Blue Collar Culture

Business Results the Old Fashioned Way

Ryan Englin

Old School Thinking Is Causing Your People To Leave With Cara Silletto

· ·

BCC 78 | Employee Retention

 

Employee retention has always been an issue, and recruiters aren’t solving the issue. The COVID-19 pandemic only accelerated the retention problem that companies are facing today. So how can managers reduce unnecessary employee turnover? That’s the question today’s guest, Cara Silletto, will answer.

Join Ryan Englin as he talks to Cara, the President & Chief Retention Officer of Magnet Culture. She helps reduce turnover by bridging generational gaps. The way people work has changed. Millennials are very different from the baby boomers. It’s a myth that they’re lazy; they are leaving because managers are not communicating with them. Learn how to help solve the retention problem today!

—

Old School Thinking Is Causing Your People To Leave With Cara Silletto

It is not every day that we get to talk to someone who is a published author. They have their own talks, travel the country, training and equipping frontline managers on how to better retain their people. There are so many things happening in this economy, our society, culture, and world that are impacting employers’ abilities to be able to retain great people. Our guest is a published author and she talks a lot about this generational divide. I am excited to have her on the show because it is the generational divide that is keeping us from being able to attract great people into our future jobs.

In this episode, we are going to talk about some of the ways that you can equip your managers to start retaining great people. I want to welcome Cara Silletto. She has an MBA and CSP. She works with organizations of all sizes to reduce unnecessary employee turnover by bridging generational gaps and making managers more effective in their roles.

—

Cara, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Ryan. I am so glad to be here.

I am so excited about this conversation. We did a workshop together. It is something that Vestige brought us in together. I knew by the time we were done that I had to have you on the show because you have so much great information to share with our readers.

I knew we had to partner and keep talking about this.

We both have these giant goals for how we shift the way that people think about the employee-employer relationship and retention. I am excited to dig in, but I want to start with one of my favorite questions because we are about breaking down these myths and beliefs that people have. What is the biggest myth about your industry?

The biggest myth that I have heard is that young people do not want to work.

They are all lazy and entitled. They want to play video games and be social media influencers, is that right?

The biggest myth is that young people just don't want to work. Click To Tweet

Yes. “Send me a check, but I do not want to show up. I do not want to work or I do not want to work hard.” That is a myth, my friend.

I have never met a human being that did not want to sit around and get paid. I do not think it is a generational thing. Tell us real briefly about what you do over there at Magnet Culture and how you help overcome this myth and break down these mindset misbeliefs.

At Magnet Culture, we work with companies across the country to reduce unnecessary employee turnover. Mostly, we do that by bridging generational gaps. I happen to be one of the oldest Millennials. We make managers better in their roles because people think, “Nowaday’s young workers do not want to work.” In reality, it is more so that they do not want to work for crazy low pay, crummy bosses, and those who are still managing people as they did in the late 1900s because I-said-so kind of managers. They do not want to work in bad, toxic, and negative work environments where they do not have work friends and do not have appreciation. We are constantly working with leadership teams across various industries to create more managers that people want to work for.

You said bridging generational gaps. I think that is one of the things that I run into so often. We have a Baby Boomer boss who is like, “This is the way my boss did it for me, so this is the way I am going to treat the people that work for me now.” They have this mindset that they do not have to change. I read a book about Millennials. They talked about this generational divide. They said one thing about Millennials that most people do not understand is that their family raised them at a round table. There was no head or no foot on the table.

It was like, “You are part of the family. Let’s make decisions together.” Millennials were encouraged as they were being raised by their parents to make decisions together, “What sports do you want to play? Where do you want to go on vacation?” The parents involve Millennials in these conversations, and then we get to the employers and they are like, “It is a hierarchy. There is a person at the top, it goes down, and you do what you are told.” It is like, “Millennials do not want to work.” I am like, “They are used to having a voice and you are not giving them one.” This is where the biggest challenge is.

In fact, you brought up the vacation example. As a Millennial, my family was very egalitarian, which is the opposite of hierarchical. Hierarchical is a very top-down my decision because I am the leader. An egalitarian is everyone deserves a voice, a say, and a vote. We are all equal. You can actually have an organization that is still run that way, even with a hierarchical org chart. You can still run with a culture that is more egalitarian where we even take ideas and we listen to the new hires who are brand new. You do not have to pay your dues and wait your turn.

As a Millennial myself, growing up in the ‘80s and ‘90s, my parents asked us where we wanted to go on vacation and we would rotate, my mom, my dad, my sister, and I. Every four years, I got to pick where we went on vacation that year. When I was about ten years old, I wanted to go to Boston so bad. It was because that is where the New Kids On The Block lived. Our whole family took their family vacation to Boston that year because I was in love with Joey McIntyre. Fast forward, Ryan, to when I came into the work world at 22. Who wanted Cara’s opinion, thoughts, or vote? Nobody. It was a wake-up call for me that I had stepped into this other world that did not want me to speak up as a young worker.

BCC 78 | Employee Retention
Employee Retention: Leave the campsite better than you found it. If you see trash, don’t walk past it. Pick it up. This is the same for company handbooks and policies. Make the place better for future generations.

 

There is a little give and take on both sides. We need to stretch the Millennials and understand, “This is not your company,” but on the other side, we have to say, “This is who they are, how they grew up, how they were raised, and how their brain works.” I am Gen X and I remember, “If we want your opinion, we will ask.” What a horrible way to run a business because you know who has the great ideas is the people that have not been doing it this way for that long. They might need some guidance. You might need to coach them, but you got to at least be open to that.

Understandably, I find quite a few chips on the shoulder of, “When I was their age, I was not given a voice. I had to pay my dues and wait my turn or do the grunt work.” What I am talking a lot about is, do you remember that old scouting adage of, “Leave the campsite better than you found it?” It meant you go into the woods. You see a piece of candy wrapper trash. You do not say, “That is not my trash,” and walk past it. You pick it up, put it in your pocket, and wait until you can find a trash can to put it in because you want to leave things better for the next camper and certainly not disrupt the wildlife there. I would say the same thing about our handbook, policies, and culture.

If I came into a work world many years ago that required me to wear pantyhose, then I don’t want the next generation not to have to wear pantyhose or a more general example is that old because I said so or no news is good news. If I do not talk to you, you are doing fine. That is a traditional mindset. Don’t want to manage better and communicate better? We know that people want more feedback.

Don’t we want to leave the campsite and the culture better than we found it and be better communicators who do not say to our workers because I said so or I am not going to thank you unless you go above and beyond? You get a paycheck for showing up, and that is good enough. That is who people do not want to work for, Ryan. As far as people not wanting to work, they do not want to work for that type of manager anymore.

It is one of the things we talk a lot about. Much of what we do is focused on sourcing and getting people to notice your company, especially small businesses. It is so hard to compete. You do not have the million-dollar budgets that Amazon has to attract people, so you have to compete. It is not that people do not want to do the work, be it in the trades or construction.

It is that they do not want to do it for you. I think that is where you come in. When you start talking about training these managers and leaders to think differently, there is a shift that needs to happen inside these organizations for them to have a magnet culture, be able to really attract, and retain these people. Tell me a little bit about that.

Remember what the opposite of attract for a magnet is repel. If you do not work on this to create that magnet culture that attracts people, you are absolutely repelling people with certain parts of the way that you do things, unintentionally. It is either attractive or repellent. Thinking about management effectiveness, managers and supervisors have the most influence on whether a person stays or goes. If you think about all the issues that we hear about, like pay, schedules, communication, team, dynamics, and generational dynamics, all those things that might cause people to leave can be buffered or cushioned by a good manager.

It's harder to understand the mindset of younger workers today because they have access to comparison data. Click To Tweet

The companies that I see who are investing in their leadership at every level, I am talking frontline supervisors, leaders to management, especially director level and even executive training. When was the last time that your leadership team had training on generational dynamics and effective communication in 2022? Not in 2002 or even 2012. It is a whole different world. If the managers are well-trained in understanding others as far as behavioral styles, emotional intelligence, conflict resolution, and how to give feedback, we tend to promote people into leadership positions and think, “They will just figure that out.” If they were good enough to get promoted, then they are decent communicators. It is very different communicating, for example, in constructive criticism, mentoring others, or dealing with a difficult conflict on the team. Those things are hard if you have not received actual training on them.

It is where the Peter Principle comes from. We see this all the time, promoting these people. It is like, “I need new leaders.” Just because they are good at the work, it does not mean they are good at being a leader. You cannot throw them in and then go, “That person did not work out. They are a horrible employee.” I am like, “Not they are, but you promoted them because they were really good. Why did you take them out of that?”

You mentioned pay. There are a couple of dynamics to pay that we see. I would love to hear a little bit more of your thoughts on this, but we see inflationary pressure. You got to be able to help your people, especially low-wage frontline employees. I talk about it all the time. The cost of gas doubles. For professionals or entrepreneurs, it is an inconvenience and annoying. It means a little less Starbucks this week or next, but when you are a low-wage frontline employee, it means it is time to find another job because that 12-mile commute is, “I cannot afford to pay my rent anymore.”

We have that side of it, but then we have the other side of it, “Everybody thinks they are worth $35 an hour when it is $18 an hour job, historically.” One of the things that I see is the amount of money they think it is worth to put up with the horrible work environment you have. That is the bribe amount. It is what I call it. I would love to know some of your thoughts on that. What are you seeing? How do we overcome an unhealthy work environment? People do not like the industry, but if they want to stay, they want more money to offset that, “I am not treated well.”

Even in a harsh work environment, so many of the folks that you and I serve are in construction and other areas, “It is a tough job. We have to be out in the weather elements sometimes.” I would love to go a little bit bigger picture on this topic. What a lot of employers, if you have been around twenty-plus years in the work world, it is harder to understand the mindset of the younger workers in that they have access to comparison data that we did not have. It is not just on Indeed, Glassdoor, Google Reviews, and things like that.

I am talking about people older than 40 who were told, “You not talk about money, politics, and religion. That is inappropriate, rude, private, and personal.” What do we see, first of all, all over social media? It is religion and politics. Second of all, people talk about money. They talk to their peers, siblings, and even colleagues sometimes, but more so, it is their friends. If I gave you an example of comparison, it is not just about the wages. Think about this. It is the wages and the workload or how laborious that job is, for example.

If I have a friend working in a call center or maybe even a toll booth, a lot of that has been automated, but not 100%. If I have a friend working in a toll booth who can study for a night class that they are having, but they can sit there and study or listen to music while they are working. Let’s say they are making $17 an hour in that market. I am going into a manufacturing environment or construction environment, and I am also making $17 or $18 an hour, but I am exhausted after work. If I want to take a night class for something or get a certification, I have to do that outside of work.

BCC 78 | Employee Retention
Employee Retention: The opposite of attract is repel. So if you don’t create a magnet culture that attracts people, you are repelling people with the way you do things. It’s either attractive or repellent.

 

I do not have access to my music, laptop, and smartphone. They will talk to each other and say, “You do not work as hard as me and you are making the same or almost the same amount of money.” We have to realize is when we are doing competitive analysis or comp analysis, it is not what it used to be because people do not know what everybody else made.

You could say, “That is not normal for this industry,” but now that we are competing industry against industry, you have to look at how hard is the job, how tethered is the job, meaning, does it have to be at a specific place at a specific time or can they come and go as they want? Not necessarily work from home, but how flexible are the shift times? There is a lot more comparison going on if we are talking about re-evaluating wages.

It used to be a lot harder to find a job too. Years ago, you had to go to the paper. I remember when I got out of college, I was told, “Put on nice clothes, maybe a suit, go drive around, and knock on doors.” That is what we were coached to do. Now, I think 98% of people are online or on their phones.

Not even just online, but most applications, from what I hear now, and you know this better on the recruiting side, are all happening on their mobile device. I still see companies that have no online application or are not mobile-friendly. Have you tried to apply for your own job on your phone? If you have not, give it a try.

I am not kidding you. We are talking 2021, and we ran to a company and it was, “Download our application and fax it to this number.”

You know most people have no access to a fax machine or know how that antiquated piece of technology works.

That was a website that looked like it was from the early 2000s. Nobody has touched it. They are like, “Nobody wants to work here.” I am like, “Nobody can apply to work there. Let’s open it up and make it easy for them to apply.” The internet has changed things for people because of the comparison, but also the speed at which comparison can happen.

It is the speed of hiring alone. We talked quite a bit about expediting certain steps of your hiring process. If you think about it, the lower the wage is, the faster a person can find a replacement job. You are seeing people who do not even give a two-week notice. They just say, “I had a bad day. I am out of here. I am not coming back.” They might tell you or not, but many of them can then go DoorDash or Uber Eats. They can go make money somewhere else on one of those untethered job opportunities that do not have to have a schedule. That is another piece of the comparison puzzle that we are dealing with. I see a lot of the workforce say, “I do not want to be told where I have to be when, because of my family side, my personal side of my life, my hobbies, any schooling I might be in, kids, or significant other’s schedules.”

Doing competitive analysis is not what it used to be. Back then, people didn't know how much everybody else made. Click To Tweet

We have some folks who say, “Cara, I’m getting up and going to work on a schedule that is called a job. You just have to do it. I have done it my whole life, so they should have to do it too.” We need to look at how the world has changed. Even though we cannot switch construction, manufacturing, and other jobs to work from home or pick-your-own schedule, we do need to have conversations around flexibility that are more creative than they used to be. I have one client. They are manufacturing. They have to have seventeen people on the line to go green.

