things is a core value, during the interview process ask, “When in your career did you feel pressured to lie and how did you handle it?” Don’t say anything else. Wait for them to answer.

By the way, people want generous managers and leaders. This is actually a very important question. “Name three times in the past year where you’ve been generous.” At first, it’s an odd question for an interview but if they can’t come up with an answer, they’re probably not that generous. If they can come up with an answer, they are and people like to follow people that are generous. People like to follow people that know that can help them. That’s powerful. That’s step two. Figuring out ways to hire for it, then build annual reviews. Here’s how you did it on your KPIs. Here’s how you did on your core values. Have your teammates on your company rate themselves and then you rate down as well.

You can have coaching conversations with them and then ask them, “What are your dreams and aspirations? How can I help you make your dreams and aspirations a reality?” You do that when you touch base with them, when you’re on the job with them. Even during formal monthly meetings, you do that with them and you build a bond because you’re helping your brother, you’re helping your sister. You’re helping them get ahead and make their aspirations a reality. What that does when they understand you legitimately have their back is it builds this culture of trust. It builds this culture of loyalty and I’m going to work my butt off for you just like you’re working your butt off for me. It helps everybody. It’s cool. Those are some simple things that you can do to make this a reality in your business, from an idea to something you’re doing day to day and living and breathing in your organization.

BCC 50 | Happy Customers
Happy Customers: Hire people who believe what you believe.

 

We wrote an entire book called Unmasked: How to Hire the Ones You Won’t Want to Fire. I love those questions that make you go into the uncomfortable but not traditional questions. The ones that are very specific and you’re looking for how they respond, kind of going into that generosity one. If you asked me that right off the bat, there might be a little bit of a stutter and it’s going to throw me off. Immediately, I can start drawing some stories from that. I think when you’re watching these interviews, it’s important to observe how do they handle those awkward situations? Does it seem like they’re pulling out of thin air or they really got something? I love that because so often we didn’t ask those questions. We didn’t learn about it. We didn’t set the right expectations. When we hire them, we don’t get what we were looking for because we didn’t ask questions that brought that conversation up, even in the interview.

I’ll get this a lot of times. I don’t know if you get this, Joe, but I’ll get, “We’re going to hire them anyway.” Yes, because labor market is short or yes, because whatever. That being said, these questions uncover stuff. People tell me that. They go through and they ask those questions and they’re blown away by the questions because they are excited about it or they’re blown away going, “I will be okay not having an employee for a while. That isn’t going to work. We were going to hire them anyway.”

I encourage you out there, if you’re reading this, to dig into what Joseph is saying here and say, “What are my values? What kind of company am I trying to build?” Go and interview to those. Joe, thank you so much for being here with us. It’s been a great time. I love diving into it. I know you had some good, practical ways to take this out into the world and do your marketing. I believe that you have a free giveaway here. Could you share that free giveaway and how they can get ahold of you?

You can go to ChoiceLocal.com. What we do is we develop marketing strategies for businesses for free, along with revenue and return on investment projections. You can see here’s what your competitors are doing. You can see exactly how to beat them. You can see exactly how to capture the projected market share that we’re showing and how many leads and how many new customers that will come out as a direct result of that at the ROI. What’s cool about it is we do that for free and that piece can drive tremendous growth in businesses.

Our mission is to help others. We’ve had tons of businesses that we’ve helped sell. People retired. Other businesses, we’ve helped them going out of business by executing that strategy unique for them. It’s a lot of fun. We celebrate that during our monthly meetings. “Here’s something we’ve done to help somebody.” At ChoiceLocal.com, there’s that information. In some industries like concrete, for example, we give free websites away that are powerful, built to rank in search engines designed to convert to qualified leads and customers. We have that as well.

If you’re reading, go to ChoiceLocal.com. We definitely would recommend it. Thank you, Joe, so much for being on. It’s been great.

Thanks, Jeremy. Thanks, Ryan. It’s been a pleasure. You guys are doing great work.

Important Links:

About Joe Soltis

Joe Soltis headshotJoe is the Founder and CEO of ChoiceLocal, a digital marketing firm that serves franchise systems where the average client partner of ChoiceLocal gains $15.51 for every $1.00 in invested in marketing.  ChoiceLocal is a local marketing firm specializing in marketing franchise systems. Their average client generates in excess of $15.54 in new revenue for every $1 invested in marketing. 

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