Podcast Episode

Double Your Business With Only 30 Minutes Per Day Of Training With Austin Clark

Ryan Englin · January 26, 2022 ·

Ryan Englin and Jeremy Macliver are back to hear some secrets from Austin Clark, CEO of Moxie Pest Control of Arizona, on how you can double your business with only 30 minutes of training per day. Moxie Pest Control has grown so much in the span of one year and is expected to double in value even further. Austin shares how luck and his work ethic transformed his view on business and what other factors affected his success. Curious about what he has to say? Tune in to find out.

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Double Your Business With Only 30 Minutes Per Day Of Training With Austin Clark

We’ve got a unique guest in this episode. We don’t often get to talk to a lot of owners or CEOs of companies in the trades. I’m excited. Our guest is the CEO of Moxie Pest Control of Arizona. He is now working on a brand-new book for the pest control contractor and he has a very popular podcast called Multiply You. He’s out here in Mesa, Arizona with his wife and four children. He loves barbecue, travel, exercise and reading. I also hear he loves business because it provides a lot of services for other companies. I would like to welcome Austin Clark to the show. Thanks for being here.

Thank you so much, Ryan and Jeremy. Thank you for having me on the show. I appreciate that.

We talked a little bit before the show and I got some ideas running through my head and some questions I’d love to ask you, but what I’d love to know a little bit is that you are a very fast-growing branch at Moxie Pest Control. Was it the year 2020 that it grew by 119%? There are a lot of people thinking, “That’s some pretty good numbers.” I know I’m thinking it. You’re scheduled to double in size again. Tell me, what is it about what you’re doing over at Moxie Pest Control that is different that is working so well for you?

I frankly think that most of it is probably a lot of stars aligning. You hear a lot of people joking about overnight successes and that’s certainly not what has happened here. Many members of my team have been working for 1 decade, 1.5 decades to 2 decades. A lot of things came together for us in terms of employees, culture, marketing, positioning, and capital to redeploy and reinvest in growth. We’re very grateful and feel very fortunate about 2020, the year that we had. I know that it was a difficult year for many people. It certainly was for us as well, but we were struggling with issues of hypergrowth and so far, we’ve stayed true to what we thought would happen in our forecast in 2021.

Maybe a couple of small things. I don’t know what we’re doing differently from other home service or home contracting firms. I normally keep my head down and work a tremendous amount. I think that is key number one. We work a lot at Moxie. We work tirelessly and relentlessly. We take a lot of pride in working when our competitors if you will, are taking a break or taking a vacation. There’s nothing against self-care and vacations and work-life balance. For me, in my personal life now, there’s a lot of things that are not done or not achieved or not accomplished. It’s important to me to lead our organization in Phoenix from the front.

Part of that is a relentless work ethic. We also have incredible people. If you have the chance to talk to them over the phone or interact with them at your home, our employees are good, genuine and kind-hearted people who enjoy the service industry. They love solving problems for people. We’ve had a great culture in Arizona at Moxie for a long time. I think that it’s gotten better in the last few years. The pandemic and some of the things that have been going on have made some things a little bit different or a little bit interesting.

If you’ve got a purpose or a mission statement and values that are important for people to wrap their minds around and get behind, pest control is simply the business that we’re in. It’s not what we’re about. People are what we’re about. We’ve got great people here that are very smart, educated and talented. They love doing what they do. They’re happy to come to work each day. When your employees are happy, your customers are happy. When your customers are happy, they tell other people and you’re able to grow. You’re able to be profitable. You’re able to then take those profits and reinvest them to be able to grow your company and service offerings even more.

When your employees are happy, your customers are happy. When your customers are happy, they tell other people and you're able to grow. Click To Tweet

I was going to call you out, but I think I got the nugget. You said you don’t know what you’re doing differently, but the stars are aligned. Most of the time, I’ve seen stars is because somebody hit me over the head again in the business. It’s a different set of stars I was trying to get to quit swirling. If I’m going to paraphrase what I heard there. That stars aligned and that luck came from working hard, great employees and having a clear purpose statement or vision. Did I hear that correctly?

That’s right.

I’d love to dig a little more into those great employees and the purpose statement vision because from what I’m hearing on the street, there’s not a lot of great employees anymore. How did you find them?

I, Jeremy, would vehemently disagree with that. I would hope that anyone reading now, whether it’s now or in the future or whenever, consider this. What would you say, Ryan and Jeremy, your guys’ client, the average size firm that you guys work with? Do they have twenty employees?

We are seeing 20 to 250 employees.

Let’s say 100. Do you know how many people live in Arizona? I think all three of us are in Arizona now. At least Ryan and I are. Don’t google it now or ask Siri.

We are all in Arizona now. I would say that about 60% of our clients are here.

How many people live in Arizona? Do you guys have any idea?

BCC 67 | Double Your Business — Double Your Business: Pest control is simply the business that we’re in. It’s not what we’re about. People are what we’re about.

I think it’s over 6 million and I’m not going to ask Siri now.

You’re right. $1 goes to Jeremy. You went over Ryan. I’m sorry. If it’s for The Price is Right, you won’t win. The last time I asked Siri or googled, it was 7.2 million people. For those of you that are reading now and you have an average of 100 employees or even 200 employees, all you need is out of 7.2 million people to go find 100 of them. That’s it. With the things that have changed in the last few years with remote working, that opens things up to the rest of the United States or the rest of North America or the rest of the world.

I understand in the trades that you’re providing a service like pool services or landscaping or pest control or whatever it is, that might be a challenge to have someone do that remotely. You can have done a lot of the CSR work remotely. You have 7.2 million people that live here in Arizona and you need 100 of them. I would like to think that I’m inspiring our management team. If you ask them, they’re probably like, “Austin’s constantly barking at us.” In Arizona, I think we’re at our low point. We’ve got about 85 employees now and that balloons up to about 120 to 140 in the summertime.

I’m constantly telling our management team, “All we need is 100 of the best people that live in Arizona. Go find them. Where are they? What are they doing? Where are they working now?” You’re A players are not unemployed now. They’re not collecting a check from the government now. They are working for your competitors or across parallel industries. Go find them, headhunt them and be creative. It’s the same way that you approach marketing.

When you approach marketing, you create an avatar of your ideal client. From there, you say, “Where do they shop? What education do they have? How much education do they have? Are they shopping online or in the store? Are they more of a Walmart or a Nordstrom’s type person?” You create an app. You do the same thing for your employees. Where are they working now? How much education do they have? What’s their pay range? What’s important to them?

You can go physically meet them, but you go meet them with ads on Facebook or Instagram, Indeed and you have a compelling story or copy to be able to have them click or capture some of their info so that you can get a chance at visiting with them. Describe why your firm is so great and why they should be with you rather than where they are now.

Austin, before I ask you the next question to keep the show going, I want to make sure I ask one question to clear the air for all of our audience. We did not pay you to say that, nor did we prep that answer. Is that correct?

Luck comes from working hard, having great employees, and having a clear purpose or vision. Click To Tweet

That’s correct.

I want to make sure that everybody hears that. That was not a stage question. We had no clue because that sounded exactly like what we said over and over. Somebody else that’s successful at this saying, “We only need 100.” Quite honestly, I bring it down a little bit tighter than that sometimes, Austin. We only need 100, but we already have 79 of you here. We only need 21 more. That’s all that we need.

It’s beautifully said. We’d go to market for them. It’s a marketing activity. It’s not an HR function. It’s the same as we would do for any of our clients. With that, I would love to hear a little bit of where you were leading that to with that purpose statement, that vision because you’re inspiring and attracting the right ones to us, that right 100. Tell us your purpose vision. Let’s dissect it a little bit. How is that attractive in the marketplace?

Moxie is a pest control company. You hear nothing of pests in our purpose or in our mission statement. People are what we’re about. The pest business is the business that we’re in, our team talents or things that we want to be important to people without, so we’re not looking to put square pegs into round holes. We want them to be kind already. We want them to be happy and smiling already. We want them to be collaborative already. Do not try to force someone to be something that they aren’t already. You’ll spend a lot of money and you’ll become very frustrated.

We want people that come that way. When they hear that, we want for it to resonate inside of them. Being kind is a good thing. Being collaborative is a good thing. Improving the quality of people’s lives is a great thing. I can see how I can do that in the pest space or in any other space. That would be a great purpose or mission statement for any organization. When we’re doing reviews or interacting with employees, whether it’s a monthly scorecard review or a weekly error log review, we are constantly tying those values back to all the interactions we’re having.

“You did great here. You could show more improvement here. These are some specific things that we think you could improve upon. What do you think? Where would you like to improve? What goals do you have set for yourself personally and professionally in the month of December? When we meet again in a month, what are the things that you’d like to have accomplished between now and then?” That’s how some of that conversation goes, but that’s our stated purpose. We made it. We hire slow, fire fast, and want people to take those things seriously.

We talked a little bit beforehand about hiring in general and how there are no good people. You’ve already dispelled some of those myths by saying, “You don’t need a lot of them. You need to find the select few.” What are some things you’re doing? We want to bring it down a little bit. Maybe there are one or two tips that you can give for those reading now,. You’ve seen something very successful that the audience could go back to their office tomorrow and go implement and maybe get some success. What are a couple of things?

I would say 2 or 3 things briefly. You’re probably doing a lot of the right things already. Do more of that. I will say I’m no perfect pro recruiter if you will. Not by any means. I don’t know that our people are necessary, but I do know that we’re putting a tremendous amount of time and effort and budget into that now. We’re seeing results. In the last few years, we’ve certainly seen it change. We have probably put 2 to 3 times as much effort and budget for about 50% of the results. I wouldn’t even call it struggling, but we have different results now than we did a few years ago, but we’re doubling down.

I think it’s a fantastic time to double down because Ryan and Jeremy, if your clients are, “We can’t do it, Ryan, for this reason. Jeremy, it’s impossible for this reason,” it’s not true. You guys got to knock off that attitude about it. Whether you think you’re right or you think you’re wrong, you’re right. It is a matter of mindset. Do all the same things that you’re doing and get on Indeed. Put ads out on Craigslist or on ZipRecruiter. Hire a recruiter. Do those sorts of things.

I’m going to say something that is not revolutionary, and Jeremy alluded to this a while ago. You already have some incredible employees that work for you. They have been there for a while, are bought in, happy, promoters of the company and of the values and of your purpose. Go talk to those people. Take them to lunch. Write them an email and say, “We are looking to hire 5 people, 10 people. You are one of the best in this business. We would love to be able to attract and find more people. Why are you here? How could we find more of your friends?”

You don’t want referrals from your C players. Don’t ask your worst employees where their friends are because they’ll be lining up at your door. You need to ask your A players what it is that they love about working there and go and see if they have people and you put together a referral bonus for employees, one that could fit any budget or any timeline that you might have. You can be creative about that. We’ve had a great amount of success with that here.

By the way, friends recruit friends. They want to work with their friends. We’ve seen a lot of great results there. Double down on what you’re doing, then put together an employee referral bonus now and launch that before the end of the year. This is something that you can put together inside of a week and launch a week later and have results that same week if you’re feeling pain with employees.

Something you said a little while back when you were posting those ads that resonated with me. Make sure that your ads are compelling. Don’t put the same boring job ad out there that everybody else does. Don’t copy your competition and go, “It works for them.” You don’t know that it works for them.