To hit the button, it has to be seventeen people on that line. They have to have seventeen people at the same shift at the same location to do that job, but there are other lines in the plant and other positions around the plant that can be more flexible and have a different start and end time. I see a lot of folks go, not only from 8 and 12-hour shifts to 4-10s or even offering 4- and 6-hour shifts because we have scheduling software. You can fill in all the pieces with technology instead of trying to do that manually or on a spreadsheet.

You are not just competing against people that do the types of work you do. You are now competing for eyeballs of everything. I remember meeting with a senior leader with one of the associations around remodeling contractors. It was a guest on the show. We were talking, and I was like, “You know who your number one competitor is in that market you are talking about.” He is like, “Other remodeling contractors.” I am like, “No, it is Amazon. I know what they are paying at that warehouse in that city. They are paying $4 more an hour than you are paying people. The work is less intensive. There are better benefits and some flexibility.” Let’s not talk about Amazon and some of the culture issues they have, but from the job seekers’ perspective, they just want to jump out of the frying pan that they are in and into something better. It appears to pay more and they take it.

Let’s talk about training managers and helping these people become better leaders. While we focus a ton on sourcing and helping them make better hires, we do not do the level of depth of training and work you do to help these companies retain them. I believe, and I have data to support this, that most of the hiring problems we are having in this country are not hiring problems. They are recruiting problems. I talked to someone, and I said, “Tell me how many you have on your team.” They go, “Eleven.” I go, “How many W-2s did you issue at the end of 2021?” He goes, “Forty-one.” I go, “You know how to hire people. Hiring is not your issue.” Could you hire better? Probably, but let’s talk about this retention piece because that is so critical to solving the hiring issues out there.

I love a good recruiter who absolutely can make better hiring decisions, pull from the better pools of people, and make better connections. Ryan, I got to be honest. Recruiters do not solve the retention problem. “Hiring better people” does not solve that retention problem. I cannot tell you how many people come to me and say, “We need to reduce turnover. Can you help me hire better people?” Let’s put ourselves in their shoes for a minute. If you were running a business for 25 years and you were successful, profitable, and people did what you said, and then the Millennials came in. That is why I totally understand why people say, “Everything was great until these dang Millenials showed up.” Now, they “do not want to work.”

Here is a quick demographic lesson. We had 80 million Boomers and only 60 million Gen X-ers. For decades, the Gen X-ers did what the Millennials told them. The Gen X-ers tell me, “I figured out pretty young and early if I wanted to succeed, I had to play that Boomer game. I had to show up when they told me to show up. I had to work the way they wanted me to work and wear what they wanted me to wear.” You had the Millennials come in at 80 million strong. It is like an hourglass of demographic visuals there. The Millennials came in and said, “Gen X, they are taking advantage of you. You are only supposed to be working 40 hours a week or you cannot possibly get all that work that is on your workload done in just one job.”

The Boomers had been telling the Gen X-ers, “We have to do more with less. You have to stay till the job gets done.” As with many things, you see this pendulum swing, and then it swings back over time. You have got the Millennials and now Gen Z group under 25 pushing back, saying, “We are not going to let you normalize 50, 60, or 70-hour work weeks. We are not going to let you normalize over time as mandatory overtime.”

BCC 78 | Employee Retention
Employee Retention: Expedite certain steps of your hiring process. The lower the wages, the faster a person can find a replacement job. Some people don’t even give a two-week notice. If they had a bad day, they’re out of there.

 

The pay, realistic, and sustainable workloads are an issue and then the management training as far as their mindset in understanding where this new workforce is coming from and how we got ourselves into this pickle of lower pay. The wage was stagnant for so long, for lower-wage workers, overloading the workforce, trying to do more with less for decades. Those things are not sustainable. The management needs to understand how to communicate better, lead, and manage the folks that are in these difficult situations sometimes.

I think that is one of the things the pandemic did. It ripped the Band-Aid off and exposed these things for so long.

They were problems before the pandemic.

Anything that happened during the pandemic was a result of practices prior to the pandemic. The pandemic exposed it so much that, all of a sudden, the employees were like, “I do not have to deal with this and be stuck. There are opportunities out there.” The gig economy and all of the non-tethered jobs, as you put it, became so commonplace. There was so much awareness around them. People are like, “I did not know these options existed.”

To your point about the pandemic exacerbating the previous issues, we had cut training and development years ago. They had supervisor 101. They had emerging leader programs and all kinds of mentoring programs in place. We just kept cutting over the last number of years yet promoting people into those positions without giving them the proper tools. Now we wonder, “They are in an even more difficult situation, but they do not know how to deal with it, the managers, themselves.” They are just spinning their wheels.

Thinking about the entrepreneurs out there reading right now. They might have a few hundred employees, but they do not have a dedicated trainer. They do not know people that can come in and do all this stuff. What are 1 or 2 action items that you could give them to help them just take that next step in getting their leaders a little bit better at being good leaders so that they can work on the retention in their business?

One of the immediately actionable tactics that we always train on is we must communicate our expectations because everybody defines professionalism a little bit differently. If you are reading, you cannot see it, but I have purple hair. I use that as a talking point, particularly for executives and managers, about what does professionalism really mean? If we do not communicate exactly what we want from someone, the behavior that we want from them, the attitude, responses, and whatnot, then they will just do what comes naturally to them.

Recruiters don't solve the retention problem. Hiring better people doesn't solve that problem. Click To Tweet

At my very first job, no one told me I had to keep my shoes on at the office all day. In construction and manufacturing, we have got OSHA and other requirements, but there are still lots of little things. Punctuality, for example, and you think, “That is just common sense. Who does not know to wear their shoes, show up on time, or not wear that clothing to work?” Instead, we have to realize, “If they are missing the boat, maybe I did not communicate my expectations as clearly as I thought.” Particularly because the new workforce is raised differently. Ryan, in the previous conversations we have had, you said, “I was told here is how you dress. Here is how you show up on your first day. Yes, sir. Yes, ma’am.”

Think about it. We have quite a bit of generational poverty in the states. I know people who are 50-plus years old that have never held a good job. They were always the person who would quit because they got mad or something like that. Now they have children trying to get jobs, and the employers are saying, “They wore the wrong thing. They said the wrong thing. They showed up late.” They just dismiss them like, “They are not professional.” They just need a mentor. They do not know any better. They cannot read your mind. They did not even have moms and dads, aunts and uncles, or even neighbors who got up every day worried about being on time and what they wore.

Because the schools and parents are not able to do that, the employers have to think about, “How do we fill that professionalism gap and how do we train our managers on how to communicate more effectively, especially with those expectations? Here is how we want you to show up and what that looks like.”

I would say that, in general, when people are doing things in their personal lives, we have learned that whether you set expectations or not, there is a lot of a gray area in that. A great example, I was at the movies. It was the first one since the pandemic. It is one of those that have the assigned seating. My buddies and I do not get to sit next to each other, so we are all scattered all over the theater because they are all sold out. We walk in and there are three people in the theater. We are like, “What is going on? Why is everything sold out? We are not social distancing anymore.”

We all sit together. We are just like, “Whatever. Maybe it is empty.” We were there on time. The movie started at 6:30 PM. That is what they told us. For 30 minutes, it was commercials, previews, this and that. By 7:00 PM, when the people do this all the time, the whole theater was packed. We had to scatter. There are so many things in people’s personal lives are teaching them, “If we do not set the expectations, you are going to get what you are going to get.” We talked about it. We are like, “We would have had dinner later and showed up 30 minutes later had we known.” I think that is the same thing that employers are doing. They think, “You should know better.” Says who?

If you think, “He should know better,” or my favorite phrase of judgment, “That is just common sense. Who does not know that?” Anytime you think or hear that phrase, that should be the trigger that tells you, “Maybe we are not communicating the expectation because they cannot read our mind.” I had a CFO come up to me after training. She said, “I hear you about I need to communicate clearly, but here is another example. I am the CFO. I have clearly asked my team to come to every weekly meeting to give me a status update. They just continue to miss the mark.” I said, “When you ask for the status update, what do they tell you?”

She said, “They just say, ‘Everything is fine. Everything is on track.’” I said, “Isn’t that a status update?” She said, “When I want a status update, I want to know what they have accomplished since last week. What are their roadblocks? Where are they now? What are their next steps?” I just got quiet, Ryan, and looked at her, and then she said, “That is what I need to communicate to them,” because they were giving status updates because it is what she asked for, but they were not on the same page with exactly what the status update was.

As soon as it clicked in her mind of, “I have very specific expectations of what a status update is.” It then changed everything. Think about the other people too. She thought they were being rude or unprofessional by not giving a proper status update. They were thinking, “My boss is the CFO. She is busy and does not want all the details. She just wants to know that we are on track.” They thought they were doing the right thing. Both parties were frustrated by the other party in that situation.

BCC 78 | Employee Retention
Employee Retention: You must communicate your expectations really well. If you don’t communicate what you want from someone, they will just do what comes naturally to them.

 

I love what I just heard in what you said, even though I do not know you specifically said this. If you are frustrated with your team, go look in the mirror first and make sure you are not the one that needs to do something differently.

She said that when we got done after I looked at her and I let her process it. She said, “I am the problem.” Those were her words, not mine.

I love seeing people have those breakthrough moments, even if they are little ones. They can be so profound and change things so much. Cara, I know we could keep talking for a long time about this. This has been so much fun. I cannot believe we are at the end of the show already. You have said so many great things in this episode and so many great nuggets. If you were not taking notes, go back to the office and take notes. There are some great things in here. Cara, if someone is reading and they are like, “I want to know more.” I am sure you have got some great nuggets of wisdom on a website or through some offer. Number one, how do people get ahold of you and then where is your best stop?

Our website is at WeReduceTurnover.com. It is easy to remember, but I would say the best nuggets are either on LinkedIn and/or YouTube. That is where you can continue to hear our content. We do free webinars all the time and post those blogs and articles. If you are ready to dive into how to reduce turnover, we have a hidden website at MagnetVolt.com. That is a bunch of downloadable resources that you can go in. It has a retention audit, a cost of turnover calculator and all kinds of great resources for you and your leadership team to figure out your next steps and actionable items that need to happen moving forward.

If you are reading this, you take her up on it because I promise you, there is gold, whether it is YouTube, LinkedIn, or even that super-secret hidden website. Cara, I really enjoyed it. This has been great. Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you, Ryan. Thanks for everything you do, both you and your readers. I appreciate it.

 

Important Links

 

About Cara Silletto

BCC 78 | Employee RetentionWorkforce thought leader Cara Silletto, MBA, CSP, is the speaker and trainer with that memorable purple hair who works with companies across the country to improve employee retention by making managers more effective in their roles.

As President & Chief Retention Officer of Magnet Culture, Cara has built an incredible team of generational and turnover experts to provide relevant live and virtual keynote speeches, specialized training programs and consulting, all of which are custom-built to make businesses more profitable!

Workforce Magazine named Cara a “Game Changer” for her innovative solutions for bridging today’s widening generational gaps in the workplace, and Recruiter.com listed her in their “Top 10 Company Culture Experts to Watch” list. She’s been quoted in Forbes, HuffPost, The Boston Globe and many more publications, and is the author of the 2018 book, “Staying Power: Why Your Employees Leave & How to Keep Them Longer.” Most recently, she was recognized in the Forty Under 40 list in Louisville, KY.

In 2020, Cara earned her Certified Speaking Professional (CSP) designation from the National Speakers Assn; she became a Certified Virtual Presenter through eSpeakers; and Magnet Culture became a certified Woman-Owned Small Business (WOSB) through WBENC.

Contact Cara today to check the availability of her and her talented team of trainers for your next event!

 

Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! https://bluecollarculture.com/podcast/

 

 

 

 

 

 

Recruit Better & Sell Better With A Brand Story With Philip St. Jacques

· ·

BCC 75 Philip | Brand Story

 

The marketing and branding of your company impacts so much more than just sales. Marketing for existing customers, new customers, and technicians are all connected. In this episode, Philip St. Jacques of WorkWave explains the importance of building your brand story in the recruitment process. Join host Ryan Englin as he chats with Philip about why businesses should invest in marketing and branding and how advertising your culture externally help attract top talent into your organization.

—

Recruit Better & Sell Better With A Brand Story With Philip St. Jacques

Our guest is an owner of a marketing agency that believes in employer branding and putting your marketing efforts towards what potential job seekers or employees learn about your company. What they see about your company’s brand is equally, if not more important, than being able to market to customers.

In fact, he tells me that he talks to employers all the time to say, “I can’t take on one more ounce of business unless I can find more people.” As an owner of a marketing company and a partner with WorkWave, Philip St. Jacques is out there helping brands from small all the way to enterprises solve their recruiting problems. I’m looking forward to our conversation. Philip, welcome to the show.

Thank you. I appreciate it.

I’m excited about our conversation. Let’s jump right in. What’s the biggest myth of your industry?

There’s no denying that the past years have been challenging for a lot of people. As people in field service, we had to deal with a lot of different challenges that we’d never seen before. One of the biggest myths is that the marketing for existing customers, for new customers, and for technicians to help grow the business are all separate. They’re not. It’s one ecosystem.

We’ve got clients to tell us, “I cannot take on one more piece of business if I don’t get any more technicians.” That seems to be a pervasive problem. That’s a newish problem. We’ve heard that before. It’s always been a challenge in the industry especially if you get more specialized verticals, but never consistently across every business owner that we typically speak to are they having trouble with either recruitment or retention.

You say that they’re not separate. Unpack that for me a little bit. How are they all connected in your world?

At the end of the day, it’s about that brand story. It’s about the story of the cultural fit for the customer. It’s like, “How is this all put together?” That’s where it all becomes connected. The technician, the employee culture, and the culture around the customer experience are all related to the same thing. There’s a problem that needs a solution. Technicians need a new career path.

We were talking to somebody in the HVAC space where he said, “Hiring bonuses don’t do it anymore. Everyone’s offering a hiring bonus. What’s the differentiator?” We found that most of the time it’s a cultural fit. “I didn’t get along with this. They don’t care about my future. They don’t value what I do. Someone else is getting more than me.” It’s more of the cultural fit that is what people are looking for because the money’s there. These steeled technicians can get money everywhere. If it’s a matter of $1 dollar to an hour, that’s not meaningful money. It’s about the cultural fit. “Does this place feel like home to me?”

It’s great that you talk about it from the employee’s side and their perspective. I find that when I meet with employers and they tell me, “I can’t find any good people.” I’m like, “Define good for me?” They’ll tell me, “They need to show up on time. They need to be able to talk to the customer. They need to keep their tools in good shape, their trucks are stocked and clean. They need to clean up the job site.” I’m like, “None of that has to do with being a technician. All that has to do with their value system and whether or not they’re a cultural fit for you.”

Good is a subjective term at any level. Maybe you’re not a good employer. I’m not saying that they’re not good employers but it’s not a one-way street. That’s what it is. It’s not, “I have a job. You must come to this job.” It’s more of, “Here’s what values that we bring as a company to you as a professional.” That’s the conversation that needs to be had. Good is a subjective term. Cleaning trucks have nothing to do with satisfying customers. It does at a minor point but if you’re starting the conversation, you’re looking at the wrong thing.

Marketing and branding costs something. It’s an investment. A lot of times people aren’t used to the dollars it takes to actually get that done. Click To Tweet

You make it sound simple. You have this brand story. You wave a magic wand and everything works. I don’t think it’s that simple because a lot of people don’t do it. What do you think is holding people back from putting together this brand story and being able to bring the synergies across these disciplines together?

A lot of time it’s the mindset. A lot of the companies that we work with started off small. They grew up big but they still have that small company mentality. Marketing and branding cost something. It’s an investment in the company and a lot of times people aren’t used to the dollars it takes to get that done. The way we work is we’re bringing a team that you couldn’t assemble yourself. It’s almost a timeshare of this team, brand strategy, digital folks, web folks, content people, SEO, and SEM. We’re bringing us all to bear onto your business at a fraction of what it would take to have you build a team yourself.

They first got to get their mind right around this and say, “I need the brand story.” I like what you said too. Maybe you didn’t quite say it but you implied it. Bring in outside experts to do this for you. I tell people all the time, “It’s hard to read the label of the jar you’re inside of.” When they’re that close to it, it’s hard to do it on their own. That goes on top of what you were saying. Bring in the experts to help you with this brand story. Let’s talk about this. Do they get this brand story together? What’s this do for them? How does this help them?

It helps to focus a little bit more on what they do best. It helps project the culture out into the marketplace, not only for new customers and existing customers but also for these technicians that are like, “I remember those guys. I remember that team. They’re doing something. Let me take a look because they’re doing something meaningful. ” I’d imagine like a lot of the interests we’re working in, everybody knows each other. All the companies know each other. All the technicians know each other. These are small like the HVAC industry, large industries.

If you look at it from a regional level, 100% know everybody and what they’re doing. You start to make changes and focus on the things that are more external like the brand building and that culture. People will take notice. That’s a big part of it. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Not doing anything isn’t going to change your outcome. Does that make sense?

Yeah. I have a line that I tell people. “If you’re not attracting good people, it might be because you’re not attractive to good people.” It’s exactly everything you’re talking about. It’s being clear on your brand story, having good marketing, and understanding what’s for you and what’s not working with experts. This is all they do.

A lot of the people that we work with either grew up in the trades or they bought in and they know nothing about the trades. Both of them are equally suited to not being able to perform in certain areas of the business. They’re either too close to it or too disconnected from it. Bringing those outside experts who may be able to help is a cool idea especially when you’ve got a one-stop-shop like WorkWave.

We cut to the heart of the matter. We were talking about franchise development. Coming in the door, we know what the problem is with franchise. We’re looking for new franchisees to open up new locations. We almost prescribe it coming in the door, “This is what the challenges are.” We know where to look. First of all, I love that line that you said. I’m going to use that.

It’s like going to get your car fixed. I can certainly pop the hood. I can certainly watch a YouTube video. I can certainly turn a wrench but I have no desire to figure out how to fix my car. I want to bring it somewhere and pop the hood. People know exactly where to look. I got the tool. They tell me exactly what’s wrong. I’m going to fix it. I’ll 100% pay for that.

Marketing is the same way when we’re talking about recruitment or marketing for new customers. If you trust the person that’s telling you that they know where to look and to diagnose what’s wrong, that’s worth its weight in gold. We’re working with a janitorial supply company down in the Maryland area. He is a great guy, a great company. They were all in on this CRM, this content publishing path platform.

It’s a household name. Everybody knows it. The CEO was like, “I was all-in on this platform. I was taking the classes. I’m watching the videos. I’m diving in. I’m going for my certification.” I stopped and said, “I don’t want to know any of this. I’d rather bring somebody in that knows this. Why am I learning?” It’s that type of thing. Either you’re going to invest, you’re going to lean in and learn everything there is to know, or you’re going to trust somebody and bring somebody in that can help.

BCC 75 Philip | Brand Story
Brand Story: One of the biggest myths is that the marketing for existing customers, for new customers and for technicians are all separate. They’re really not. It’s one ecosystem.

 

Recruiting is something that does have a direct impact on the financial health of your business. You already said it, “I can’t take on another customer until I get more people.” That’s not what your business is about. Unless you’re a staffing agency, you don’t need to be super expert at being able to recruit people. You do need to be good at retaining them but you don’t have to worry about the recruiting. Let the experts analyze.

I heard you say a lot about the tech stuff. I know WorkWave. We could go in a hundred different directions on the ways WorkWave can support people but I want to focus on some things that you’ve seen work when it comes to recruiting tech. What’s a good tip that you could share with our readers if they want to recruit tech more effectively?

I’m not young anymore but I do know that mobile-first is something that they respond to. I’m imagining a lot of the technicians that coming are either coming out of the trade schools or they’re growing into their careers. They’re mobile-first. If your website, your communications, and even your social profiles and applications, aren’t thinking in terms of mobile-first like being able to apply for a job while you’re sitting in your truck between jobs. Someone’s scrolling through and be able to apply for a job using your thumb. That’s what people are looking for. It’s making it a lot easier. If you’re thinking that somebody’s going to mail in a resume or write one, that’s not going to happen.

We ran across this with somebody. I’m like, “What? Fax machine? What is this?”

It might seem obvious to some people but if this is the way you’ve always done it, this is what you know. Being able to cut and clip a resume, click a button to apply for a job, autofill the information, and shoot it off somewhere, it’s simplicity. Mobile-first technology is how we do things.

There’s a statistic out there. More than 90% of job seekers start and end their job-seeking journey online. Whether they’re doing it on someone else’s dime because they’re on the company computer or they’re doing it when they’re hanging out with their kids and surfing on their phone, it’s all online now.

It’s all online and it’s coming at you in all different ways. I love LinkedIn. You can’t log in. You can’t scroll for 30 seconds without seeing somebody looking for a job or posting a job opening. It’s being where the people and your audience are looking. It seems simple but a lot of people haven’t caught up.

I would even say to take it one step further because your audience is on Indeed but so is every single one of your competitors and non-competitors. Where else is your audience that is not buried with competition and getting clear on that? I imagine that’s the stuff that you can do over there at WorkWave.

A lot of times people will reach out when Indeed is not working or if a recruiter’s not working. The tried and true things that they’ve always relied upon stopped working. You’re like, “Where do I go? I’ve got to compete, eat it even harder on the platforms that I’m used to,” but then it’s still not working. That’s when you have to take a step back and say, “How am I showing up as a consumer brand? How am I showing up as an employer brand?” Those things are important.

I remember it wasn’t that long ago where everybody’s like, “Craigslist isn’t working for me anymore.” Now we almost never talk about Craigslist anymore. It’s, “Indeed and ZipRecruiter aren’t working for me anymore.” There’s always going to be a platform that’s going to get saturated and you’re going to have to be ready to move. Unless your business is 100% recruiting, that’s what you focus your effort on, it’s best to work with people that get it.

I tell people a lot of times, “As the owner, as the person that is fully responsible for operations, you should spend about 30% of your time on recruiting,” which is weird because they’re like, “I have HR people that do that.” I’m like, “You have HR people that have 100 other things to do besides figuring out why Indeed isn’t working.”

Be somewhere the message isn’t so diluted. Click To Tweet

That tips more toward the marketing side of things as opposed to the recruiting side of things. HR is good when you’ve got somebody close and in the door. That’s when HR is good. Everything up until that person makes contact with the HR department is all the marketing side of things. How are you getting people to the door? Once they’re through the door, they go into a different process.

Once you’ve got this story and some stuff, what are some things that you’ve seen effective? You had mentioned being mobile-first but are there social media platforms that do well? Is there a certain type of maybe video content, written content, or memes? What are some things that you’ve seen that have been good at helping attract good people?

A lot of times it is thinking and shelling up where people aren’t expecting it. Everyone’s on Indeed and it’s oversaturated. I’m sure you’ve heard of this platform called Nextdoor. The CEO was just on Shark Tank a few weeks ago, which was fascinating. It took them ten years to get enough neighborhoods together to turn it into something.

Next door is great though because it’s so local. It’s like neighborhood to neighborhood. There are people on there. There’s an audience on there but you’re not competing with people 20 or 30 miles away. You’re zoned in on your neighborhoods. You could expand that search out for a couple of miles around your neighborhoods. We found that to be efficient and effective because you can micro-target as many neighborhoods as you want but it becomes efficient to target.

The takeaway for me is to think outside the box with the platforms that you already know and use. I don’t use Nextdoor but my wife does. I know a lot about Nextdoor. I would’ve never thought about that. It’s great that you have something that’s worked.

It’s worked but it starts with, “Let’s give this a try.” It’s not like we’re one of many. We’re 1 of 1 if we’re talking about recruiting technicians. We’re 1 of 1 on that platform. It puts us at the front of the line. We’ll put it that way.

Marketing 101 is you got to stand out. You got to be different. The whole point of marketing is to differentiate yourself a little bit. If you’re the only one there, you’re different. You don’t have to do anything different, just be in a different place and you can get great results from it

Be somewhere where the message isn’t so diluted. That’s the other thing too. This goes back to a few years ago. If you were the first ones using Google Ads, you had free reign. You were running ads for $1 a click and making money. All of a sudden, everybody got real smart at it and that $1 a click is $10, $20 sometimes $30 to get somebody over to your website.

People are like, “Google Ads doesn’t work anymore.” I’m like, “It still works. It’s just competitive now. Everybody’s doing it. There’s a lot of money flowing through there.” It’s being efficient, looking in those areas, and getting the brand story together. We’re looking for those other areas where no one else is looking.

It’s good. It got me thinking. Google got more expensive, which means you have to get more efficient. You have to get more effective in order for your new customer to be the same. I see that a lot of times it used to work. A lot of employers will stick with what worked last year or even before the pandemic. They’re like, “It worked before. Why isn’t it working now?”

When it comes to recruiting, the pandemic has shifted the way people think about work. If you haven’t shifted then you’re already behind the times. When you’re helping these guys recruit techs, what have you found to be a good way to make that transition from marketing to, “It’s time to interview the guy or it’s time to hire the guy?” Is there a process or tool that you recommend to your clients to say, “Here’s how you can make that be an effective transition?”

BCC 75 Philip | Brand Story
Brand Story: It’s either you’re going to invest and you’re going to lean in and you’re going to learn everything there is to know, or you’re going to trust somebody that can actually help you.

 

We’re about getting people to the door. We’ll assess that quality. You’ve got a model or a platform to help on the interview side once somebody’s through the door. That’s not our area of expertise.

I thought I’d ask because you see a lot of it. One thing I can say is to treat it like a customer lead. I ask people all the time, “How long when a customer lead comes in, would you let it sit?” I’m like, “Five minutes.” Why is it that you let an app that can’t sit for seven days?

That is a great point because at the end of the day, they’re both equal revenue to the company. The technician has to service the job to turn that into revenue. A new customer is the one that has a problem that needs to be solved that turns into revenue. If we’re looking at it from both avenues are revenue-producing, how long are you going to delay that revenue by not jumping on this?

Give me the quick little spiel on WorkWave and how you can help work with our readers. Talk to me about your free giveaway.

I’m going to start with the free marketing assessment first because that’s the easy part. To your audience, I’m happy to do an analysis of your recruitment marketing, your franchise leads gen operation marketing, or even your new business market. I will take a look at it and give you our two cents as a mechanic that can pop the hood, hear the noise, understand what’s needed and be able to diagnose it. That’s what we can do. We’ll do a free analysis. We’re happy to do that for your readers.

WorkWave is a large operational software company. They’re in several large verticals like pest control, lawn care, residential and commercial cleaning, HVAC, plumbing, and fire safety. At the end of the day, WorkWave is an operational software company for field service businesses. It’s about any industry all the way from routing to billing to the operational software and all of that stuff. The marketing services side is all about that new customer, new technician, and that acquisition strategy to help you grow.