Has anyone read an ad lately? I hadn’t read them for about a quarter and I popped on. The only thing more boring than I’ve ever read in my life is my college school books, my textbooks. You have to have some personality come through there and take bits and pieces of either competitor or have your in-house copy for some person writes something that’s compelling. Don’t make it harder for people to want to work for you or with you than it already is. You have to give them a reason to click that button or apply with your firm.

Do not try to force someone to be something that they just aren't. Click To Tweet

I’ve heard this a couple of times. There’s this mindset out there. There’s a belief that we need to make it hard for them to get a job with us because the harder it is to get a job, the harder it is for them to leave. I don’t believe that. I’m not sure that’s true, but some people have this mindset. “Nobody cares. I’m going to make them jump through all these hoops and figure it all out. If they make it that far, I’ll go ahead and keep them.”

I’m a fan of top grading, too. Dr. Brad Smart wrote the book Topgrading. Full disclosure, I’ve never read it. I understand the principles inside of it. His son, Jeff Smart, wrote Who, which is more for simple people like me, larger font and less of a workbook. I do think that you certainly need to have a systematized way of recruiting and hiring and onboarding and whatever else. It is an employee’s market now. I don’t know that makes sense to make it more difficult than it needs to be. Don’t beat them up too bad.

One of the things that we talk a lot about is finding people who want to do this work. I don’t know what you have over there at Moxie, as far as developing people. Do you have any training or coaching programs? Is there anything that you’re seeing working where you bring in people that don’t quite have the skills and you’re willing and able as the employer to help them grow into that role? Do you do anything over there at Moxie?

We have a training platform. We prefer people with no previous pest experience because we don’t want them to come over with that. It’s certainly not bad ideas, but we don’t want to have to break down barriers that don’t exist with a blank sheet of paper. We pay people to train. We pay people to get their licenses. They’re on the clock when they go down to the state and get their tests. We pay for all of the licensing, for all that. We make the barrier to come on board easy and simple. The other thing that I share with people that surprises and I mostly share it with competitors, but it mostly surprises them.

We invest a tremendous amount of time and money in developing our people. It doesn’t matter who you are inside of the company. If you’re in our contact center and work in inside sales or on a retention team or a commercial field person or a residential field person, you are receiving at least 20 to 30 minutes of instruction and training every day, no matter what. When I share that with people, they say, “How do you afford that?” We’ve been doing it since the day we opened our doors.

In my mind, I’m thinking, “I don’t know how you afford not to do that. Normally, the firms that are taken aback by that are smaller firms in terms of employee count, revenue or whatever else. We view employee training and development as a huge investment. I truly believe that that’s what it is. We came across a case study several years ago. In terms of what an employee wants, it was two things and these are A players. One, they wanted to have a good, healthy, two-way relationship with their direct supervisor. They wanted to have a great relationship with that person. Second, A players constantly want to know how they’re doing. “How am I doing? How can I improve? How can I do better? What’s next for me? What does advancement look like? How can I take on more responsibilities to make more money or to receive compensation?”

They want to have a great relationship with the person that directly manages them and they want to know how they’re doing. We let our employees know how they’re doing because each position has a scorecard with 7 to 12 outcomes. After those outcomes, we have them set monthly goals. We have a rating system for how well they’re doing with our core values or team talents. We go to work on those things every month and it’s a point of conversation throughout the day and in our chats. It is neat to see people level themselves up.

Half a dozen or a dozen other things or tools that we use are ways that we’re able to take people that have no experience, just the willingness to be able to level them up and get them trained to be able to provide great service at your place of business or your home very quickly. That’s what some of the training and development looks like there. We have other stuff. If people want to lose weight, we’ve got programs for that. If they want to better handle their finances and know where their money is going, we have programs for that. There’s a lot of things that we do to be able to invest to have an improved personal life as well.

As we get ready to wrap up here, I want to summarize some of the things that we say because there was a lot. We back up. The first thing is to get clear on that vision and that purpose and make sure that you know what you’re out there communicating to everybody else. It’s how I say it. What is it about you that makes you different, hiring people that are aligned to that?

From there, keep doing what you’re doing but maybe get your marketing team involved. Get a second set of eyes on it. Go to your existing team and talk to them about referrals. Finally, when you train people, realize that you’re making an investment in them. I love what you said about how you bring people in with no pest control experience. You put them through the training. You get them licensed. You pay for all of that.

Your retention is probably through the roof because people love it when they’re being invested in. They know that you have this investment to continue to help them grow. You’ve mentioned that you’ve been doing some of the personal development stuff. There are a lot of great things you’re doing over there at Moxie Pest Control, for sure. Did I miss anything?

Ryan, that was very well-summarized. There’s a lot of meat and potatoes there and a lot of things that people could take home and put action and see results very quickly.

As we wrap up here, I want to let the audience know that you’ve got your podcast and to go check out your podcast. Also, you’ve got a book coming out. Keep an eye out for that as well. Austin, thanks for being our guest. I enjoyed it. We’ll talk soon.

I’m very happy to be on. Thank you, Ryan. Thank you, Jeremy. Thank you, everyone, for reading.

Thank you.

Mentioned in this episode:

About Austin Clark

With years of experience in his field, Austin manages and oversees every aspect of the company. His focus has been on building relationships and growing his team.

Austin’s goal is to continue expanding, creating more jobs and opportunities, by creating leaders who believe in themselves and will work to achieve their dreams.

Austin earned his Bachelor’s of Science in Business Administration from Arizona State University.

Make Your Time Worth $10,000 Per Hour With Dr. Sabrina Starling

Ryan Englin · January 12, 2022 ·

One of the biggest myths about being an entrepreneur is how we’re supposed to grind it out. But isn’t it one of the reasons we left our 9 to 5 jobs is to have more control of our time? International bestselling author of the How to Hire series, Dr. Sabrina Starling, is here to share another amazing work that will help entrepreneurs fulfill their dream of stepping away from business for four full weeks without having to plug back in. She takes us into her book, The 4 Week Vacation, where she reveals the secrets to make your time worth $10,000 per hour, so you don’t have to grind from day to night. Work supports life, not the other way around. Join Dr. Starling as she helps us make business our source of life and energy and not drain it.

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Make Your Time Worth $10,000 Per Hour With Dr. Sabrina Starling

I met our guest and I feel like we have already hit it off. We have so much in common because we are both so passionate about entrepreneurs and helping them build the business of their dreams so that they can have the life they have always wanted. Our is guest is an international bestselling author of the How To Hire series. She has a book which we are going to learn a lot called The 4 Week Vacation. Every entrepreneur’s dream is stepping away from the business for four full weeks and not even plugging in. How amazing would that be? I’m excited to get some tips on how we can move towards that and learn about the new book.

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Dr. Sabrina, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you, Ryan. I’m so excited. You and I have such a passion for helping small business owners hire A-players and really succeed. It’s very fun to think about what happens in the business once you have those A-players on board. It’s going to be a great conversation.

What is the biggest myth about being an entrepreneur?

That we are supposed to grind it out and that’s part of entrepreneurship. We should be celebrating the grind, fist-bumping each other, and high-fiving like, “I don’t sleep more than four hours a night. I’m working constantly. I’m so busy. It’s great.” It’s a very destructive mentality and it doesn’t need to be that way. This whole idea that we need to be a slave to our business and pour our whole selves into keeping our business afloat, sacrificing our health and our time with our loved ones is very destructive.

It’s not sustainable to do that long-term. There is a healthier way to do entrepreneurship. I have been doing it. I have led clients through it. Our The 4 Week Vacation trailblazers are living it. It’s coming from that perspective of work supports life, not the other way around and how do we build our businesses to support not just our lives but the lives of our team, family and our team’s family. Our business is our source of life and giving energy to people, including ourselves, and not draining energy.

Someone told me one time that workaholism is a well-respected addiction in America. I was on the phone with a friend who happens to be a vendor of mine as well and I was asking him. He just moved. He’s living in his dream location near the beach and something about his life, “How are things going?” He goes, “I’m not working a whole lot. It feels weird to tell you this but I might clock fifteen hours a week. I’m spending time raising my kids with my wife and enjoying the beach.” We had this conversation and it’s almost like he felt bad to tell me that he built a business and he only works fifteen hours a week and has the lifestyle he wants.

The biggest myth about being an entrepreneur is how we’re supposed to grind it out. Click To Tweet

There’s guilt around that. When I started my business, I made a decision that I wanted to work no more than 25 hours a week because I had my young daughter at home. I didn’t want to send her to daycare for more than 25 hours a week. I built to tap potential on 25 hours a week. Here we are, many years later, and the business has grown by at least 30% year-over-year.

I kept that a secret for the longest time. I didn’t want to tell my clients, many of whom are business owners in landscape construction, guys who were working 70 or 80 hours a week, who’s grinding it out. I didn’t want to say, “I’m running my business on 25 hours a week,” because I felt like they would look at me and think, “You don’t have a real business.”

It wasn’t until a colleague of mine said to me, “Sabrina, not only do you have a real business, you have a really cool business because you have figured out how to do this on 25 hours a week.” That made me aware and it took the shame out of those conversations but that is so much a part of our culture in the United States that we are supposed to work hard and we go around feeling guilty if we are not working hard. We are on a mission to change and tap the potential is that work should support life, not the other way around, and entrepreneurs can take their lives back from their businesses.

There’s probably a lot of them but what do you think are the top 1 or 2 things that are holding entrepreneurs back from being able to achieve that?

One of the challenges is what got us here won’t get us there. When we start our businesses, we have to do everything in our power to bring in sales and keep the business afloat. A lot of times, we do things on our own to save money because resources are tight when you start a business. That mentality in the startup base is great and it’s important but it does not serve us beyond the startup base. If we don’t shift our mindset, there are critical junctures in the business. If we don’t shift our mindset at those critical junctures, we continue to operate our business from that mindset, and it keeps us stuck. It actually caps the growth of the business and keeps the entrepreneur working in the business.

How do you do that, “Shift your mindset?” It sounds so easy.

First off, let’s tackle the, “I want to save money, so I’m going to do it myself. It’s easier for me to do it myself than to train someone else.”

BCC 64 | Time Worth $10,000 — Time Worth $10,000: This whole idea that we need to be a slave to our business and pour our whole selves into keeping it afloat, sacrificing our health and time with our loved ones, is very destructive.

I hear that one all the time. “I can do it so much faster. Why train someone to do it?”

You can’t take more than a few days away from your business without things falling apart. When I say a few days away, I mean it’s unplugged. What happens in your business if you unplug? If you can’t totally unplug from your business for a few days or a couple of weeks, you are doing activities in your business that are capping the growth of your business. When you let go of running payroll and doing basic bookkeeping activities in your business, you free yourself up to do the $10,000 an hour activities in your business.

The $10,000 an hour activities are putting systems in place, hiring A-players, and training those A-players to take things off your plate. They should be taking the $10, $50, $100, even $1,000 hour activities off your plate so that you can focus on the higher-level strategy for the business. It’s not about, “I’m saving $500 a month by doing my own bookkeeping.” You are costing yourself an opportunity because you are not doing the $10,000 an hour activities. When you are spending 10 hours a week, however many or 30 hours a month on bookkeeping, that’s not saving you money. It’s costing you growth and the opportunity.

I hear some of that. We can outsource. We can find good strategic partners and vendors that can support us but also have that system to hire A-players. I know from the work I do that hiring A-players is what it’s going to free you up to move towards that four-week vacation.