It is a one-stop-shop. You could start, grow with you and then get into other areas as needed. You’re there to support them in a lot of different areas.

We’ve got programs for new businesses. On brand new business, where do I do? We have a product called Instant Website Builder. If you’re in a field service vertical, you don’t have a website, you’ve got ten minutes and you don’t even know how to code, you can have a website in ten minutes. We’ve already written it for the industry. All you have to do is put your address in, put in your contact information, and maybe upload your logo but we built it to make it easy.

“I need something online. I don’t want to figure it out. I don’t have enough money to hire a web guy.” We built this. For $79 a month, you can have this website that you can turn right on all the way up through the bespoke marketing services that are like, “I’ve got 80 franchisees in the market and they all need more leads. How do we put our program together to satisfy all of them?”

When you’re offering a free digital marketing audit, it’s legit. You guys know what you’re doing because you work with small companies all the way up to the enterprise level. You’re able to take advantage of that free audit. Even if you’re working with an agency, I would imagine you don’t want to change. There are so many other ways that they could work with you and get some extra value from you guys.

We work with companies all the time that have outgrown their current agency and that’s perfectly fine. We’ve been in that boat. We signed out a client who said, “We hit the limits of what they’re able to do. We need a different thinking and a better strategy.” It’s very small, large and everything is in the middle.

Philip, I enjoyed our conversation. I will make sure that our audience can take advantage of that free audit. Thank you so much. I love hearing from other marketing experts who are like, “Recruiting is a marketing activity. You need to think about marketing.” Thanks for being here.

Thank you. I appreciate it.

 

Important Links

 

About Philip St. Jacques

BCC 75 Philip | Brand StoryBrothers Philip and Michael started St. Jacques Marketing in 1991. St. Jacques has grown significantly and now specializes in closing the gap between marketing and sales and is a brand of marketing thought leadership. Their insight-based strategic process is the hallmark of St. Jacques Marketing’s success today that’s core to the St. Jacques brand of marketing leadership. Understanding that quality research and analysis delivers insights that leads to distinct positioning is the cornerstone of marketing success.

Philip is the front-facing, thought leader for St. Jacques Marketing and is sought after for many speaking opportunities. Marketing is a fractured and complex process and one of the most complex processes to scale. As social, mobile, and digital channels evolve and mature, how do brands provide leadership and how do brands embrace new strategies. These challenges are top of mind for brands large and small.

He is also the cultural leader for St. Jacques, creating an environment of belonging, inclusion and appreciation that creates a family atmosphere.

“St. Jacques has a culture where everyone can feel a sense of ownership and is fulfilled professionally. We put no limits on growth and have yet to reach what’s even possible.”

Specialties: digital lead generation strategies, brand strategy positioning, local and regional marketing strategies, franchise brand marketing, inbound content strategies, and operations.

Change Your Results With This Single Shift With David Taylor-Klaus

· ·

BCC 76 | Work Life Balance

 

Work-life balance isn’t as simple as separating work from personal life. Balancing both aspects of your life would only be successful if you learn how to make them work together. David Taylor-Klaus shatters the very concept of work-life balance for us in this conversation with Ryan Englin. David discusses how a single shift in a leader’s mindset can lead to a series of changes in themselves and their employees that will benefit how they balance their work and their lives. Work culture is dependent on the company’s leader. Leaders make a huge impact by providing motivation. It is a chain of positivity. Listen in and learn how this shift takes place in practice!

—

Change Your Results With This Single Shift

We often have a lot of people on our show that talk about the mindset shifts that as entrepreneurs we need to make to get to the next level in our business. I am excited to speak to our guest because that is exactly what he does. You may have heard the term work-life balance. You might even believe that work-life balance is possible. Our guest is going to shatter that idea for us. He is going to talk about why putting work at the beginning of work-life balance is the biggest mistake or lie we have ever been told. I am going to dig right in. I am excited to welcome our guest, David Taylor-Klaus, to the show.

—

David, welcome to the show.

I am glad to be here.

I am excited to have you and where this is going to go. Tell me what is the biggest myth about your industry or the work that you do?

The biggest myth is that people believe coaches are focused on work-life balance. Saying that phrase makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I loathe that term because I realized that the industry has created that term to fool workers into over-calibrating towards work and losing contact with everything else that is important. In other words, they get so focused on work that life does not ever happen. Here is why it is asinine. Whose idea was it to put the word work first?

It changes the way we think about it. There is a professor out in Texas, James Campbell Quick, who did research, which is going to match your previous work experience. The average workweek is now 70 hours. Our job is to try to jam life into the cracks around it. That never happens. You never get around to it because you are so busy. If you are one of the truckers or you are the one behind the desk, it does not matter. Seventy hours does not leave you enough waking time to have a real life.

That is more time than I spend sleeping if I sleep a healthy number of hours, which most of us don’t.

BCC 76 | Work Life Balance
Work Life Balance: If half of our waking time is contributed to work, then we have to make that investment an effective investment that leaves us time to actually have a life.

 

If half of our waking time is contributed to work, then we have got to make that effective investment that leaves us time to have a life.

Why do you think that that has been perpetuated? I left corporate years ago and that was the one thing that they drilled into our heads like, “We want you to have work-life balance. We want you to find the balance when you are working 90 hours a week.” Why do you think that we do this?

It is because the lie has worked. People have gone on believing that to balance two things, you have to separate them. You can’t do that. You can’t separate work and life anymore. It is not a nice, convenient, tidy little bundle. The longer we believe it, the longer we buy into it and say, “We will play with our kids tomorrow. I will see my wife this weekend.” As long as we buy into that crap, it is going to perpetuate the pieces. Since we can’t separate them, this is about making life and work together but here is the other thing, family, faith, community, and kids.

There are so many things that are part of life, but why is work the only other thing included in the term that we use? It should be something closer to life rhythm and creating a rhythm between all the things that are important in your world. That is the game. When we talk to the folks who work for us about wanting them to have a whole life, we have to think about that, “How am I creating rhythm as the owner and leader? How am I creating rhythm in my world and then look at how am I creating space for the folks that are making my company possible? How do I make it possible for them to have a life?”

We have got to be the example and often, leaders are the bad example. We show people, “I am available 24/7.” We have got a client and they tell me, “If anybody calls me anytime 24/7, I answer the phone and expect them to do the same.” I am like, “Where is the balance in that?”

That is not healthy.

You talk about rhythm. We do a lot of work where we start to understand the different generations because when we are looking at hiring and building teams, we all think differently. I am a Gen X-er. As a Gen X, I am hoping that I teach my kids the things that I learned the hard way. I do not want them to go through the same stuff I did. We hope we are doing it better. I am not sure that we are but I do think that a lot of the modern workforce has shifted from this work-life balance idea and has gone to work-life integration, which I do not know is any healthier.

You can't separate work and life anymore. Click To Tweet

There is an important language change. I would never let it play out where the word work comes first. It makes our intention and orientation backward, even changing that and getting people to think about their life first. There is a great quote from Rev Run, “Never get so busy making a living that you forget to make a life.” By calling it work-life balance, we make that the outcome. Words create worlds. We are screwing ourselves by calling it work-life anything.

How do we overcome this and change our mindset on this? What are some things people can do? How do they make this happen or break down that belief?

The fish rots from the head down so it is the owner or the leader that has to model this. It starts by naming what is important and looking, “What are the things that are important to me?” I have a firm belief that your calendar does not lie. I can look at your calendar and tell you what is important to you because if it is on your calendar, it is not important. It is not going to get done if that says, “This is what time I leave the office. This is what time I am going to be in church, at dinner, or exercise.”

What happens first to an entrepreneur? The three things that fall off first are sleep, nutrition, and exercise. If you are not making time and space for these things to happen, they do not happen. You have had several guests who have talked about Mike Michalowicz and Profit First. It is the same idea. If you do not set up your accounts and structure so that you take the profit first and pay yourself, you are not going to. The calendar is the same window into what you are allowing to be important for you.

I am thinking through a bunch of entrepreneurs that I know and even me at different stages of my life and thinking, “That is great but you have not seen my calendar.” There is no room for those things. I would love to put them on there but there is no room. That goes back to your original point.

That is exactly what happens. There is the challenge. They are not on there because you did not put them on there. There is no room on there because you allowed it to get that crowded. You are answering the phone 24/7 because you are allowing that to happen. You are not training your team and training your customers. This is a completely different mindset than most of us were raised with. We were raised with this effed-up lie that the fiercer the dragon, the sweeter the victory. That is not true. The fiercer the dragon, the bloodier you get. Bludgeoning, powering, and hammering through things is how you die young.

I have two quick examples. One, I remember this guy. He was so excited. He is an entrepreneur. He had been grinding away for years and finally got over the $1 million revenue mark, which is a big deal for a lot of entrepreneurs. He had seven employees and he was loving it. He was like, “I finally made it.” We were sitting down talking about this and he goes, “I work about 70 hours a week. In 2021, my personal take-home or income is $72,000.”

BCC 76 | Work Life Balance
Work Life Balance: Industry has created the term “work-life balance” to fool workers into over-calibrating towards work and losing contact with everything else.

 

Originally, I was thinking, “This is cool. I am jealous.” I am like, “I am not jealous at all because he is putting in so much effort.” You can make $72,000 way easier than being an entrepreneur. There are much easier ways to do that. This was his thing. I was like, “I have no desire to even want your business.” Many times, people get hung up on this revenue number like it is a vanity number. Revenue means nothing. I would rather have a very profitable business with lots of free time.

That leads me to the second story. I have another friend who moved up with his family. He is like, “I want to live on the coast. It is very expensive. I get it but that is where I want to be because that is where I spend time with my family.” We are talking and I can hear there is some shame in his voice as he is about to tell me what is going on. It is sad because this is what you are talking about.

He goes, “I have got a business now where I work 5 to 7 hours a week. I spend all my time with my young kids. I get to take my wife out every day. Do I have the big house, the riches, and all this other stuff? No, but I get to live where I want to live, play where I want to play, and spend all the time I want with my family. I do not tell a lot of people that because there is shame associated with admitting that, which is sad.” I was like, “I am so jealous of you. That is so awesome.”

There is shame in the idea of, “I have got the business structured so well that I am redundant. It can run without me.” Yet that is the goal. You have had a lot of guests on your series that are talking about exiting the company. If you are working 70 hours a week and your ass is in the truck, you got a company that is very hard to sell. If you have got a company that you can run in 5 to 7 hours a week, you can sell that and make some money off that because it is no longer reliant upon your grinding.

I can’t tell you how many people I have met who are in their early 60s and they are like, “I am ready to sell.” They call me and they are like, “I need you to help me build a team. I need you to get me out of the business. No one wants to buy it because I created a job for myself and the number of hours they are working.” I tell people, “That is going to be hard. You have got 40 years of doing it one way. For you to let go of that team is going to be tough.”

Here is the scary part. This goes back to your first story. This is a stat from after the fiscal readjustment we had in ‘08 and ‘09. Only 7% of companies that reached the seven-figure mark ever reached it a second time. That is because they have done it by grinding. There are no systems, structures, or processes. They are the system, structure, and process. Their butts are in the van. That is not sustainable. They say, “We did it,” and then they crash. We can wait until we decide to sell it. The broker or the consultant says, “You need a team or you are never getting out of this.” You can build the team then or at the beginning so you can be like the guy in your second story.

There is a mindset shift that has to happen but there are also some actions that people can take. Let’s talk about some of the actions they can take to grow their team and even themselves. How do you do that when it is not something you are accustomed to, not something you were raised to do, or it is not a habit? How do you get started doing something like that?

If you want to grow your company, grow your people. And if you want to grow your people, grow yourself. Leadership always starts from you. Click To Tweet

Part of this is changing the way you build and lead your team. Let’s start with how you play with the folks already in your company. I have a firm belief and I have seen this from experience that being listened to feels so much like being loved that people can scarcely tell the difference. We often get so busy and intent on making things better that we forget that we are working with people who want to feel like they are heard. One of the quickest ways to kill trust inside of a company is to make your employees feel like you are not listening.

You and I were talking before. The idea of continuous quality improvement has poisoned the mindset of entrepreneurs. It is not that I am not a fan of lean manufacturing. I am but as you pointed out, it is a process, not a mindset. It has poisoned our minds so that every time we are listening to an employee, too many of us are thinking, “Let me correct that. That is not quite right.” Most of our time is spent correcting and redirecting. The problem is they do not feel heard, especially when there is so much of what they are saying.

An example is when you are listening to your employee for what is broken, what is wrong, and what I need to fix and tweak that. All their feelings are corrected. That erodes trust and increases turnover. All of us know how expensive it is to bring in a new employee, train them and get them up to speed. That costs time, effort, energy, and money. The more we can grow them, keep them and make them feel trusted and included, the less expensive it is for our payroll. The piece is when you are listening to somebody, it is a simple shift in mindset that you can practice. That is listening for something that you agree with or like or that you can build on.

It is listening for something positive and saying out loud, “What I like about that is this.” Tell them what was good, right, or on target about what they said and then add and. “And here is how we build on it and what we can do with it.” You are not making it thinly veiled, “What I like about that is this but it is wrong.” It is incumbent upon the owner or the leader to say, “What I like about is this.” Find something genuine and then say, “And this is what we can add and shift.” It is looking for something positive so they feel like they are part of something, especially with how many of us are leading teams that are now no longer all in-house.

As you were telling that story about listening to your team, it reminds me of something. This is something we coach. Especially in my world, I see so many times that entrepreneurs think about their people as an asset. We have convinced them, “Your people are your greatest asset.” When you hear the word asset, what do you think? You think of a thing, a machine, equipment, real estate, or property. We call people human capital or our assets. We think of them as things or cogs in a machine. What do you do when a cog breaks? You replace the cog.

When you were talking, you got me thinking. When you are talking to people, remember that they are human beings. They have hopes, goals, dreams, and all that mushy stuff that entrepreneurs do not want to talk about. It is so important because if you do not care that Bobby is going through a nasty divorce, that Jimmy’s kid has a health diagnosis, or that Susan is fighting with her spouse all the time because she wants to move back home and it is causing issues at home because she wants to be back to where her family is, you are never going to get your people to care about your business.

Your business is your dream. If you do not enroll these people and treat them like humans, they are going to help somebody else build their dream.

BCC 76 | Work Life Balance
Work Life Balance: It’s not always about learning more about the finances or learning more about operations or learning more about processes. It’s learning more about yourself.

 

I love what you said about listening to people and not with the intention to reply. They would be like, “I can’t wait to get my few cents in.” Listening to what is not being said is what I tell people all the time. We are talking to our people, listening to our people, and learning from our people. You said something, “As leaders, it is our responsibility to continue to grow as well.” Talk about that a little bit more.

One of the things I say a lot is, “If you want to grow your company, grow your people. If you want to grow your people, grow yourself.” Leadership always starts with you. You are never done. It is not always about learning more about the finances, operations, or the process. It is learning more about yourself. The more you learn about yourself, the less you will find you are doing things that do not serve and work for you. Back to that lie of work-life balance, so much happens as we convince ourselves that what we are doing is meaningful and meaningful to us but we can only live that lie for so long.

Gay Hendricks wrote a book called The Big Leap. He talks about the idea of your zone of genius versus your zone of excellence. We spend our time doing things we are good at and we may even be excellent at but it is not our zone of genius. It is the thing that we are best at and the thing that we are the only one in the company that can do it. The better we get to know ourselves and what lights us up, the more we can spend our time doing that and growing our team to do all those other things.

Back to your example in your second story of the guy who is working 5 to 7 weeks running a company. He is spending those 5 to 7 hours in his zone of genius. That is the best possible position to lead a company from. I had a technology company for fifteen years. I did the books for the first year. It was not my zone of excellence. It certainly was not my zone of genius. It was my zone of incompetence.

The only reason we had a second year is that my partner started doing the books before we eventually hired somebody to do the books. I was terrible. I had no idea what I was doing. I could spend a lot of time getting better at individual tasks or areas of understanding of a company or learn enough to manage the numbers and the people running the numbers. I can put my focus on what I should be doing and what I am supposed to be doing because that is what I am a genius at.

I tell clients, “What is the thing that you would have to pay $10,000 an hour to have someone else do that you do? That is the stuff you stay focused on.” How many times do you need an entrepreneur who is answering the phones or driving a truck? I am like, “You are doing $50 an hour of work. You get the job. Even at 70 hours a week, you have only got so many hours.” You are going to max out or burn out. That happens too.

I am working on myself and my people. Why do you think so many people get stuck? What is a way to not get stuck? That is my question because I picture this, “I am growing, learning and doing all these new things but I got to get back to running my business.” How do we make it part of the mindset shift, our habits, and our daily routines so that we are constantly growing ourselves and our people?

Your business is your dream. Click To Tweet

You said the perfect word in there, habit. We do not have habits of behavior. We have habits of thinking and the habits of thinking are the hardest to break. When you get into brain science, our brains are designed for consistency. In other words, if you have a certain thought pattern or behavior, your brain wants to keep doing that. That is the way that neurons in the brain work. We do not have to nerd out and get into brain science.

Here is the thing to change a habit. Our brains suck at stopping something. We are good at replacing something that does not serve with something that does. In other words, it is building a new habit. That depends on who researched you. You read 21 to 30 days at a minimum of as much as 90 days. That means if you want to create a new habit of thinking, mindset, or behavior, back to your calendar, this is something you have to do every day. To create a shift, it is small actions repeated with frequency for a duration of time.

I was listening to previous episodes. If you want to change the way you see money and get out of that scarcity mindset into an abundance mindset, then that is something you have to keep in front of you every day. Lindsey Vonn, who is an Olympic skier, wanted to get better at jumping because she hated jumping and the sport that she was competing in changed to start including jumps. She hated it. She was terrified of it. It is something as simple as a little Post-it pad.

She had little Post-its in her locker, bag, bathroom, and everywhere that said, “I love jumping.” It is helping her take on a different mindset. She spent all the money on a sports psychologist and the coach just said, “Here is a pack of Post-its.” That made all the difference. Those are three gold medals in extreme downhill. The idea is how do you keep the goal in front of you long enough with enough repetition to change and create a new habit of thinking?

It is almost like creating these little traps and things to jog your mind for a second. It reminds me of a client we have. They are in construction. All the guys in the field wear safety vests. They bought everybody all-new safety vests with a clear plastic pocket over the chest. The guys are like, “What is this clear plastic pocket for?” Right above the pocket, it says, “I work safely for.” The idea was for them to put a picture of their family in it. They are not looking at it every day but they are seeing everybody else that they are working with and all the people they work safely for. It makes them go, “I got to work safely but I got to make sure that they work safely too because I want them to go back to those people.”

That is a structure that helps bring it to the front of the mind throughout the day. It is brilliant. It is a great way to build a new habit of thinking.

I know that you have got some thoughts around values too. I talk a lot about values inside of an organization in the work I do. Every organization has values whether they are written on the break room wall or not. Talk to me a little bit about that. How do values align with leadership? How do we hold people accountable to them? How do we use that as a way to make sure we are all moving in the same direction as we start growing our people?

BCC 76 | Work Life Balance
Work Life Balance: Start following some coaches on social media. There is so much good information from coaches that are serving leaders in serving entrepreneurs. You can get a ton of information for free.

 

Let me apologize in advance for starting off with the negative. The problem with those values that are posted on the wall in the break room is that a precious few of those companies can answer the question, “What behaviors are visible when those values are being lived?” We confuse common language with common understanding all the time. You have got a value of trust or responsiveness for your company.

If I ask people inside the company what trust means, there is more than one answer, then there is a problem because each person thinks, “What I believe trust means for me may be wildly different than you.” That is going to be the case across the team. If or when everybody on the team is clear about what behaviors are present when those values are being lived, then those values have meaning. When you talk about holding people accountable, you can’t hold them accountable for what has not been named.

The idea of accountability has four simple questions and this is great around the values. Ask the employee what was supposed to happen and let them answer it. When you walk up and say, “You were supposed to do this,” they have already shut down. Ask them what was supposed to happen and then what actually happened. They have now drawn awareness to what the gap was.

What are you going to do to make it right? How are we going to make sure this thing does not happen again? The first step to any of that is them knowing what they are being held accountable to. That is where we fall down. Spoiler alert, we are not clear on our values even when we have articulated them as to what behaviors are present when we live those. If we are not, how do we know what we are holding ourselves accountable to?

I like what Simon Sinek says. He is like, “The values inside of your organization should all be a verb.” That way, you can tell when someone does them. If they are not a verb, it is not a good value. Jim Collins even goes a step and says, “There is this permission to play values like trust, integrity, honesty and all that.” You would have to test people you invite to your team for trustworthiness. We shouldn’t do these things but we do them all the time. Why? It is because, especially with the values, we have to look at ourselves. We are the first person that has to change when we want something different. We can only change ourselves. We got to be the leader. When we go to values, keeping trust is so much easier than figuring out what it is that we value.

It is easier to pull those aspirational words off of a list, have them done by a graphic designer, and put them up on the wall. Roy Disney said, “When your values are clear, decision-making becomes easier.” For every single one of us that had ever started, grown, and run a business, decision-making is our lifeblood. The better decisions we make, the better results we get. Get your values articulated clearly and internalized. Know what it is that is important to you then you can filter out the things that aren’t.

We could keep going forever on this. I have so many questions but I want to make sure that our readers get the value out of it. I can picture a lot of people reading this and going, “David, you make it sound so stinking easy. I have done this stuff and worked on this. I have not been able to make this happen.” You have a very specific prescription for people that want to get help and get somebody to help them do this because professional athletes have it and everybody else. You talk about Lindsey Vonn. Most of them have more than one. Tell me about that. What is something they can go do if they want to do this but maybe they have struggled in the past or they do not know how to get started?

To create shifts, you need to take small actions repeated with frequency for a duration of time. Click To Tweet

The more extensive answer is to get a coach. There are so many folks that provide leadership coaching. If I want to get better at any sport, I am going to hire a coach because I do not know what I do not know. The reason coaches are so powerful for leaders is that we do not see ourselves as we are. We have a warped view of ourselves in the mirror. A coach’s job is to help you see how you are being out in the world and help you shift that in a way that makes sense for you. Here is the first thing. I loathe the idea of sending people to social media but I am going to do it anyway.

Start following some coaches on social media. There is so much good information from coaches that are serving leaders and entrepreneurs. You can get a ton of information for free. If there is high-value information at a low cost or free, hell yeah but start listening, watching, reading, and looking at how you can improve who you are being and how you are leading. The better decisions, the better leader you are. This is about working on your decision-making. The more of that comes from your values and the truth about who you are, the easier your life becomes and the better your results become. If you are not ready to hire a coach, start following them.

Let’s figure it out for those people that are ready and want to either follow someone or maybe even reach out to you. How do people get ahold of you? You have got a free offer for them as well.

I have got a tool online that I wish I had when I started as an entrepreneur years ago. There is a quiz online at DTKQuiz.com. It gives you a chance to take a test of where you are along the curve of living, loving, and leading at your best. It is simple and easy to do. It takes you just a couple of minutes and you get good information back. If there is more of a conversation you want to have, I am available. This is not going to put you into heavy hammer email sales. This is an opportunity for you to get a better sense of how you are doing in your life from a different perspective.

David, I have enjoyed this conversation. I can’t believe we are done already. I feel like we just got started. There is so much to dig in here. I have enjoyed it a ton. Thank you for being here and for some of that impactful insight on being able to change the way you think enough so that not only you can become a better leader but create better leaders inside of your organization as well. David, thanks for being here.

I enjoyed it. Take care, Ryan.

 

Important Links

 

About David Taylor-Klaus

BCC 76 | Work Life BalanceMy clients are entrepreneurs & senior executives achieving success professionally but seeing that growth come at the expense of personal fulfillment.

You know you’re ready to work with me when you catch yourself thinking things like:
• My spouse hates my company!
• The company is making money but I’M not.
• I thought my company would have been farther along by now.
• I don’t know what’s next.
• How much more can I take?

I get it. I’ve been there. And I promise it doesn’t have to be that way. I turned around my life AND my business and I’ve been helping entrepreneurs and senior executives do the same thing. Now in my 3rd decade as a serial entrepreneur, the last 9 as a coach, I have thousands of hours helping entrepreneurs and executives succeed professionally AND personally.

My process helps my clients in three ways:
• Mindset Coaching to grow the person
• Business Coaching to grow the company
• Team Coaching to grow performance

My newest book, Mindset Mondays with DTK: 52 Ways to REWIRE Your Thinking and Transform Your Life, (available as of September 1, 2020: https://amzn.to/2CWnUdd) is a user’s guide to changing your mind. In it, I’ve woven well-known quotes from authors, artists, coaches, and other visionaries with engaging stories to inspire new ways of thinking. At the end of each of the 52 chapters, you’ll find an interactive section called REWIRE, which includes provocative questions, thought experiments, and prompts designed to deepen your connection with the material and to make the learning stick. REWIRE is an acronym for Reflect | Experiment | Write | Investigate | Revise | Expand — a structured yet playful approach that integrates and reinforces new ways of thinking, being, and doing — all in service of increasing cognitive flexibility and creating meaningful, lasting change.

Mindset Mondays will help you recognize that you always have a choice: you’re not stuck, you’re not bound by a fixed set of capacity and capability, and you don’t have to be at the whim of unconscious beliefs. You ARE limitless!

As my clients master their mindset, they master their career and they master their money.

My clients learn to build, run AND grow profitable businesses while raising a thriving family and living a wildly fulfilling life.

To get a sense of my approach, download my free book “This Is Your Wake-Up Call!” at DTKcoaching.com/get-your-copy/

I gladly offer a Complimentary “Wake-Up! Call” – a Laser-Coaching call to see if we’re a good fit. Call or email me to set up a time!

Why Marketing Should Run Your Hiring Process With Jason Piasecki And Richard Witham

· ·

BCC 74 | Hiring Process

 

When talking about a company’s hiring process, the HR department comes to mind. If you face some challenges when acquiring and retaining people, perhaps you need to try a refreshing strategy. Featured in this episode is Jason Piasecki, a Partner and the CEO of Revel. He discusses the benefits of letting marketers run your recruitment process. Joining him is Richard Witham of Motion Dynamics Corporation, who shares how Jason and his team helped them set up this unique hiring process. Together, the two talk about the fruits of their partnership and how they stay on top of the rapid workflow.