We have been surveying entrepreneurs with our Better Business Better Life Assessment for a couple of years. We have data from over 200 entrepreneurs during 2020 in the height of COVID. Eighty-nine percent have no system for attracting and hiring A-players. This is the biggest gap that exists in small businesses. I firmly believe that entrepreneurs get stuck in their business and have a poor quality of life because they never learn how to hire A-players and put a system in place so that it happens easily.

It’s not just a system so that it happens easily but you are constantly attracting a steady stream of people who want to work in your business, who are highly qualified, and there’s great word on the street about your business. Once you get that going in your business, and this is why the work that you do is so important why I wrote the How To Hire The Best series, it’s to solve. This is the biggest problem that exists in small businesses and keeps business owners stuck in their businesses.

This is going to be hard for some people to know but I hear entrepreneurs all the time. Nobody wants to work anymore. The truth is nobody wants to work for you because they either don’t know you exist, which is most likely or they do know that you exist and they don’t like what they know about you.

Work supports life, not the other way around. Click To Tweet

Thinking about what is the word on the street about your business? If there is no word on the street, they don’t know you exist. If the word on the street about your business is not good, if you have warm bodies in your business and they talk bad about your business, which happens because we don’t want to hire, it feels like it’s such a burden and time suck to go through the hiring process. We tolerate poor employee behavior. That’s like spraying A-player repellent all over our businesses because those warm bodies are talking negatively about their boss out there and it creates bad PR.

Here’s the thing. If we consider that about 10% of the population are A-players and of that 10%, some of them are retired. They are living the dream. Some of them are still in elementary school. We can’t hire them and the rest are not out there looking for work. They are employed elsewhere. Our job is to attract them to our businesses.

They need to know about our businesses and we need to work on becoming great places to work for the A-players we want on our team. A-players love to work and they are out there but they are working elsewhere. The question is, how do you, as an employer, become so attractive that those A-players you want on your team are finding you, hearing about you, and approaching you?

For the readers, I don’t want to digress onto this topic but it’s not more money. Just to be clear, raising wages and offering more than the competitor is not the way to get those people. Would you agree?

I totally agree. If you can pay an appropriate wage or salary for the role that you are hiring for and then you do the work on your business to make it attractive to the A-players you want, they will come, stay, and will be so appreciative. It’s some of the most basic things that you can do to create a great workplace but you have to stop and think about it from the perspective of team members and what they are looking for. I worked with a lot of contractors and landscapers. When I’ve got to talk to the A-players who are on their teams and ask them what do they appreciate most about where they work, there are a couple of just basic things. One of them is a respectful work environment.

If you are not yelling, screaming, and cussing out your team members, you are miles ahead of your competitors. That’s a sad thing to say but when you work on creating a family environment and everyone feels good and excited to come to work, when you focus on putting people in roles where they work from their strengths, A-players exist at every level. They exist on our crews and entry-level positions. They are intrinsically motivated, so it’s not about the money. They just do a good job because it feels good to do a good job.

Another myth about A-players that I want to share because it’s super relevant and I’m dealing with this is not all A-players want to climb the corporate ladder.

They want opportunities for advancement but it’s not necessarily about moving up and becoming a manager. There are a lot of A-players who want to be really super good at what they do and they don’t want to deal with and manage other people. When can you look in the role that they are in and figure out, “How can I give them more training? What’s important to them? What do they like to learn about?” A-players like to learn, improve their skills and be better.

What training can you provide and can you create levels within the role so they can move up from level 1, apprentice 1 to apprentice 4 or something like that? There’s an acknowledgment of their experience and their longevity with you but they don’t necessarily have to move into higher levels in the organization.

Another thing too on investing in them, it doesn’t always have to be professional development. Sometimes investing in their personal development can pay huge dividends. We worked with a client years ago that used to send the employee and their spouse to communications training. Not because they needed it, but it’s like, “We believe that if you communicate better at home, you’re going to bring better home life to work.”

One of the fun programs that we do is Tap the Potentials Leadership Bootcamp. That’s where our business owners send the A-players on their team to learn about how to be valuable team members in the business. We do people map training. That’s where they learn what their preferred communication style is and what their strengths are. They take that home to their families and share it.

Their team members love talking about these things at home with their families. One of the tools that we teach is something called the Choice Map, which helps you get out of that judger pit and feel like, “What’s wrong with those people around me? What’s wrong with me? Why is everyone so stupid?” That negative mindset. We give them tools for that. They take that home and teach that in their families.

What’s so nice about this is they are not necessarily learning how to manage people. They are learning how to be that person on the team that sets a good example for everyone else to follow. It starts to create that feeling on the team of, “We are all in this together and that business owner is not the only one who’s trying to raise the standard in the business but the A-players are coming on board, too.” It’s like the business owner is saying, “I’m up to something cool. I want you 2 or 3 to come over here and help me because we are going to make a great place to work. Let’s get to work on it.” Those A-players start to show the others in the business, “This is how we do things.”

There’s so much to that mindset shift. I love what you said there because I think, for the entrepreneurs that need this, those that are on 80 hours a week, you can almost learn something from your employees. They don’t want to grind it out and live to work. They work to live. They are creating a lifestyle for their family and those things that are important to them.

If there is no word on the street about your business, people don't know you exist. Click To Tweet

I hear a lot of times entrepreneurs will tell me, “I will never find anybody that cares about the business as much as I do.” That’s such a big lie we tell ourselves. They might not care about everything because they don’t know everything but I can promise you they are going to care about the 1 or 2 things they do more than you do.

When we help them to take ownership of their role, that’s when that comes about. We have to think about we teach people how to treat us. If we are the one in the business that works 70 hours a week, and we are the one who fixes everything when it gets messed up, and all the decisions have to run through us, we are training our team that they can count on us to take care of everything.

When we stop, we identify expectations for the role, “Here are the results we are looking for,” then we allow the team members to do that. We support them in delivering those results and we ask them, “What support do you need to achieve this?” They will tell us when they own that result, “That’s what you want because then you don’t have to own the result.”

You just coach them to deliver the result. Business owners are amazed that their role shifts from doing everything in the business to being that leader and that coach in the business that pulls out the best performance from the team members. We talked earlier about the mindset shift. We have to shift from being the one who does it all to, “How do I become the very best coach who helps tap the potential of my team members?” That’s where the business owner’s quality of life starts to improve and the business has the opportunity to grow with them.

I love what you said there about stopping enabling your people. We have an exercise that we do with some of our more in-control entrepreneurs. The one that has to make all the decisions, where anytime something shows up in their inbox, they have to wait 24 hours to respond to it if it’s a decision that their team should be making. It’s amazing how often they will finally reply. They are like, “I took care of it,” when he didn’t hear from you.

They are like, “How did you take care of it?” “That’s what I would have done.” They eventually learn that the team is going to go take care of it when you are not there to help them. It makes it so much easier to step away. Many of our clients are probably very similar to your experience. I want to talk more about the book because I know a lot of people need a four-week vacation. They don’t just want one.

They start realizing, “I don’t have to work as hard and people will stop coming to me after they understand that I’m okay with them making decisions and I don’t have to make them all.” Your team wants to be autonomous. One of the things that motivate the modern workforce is being able to make decisions without permission.

They crave this. When we decide, “I want to have a different relationship when we decide we want to write our relationship with our business so that work support our life and not the other way around.” That mindset shift changes everything. When we have these thoughts in our head of, “I can’t trust my team to get things done if I’m not around,” change that to a powerful question and ask yourself, “How do I train my team to handle decision-making in my absence?” One of the things that you and I come together around is the importance of hiring people based on core values and making sure that they have the right values at tap potential. We call them the Immutable Laws for the business.

When you hire people who have common values with you, you can trust them to make decisions in your absence because they may handle something differently than you would handle it. If their values are aligned with yours, you’re going to feel good about how they handled it. That’s the key. We can create all these systems in our businesses but there will always be things that happen while we are away that are unexpected, that are outside the systems, processes, and our team members will need to think on their own. That constant training that goes on in the business for team members to think on their own is critical.

We keep going back to the mindset and A-players like you’ve got to have great people and mindset about this. It does require a shift. I think I can’t walk away for a week from my business. How on Earth do we get to four weeks? We don’t just rip the band aid off like, “See you.”

It’s about baby steps. You create four-week vacation tests in your business. Ryan, I’m going to put you on the spot here. What’s the longest you have been able to be away from your business fully?

A week.

Your next vacation test would be that you would plan to go away for maybe 8 business days or in 2 weeks. You could probably double it and then you need to think about, “What would not get done if I’m fully unplugged for two weeks?” Whatever comes to mind is what you need to go to work on creating a system around and making sure there’s a team member or more than one team member who knows how to work that system essentially. All you do is you say, “The longest I have been able to be away unplugged is five days, so I’m going to stretch it. I’m going to double that next time. What would not happen?”

When you go away for that time and come back, you ask your team, “What fell through the cracks, what went wrong or what did we not anticipate?” You work on that thing, and then schedule your next vacation test, which in your case, Ryan, would be three weeks. Just imagine, you didn’t realize coming to this show that you were a few steps away from three weeks off from your business fully unplugged but you are. After you do those three weeks, then you schedule a four-week vacation. Most businesses that have steady lead generation in place and solid conversion are less than twelve months away from the owner being able to take a four-week vacation.

A-players love to work, and they're out there, but they're working elsewhere. Click To Tweet

I think that would be most of your readers. The reason I say it with confidence is most of your readers are reading because they need the hire. They need to hire because you have a steady lead conversion, lead generation and solid conversion. That’s the point when you need to hire. You are really in that place, where it’s time to solve the problem that you have, which is how you hire consistently and get great team members, and then get them to be able to run the systems in your business.

I once heard a leader at a workshop challenge the audience and he said, “Imagine what your business would look like a year from now if you put one system in place in your business per week, so at the end of the year, you would have 52 more systems than you have now.” That’s mind-blowing. I bring this up because one of the interesting points in our research is that entrepreneurs who have a high quality of life and are not experiencing burnout have almost doubled the number of systems in place than those who are burnt out. It boils down to hiring great people, getting the systems in place, and teaching them how to make decisions.

It’s hitting home with me. I had to take a week off for surgery and I was completely unplugged for that week. I have 100 other things I would have rather been doing than recovering. It occurred to me that I’m the only person in my company that can send a client agreement. That’s a marketing and sales issue right there. My people are like, “He will be back in four weeks. You can get started,” then they are like, “No. We’ve got to fix this.”

Something I have been working on is how do I get out of being the only one that can do it. I’m looking to automate things because I have learned that when we automate things, they happen. The more we can automate, the better and a lot of the stuff that we can automate is that $20 an hour work. I want to hire people that are doing $500 an hour work, not the $20 hour or let a computer do that. Let people be creative, think, create new things, and create great relationships with our clients and let them focus on that. The administrative tasks we automate as much as possible.

The other thing is to hire people who like to create systems because it doesn’t need to be us that creates these systems. One of the most freeing moments I had in my business was when I brought on our integrator. She already existed in our business and I was not tapping that potential in her. It allowed me to step into the visionary role. She’s the one who creates the systems. I will have the idea that, “We need this or that.” She coordinates across the business and creates the system so that if there are three people involved touching a certain action or project, that’s all coordinated through her. This idea is that we, the business owner, have to create all the systems as a limiting belief. It’s not true. We can get ourselves out of that role.