—

Why Marketing Should Run Your Hiring Process With Jason Piasecki And Richard Witham

It’s no secret that I believe that when it comes to recruiting, it is best left in the hands of your marketing team and not your HR team. We’re excited to talk to our guests. We’ve got two guests in this episode. This is something we’ve never done before. We’re going to be talking to a marketing expert who shares that same belief when it comes to recruiting, and we have one of his clients who has been on the receiving end of the incredible results that they’ve been able to generate.

Our first guest is Jason Piasecki. He is a Partner and the CEO of Revel. They are a marketing company that does some great things when it comes to helping companies better recruit talent. Joining us is Richard Witham. He’s with Motion Dynamics Corporation. He has been on the receiving end of some of the work that Jason and his team have done to help them recruit better people. We’re going to have a great conversation about the idea that marketing can help transform your recruiting results.

—

Jason, Richard, welcome to the show.

We’re happy to be here.

Thanks, Ryan. I’m happy to be here too.

I’m excited about this conversation. As we get started here, tell me what the biggest myth in your mind is when it comes to hiring.

The biggest thing that we see as a marketing agency is that manufacturers and B2B companies don’t need a creative campaign to attract employees and differentiate themselves. A lot of times, we find it’s just business as usual. It’s understanding that there’s a seat at the table for marketing when it comes to their recruitment.

You’re saying the biggest myth is that they think that they don’t need to market. They just need to go get people. Let’s dive into that a little bit more. I love that because we have our book coming out, Hire Better People Faster, and that’s one of its tenets. We often think that hiring needs to be in the HR function, but you’re saying that you’ve had great success in its marketing function.

We typically find that we have the best success with our clients when it’s a collaborative effort, and HR is at the table with leadership, and they’re talking to their employees. There’s an opportunity for a marketing partner to get involved either in an in-house team or an outsource agency.

We get to have both of you for this interview. We get to have the marketing seat and the client’s seat on this. We’ll bounce back and forth as we go through this. Why marketing? Why have that as an important part of this? I’ll let the marketing guy go with this one.

That’s an easy one for me. Everyone has a unique story and employer brand that is theirs alone. Often, people think that they have to attract employees at the expense of other companies out there when the truth is, by telling your story and speaking about why you exist, you can attract the right type of employees and get more qualified candidates through the door. The paradigm has shifted where the power is in the employee’s hands now, so as employers, we need to appeal to them on their own terms and highlight why we’re an attractive choice for them.

 

By telling your story and speaking about why you exist, you can attract the right type of employees and get more qualified candidates. Click To Tweet

 

Richard, you’ve brought in Jason. You’ve brought in the marketing seat and made sure that you’ve looked at this from that proactively. Tell us a little bit of your why. Why would employees want to work for you? Then, let’s dig into how that translates into the marketing realm of it.

It’s an easy question to answer. For me and from our perspective, we understand our product. It’s a technical product, and that’s what makes it unique. We’re manufacturing, but most people, even locally, who aren’t familiar with our company don’t understand the uniqueness and importance of the products that we manufacture. They contribute to life-saving efforts. That’s easy for us to understand.

We’re engineers. We’re technical people. We don’t know how to market that, and that’s where Revel comes in. It has been a unique relationship as we’ve grown up together in the same community. We’ve worked together for years. They understand us, and they know how to get that word out differently than we would have thought.

Help me understand this, then. You’re an engineer. You ought to be able to get engineer buddies.

We’re not the most social people.

I wasn’t going to say that. You’re on here. I figured you were at least so. How is marketing going to attract engineers?

It’s presenting our product from a different perspective than we would’ve thought. We’ve always tried to fly under the radar. We were a small company. Our marketing was truthfully at $0 for a long time. We didn’t do social media campaigns, billboards, or anything like that. We were an under-the-radar company. Our target market is R&D engineers.

Over the course of time, mostly through word of mouth, we built a reputation in the industry that positions us where we want to be. This is thinking in a different way than we’ve ever had to attract people to the team. It’s a language that I don’t speak. Jason and the team at Revel understand us better than we understand ourselves in a lot of ways.

If I could add one thing to that, Richard is being very humble. One thing that is true of a lot of manufacturing companies that are looking to recruit and retain employees is they’re not a smaller company by any means. They’re 150 employees looking to grow and add to their team. They’re humble guys and gals. They don’t want to pound on their chest and talk about how great they are, so it’s our job as their marketing partner to talk to their leadership team, survey their employees, and find out what those things are that make Motion Dynamics a unique place for people to work. We were able to do that in a genuine way and share that with the outside world.

 

BCC 74 | Hiring Process
Hiring Process: Marketers take a candidate and hand them off to HR as marketing does with sales. That type of alignment is critical to success.

 

I’ve got two questions, one for Jason and one for Richard. Jason, I’m going to ask you to go first. I’ve heard you talk about being able to pull out their messaging because you know them well. I don’t know if you have the biggest thing that you’ve ever done or got the best results, but what is one thing you can share with our audience where you’re like, “We did this for them, and it got some great results. It helped move the thing forward?”

Richard, I’m going to give you the question so you can start thinking about it. With what Jason’s team has done, how did that help you with retaining employees? That’s more than half the battle a lot of times. You hire them, but how do you keep them? I truly believe that with the right marketing message and understanding of who you are and communicating, you keep the right people when you attract the right people. I’d love to know from you about some of the real-world things you’ve seen happen. Jason, I’ll let you go first.

The biggest thing that we did was we got everyone in the same room. We had leadership, HR, employees operations, and our team there. We asked questions and then listened. The emotional culture that sets them apart is when we made that front and center with their employer branding campaign.

Their company leadership keeps their employees updated with weekly team meetings. They have a workout facility on site. Not many companies have that, so that’s a differentiator. They also do fun things like cookouts and catered lunches. Another differentiator is their modern manufacturing facility. These are all things that we played up in their campaign through photos and videos and brought out there to their potential employees.

We ran an integrated campaign across traditional media. There were billboards and social media ads. We beefed up their careers page and did a company video where we had not only the company leadership talking about all this, but then we had their employees saying it in their own words. We also tagged on some internal communication where we were able to highlight a great referral program that they have. All those things help with retention.

We’ve had over 50 job applications and 4,500 visits to their careers page in the first three months of the campaign. The message is getting seen, and it’s driving the right type of people to interview. The last thing I’ll add is Motion Dynamics has an unusually high conversion rate when they get someone, and they make it to the point where they apply and convert them to employees. Our job as marketers is to take a candidate and hand them off to HR as marketing does with sales. That type of alignment is critical to success.

Richard, I know we got your question sitting there, but Jason said some stuff that we want to dig into a little bit. There’s one thing you said there that I could think the audience say, “That’s probably not so real.” You said you got the employees talking about it. Tell us a little bit more about that.

One of the things that are evident with the social media that has been out is employees are going on their liking, commenting, and sharing the post. That’s organic interaction with the campaign as they’re seeing it. From an employee’s point of view, it shows that their company is investing in growth, and they’re proud to see the ads out there. The fact that they’re interacting with the comments is proof that it’s ringing a chord with the employees.

I love that because I know if you can get the employees talking and chatting about it, we’ve turned the corner. We’re off. I’ve seen it happen several times. Sometimes I know that when I say something like, “We get the employees engaged in building the brand and attracting the right people,” they’re like, “I can’t get them to hardly show up for work.” When you touched in on that, I was like, “We got to know a little bit more.” You got them posting and commenting. You got them engaged in it because they knew that they had a great brand and a great company. I love it. Richard, let’s turn to your question now. How has this helped with the retention of your employees?

 

Every company's purpose is different. That's why employees dedicate their careers to fulfilling the company's missions. They want to work with a company with a higher purpose. Click To Tweet

 

What has helped the most and is spawned from Revel’s homework was a period of time during the introductory phase where Revel did a lot of surveying of our employees. We got to interpret that feedback. It was so beneficial to us because, as Jason said, we’re now a 180-person team here at Motion Dynamics. That’s quite large.

Our number one priority has always been maintaining culture. For many years, we were a company of fewer than 50 people. Many of our team members are comfortable walking up to our president’s office and sharing direct feedback on anything, whether production-related or about their role at the company. That has become more difficult to maintain when you get to the size we are now.

It prompted us to start asking questions about vacation policies or compensation or the different benefits we offer here. We surveyed our team, listened to their feedback, and made significant changes that are tailored towards not the group of 50 people that have been here for 10 to 20 to some upwards of 25 years but listen to the people that have been here for less than 5 years or maybe even 1 year. It has allowed us to tap into our team like never before, and that’s been extremely valuable for us.

Maybe I missed it, but did you say you used to be 50 employees, and now you’re 180 employees?

For many years, we were less than 50 up until the early 2000s. Jason mentioned a number of 150. We were 150 employees towards the end of the summer of 2021. We have 40 open requisitions that, if 40 people lined up at our door that fit well within our team, we could take them on. That’s why we’re such good friends with Jason.

That’s significant growth. That’s amazing. Jason’s not only doing a good job on the customer side, but he’s also helping you on the recruiting side too. It leads me to a question here for you, Richard. As a company grows, especially at that scale as fast as you’re growing, I imagine there are a lot of changes that are happening. Working with Revel, how do you keep on top of all those changes and make sure that your messaging is right and you’re getting in front of the right people? 40 open reqs is a lot of people you need to hire. How do you make sure that you guys are keeping on top of all the changes happening both inside your company and in the marketplace?

As with our relationship with Revel, they know us in a lot of ways better than we know ourselves. They have account executives like Kayla, whom I work with weekly at least. We have such frequent interaction that they get it. This is from a manufacturing perspective separate from the marketing. For a long time, we were a research and development company. We had R&D engineers that would approach us with either an idea or a sketch of something simple, and we would help them bring it to production.

us with either an idea or a sketch of something simple, and we would help them bring it to production.Over the course of the years that we’ve been in business, there are a lot of things that have been developed and reached production. Here we are now at the point where a customer of ours will know Motion Dynamics Corporation on their drawing. Sometimes in the medical device industry, you’ll have components move from supplier to supplier. We are so large now because we are responsible for producing these large production level quantities. That’s what has been attributed to our rapid growth.

You’re giving credit to Revel a lot of the time. I want Jason to finish this. How do you stay on top of all of this? It sounds like your team has dug in and knows them well. I imagine you do with all your clients. I’m thinking specifically for you because I’m sure a lot of our audience is like, “That would be great, but I don’t have a Revel on my side.” What are some things they can do to stay on top of this?

 

BCC 74 | Hiring Process
Hiring Process: Finding your why and doing some regular research are two great ways for companies to remain relevant and invest in their own growth.

 

You say doing employee surveys and bringing everybody together. Is that something that you frequently do? Give us some tips and advice on how you stay on top of all this.

The number one thing is having a clear understanding of the reason the company exists. We have an exercise that we go through that was created by Simon Sinek, which is his Start with Why process. That’s how we kick off all our client engagements. The great thing about working with someone like Motion Dynamics, who we’ve had a long relationship with, is the one that we did years ago was different from the one we did when we launched its employer branding initiative.

Companies are always changing and evolving. Engage in that exercise. It’s great if you have an agency partner to walk through it with, but you can do that yourself. It’s a TED Talk. You can go on YouTube and watch it. Simon Sinek has tons of material out there that you can walk through yourselves. That’s the first key. Every company’s purpose is different, and that’s why employees dedicate their careers to fulfilling the company’s missions. They want to work with a company with a higher purpose. In someone like Motion’s case, they’re making life-saving products. That’s maybe a little higher purpose than the average company across the street, but every company has something unique.

Regardless if it was the products they make, it’s their leadership, their people, and the fact that they care and take the time to do those weekly updates to the team and let the company know how it’s going. They invest in a clean, modern manufacturing facility and do fun activities. All those things play together in the employer brand. You can do that regardless of whether you work with an outside firm.

The other thing is asking questions. Surveys are a great way to do to get feedback either from customers or from employees. We’re a little biased, but we always feel like you get a better answer if a third party asks the questions. Those two things, finding your why and doing some regular research, are two great ways that companies can remain relevant and invest in their own growth.

I liked the way you broke that down into those two things. Survey the employees and get them involved. One of the best resources employers have is their existing team, and they forget to tap them for that and then get clear on why they do what they do. I love the TED Talk and the Simon Sinek stuff. I want to take it down another level here, Jason. I’m going to start with you on this. If you were to get enough applications for Richard and his team to fill 40 reqs, maybe at one time, there was a little bit of fear like, “Are they even going to call these people? Are they going to follow through? I’m putting all these applications in front of them.”

I see a lot of employers struggle with the process side of it, and I’m big on the process. Are some things that you’ve been able to do between the two companies to make sure that when you’re generating these results for them, the team over there is dialing in the process and connecting and engaging with the people? What kind of coaching or thoughts do you have on that?

It’s a lot like marketing and sales alignment and making sure that there’s a service level agreement that there’s going to be a handoff. If you’re thinking about sales and marketing, what do sales do when a lead comes in? It’s no different with HR. Motion has an experienced HR professional heading up the effort, so our job was easy. It was to bring the leads in, make sure they’re logged on the website, and then communicate regularly and do regular check-ins. It’s having constant communication.

Accountability is not me telling you to do something. It’s me asking you if you did something, and you’re giving an account of that. When you have good accountability partners, the process works seamlessly. It’s got to be a team effort because we can do everything in our power, but if there’s not a great transition from when an applicant fills out a form, calls a phone number, or responds to an ad, the process will fall apart.

 

Everyone's saying that you must go to college and get a four-year degree. In reality, you can make an amazing living working for a great company doing manufacturing work. Click To Tweet

 

Richard, what have you seen on your side being in the team that receives that? Being on the other side of those service level agreements, what are some things you’ve implemented or been successful at over at Motion Dynamics?