That’s how we make our time worth $10,000 an hour when we have people on our team who can implement and execute. Absolutely, we are having this conversation on our tap potential team because we have people who have incredible amounts of insight and talent. They are doing $20 an hour tasks. That’s a waste. We are looking at how do we delegate and elevate. Automation is one of the very first places to look like, “How can things be streamlined?” Once you, the entrepreneur, are thinking about, “How do I get myself into the $10,000 hour activities?” You need to also be looking at, “How do I get my team members doing these more valuable activities and not getting stuck in the weeds?”

I have one more question for you before we wrap up because it’s something that I see happen a lot and I will admit, I have even struggled with this myself. I truly love the work that I do. For me, it’s playing. I hear this, “Take four weeks off.” The first thing that goes to mind is, “I would be bored if I’m not creating something or doing something.” I’m sure that’s a lie we tell ourselves.

We have these unhealthy relationships with our businesses. When we think that we love our businesses and we don’t know what we would do if we weren’t working in our businesses, that’s a sign of codependency. A codependent relationship is not a healthy relationship. There are people in our lives who are probably jealous of the business, like spouses, kids, friends. I know you have a huge guy audience.

I’m going to speak to the guys directly. Your male friends miss you. They want to go hunting, watch football game, and do things with you, and you are too busy. It is time to break up with your business so you have time for other people in your life and you also get to explore who are you away from the business? What hobbies did you used to have many years ago that you haven’t had time for? When you have four weeks off, you are going to be bored and that’s okay because you are on the cusp of discovering who you are away from your business. We have to work through that boredom and accept it as part of it but there’s something great on the other side.

One of the things I have had to do is that we plan fun vacations. When I take a week off, we are fishing or hiking. I used to only vacation in one spot in Arizona that did not have a cell tower. That was my trap. I love being that rural, that remote and my whole family does. We enjoyed just being out in nature then they built a cell tower on top of a mountain. I’m like, “We’ve got to find a new place to go now.”

The things that I learned and just want to recap things. Number one, I think this one is the harder of the three things that I wrote down, is shifting your mindset. That’s way harder than hiring A-players but that’s what I do all the time. I might be a little biased. Shift your mindset. Start thinking that your business is here to provide for your life and your family. It’s not to drain, exhaust and burn you out. The other thing is to hire A-players, which I’m all about. Let’s do that. Finally, the third one is how do we get through this? We test. I thought that was great. Go take a week and see how it happens. Most businesses aren’t going to burn down in a week.

You may come back and a few balls may have gotten dropped but that’s your opportunity to figure out what to work on in your business. I do also want to share that it’s not about having the luxury to take a four-week vacation. It’s really about risk management in your business because you could be out for surgery. You could have a family member who’s ill that you want to take care of. Something could happen to you, so how does your business run without you? That’s something that we typically don’t think about.

I also want to share that in terms of the mindset shift because that is the most challenging piece for us. I have a cool chart in The 4 Week Vacation book that gives you all the objections that you are coming up with within your head to taking a four-week vacation. I have heard them all and listed them all out. On the other side are the powerful questions that help you move in the direction of a business that supports your life.

This is great. Our readers want to know how do they get more information. How do they contact you? I think you’ve even got a special offer.

A codependent relationship is not a healthy relationship. Click To Tweet

Go to The4WeekVacation.com. That’s where you can find out how to get the book. The book is $0.99 on Kindle. Get a copy of the book. I do regularly four-week vacation, Better Business Better Life jumpstart. That is a two-week closed-door training with me, no charge. This is your opportunity. If you are reading this and you are thinking, “I want to get my business on that trajectory where I have freedom and I can choose, whether or not I’m going to work.” Do our jumpstart and all the details for that are on the website.

I am so excited that people are getting this message because not only will it help you with so many other things in your life but it’s going to help your business, too. The number one issue we run into is the bottleneck in the business is almost always the entrepreneur or the owner. Dr. Sabrina, thank you so much for being here. I have enjoyed our conversation. I know there’s a ton of value packed into it.

Ryan, thank you so much. I want to give a shout-out to your readers. If you have been getting value from this show, be sure to leave a review because it helps others find the show. Ryan is doing a great job of bringing you critical business information.

Thanks for being here. I enjoyed it.

Important Links:

The 4 Week Vacation
Better Business Better Life Assessment
Kindle – The 4 Week Vacation: The Entrepreneur’s Ultimate Guide to Taking Your Life Back from Your Business
How To Hire The Best
Sabrina Starling
Leadership Bootcamp

About Dr. Sabrina Starling

Dr. Sabrina Starling, The Business Psychologist® and international best-selling author of the How to Hire the Best series and the 4 Week Vacation®, is the founder of Tap the Potential and co-host of the Profit by Design Podcast. At Tap the Potential, we work to free business owners from the constant demands of a growing business. We believe work supports life, not the other way around. Clients in our Better Business, Better LifeTM coaching program have more time and more money than they’ve ever had. Next, we send them off on a 4 Week Vacation® to celebrate their hard-earned journey to take their life back!

Dr. Sabrina and her team at Tap the Potential are on a mission to change the story of entrepreneurship from one of long hours, grinding it out, to that of sustainably profitable businesses that support and enhance life. The Tap the Potential SolutionTM and our Tap the Potential Family of Business Owners are disrupting small business as usual. We are on our way to making the Tap the Potential Solution the mainstream model for growing business. In many entrepreneurial circles, it is becoming more and more common for one entrepreneur to ask another, “Have you taken a 4 Week Vacation®?” (as opposed to asking “How many employees do you have? What is your annual revenue?). Taking a 4 Week Vacation® is rapidly becoming the recognized symbol of entrepreneurial success.

Never one to accept the status quo or back down from a challenge, Dr. Sabrina’s How to Hire the Best series grew from her desire to solve the toughest hiring challenges interfering with her clients’ growth and profitability. What sprang from her experience working with entrepreneurs in rural areas catapulted her into becoming the world’s leading expert in attracting top talent in small businesses—no matter what hiring challenges those businesses are facing—and earned Tap the Potential’s reputation as the go-to resource for entrepreneurs committed to creating Great Places to Work with thriving coaching cultures and highly engaged team members working from strengths.

As The Business Psychologist® and with her years of driving profit in small businesses, Dr. Sabrina knows what it takes to find, keep, and motivate exceptional performance out of your biggest investment— team members.

FUN FACT: Dr. Sabrina was the first Profit First Professional and Pumpkin Plan Your Biz Strategist. Tap the Potential is a Profit First Mastery Firm. At Tap the Potential, we are Pumpkin Plan Your Biz certified, and we are Founding Fixers for Fix This Next.

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Grow Your Business With This One Change With Joshua Gillow And Duane Draughon

Ryan Englin · December 29, 2021 ·

What if the secret to growing your business relies on you making one small change? Today’s guests are Joshua Gillow, Founder of YES Express, and Duane Draughon, Co-Founder and Lead Designer of VizX Design Studios. The duo also hosts the Outerspaces Podcast, sharing tips, strategies, and contractor success stories. Joshua and Duane join Ryan Englin to talk about how they built their own successful businesses in the outdoor living space and what you can do to achieve the same results. All it takes is one little shift. Tune in and gain incredible insight on how to take your business to the next level.

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Grow Your Business With This One Change With Joshua Gillow And Duane Draughon

I’ve got a couple of guests here that I’m excited to talk about because I often meet people coaching other people, how to get this done, get out of their business, and create success, and they’ve never done it themselves. Not these two guys. They’ve built some amazing least successful businesses in the outdoor living space. We’re going to talk about what they’ve learned and what things you can do in your business to help you achieve some of the same incredible results they have. I’d love to welcome to the show Duane Draughon and Joshua Gillow. Welcome to the show.

Thanks for having us.

I always start out with this first question. What is the biggest myth in your industry? I don’t want you to limit it to outdoor living spaces. Let’s talk about the trades in general, anybody that’s in that construction space.

The biggest myth in our industries is that if you work in your business for most of your life, you’re going to retire rich one day.

Break that down for me. You talk about working in the business. What are you talking about?

Showing up every day as your best employee owning the company and thinking that you’re going to work, maybe like your grandparents did on the farm. You’re going to work and one day you’re going to open up your bank account and there’s going to be tons of money in there. That’s not the reality of life and owning your job is like working in your business. Once you flip and strip and start working on your business, that all changes.

I love what you said there, “It’s a job.” If you wake up and go to work for yourself every day versus creating an asset, creating this value and leveraging other people to make it happen. How did you guys take that concept in versus on your business and create the incredible businesses that you guys have?

When I was much younger, I grew up in a garden center. At five years old, I started in a family business and grew through that, selling things and getting used to helping people and all that good stuff. I worked in the family business. My brother, father and I started a landscaping company. I worked in that business as well and I was not aware of it at the time, but working a little bit on it and mostly in it. Fast forward that fifteen years, we kept hitting this glass ceiling. I couldn’t get through it. I couldn’t break that million-dollar line. Eventually, I realized in order to do that, I had to start working on the business, not in the business.

That started to change. It worked out well. I started another company where we focused more on the design and the management portion of the industry. I shattered right through that in no time. It’s because I started working on the business, not in it as much. As soon as I started that, I started hiring people to do the things that I was doing so that I could focus on the growth and the trajectory to be the captain of the ship, not the one running around, throwing the coal in the engine. It’s constantly changing your roles to get to a point where you’re managing a company, an actual entity, and not working in the business doing the day-to-day task and trusting. The big thing is to trust that other people can do it, and not just do it, but do it a hell of a lot better than you.

Trust that other people can do it, and not just do it, but do it a hell of a lot better than you. Click To Tweet

The change came from educating yourself and educating your mind. We all talked about this in our podcast. The trades were such a powerful thing back then and we were also looked down upon and you look down upon yourself. When we were working our businesses, we did not feel right unless we were the ones working. We were the physical wheelbarrow pusher. Before I met my wife, I bragged that I worked 67 days straight, and that was like a hurrah brag, like, “I’m working hard.”

Educating yourself and understanding that Who Not How types of books. Proximity is power hanging around the right people, and then you start educating yourself and you realize that, “Maybe I need to start doing this another way. Maybe I need to start bringing people in who can do this better than me. Educate or motivate them and you can pull away from the business,” and that’s what I did. When I look back in the terms of years, this is why I’m so passionate about teaching. I have more years of that physical work than I do have of the years now that I have the management work. I want to help change this for people.

What is the thing that’s holding most people back from this? I get we could go down the hiring path. You can’t leverage and find people you can trust if hiring is so hard. That’s probably a different conversation, but there’s something that comes before people. We were talking about this briefly before we started this show. Talk to me a little bit about what you think is the number one thing holding businesses back.

I want to start on mindset in general. The more I’ve understood this study, 80% of what we think in our minds is what we become. We’re never thinking, “Let’s hire people. Let’s bring them in.” We’re always thinking, “I got to pay that next bill. I can do the job. Nobody can do it and talk to the client better than me.” Until we release that out of our minds, a lot of the businesses are always going to say the same way.

It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in. If you keep that mindset that you’re the only one or you’re going to go broke if you bring somebody in, you’re going to get stuck in that rhythm and that pattern, and it’s going to stay that same way. What needs to change first is to change the mindset then start working everywhere else.

You only got so many hours in a day or a week. Even if you’re billing an insane amount at the top of the market, you’re going to put a limit on what you can make and what your business can do if you don’t figure out how to get out of that stuff.

At the end of the day, that’s a good point. Most business owners out there, a lot of them start out as actual workers. They got a hobby, and all of a sudden it becomes their business. What happens is they get stuck in that role. They have a hard time changing what they do because they’ve always promoted their way of doing things to their clients, and then all of a sudden, if they put somebody else in place, they would do it differently. They don’t have systems and processes in place. They do it the way they do. How can you trust somebody to go out and do you? It’s not going to happen. That doesn’t work. Oftentimes, that’s too big of a mountain to climb and they stay away from it.

They’ll say, “I’ll bring somebody in and I’ll have them do the stuff behind me. I always have to be the front of the company,” but the problem is you can only go so far. If you want a vacation, the company stops growing and moving. It doesn’t work that way. A big thing for business owners after they’ve been doing it a while is trust issues. That’s a huge one. You are trusting that others are going to do it the same or better. That’s isn’t the case. Believe it or not, we have to put our egos which is the second piece here. Put those that aside because as for the mindset, it’s so much, especially the males out there. They’re driven by ego like, “I want to be the face of a company. I want to be sitting in that truck. I want people to be looking at me. I’m the one that’s building this empire,” but they didn’t step back a little bit.

BCC 63 | Grow Your Business — Grow Your Business: The biggest myth in our industry, or industries in general, is that if you work in your business for most of your life, you’re going to retire rich one day.

Step back and realize that the bigger goal is to empower that team because as a business owner working on your business, it’d be great to be able to do that from a beach, while running five other companies, or being at your kid’s soccer game. That’s the cool part. That’s the success. It’s not having 50 guys looking at you saying, “Boss, what’s next,” or 85 trucks in a row with your name on it where you can point to your friends, “I own that.” It’s lame. The team behind it drives the engine of the business.

The best leaders create that team and empower and equip them with what they need to make it happen. I’m so passionate about process and systems, but most of the stuff that a business owner I see happening is they’re stretched in 100 different directions. When you hire somebody and you say 100% of your focus is on this doing the work and taking care of the customer. One hundred percent of your focus is on managing my finances. They can do it so much better because they’re not constantly putting on different hats, taking them off, switching gears and going from dealing with an upset customer to a sales meeting to designing the next project. They don’t have to keep shifting those gears. They can focus, stay in their lane and it can be so much more productive.

Some of our marketing is story-based. With the new staff we’re bringing in, I gave some work to one of the staff members. It was amazing how fast they were able to knock it out, focus on it and get it done that way. I would do it, but it’d take me 3, 4 or 5 days to get it right and I have to have it proofread and it was done in about an hour and a half because I gave it to him. Now it was full focus on them to do that. It was amazing how much faster that was. It’s almost like you can’t afford to hire people.

You guys make it sound so easy to stop working in the business, but sometimes in practice, it’s not that easy to get owners out. I worked 70 hours a week as a badge of honor. I used to have this job working for someone else for 40 or 45, but now I go work for myself, I work 60, and they’re excited about it. What’s the thing that maybe you guys went through it or maybe you coach some of your clients through it? What’s one of the first steps people can make to start down that path of shifting that mindset so they can start working on the businesses instead of in it?

Let me make this as simple as possible and not make it a technical answer. This is what I did do. The first position that I brought in was an assistant. It was a tough job for the assistant because the assistant was working for somebody who didn’t know how to hell to show the assistant what to do. The assistant’s job was to learn how to pick up, take over, figure out things to do to make it easier, and then we slowly got into a rhythm. After the rhythm was created, a lot of stuff was taken off my plates.

I’m a guy who’s living a life right now where I don’t even check my junk emails anymore. That’s something my assistant does, goes through it and deletes all that stuff first, and then I take the meat of the emails. I may not be an expert on this, but it’s worked for me, bring that assistant in, start taking that little stuff off my plate, start freeing me up, give me some other stuff to do and then I can focus and start bringing in some of the big guns. At least that’s what I think.

It got me thinking that one of the things you said was it didn’t work out super easy in the beginning. It took you a while because you didn’t know how to have an assistant. I see that happen often where somebody will hire one of their first employees and it doesn’t work out on the first day. They’re like, “I knew it wasn’t going to work.” They give up, they throw it out and they say, “I’m not going to do this again,” but it sounded like it took you some patience and trial and error to figure that out. How long should people be patient for this to figure out how to bring someone in and help them with the business, especially if they’ve never done it before?

To be honest, my experience was I often like to have things planned out. I’m a systems-in guy. I want to lay everything out and plan things out, but it was on faith when it comes to hiring the first person. I’m like, “Help. I don’t have all the answers right now. I know that I can’t keep going the way I’m going now.” I started writing out things that I did every day. I started running lists. Here’s what I do every day. I track what I would do for 1,2 or 3 weeks. I don’t even remember but it was a pretty useful amount of time, and I started seeing some similarities, things I was doing over and over again. I’m like, “I don’t need to be doing this. I don’t need to be answering the phone, this email and scheduling projects.”

Certain things started becoming more evident that I didn’t need to be doing, and then once that was the case, I’m like, “Here you go. We’re going to have to figure it out.” I’ve never had somebody in the office the first time around to help that with that. We went together on faith and said, ”We’re going to figure this out together.” I told her when she came on, “If you’re looking to get on a train, punch in a ticket, fall asleep for a while and head down the tracks because everything’s lined up for you, that’s exactly what we’re going to do every single day. It was probably not the right job for you.”

What needs to change first is the mindset, then start working everywhere else. Click To Tweet

I said, “If you’re ready to sit down in this dune buggy, put on your seatbelt and go across the dunes with me and back and forth, up and down, day and night, if that’s something you’re in for, let’s do this thing because I don’t have the answer. I am not the leader yet that has all the answers. I’m getting there.” My mindset is always ready, fire, aim. I’m like, “I need this. We know this has to be done. Let’s figure it out together.”

If not, you get stuck in analysis paralysis. I see this with a lot of our students where they don’t know what to do first. “What should I do first?” I don’t have any help and assistance. Start writing a list of the things you do on a daily basis and put in a list of, “This lights me up. I can’t wait to get up and start this in a day.” This other side is, “I’d be happy if I never had to do that stuff again,” and then find somebody that lights them up, the stuff you don’t want to do. The next thing you know, everybody’s happy.

It takes a certain amount of humility to be able to do that, to be able to say, “We’re going through the dune buggy together. If we roll the dune buggy when I ask you to get out, then help me flip it back over because we’re so focused on this together.” It reminds me of when you talked about the systems and processes, which is probably more for the readers that are a little bit more technical in nature.

I remember Mike Michalowicz describing in his book Clockwork, one of the easiest ways to document your systems. He’s like, “Take your phone, set it up, point it at your screen or at the work you’re doing. Wear a GoPro and whatever it is, and think out loud while you’re doing the work.” Record it, and then take that recording and say, “Here’s your training. Watch me do it while I think out loud what I’m going through.” It’s almost something that people can do intuitively because they have to remember to think out loud and then they can document all their processes.

We had our assistant start making the processes for us based upon how they see it. We’ll take it and tweak it, and then based upon how they see it and saw it. We have a lot of different processes that were created by the assistant. I know the word process. I guarantee it. Some of your readers are like, “I can feel the hair on the back of my neck stand up.” I hate that idea. It feels like I’m constrained in a box. Where does the creativity come in? I feel like it’s the mundane task every day of doing this and doing that.

The crazy part is it’s a hell of a lot easier when you create systems and processes and you manage the system and processes versus the people doing them. Once you come up with a standard, even if it’s a very basic, certain thing you do each and every day, you hand that off to somebody, then you’re managing the process. You’re not blaming them for doing it wrong because the process is at fault, unless they screw it up.

It’s a process. The process didn’t work. Maybe we need to take step nine and put it before step eight. Try that and see if that works. Eventually, when you’re hiring 5 or 6 people that do the same process, they’re all filing the same thing. It’s like McDonald’s. It’s a production line. That’s the beautiful part of it, but they can add their own creativity to those things as well. Having that, starting out and spending a little bit of time writing down what you do on a day-to-day basis and then starting to systemize it or standardize it as your standard, that’ll start your entire process then deals through your mind go like, “If I can do that, what else could I give up?”

You’re not talking about the step-by-step. If they got to enter something into our CRM or their jobs management platform, it’s not like click this box and then type this and click this box. You’re saying, “What’s the 20% of the work that gets us 80% of the results?” It’s, “Put them into our management platform.” That’s one step of the process. How do you do that? That might be a different training, but it’s, “Just do that or call the customer back within 24 hours.” I’m not going to tell you how to call them back or what time to call them back, but we don’t get that detailed. It’s call them back and we make these processes simple.

We have some specifics. The way things are loaded into the CRM system, it has to be loaded in exactly the same way every single time, but they’re easier processes. It doesn’t take rocket scientists. We have it all spelled out and we have our CRM. We created it to where it’s like a flow. You got to go from one spot to the next spot, then certain things are required. It has to work that way. It is very specific but it works, and maybe because that’s that little word in me. You mean like, “I can’t have the last name, not with the capital letter.” I will lose my brain. There are some things that’s got to be right.

To that point, those are preference things sometimes. I’m sure we all have it.

There must.

If you’re working for Duane, you got to capitalize the last name. That’s it.

The home address is not the work address. It’s the home address.

Take notes. If you’re applying for a job to work with Duane, there are some rules, but for the most part, what happens is people get hung up and they think process, “I got to have this manual.” That’s like 30 pages long to tell him how to do this. I’m not even that detailed. They get hung up, but I love what you said, Joshua. We coach this a lot because human beings make mistakes.

If you’re struggling to hire, it’s usually because we set a standard for human beings above what they are capable of, which is perfection. “I got to be able to trust them right out the gate. I got to like them. My customers got to like them.” If we build great processes and we know the processes work and the people follow the processes and something breaks, we get to turn to the process. If the people aren’t following the process, that’s a different issue, but the majority of the time when someone fails at their job, it’s because of a broken process, not because of a broken person.

Think about from the employee or the team member’s standpoint. They then have a standard to go by. Oftentimes, they want to succeed. Most of them do. Let’s keep that as a standard. They all want to succeed. When you give them a set of rules to follow and go through, it’s like you’re playing a game like a football game or a baseball. There are certain rules in order to consider the winner. You got to do certain things in order to win. With systems and processes, you can lay that out as well. They know they did a great job when they got this result and they follow the process to get there, and it’s the same process everybody else follows so that they can all have a conversation around that. I’m going to throw another angle at you here, which I found very powerful for our business.

I remember hearing or reading a book or something where McDonald’s said, “I want to be able to hire a $7 an hour person and be able to give them a task that anybody can do. Run a gigantic company like that. They’re doing a small part of it, but then it’s process and system-driven that anybody could do it. Is there a point? You could come in drunk and high and you could figure it out because it’s that simple. It’s a 1, 2 or 3-step.” My memory is not fantastic. When it comes to our more complicated projects, we’re doing outdoor living projects where we have hundreds of different moving parts throughout this entire project. We might spend six months to a year in a client’s home.

It all depends on where your mindset is. Even when you start, it depends on what you know and don’t know. Click To Tweet

With that being the case, I had to constantly go through the entire project, building it in my head, thinking of everything that could happen, making sure all of my RFPs out to my partners and subcontractors were coming back fully loaded with everything I needed in them. It took a ton of brain space to do that. Every time, that shut the world down and focus on building a project that we haven’t even started yet.

Instead of doing it that way and I did that for years, it was too much. I said, “What if I spun it around back the process and wrote down every possible thing that could happen during that or I could need?” A question I would have or something might come up during, say, construction of a deck, a patio, a roof, a pool, landscaping or whatever it might be outside. Instead of remembering everything, I could take the things off that weren’t pertinent to this project. I don’t have to think anymore. I go down through it like, “I do need one electrical outlet to over by the grill. Thank goodness I had that there because my mind is in three other projects.”