Firstly, we were overwhelmed with how successful this campaign has been right off the bat. The amount of applications that we see coming in through our website far exceeds anything that we’ve been able to generate on our own before. We have an HR professional who has been responsible, whether it be on Indeed or relationships with multiple technical schools. There are several different relationships that she works with, but the process with Revel has forced us to look at ourselves from a different perspective.

We’ve got different people involved. We’ll do a pre-screening or a general interview, and then we’ll do a second interview, maybe with an operations member, engineering member, or even a production level member. We’ve started to involve other members of our team in the interview process. It has been interesting to see how much more detailed these interviews get. We place people better into areas because we have their potential peers working with them and understanding what they like to do. Before, we had an HR professional, but one that did not necessarily have a manufacturing background. It has restructured our process for interviewing a candidate and the people that we involve in the interview process.

What I’m learning from you is, and I’ve seen this happen quite a few times, how we communicate to the world, the opportunity restructures the way we interview them. You were in the interviews in between marketing their worlds where the sales pipeline was headed towards getting them to the end of the door. I’d love to learn some of the findings if we could go a little bit deeper into that. As you looked at five-year employees versus the long-term, what were some of the attractive benefits at this point in the world?

It’s about establishing a connection. Once we meet somebody and get a better idea of who they are, where their interests lie, what their experience has been, and the role that they may be a good fit for when we bring in the existing team or their peers that they could be working with, it establishes a connection. That connection, especially with some younger employees, has allowed us to communicate or demonstrate our culture.

Jason mentioned that it is so important to us that we try to maintain that as best as we can as we grow. There have been instances where we have not done a good job of that, and we have put somebody in an area that isn’t a good fit for them and what they want to do. For example, we make these small micro parts with a wire that is smaller than the diameter of your hair. We pack these into gel packs. We do it under a microscope. It’s very precise. It can be tedious, so you can’t put a high-energy person into a role like that. It’s almost torture for them. It doesn’t work. This process of working with our existing team out on the floor has allowed us to tailor candidates into a more well-suited position.

Jason, are there any reflections you have from any of the survey work you did? Were there any a-ha moments where you were like, “That’s a way we could pitch the benefits?” It could be outside of the culture. I know we’ve touched base on that one, or maybe it is in their culture, and you say, “It was all right there.”

The biggest thing with them is looking at it as more than a job. Manufacturing, many times, is viewed as a career that may be less than ideal. The reality is we’ve had a generation of everyone saying, “Go to college and get a four-year degree.” In reality, you can make an amazing living working for a great company doing manufacturing work. It’s not your dad’s manufacturing dirty or grimy on a shop floor. There is some of that, and that is rewarding work for the right type of person. It’s telling the story that this isn’t just a job. It’s a career.

We changed that paradigm rather than an hourly rate, which we see a lot of times on hiring billboards and campaigns. Anyone who’s running a recruitment campaign and is reading this, do not put your hourly rate on your billboards because there will always be somebody who has one better. It’s not the reason that very few people put it on the top of their list when they go to work at a company.

 

BCC 74 | Hiring Process
Hiring Process: Establish a connection with another person by getting a better idea of who they are. Find out about their interests, experiences, and the job that could best fit them.

 

For the campaign that we did for Richard, it was about folks putting their careers in motion and showing all the things they could do while at the job, but also as a result of having this rewarding career where there was an opportunity for advancement, good salary, great benefits, and other perks that you don’t always see. Everything we did was centered around the word career.

I enjoyed the conversation. Clearly, you two have an amazing partnership for being able to do this. It takes a team effort here. Thank you for some of the insight. Jason, I know that you have an offer for our audience and anybody interested in learning more about how Revel may be able to help them get similar results. Can you share a little bit about that with us?

We want you to think about your employer brand, and one of the central points of any employer brand is a careers page. What I’d like to offer to anyone reading is a free careers page audit. Email me at [email protected] with a link to your careers page along with at least two competitors and what your hiring goals are, like you’re looking to add a certain number of employees. We will take a look at your page and give you some suggestions to improve it so you’re presenting yourself in the best light possible.

Thank you so much for being on the show. I’ve enjoyed it and learned a lot of great things. I do love the partnership that you two have in making this work. If you’re reading this and you’re thinking, “Maybe I don’t have what I need to make this happen on my own. Maybe I need to find an agency partner,” know that Revel is out there, and I’m sure there are other agency partners out there too that can help with this.

Recruiting is the number one issue that employers are facing, so make sure that when you are looking at your recruiting process, remember that it’s not an HR function. It is something that if your marketing team is not handling it exclusively, they are in an extremely close partnership with HR to make sure that you are attracting the right people to apply for your jobs. Thanks again. I enjoyed it.

Thank you.

Thanks, Ryan and Jeremy.

Thanks so much for being on.

 

Important Links

 

About Jason Piasecki

BCC 74 | Hiring ProcessJason’s our CEO and resident baseball expert. He is a graduate of Central Michigan University (Fire Up Chips!) with degrees in Marketing and Graphic Design. In 1998, he started ImageQuest Design, then in 2006, paired up with Andy to form Qonverge.

In 2011, they took things up a notch again and Revel was born!

About Richard Witham

BCC 74 | Hiring ProcessMotion Dynamics Corporation is a specialized spring and wire form company committed to building long term relationships with customers desiring excellence in all aspects of relationships! Each of us is committed to understanding our customers and their needs.

We will accomplish this by providing unequaled quality and delivery, by dedicating resources to innovative processes and equipment and by hiring and developing people with exceptional skills that uphold our high ethical standards.

Attract Talent With The TikTok For HVAC With Aaron Salow

· ·

BCC 73 | Attracting Talent

 

Finding and attracting good people in the trades is a challenge right now. New technology is emerging, and today’s guest has figured out how to use it to solve this problem. Aaron Salow is the Founder/CEO of XOi Technologies, which helps contractors overcome the skilled trades gap using tech and data. He joins Ryan Englin to explain the gap and how their tool enables you to solve the problem. Aaron talks about the importance of incorporating tech in trades and the value of hiring and training younger technicians to make sure your business endures the changing times. Stay tuned!

—

Attract Talent With The TikTok For HVAC With Aaron Salow

It’s no secret that finding good people in the trades is a challenge. Our guest has some amazing technology to help us solve that. I am here with the Founder of XOi Technologies. If you have not heard of XOi and you are in the mechanical HVAC space, skilled trades, and electrical plumbing, these are the people that are revolutionizing the way they do business. You need to learn about XOi. You are going to learn about them in this episode.

They started with a single goal in mind, to help contractors overcome the skilled trades gap. It’s no secret that we’ve got this. Something I am incredibly passionate about is not only helping contractors hire better people faster but if we don’t start bringing in the younger generation, we are never going to be able to solve this problem. XOi Technologies is the TikTok for the trades. I want to welcome my guest, Aaron Salow, to the show.

—

Aaron, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me, Ryan. I’m excited.

Me, too. Let’s jump right in. What is the biggest myth that you want to shatter for our readers about your industry?

It’s that you should be afraid of your technicians when it comes to technology. That’s the biggest myth I want to shatter on this show.

You need to unpack that one for me. Go a little deeper on that.

The nature of the skilled trades gap has a lot of owners and operators concerned about driving new solutions into the workforce and walking on eggshells around their technician workforce because if we are pushing too hard, they will go to a competitor. They are willing to lead for $1 more an hour. What they are missing is most of the solutions in the past decades have been put on technicians. There are great solutions out there that are built for technicians that also impact your top and bottom line. There’s a way to solve both problems. That is where operators can focus to make a difference and kill that myth.

We are talking technology and retention. We are talking about people and growing them, investing in them, and engaging them. We have a lot to talk about.

I’m excited.

Tell me a little bit about that. You founded a company called XOi. You help with breaking this myth by doing what you do. Give me a quick, little 30-second version of that.

We launched XOi with an exclusive goal of solving the skilled trades gap. We did it with smart glasses. I will give you a 30-second version, which is we deployed thousands of smart glasses into field service, predominantly HVAC. We were all over ACHR News and had a big article. It was exciting. We were way too cute and far ahead of what technicians needed.

We learned a big lesson. Giving a technician a few $1,000 pairs of smart glasses and saying, “Keep it charged. Don’t break it. Treat it better than the rest of your tools.” It was a lesson for us to say the least. I can tell you the different podcasts about the $100,000 blue machine. We had to fix these things because they were getting thrown around. We learned a super important lesson, which is that the curb-to-curb space is super underserved.

We give them bite-sized chunks of relevant information in the moment they need it, because that’s how these kids are used to consuming content in their world today. Click To Tweet

This time when we are trying to equip these technicians with smart glasses, “We can see what you see and hear what you hear. We can help you solve problems.” It was clear that the office was missing sales quote information and safety information. The customer was inherently mysterious about what was happening in that curb-to-curb space. As we pivoted to smartphones and tablets, since we are a little ahead of the curve, we are able to do a whole lot more with the technology.

When we talk about serving the tech, we have always had this ethos that says, “If you can drive value for the technician on a job by job basis and create continuous use cases versus episodic, then you can win in your business.” That’s where that myth of being careful comes from because the technology solutions we put on text for the last few decades have been put on them, “We are going to control your cell phone, track your GPS, make you fill out an FSM.” Everything is about putting things on them to control their day versus, “What am I giving you to make your day better? How am I winning as an owner-operator as a result?” That’s possible if you focus on that half a time.

A lot of great things are in there. I can tell you are passionate about what you do a little bit.

It’s easy when it’s genuine, for sure.

You have been doing this for a while. You talk to a lot of owners. I’m sure you have come up with resistance against them. That’s why this myth exists. What is it that holds these owners back from being able to say, “You are right, I need to empower my people. I need to give them something to make their lives easier. I will benefit maybe not as quickly or as directly?” What’s holding them back? What’s keeping them thinking the old way?

The nature of the growing skilled trades gap has people nervous about their technician bases and saying, “If we put too much on them, they will find another job and go somewhere else.” We will see if they like it. We will see if it makes sense. As anyone who’s successfully deployed technology knows change management is super hard, there’s no question, especially for men and women that were hired to work with their hands. They look at technology as an extra thing that they have to do. The reality is that the technology that’s existed in large part has been extra work.

When you drill into the actual things that a technician has to do on-site and the things that are a pain in the butt for them in terms of communication to the office, the customer, the things they have to search and wait on hold for, all the things, they start to go, “Is there opportunities to make their lives better?” In pursuit of that, collect better information and understand the assets that we work on more effectively. Try not to piss off the office as much as we do by not giving a massive information or getting information from the field.

You start to understand that in this underserved part of the time, you can accomplish all of those goals, create a great customer experience, make the technician’s life easier, and connect better info back to the office. It’s all because it’s wrapped around the asset. The asset is the core of what we do in the field service. It is the thing that we are servicing, installing, brake fixing, selling, etc. Those are the things that we try to wrap this all around.

I think a lot about what I do in helping these guys hire these texts, find these texts, and everything else. One of the first things we talk about is if you don’t care about their day and what’s going on in their world, they are not going to care about doing a great job for you or taking care of the customer. Everything you said is about, “We want to help these guys. We want to empower them. We are going to make their lives easier.”

Also, meeting them with the technology they are used to. It’s connecting to their attention spans. The younger generation is a TikTok generation, “Give me 15 to 20 seconds at a time and I’m on to the next thing.” If you are providing them a solution that is long in the tooth in terms of technology and it’s different from everything that uses a consumer, it’s not going to connect with them in a meaningful way.

One of the things we do at XOi is microlearning content on workflows. Step 1, 20-second video. Step two, wiring diagram. We give them bite-sized chunks of relevant information at the moment they need it because that’s how these kids are used to consuming content in their world now. If I fired them off a 30-minute YouTube video and say, “It’s at minute fourteen somewhere.” They are going, “Sure. I will wait on hold with a buddy for a while or I will post it in a Facebook group and a lot of strangers will help me,” which is common as well.

BCC 73 | Attracting Talent
Attracting Talent: The nature of the growing skilled trades gap has people nervous about their technicians and saying, “If we put too much on them, they might find another job and go somewhere else.”

 

Interestingly, you say that. You mentioned that the modern workforce and the younger generation are used to consuming content in those bite-sized chunks. How do we get the older generation, those guys that still got 10 or 15 years left of their career that is in here? How does XOi help them adapt?

When we train technicians, we learn about different ways to frame our technology in a way that benefits them and also the office and the customer. The interesting thing is about taking content on every job site. This is something that customers are used to in everything they do. A few years ago, I’ve got my truck oil changed and this dude came up with a video of the underside of my truck. Immediately, I’m like, “Genius.” What I used to have is a dude covered in tattoos, burning a heater going, “You need $17,000 of work done.” He goes, “Sure thing.” “Is the oil changed?” That can be done.

It’s different when you see a video of your rear diff leaking and you realize it’s a real problem. That’s the same transparency that we are giving to folks. In a technician’s world and a seasoned technician’s world, that looks a little bit more like, “Cover your butt.” Seasoned technicians have gotten burned more than anybody on he said and she said games with the customer. From a marketing perspective, we are not going to put on our website, “Cover your butt and show the customer the wrong.” That’s not the intent.