By having a list of everything, and it’s always being added to, possibly be asked, I could then forfeit some of those that don’t pertain to this project, as opposed to trying to remember those small details. By doing that through all of our processes, and that’s how we have all of our RFPs set up now, when a team goes through them like “No, yes,” they don’t have to think anymore.

I had a mentor real early on in my career tell me that the brain is meant for processing, not for storage. It took me a while to comprehend that because I’m like, “I’ve got to store some of the stuff I’m processing,” but the more that I write down and create systems and processes, the easier things became because then I could take my brain and use it for that creative side of the job and work.

We could probably take this to a whole other episode. I agree with both of you guys on that, but I’m still amazed at what the brain is being loaded up with. I cannot believe the amount of information that I’m loading up my brain and it’s taking it, storing it and remembering it. I hear what you guys are saying, but this brain is loaded up right now.

One of the things that we deal with is that my hiring process is so focused on marketing and how you promote and do that. The biggest thing we were talking about a little bit before was, “How do you cut through all the noise?” It’s so noisy right now and this is the problem with the brain. It’s not designed for handling the volume of noise that we get. A study said the average Gen Z receives more advertisements in a 30-day period from everything. The greatest generation. Their great grandparents’ great-grandparents got their whole lifetime. The brain is a lot of volume of information, and not everything is going to stick.

Remember every single ad you saw on social media or every single spam email that came through. A lot of that stuff, we’ve had to teach our brains to let that stuff go because if we don’t, we’re never going to be able to hold on to all the volume. How do you cut through all that noise, and how do you help your employees cut through all that noise? How do you, as the owner, cut through all that noise? A lot of it is to get a lot of that stuff out of your brain to retain and process the good stuff, the stuff you need to grow the business.

I’m going to add to that. Since there’s so much clutter and so much, “Look at me,” sparkly things, looking around, instead of thinking about how do they see you, focus on having them feel you through your words and your delivery. How do you have your future team members, your clients and your customers feel you? That changes the game.

We talked a lot about mindset and creating these systems and processes. How do people get started in this? I hear this and I’m thinking back to when I’m getting started in my business. I’d be like, “Awesome stuff, guys.” What’s that step I have to take? Do I need training, a mentor or a coach? How do I consume some of this information that can help me with building this?

It’s real simple. Start to surround yourself with people.

We’re going to try to answer this, but that’s going to be a tricky question because it all depends on where your mindset is even when you start this. It didn’t depend on what you know and don’t know. I remember when I first started this whole business thing and I would see all these extra things that I need to add.

I would get stressed out and I’m like, “Maybe I’m not even a business owner.” I would lose my mind when I go to that class, and it was talking about how to set up workman’s comp and all that other stuff. I remember reading that and I’m like, “I don’t want to own a business. This is not for me. This is BS.” What happened is you’re in it and you start building your work and you realize, “I can do this. I can do that,” but one thing I want to say is one of the best things to do is you got to get outside the business and hit some immersive training.

Tony Robbins’ UPW, Unleash the Power Within, will shake you to your soul. Landmark Forum to understand how to say to your mind, get your mindset down to zero and start becoming one with the universe. This is the Super Bowl of my life. I have lived my entire life to be on this show right now. This is the most important thing in my life. Whoever’s reading this at the moment they’re reading this, that’s the most important time in their lives. Understanding those mindsets, you can start building upon there and going from that spot when you get into that.

There are experts and organizations out there that this is all they do. You mentioned Landmark and Tony Robbins. They help you get clear on that mindset and be present to focus on the things that are the most important. Taking advantage of those opportunities and those experiences that are out there.

I have to back that up as well. That was one of the biggest shifts. A catalyst in my life was to start working on the inner game. It’s the scariest frontier you’ll ever get into. Most times as business owners, we keep ourselves busy because we truly don’t want to dive deep inside of our souls. We want to keep ourselves busy with tons of stuff. That’s why we don’t hire people because if we don’t hire people, then we are doing everything and we can stay in the focus of the fact that I have to do this. If I don’t, then the whole business fails. Once you hire people, you put on a different hat. You now have to be a leader, and that requires work. The sad part is that most, especially men, are scared to death to look inside of themselves at six inches of real estate between their ears, which scares the crap out of them.

They stay busy so they never have to face that, but once you look that old mindset, whatever you want to call it, look yourself in the eye and realize that you got to work on you first, and that’s where these immersive events impact people around the world. Once you’ve done that work and you go inside and you realize you don’t know anything about who you are, why you exist, what you’re here to do and how you’re going to serve and why anyone out there would give any of their precious lifetime to you under your business as a team member, why anybody would ever give that time to you is? You can’t answer that quickly. Why would they come work for you? It’s that simple.

If you’re not offering that at the tip of your tongue, and you don’t know that within your being of what you’re here to do and why you’re here, no one else is going to see it either. If you’re playing with that head trash constantly in your head, and you don’t know when you’re faking it until you make it and all that crap, you’re always going to hit a plateau, stop and blame the world for it. The reality is you got to look in the mirror and you got to say, “I got to work on you first. Once I get you figured out or at least in the right direction, now I can finally empower other people to live their best lives.”

It’s only in that time when you realize that vulnerability is a superpower that you actually start showing up for yourself. Click To Tweet

I coach a lot of clients around. You’d mentioned make your marketing, make them feel. It’s got to creating this connection and the sense of belonging, especially when you’re building a team. I have people tell me all the time, “This is way too touchy-feely.” I’m sure there are people right now like, “Joshua, I get it. It’s way too touchy-feely for me. I’m a rough, tough construction guy.” I’m like, “No. It’s called emotion.”

It’s called getting in touch with our emotions and understanding that human beings are emotional creatures. I’ve heard the argument for, “They’re not my guys. My guys aren’t emotional creatures.” I always ask them, “When’s the last time one of your guys, customers or GCs cursed you out?” Not even days, minutes ago. This is called emotion. We’re channeling the wrong ones.

Let’s get clear on what’s important to people and how we can do this. I love what you said about looking in the mirror and saying, “I got to work on you first.” The mindset is so critical in all this and, Duane, what you said, we probably couldn’t even do it as a series of shows on mindset and how important this is and dive deep into it.

For those people that are out there that are reading, “This sounds good. What’s the next step?” I heard you guys mentioned Tony Robbins and Landmark Forum. There are other groups out there. There are local ones and national ones. You can even find mentors that are good at this stuff, but this is something that you guys work on, too. You guys have students in a program that can go through this and can get exposed to this. Tell me a little bit about your program and then let the readers know how they can get in touch with you.

I appreciate that. I did it the hard way. I know Duane did in the beginning, too. Our goal was we own businesses. That was a big patch on our shirt. It was a cool part. As a business owner, I stand out. I get the identity and all that stuff. The problem is that oftentimes that identity starts running your life. You forget who you are and you have to be whatever the business needs, but at the end of the day, what I found and it took me years to realize is this, “Why the hell should I try to figure everything out?” We talked about processes and systems over this show. For years, I thought I had to make my own.

Reinvent the wheel every time. “Mine is better. You guys don’t understand how I work.” The reality that I found eventually was that if I would hire a coach and a mentor, I could get their help a lot faster. They’d be like, “No, Josh. Don’t do it this way. Do it this way. I know because I did it that way for five years and it didn’t work.” You saved me five years of my precious life, thank you.

Hiring mentors, getting around people, coaches and things like that, you do that for sports. Why the hell wouldn’t you do it for your business? Is it that simple? Our program, we came together after all these years in the business. We have a similar business model and we came together and said, “We see our industry struggling, trying to figure these things out. How to communicate with clients and design cool spaces.”

We’re getting sick and tired of going out and talking to clients that are only looking to do something simple like a paver patio. It’s not that it’s a bad thing, but who the hell wants to go out on a sunny day and sit in the sun, baking on a paver patio? Nobody does. What they want is an extension of their living space. They want a space they can be comfortable in, share memories and create those special moments with their family. Let’s have that conversation with our clients.

We’ve done that over the years, and we found that so many in the industry aren’t. We said, “What if we try to help them have that conversation?” We train people in our industry how to have a conversation with our clients, not just to sell them shit, but to better understand what gets them excited.

What’s the bigger why for doing the project? How can we make sure as the guide in the conversation, not the hero here, that we can guide them to the best solutions and tell them when they’re getting close to something that doesn’t make sense for them and guide them away from that? Let’s face it. The work that we do, you might do once or twice in a lifetime.

A client is not looking for someone to say, “Build me a patio.” What they want is someone to help them through this process. That’s what we’ve come down to doing in our own practices now. We’re teaching people in our industry across the country how to do that and how to have that conversation. How to get budget, how to tell a client, “No, we’re not a good fit,” not just take everything that comes in the door because they called you. It’s having a conversation by the end to create a win-win environment for those clients so they don’t have to keep going through the phone book.

How did you find out about this program that you guys have?

We have a couple of different ways to do that. One is that we have a podcast as well. It’s called Outerspaces. You can check us out on any of the platforms. You can go online OuterspacesPodcast.com. We have a conversation like this weekly, Duane and I, with all kinds of cool people like Ryan, that’s how we met you. We also have a website Yes.Express, you’ll find us there.

For the readers here, we have a free bootcamp. You can get a little taste of what we do and who we are as people. If you find value in there and you’re like, “This would be great. I could see this being a real launch for my company,” then reach out to us. We’d love to have you onboard, talk and make sure we’re a good fit and then help you take your business to the next level.

Any closing thoughts? Anything else you guys want to add before we wrap up?

This is a little bit outside. I wanted to say in the beginning, we were going to talk about it. One of the biggest takeaways about our industry. One of the biggest hangups I have to say that’s going in my head is like, “People think what we do is landscaping.” There’s this mindset about it behind it as if it doesn’t add value to the home.

I was speaking at an event. I was speaking upon getting more interior decorators to start working with the exterior contractors and building some synchronization between the two. That’s one of the takeaways. In the beginning, we were talking about it and we flipped from that straight into processes.

I didn’t get to say this and it was burning me up for a while. Outdoor living does have a lot of value. It is the place that has the feeling. It can help you feel because the space changes every day and every hour. The temperature changes, the wind blows, the birds chirping and the cars driving by. It’s one of the best places in the house. It’s the place that’s going to give you more value. If you’re swamped out in home remodel with a kitchen, a bedroom, and an install done, the outdoor living space is the best place to have it done, but it has to be designed and done correctly.

The closer you are connected to your emotions, the stronger leader you become. Click To Tweet

I love what you said there. It’s something that we work with our clients on when we develop their core story. Nobody is buying the actual service that you sell. Nobody is buying the pavers and the swimming pool. They’re buying the memories that they can create around it, that extension of living space, and those other things that are emotionally tied to that. It’s important, especially from my perspective when you’re building a team that the people on your team buy into that same emotional purchase that your customers have. There’s so much to that. Duane, we could go to other shows on this

This is going to go out to the gentlemen in the group that are reading. We talked about this throughout this show so far about being open with emotion. Most guys don’t want to touch that with a 300-foot pole. You’re a coward if you lean into your emotions, or if you cry, you show weakness. Your fear of someone judging you, it’s only in that time when you realize that vulnerability is a superpower that you start showing up for yourself and you start putting on those clothes or that armor of masculinity. It’s like, “I have to be strong. I have to do this.” Let me break it down for you. Your wife, your children and your team, they want a leader that they can connect with. That’s someone who tells them what to do. They need to feel you as well. They feel you when you share that you don’t have all the answers.

Men, we’re programmed to be strong, don’t cry. That’s crap. The closer you are and connected to your emotion, the stronger leader you become. Everybody that I look up to as mentors and all that have figured this out. It’s something that took most of my life to figure out. Once you finally embrace that and realize emotion is power and not something to be feared or put under the rug, that’s when you can truly grow and that’s when a team will collect behind you and say, “Leader, where are we going?” It’s a huge piece of this.

That’s a huge shift. That’s a shift that I’ve seen when our clients make that shift, that it transforms not just their business but their personal life too. They get everything. They get their cake and they get to eat it too, but the one thing I do know is that for many people, this doesn’t matter. This is business owners in general. This is our baby. We built this business, blood, sweat and tears from the ground up. I struggle with other people taking care of my baby. That’s an emotional decision. It’s an emotional hangup that’s keeping us from moving forward. There are people out there that can support you. You guys have great programs. You’d mentioned some programs.

Our program is all about how do you become a company that attracts great talent. People want to work with you. We have one client that says, “We are at a point now where people have to work with us. This is not like I have to be a part of that team.” Not I want to, but I have to. That mindset shift is so critical.

Guys, thank you so much for being here. I’ve enjoyed this conversation. I’m sure we’ll do it again here in the future. Duane is taking notes. He’s probably going to have a whole bunch of ideas for other ways we can take this. I’m looking forward to that. Thank you so much for your candid, honest feedback and thoughts on this matter.

Ryan, it’s been a pleasure. Thanks for having us on and we’d come back on any time. If we can shift one person’s thinking to have them live a more happy and joyful life with their family and their business and fall back in love with their business, I’d be here every day for you.

Same here. I’m game.

Important Links:

About Joshua Gillow

Meet Joshua Gillow: A Man With a Plan

Award-winning landscape designer Joshua Gillow’s passions – natural beauty and timeless design – are evident in every project he undertakes. Just ask his happy clients, who rave about his work.

After 15 years as a partner in a family-owned landscape design firm, Joshua realized his clients were craving “The Big Picture.” Joshua launched MasterPLAN Landscape Design & Installation in 2011 to combine his love of natural beauty with cutting-edge design tools. With MasterPLAN, Joshua is able to create a realistic 3-D vision of what the finished project will look like.

Joshua’s passion for his work is contagious. “I love the excitement in my clients’ eyes when I present the plan for their new backyard,” Joshua says.

The seed of Joshua’s great love for plants, creative design and the great outdoors were planted in him as a child growing up at his parents’ garden center. He realized he could combine his love of nature and design when he earned his degree in architectural design and engineering in 1999.

Josh excels at combining his knowledge of nature with the skills needed to create a well designed and beautiful outdoor space.

While Joshua has received many honors for his design work, the award he cherishes most is the recommendation of a happy client.

About Duane Draughon

Living in the present moment creating new possibilities for my life and others, is becoming my most exceptional quality. I’ve learned that you can do anything or be anything you want by focus, education, and massive action. There is no glass ceiling.

As for my objectives: Treat everyone fairly and learn as you go. Every day is a new class; some days, you take notes, and some days you create the notes.

Specialties: Business Branding, Spread Sheet Design, Marketing Plan & Design, Small Engine Repair, Disc Jockey, IT Trouble Shoot, 3D Rendering Design, CAD Designer, Project Management, Customer Relations

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600% Increase In Employee Applications

Ryan Englin · December 15, 2021 ·

So now you’re looking for people to join your company. You need employee applications, but you just can’t seem to get the right kind of applicants in. Worry no more as Ryan Englin and Jeremy Macliver share their insights on the hiring process. Ryan and Jeremy discuss several key points that can help boost the number of applications and get the right people through the door. Listen in and learn how to fine-tune your hiring process with these useful insights.

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600% Increase In Employee Applications

Welcome back to another episode.

Welcome back. I am looking forward to this one because I have a question that I am seeing come up continuously in the session room. I’m excited to ask this and we’re going to know what we need to do to get people to apply for our job. Before you answer this, I want to clarify it. I don’t want people. I want the right people.

Now you’re setting the bar.

I don’t need robots or people that are under this minimum wage and they don’t even want a job. They’re just trying to keep it going. How do I get good people to apply for my job?

What you’re saying is they can’t just fog the mirror. They’ve got to be able to do the work.

Do the work, do the work well, fit my company and be that person I’m looking for. I want it all.

That’s one of the things that I feel a lot of employers have done wrong over the last few years. They’re so desperate to hire that if a person shows up, has a pulse, can fog a mirror, they’re in, let’s do it. Three weeks later, you’re like, “I don’t understand why this project is over budget. I don’t get it.” I think there’s so much that doesn’t happen in the qualification process. Often, we’re desperate to hire people quickly, that we think if we slow down the process and get to know them a little bit better, we’re going to hurt our results. It’s what it comes down to.

We have to start thinking about this job post as an ad, so people will start applying. Click To Tweet

When it comes to getting people to apply, there’s one thing. I wish I could give two takeaways in this one, but it’s going to be one thing, and maybe you get some other takeaways in here. The thing you post on the job boards, stop thinking of it as the job description that HR gave you or that your lawyer gave you, or that you downloaded from your association.

Those job descriptions are internal documents to help you define the role inside your organization to hold people accountable. What you got to start thinking about is that thing that you post on those job boards that you put on your website, that is an advertisement. Ads are exciting and engaging. They draw people in. They’re attractive and you’ve heard me say it before. We got to start thinking about this post as an ad. When we can think about it as an ad, people will start applying.

I like what you’re saying. I’m going to need some more clarification on it. Of course, we would never say, “I’m looking for clients that have more than $100,000 in income, living in a house that’s $350,000 or more, drive two vehicles. If you’re not that, please don’t call me.” I’m like, “That makes sense but how do we do that?”

The analogy I like to think about it is a car commercial. We’ve all seen some advertisements for a car. Picture that we’ve got a Corvette convertible on the Pacific Coast Highway and that’s the commercial you’re watching. What is it? It’s a couple driving the car, seeing the ocean in the background, and having a great time. Take that and put it against an advertisement that was the maintenance schedule. At 250 miles, you got to bring it in and make sure you broke it incorrectly. At 3,000 miles, you’re going to want to rotate the tires and change the oil. At 10,000 miles, we’re going to charge you for this extra service that you weren’t planning on when you bought the car. Imagine if that was the advertisement. How many cars do you think they would sell?

Not very many.

That’s what we do all the time with our job ads, “Must be able to lift 50 pounds. Must have reliable transportation. Must be able to turn a wrench,” whatever it is. No wonder these things don’t work. I want you to stop thinking of your ad as that maintenance schedule and start thinking of your ad as driving down the PCH, having a good time, wind in the hair, and enjoying life. That’s what’s going to attract people to you.

One of the first things we like to do when we work with a new client is we tell them, “Here’s the deal. I know you got an HR department and you got HR people. Let’s take recruiting away from HR.” I know some people are not going to like this. You might not like it, but let’s take recruiting right away from HR and let’s give it to the marketing team. What do you think that would do to that ad that you post?

BCC 61 | Employee Applications — Employee Applications: We’re so often desperate to hire people quickly that we think if we slow down the process and get to know them a little bit better, we’re going to hurt our results.

That is interesting. I could see the marketing team taking that on. They could make it fun if they could but let’s get real. We’re all blue-collar. It’s not that cool. It’s not driving down the Pacific Coast Highway in a Corvette.

In the construction space, they have these apprenticeship programs. I don’t know about you but I hear like, “I spent a lot of money and a lot of time building this apprenticeship program and I can’t get anybody into it.” What’s the coolest part about an apprenticeship program? I see the social media ads sometimes, “Earn while you learn.” You might have seen that one where it’s like, “This is Billy. Billy went to a four-year college, and he has $150,000 in debt and he can’t find a job now. This is John. John went to an apprenticeship program, earned while he learned, makes $80,000 a year as an electrician, and has no debt. He just cut off Billy’s electricity.”

The apprenticeship programs are so valuable. Whether it’s in construction or as a contractor, home services, whatever it is, these apprenticeship programs are impressive. You can take somebody straight out of high school and in four years, get them the equivalent of a four-year degree in their trade. They’re making $60,000 to $80,000 a year with zero debt. I don’t know about you but that sounds pretty sexy to me. That sounds pretty much like driving down the PCH in a convertible.

You said home services. How many home services companies have an apprenticeship program? Is that the only trick? Is there something else that we could do?

There are other things. This is a serious question. How many people do you know that they want to hire somebody entry-level and keep them there? They don’t want them to get better skills. They don’t want them to be more productive. They don’t want to be more profitable. They just want them in entry-level and keep them there.

I don’t know anybody like that.

I don’t either. How cool would it be to say, “Here’s the deal? Maybe you’ve got 1 or 2 years of experience.” Let’s even take a semi-experienced guy because not everybody’s going to look for a guy that’s totally green. We take a guy that’s maybe got 1 or 2 years of experience. He’s probably not going to do it your way but you’re going to coach him. You’re going to train him on it. Whether you have an apprenticeship program or not, you’re going to take him at this, “He’s still learning level,” and you’re going to turn them into a journeyman inside of 3 or 4 years just because you invest in your people, just because there’s an opportunity to create this career path, just because the work is such that he’s going to have to get better at his trade. He’s going to have to get better at his craft.

People don’t leave jobs; they leave managers. Click To Tweet

Most people that go into the trades want to get good at it. You probably do already have this in place, but imagine your organization had a well-defined career path for people. By well-defined, I mean there are four bullet points. You’re going to do this for a couple of years, then you’re going to do this for a year, then you’re going to go get this certification and then you’re a journeyman. You’re making $60,000 a year. That’s attractive to a lot of people.

A lot of my teams use the accountability chart. They use that for what you’re talking about, “Master these? Why don’t you get these? Take rocks to learn the next level up as you’re developing. When that opening comes, you’ll be prepped and ready.” That’s their master plan. Super simple, super fast. They already have it because they already had to do that to get aligned so the team was all rowing in the same direction. You mean that by an apprenticeship program, it’s not this federally registered. I was like, “This is going to be a big deal.”

Maybe. If you went through that route and you spent the money to get this federally accredited apprenticeship program, you best damn give that to the marketing team if they can figure out how to get you an ROI.

We got learning and development. We got apprenticeship programs that this marketing team can do. What else is going to make it cool to come here? “We fix people’s toilets” is not that cool.

That’s great because my next story is going to go right in line with fixing toilets. We said it before. People don’t leave jobs. They leave managers. Imagine your job ad talked about what it was like to work with you or to be on your team. What if it painted the picture that the grass is greener? Most job seekers are thinking like, “It looks pretty cool over there but I don’t know. Maybe it was growing over a septic tank. Maybe that’s why the grass looks greener. It’s toxic.”

What if it wasn’t toxic? What if you had good hiring managers that invested in their people and communicated well? The truth is you probably have some. You might even be one. Imagine that your ad talked about that. The reason that people are looking for a new job is they want a new manager. What if your ad talked about your manager? What if the ad talked about who you’re going to work for and how you guys communicate? That’s attractive because nobody else is doing that. Everybody else has given me the same old song and dance, and then throwing me into an environment where I’m disregarded.