When you are talking to tech and they’ve got six stories that have happened in the last year, “You left screws in the ground. My wife ran over them and wrecked her SUV. She’s got a hole in her tire now. Are you guys going to pay for this?” The guy is like, “I didn’t leave screws on the ground. I didn’t leave the panel up.” The ability to be able to meet the tech to say, “You do great work.” Shoot a 30-second video and show that it was done right. Give it to the customer. Be proactive so they never make that call in the first place.

It’s about positioning. The contractor gets to give the customer a new deliverable. The technician gets to validate the work and not have those he said and she said moments. We are using data science to learn from those videos to give it back to the company and say, “That compressor tends to break a lot and that Model Family X. You may want to consider buying different compressors.” There’s a virtuous data cycle in this if you do it right but it is about engaging the technician on the job every time.

You reminded me of the way your system works. You were focused on the asset and having all the information about that asset. You told me one time that someone could scan a serial number or something and know the service history of that unit, what worked, and what didn’t work. Not just that but across everybody that’s in your network. You will know that compressor is an issue.

For companies that choose to be part of that network, we are certainly not sharing companies’ information broadly unless they choose. I will give you an example. We work with a large peer group that has 40-plus contractors in it. Those 30-plus of them are customers of ours. They have opted into knowledge sharing across North America because they want to understand that information and benchmark against it.

That’s a company’s choice to do that. When they do, it’s powerful. We certainly don’t want to give the impression that we are sharing anyone’s information, we aren’t. We can help you empower your own information. If you are part of a peer group or an association, we certainly can make that much more powerful.

I didn’t mean to imply that you were violating any privacy things. It’s the fact that’s available. It’s an option to learn about this stuff. As the owner, I’m sitting here thinking, “I’m engaging my guys.” I love the older generation, which is the generation I fit into like the CYA moment. I’m going to cover myself and say, “I’ve got the recording of it. Here’s what it looked like before I left.” You are there, three days later, it doesn’t look the way I left it. I love that idea.

You are also empowering these guys because you’ve got the training right there. They are able to pull up the information about the asset. They are not having to call the home office and wait. That kills me as a consumer. I’m like, “What do you mean sitting outside on the curb?” They are like, “I’m waiting for the office to get back to me because I don’t have this or I don’t have that.” I’m like, “What?”

“Am I paying for this?”

It’s expanding upon that core ethos of trust, transparency, reputation, and the knowledge people have that makes any field service business great. Click To Tweet

Your product is cool and what you have done. It hits so many different angles of the business in the mechanical space. I used to do a lot of digital marketing for guys in the HVAC space. The thing that consumers always run into is they can’t see it. They can’t see the problem, air handlers in the attic or units up on the roof. They don’t understand it. It’s a box. It turns on. It makes noise and it makes me feel good inside. It helps with warming up the house or whatever. You are solving that problem with these videos.

I worked with a client. I didn’t even know this. We have a mutual client. He sent me all these videos. I’ve got 11,000 videos of all these jobs we have been on and he shows me something, I’m like, “This is cool.” You share this stuff with your customers. I love that it’s about engaging with your people and giving them the tools to make their lives easier. I bet customers love this stuff, too.

The customers have that visibility throughout other parts of their life. You sit and make the joke. You get more visibility on a Domino’s pizza order than you do your $5,000 service call at your house. We are trying to provide that level. Plus, it’s trust-building. I have been fortunate to talk to hundreds and hundreds of owners. I have asked them a simple question, “What’s made you successful?” You talk to these generational businesses that have grown for decades and decades. It all boils down to two answers, trust, transparency, and reputation. Number two is their people and the knowledge that their people have.

If you look at everything we have talked about so far, it’s expanding upon that core ethos that makes any field service business great. I have talked enough to say confidently that there is not a field service business out there that doesn’t value those two things significantly that has made it and done well. If you don’t care about your reputation and you don’t care about the knowledge of your people, that’s the core of who you are.

This is about sharing more, being more transparent, taking that to another level, and giving your people more tools to be more successful on-site for the customer. When you look at it that way, talk about data science, AI, and all these buzzwords that people want to put index for investors, it boils down to something meaningful. It’s about building on those things that have made service businesses successful for the past couple of years.

Let me ask you this question, why do you think people don’t need that? I’m listening to you talk and I’m like, “This is a no-brainer.” I would be buying it if I needed it for my business. What’s holding people back? A lot of times, as owners, one of the biggest struggles is getting out of our own way. I see a huge advantage here not only being able to better serve the customer and make life easier for the office but make life a lot easier for the tech. Why do people not do this? What’s holding them back?

We had a 100% close rate for years. I don’t know what you are talking about. Change management is a big one. We used to make a mistake as a business where we thought we were being clever, we are like, “When you put your field service management solution, name the player out there that does it. There are a lot of mature markets.” Who is involved? That was our way of mapping the account. What we realized we were doing is we were bringing up the pain to the contractor because they were like, “They’ve got to hire an IT person that had to do this and do this.” It took 6, 8, 9, and 12 months.

A lot of times, change management is hard. The reality of being able to put this in again back to the technician, back to being careful, we want to make sure this isn’t painful. We deploy people. We deployed 150 techs all the way to 5,000 techs. We can do that in a matter of weeks and on the bigger side, a few months. We have made this simple.

Part of the things we have learned as a business is to make sure our customers understand how simple this is to deploy, how little we are asking for the tech, and how much we are giving the customer and the office in exchange for that value. Where we get pushback is change management and the status quo. We have already invested in this other FSM thing and we will do this thing. The reality and what they are finding out is that those systems are being left in the van.

The core of what they are doing the whole time is chicken scratch, making metal cereal, parts information. Go back to the van and type out the thing my boss is making me type out so I can get paid. The reality is the heart of our whole business and the data that exists there is being ignored. That’s a critical piece and that’s where we see pushback.

One thing that’s worth mentioning is assets. When we talk about owning this file model, the EPA is putting new restrictions on folks every two years. On January 1st, 2023, they are doing a major swap out in terms of SEER ratings. A bunch of parts is changing across every OEM. Not only do we have a skilled trades gap but we have the actual equipment changing as well.

BCC 73 | Attracting Talent
Attracting Talent: If you own that piece and you own it by democratizing the data in it for your company, you will sustain yourself for the next decade.

 

The reality is that contractors can control their own destiny by understanding that equipment when it fails, what type of skillsets are needed to fix it, how it’s failing depending on environmental parallels, and things like that. Those are things that distributors and OEMs don’t have. They don’t have that information. They sell it to distributors, sell it to a contractor, and put it in a homeowner’s house. They have sales information and warranty information and that’s it.

When you are talking, as a contractor, “How do I control my destiny moving forward?” I’ve got a skilled trades gap. I’m changing equipment. It’s my ability to document that equipment consistently. I met my asset universe, the skill around those assets. That is massive bargaining chips for buying, warranty support, for parts, to bring in new talent into my business, so I don’t get disintermediated by the big players that are out there and the big roll-ups that are happening. This is the secret sauce for the next decade. If you own that piece and you own it by democratizing the data in it for your company, you will sustain yourself for the next decade. There’s no question in my mind.

My brain is running on all the implications, marketing, sales, and everything else with this. My passion is the people. I’m going to focus on them for a second. I love what you said about the younger workforce, especially the new techs. By the way, if you are in the trades and you don’t start bringing in young techs, the guys that have been doing it for 20, 30 years, their backs aren’t going to last much longer. We’ve got to start bringing in the younger guys. They were raised in technology. That’s what they know.

The guys that are entering the workforce now or even the guys that have been there for a decade never saw a telephone with a cord outside of a TV show. They can’t believe that you had to stand in one place to be on the phone. When you had to leave for an appointment, you had to hang up the phone and wait to start your conversation again. The simplest, little things that we take for granted, now this younger generation is clueless. They grew up with devices. They are in their hands. Asking them to do something on their device is like second nature. It’s like breathing to them.

Gamification is a big thing that’s coming out now. I’m seeing this happen in the construction world. They are gamifying the use of cranes now because they have to turn it into something that these kids are used to. They can’t rely on, “That’s the way we have always done it so that’s the way we are always going to do it.”

The younger generation doesn’t know by the nature of how profit margins are shifting, and how OEMs and distributors are changing behavior. Roll-ups and consolidation are happening. A lot of companies don’t have the benefit of the mentor model, the ghost model that they used to have for quite some time where they can be like, “Young apprentice, sit with another guy for the next three years.” They have to get these folks up and running.

Being able to invest in tools that allow them to be self-serve and diagnostic, one of the most important things that have become a trend out there that people should be wary of as well is offshoring if you will, your knowledge set. When something is free, you are the product. When folks are providing free services, free knowledge, free expertise through live video, call centers, whatever the case may be, you are offshoring that skillset, which is 1 of those 2 core ethos that we talked about.

Unless you believe in a world in which we are going to have all Uber-style technicians, whether they are all Uber-fied, go out and get sent and you don’t know who showed up to your house or commercial site. That would be a whole other episode probably to talk through why that’s problematic from a relationship and trust perspective. The ability for you to protect that knowledge and expertise is important inside an organization.

Back to what they were able to do several years ago, your ability to give that young technician, “This is an emphatic, empirical data set that you can use to figure out history, diagnostics, and support.” With this piece of equipment, it’s going to be critical. You are going to hire younger talent. You can be able to get them more effective quickly. It’s going to be a critical part.

There’s change management. Nobody likes change. It’s going to be a little difficult to get this going. Months from now, your team is used to it. Now they are thinking, “This guy down the street is offering a dollar more an hour.” They call him up and they are like, “What are you doing to make my life easier?” It’s like, “I’m paying you a dollar more an hour.” It’s paper. You are going to do it the old-fashioned way. You are going to wait on hold. You are going to sit at the job site much longer. These commission texts are like, “Are you nuts? I’ve got to move quickly.” Once they are acclimated to it, once the software is in place and they are used to this, it’s a huge retention tool.

We have been fortunate to work with some of the larger educational institutions across the country. They believed in partnering with us that the ability to give technicians this tool in their training is going to be something that allows them to be more effective once they go out in the world. They will either start their own business or work for someone that’s out there by having these tools readily available. All this knowledge now is locked in men’s and women’s heads across the country that is aging. It’s between their ears.

When something is free, you are the product. Click To Tweet

The reality is we, as an industry, have not done a good job of centralizing that information and making it available. There are companies out there that will centralize it for you and they will keep it. You can take an intentional step to keep it yourself, own it yourself, and create an asset for yourself. That’s what we hope to empower contractors to do.

That’s fantastic. Over at XOi, I still own all that information. Tell me a little bit more about XOi. I’m excited. I want to learn more. I’m sure some of our readers want to learn more, too. Tell me a little bit about what they’ve got to do to get started and how they get ahold of you. You’ve even got a free giveaway for those who are reading.

You can always go to XOi.io. For folks that are part of this Blue Collar show nation are able to get a free price analysis. Effectively, what that means is we are going to look at any process that’s happening between the curves. It’s anything from gathering asset information, sales process, safety process, and how you interact and interface with customers. We are going to say, “What are simple ways that we can use workflows to be able to impact dollar values there to sell and get more at-bats for your tax.

You mentioned condition tax. We have seen a 30% increase in the number of jobs that they quote because we make it super easy to take video content, tie it to the asset, and get it to the office seamlessly. They are getting higher close rates as a result. We do an analysis for you to see what that looks like. We will be the first to tell you, “This doesn’t make sense on paper or it does.”

We will look at the ROI with you and look for an opportunity to start with you to see if it makes sense over an opening period. That’s what we are offering. We are excited to do that with you. We can do that in a quick 30, 45-minute call. We work with mechanical, electrical, and plumbing contractors predominantly. There’s a lot of expertise. Hopefully, we can help you understand whether XOi is a good fit or not.

If you are reading this, make sure you look it up and get connected there. Aaron, this has been great. I learned a ton. My brain is churning. I’m sure some of our readers are feeling the same way. I can’t wait to learn more and check you out at XOI.io. Aaron, thanks for being on the show.

I appreciate it. Thanks, Ryan.

 

Important Links

 

About Aaron Salow

BCC 73 | Attracting TalentWhen I walk through a manufacturing facility and smell the sweet mix of coolant, metal shavings, and oil, it takes me back to my childhood. The family factory was my playland, an escape in which you could build, experiment, and experience.

As a 15-year-old, my father told me if I could run the (less than safe) screw machines as fast as the small handful of guys that worked for him, I could make $7/an hour too. It was a challenge. It was rewarding. It made me feel like a man. That work continued through high school, college, and almost every school “break” I had growing up.

As a professional, I continued to pursue work in manufacturing and construction. As an entrepreneur and an employee in these industries, I continued to grow my experience and admiration for the people that make this country run. Whether it was hub components for heavy truck, or a clean room for the Department of Defense, the fingerprints of hard work and resolve was evident everywhere I spent time.

My entire life has been marked by learning from and spending time with blue-collar men and women. When you think blue-collar, you probably think about a job…I think about the mindset. Blue collar people are loyal, work hard, and care about the most important things in life. They use their hands to make a difference and they are proud of what they create.

The problem is, there are less and less people that want to do this job. To put a number to it, there are over 7 million unfilled skilled trades positions today in the United States…this is no joke.

I started XOi to solve the biggest problem every company in blue-collar industries are facing today: a skilled trades gap. They are struggling to answer the question: “in the face of a growing skills gap, how do we grow?”

Our mission at XOi is to help companies answer this question, and we are humbled to do it every day with field service customers across the globe.

Never miss an episode of the Blue Collar Culture Podcast.