That’s definitely something where I see a lot of good people in the trades, hard workers, care about each other. They’re out there working hard doing whatever they’re doing, but they’re passionate about their people. I could see that being a huge thing to talk about what it is like there. That’s pretty cool.

There’s so much more like, why do people stay? One of the things that I tell people to do when they’re writing a job ad is to give it to one of your top performers and ask them if they’d apply there. “Would this be attractive to you? I want more of you. We all want more top performers.” Give it to them and say, “What am I missing? What is it about being on our team do you like?” Let’s include it. This isn’t something you have to do in a vacuum. You don’t have to figure it all out on your own. Ask your team to help. Your people that are productive, guess who they like working with? Productive people.

Birds of a feather flock together.

There’s a ton of opportunity in the ad. We’re talking more at a conceptual level. I do want to give some very specific tips that you can take away, but I do want you to think about this as an advertisement. Get your team to help you. Give it to the marketing team. Spice it up. Have fun with it but don’t oversell yourself. That’s the other thing. That’s my warning. If it’s not legit, don’t put it in there. Other than that, have fun with it. Be different. Give it to your marketing team.

We don’t have to say we’re the Disneyland of concrete pouring?

If you are, awesome. Are we going to have churros and cotton candy on the job site? I’m all in.

No, we got to work hard. It’s early in the morning. Be real. There are some real things that you got going that are good. I love that. Let’s hear something. You piqued my interest. I want to hear some practical tips and get down into it. Let’s hear those.

Here’s the first one. I don’t want to be absolute but everybody has made this mistake. Do not get clever with your job titles. Don’t get creative with them. We had a client and this was being creative, field technician. I was like, “What the heck is a field technician?” They’re like, “I wanted to go short as I could because I wanted the best chance of my job ads being seen.” I was like, “You’re getting a little clever here with this so you can game the system.”

We don't want just more applications. We want the right people. And qualification questions are really going to help with that. Click To Tweet

One of the things we did was we went and did a Google search and a job search for field technicians. We wanted to see what came up. This was a refrigeration guy, by the way. All of page one are field technicians and IT guys. All they were are IT guys. He thought he was being clever and he was going to game the system by putting in a field technician to cast a wider net. He ended up getting lost in a sea of IT guys. A refrigeration tech and an IT guy are worlds apart.

We went and as simple as we did, we put refrigeration in front of it because that’s what it was. All of a sudden, we started getting applications that were the right applications. This happens more in the tech space than it does in the blue-collar space, but I still see it every once in a while, where you get fancy with these titles because they’re cool and they’re hip. It’s like Master and Commander of the Unicorn Army, and you’re the customer service agent. Let’s not get crazy creative with our job titles because no one is searching for them. No one is searching for your crazy creative job titles.

The idea that if you get creative with the job title, you’re going to stand out is true. However, you have to remember that job boards are search engines. If someone isn’t searching for that job title, you’re never going to show up. Call it what it is because your technicians, your craft workers, your laborers, they’re searching for those words. If you’re looking for welders, put welder. Don’t get all fancy with what that means or what you think might be creative. Just put welder because that’s what people are searching for.

The title is a big one. That’s probably the biggest mistake we see happen a lot. We’re not clear in the title. We either got clever or we got creative, and that never works. That’s one of them. Do you remember how I said give your job ads to your marketing team? The marketing team understands this thing called search engine optimization. They’re creating content for your website that the search engines can pick up so that you can be found. What did I say about job boards? They are search engines. If we are not optimizing our ads before we post them on the job boards, they can’t be found.

One of the easiest ways to do this is to take the title and make sure you repeat it. It depends on how long your ads are. There are some technical requirements but I say 3 to 4 times inside of the ad, repeat the job title. Get clear on what that title is. As I said, refrigeration field technician. When you’re writing the ad as a refrigeration field technician versus as a technician, if you’re going to write that and talk about what it’s going to be like to be there, search engine optimize your job ads. Your marketing team already knows how to do this. If you give it to your marketing team, they’ll be able to help. That’s another one that we see that is helpful in getting people to apply for your jobs.

Do you have a third for us?

I’ll come up with a third one. Here’s the other one. Now, you’re going to show up in search results. People are going to be able to see your job ads and they’re excited. You get a lot more views. Typically, views are going to equal more applies. It’s going to happen. We’ve done all of this to create extra traffic for our ads, and now we start getting all these garbage applications. We’re like, “I already don’t have time to hire people. I definitely don’t have time to deal with all of these garbage applications.”

The job boards have this. If you’ve got an applicant tracking system, they have this. You want to make sure you take advantage of any of the qualifying questions that the job boards give you. I’m not talking about name, address and phone number. I’m talking about the ones that say, “Do you have this certification that we need? Yes or no.” If the job is mobile and we’re not going to give you a truck, we might ask, “Do you have reliable transportation to get to the job site?”

These qualification questions are critical to making sure that you’re getting high-quality people. We don’t just want more applications. We want the right people. These qualification questions are going to help with that. I don’t know of a single job board that does not allow this or that doesn’t have it. The one place that you can’t do this, or most people don’t do it is on their own website. If the only place you’re posting your job ads is on your website, you’re probably not going to see a lot of people or a lot of traffic. If you are posting them on the job boards, take advantage of those qualification questions. It’s not just about the views and the number of applications. It’s about getting the right applications.

We’ve got three helpful tips there as we bring it over to the marketing department and create a marketing version of it. We definitely have learned that we all have good things about our company that we should be sharing out there and making sure that that’s communicated as we build our employee brand. With that, what is one action that they should go do after reading this?

Go rip the job description out of HR’s hands, go give it to your marketing team and say, “Fix this for me.” The other thing is somebody will be like, “I don’t have a marketing person to go to.” Go to one of your employees and ask them. One of them that you like or one you want to keep or you’d love to clone and say, “Tell me what’s it like to work here. Describe it for me.” Let them talk and write some notes down. Worst-case scenario, you might have to make some adjustments. The more you can make your ads sound like the people that you want to hire more of, the more you’ll attract the right ones. That’s what I would do. I would go clean them up right away and get them posted.

Everybody go out there, look at your ads, and make sure they’re coming from a marketing perspective. If you don’t have an HR and a marketing team, at least make sure that you’ve changed the hat that you’re wearing when you’re writing and reviewing them to be in more of a marketing hat. Bring in some of your key employees to ask if they’d be attracted to it, and then use some of the fundamental principles that we talked about there around marketing.

A lot of good things here. I don’t want to overwhelm everybody, but start thinking about those posts as ads and that’ll help you change the type of applications you’re getting and the type of people that you want to talk to.

Thank you all for reading and see you on the next episode.

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The Talent Shortage Is A Myth With Ryan Kohler

Ryan Englin · December 1, 2021 ·

There’s an entire concept that there are no applicants looking for a job right now. They’re saying that there’s resignation and other issues in the workplace. But what if it’s not true? What if it’s truly possible to hire great people with the right techniques? Ryan Kohler joins this conversation with host Ryan Englin on the myth about talent shortage. Ryan Kohler is the founder of one of the most popular applicant-tracking systems, ApplicantPro. He emphasizes that the applicant tracking system is critical to managing a good recruiting pipeline, especially for small business owners. Learn how you can think differently if you’re struggling to hire better people.

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The Talent Shortage Is A Myth With Ryan Kohler

As you probably know, I am super passionate about helping small businesses hire better people faster. Our proven process, the Core Fit Hiring System, is something that no one else is doing in the marketplace. It’s one of the biggest reasons that it works so well. People always ask me what the best part of our system is. What is it about our system that makes it so different? It’s a combination of using the right tools well and putting in a process that your team can manage for you. One of those tools, which I’m going to call the cornerstone tool of our system, is the Applicant Tracking System.

BCC 62 | Talent Shortage — Talent Shortage: The number one myth is that there aren’t applicants because the government is paying people not to work.

I am so excited about our guest because he is the founder of one of the most popular applicant tracking systems out there for small business owners. I’m super excited for you to know him and learn about this amazing tool in some ways that you can think differently if you’re struggling to hire better people. Ryan Kohler with ApplicantPro, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Ryan.

We could probably geek out on this a lot because I do believe that the applicant tracking system is so critical to managing a good recruiting pipeline, especially for those busy small business owners, those ones that wear 27 different hats. That recruiting hat is the one they dread putting on every single day. It’s the last thing they want to do.

One of the things that I want to know is what do you believe is one of the biggest myths about recruiting? It seems to be the number one issue in America. Everybody is saying that there is a hiring shortage, a great resignation, and all these other things. What do you think is the biggest myth that people are talking about?

Clearly, the entire concept is that there’s a shortage, there are no applicants, and nobody wants to work. I’ll tell you the number one myth. The government is paying people not to work. The reason why there aren’t applicants is that the government is paying people not to work. Even if it’s true, there’s nothing you can do to solve that if it was true. Anything that is a boogeyman or a big outside influence, we’re giving up our power.

Imagine if somebody is like, “There’s a great lead shortage.” Your marketer came to you and said, “There’s a shortage of people looking for our service.” You’d fire that person. If it were real, you’d shut down your company. If there were a shortage of leads, we would throw money, resources and creativity at it to solve it because we know that’s all that matters. If we can’t solve that problem, we’re screwed.

If HR, an accountant or a random person says, “There’s a shortage of applicants,” we threw up our hands, walk away, and don’t even try to solve the problem. Where America is at, by and large, is very few companies are trying to solve the problem. They’ve accepted that it’s out of their control. That’s where we’re at. Everything is a boogeyman.

It used to be, “Unemployment is 3%. That’s why we can’t get enough workers. Immigration laws are being put in place, that’s why we can’t get enough workers. There’s a talent shortage.” All those things could be true, but talking about them doesn’t do anything because it doesn’t lead to action, which was what you set up. We need stuff that leads to action. Talking about the talent shortage doesn’t lead to action.

Every job offer advertisement has to explain how this is an upgrade to a target audience. Click To Tweet

It’s easy to blame others, put your hand on your forehead and play the victim. When I first started doing this, I was researching a ton about how labor shortage is perceived. I found an article from 1962 talking about the labor shortage in 1962. If there wasn’t a massive reform, we were going to have a labor shortage. At the time, they were talking about typists or typewriters. There was a labor shortage there. This isn’t new. We just find different things to blame it on.

One of my top five books is The Obstacle Is the Way. I’m a big stoic. Anything stoic from Ryan Holiday is going to be what I’m after. It’s one of those books that transformed me as a business owner. There’s the story in there of the king that hit a little bag of gold under a giant rock that he stuck in the middle of the road. He sat back and watching what the people the townspeople would do. Some of them came, complained and turned away. Some of them complained and worked their way around. One peasant came, left, came back with a lever, lifted the stone out of the way, and found the pot of gold.

The theory is that while there are obstacles and it sucks, and it’s hard, you have to work around them. If you’re the person in the marketplace that figures out how to make that obstacle or overcoming at your superpower, you suddenly have a competitive advantage over all the people that are like, “It’s so hard to get customers.” They do just enough to solve it.

Those guys are okay, but the person who’s like, “I will be the plumber, that lead generation is my superpower,” that guy has a competitive advantage. Most of it comes from being willing to lean into the problem and say, “I’m not just going to solve this for today. I’m going to solve this going forward. I’m going to create a better system and approach. I’m going to do it differently than everybody else.” That is usually where the superpower comes in.

I’m a contrarian. You get a pool of water, and the fish are going one way. I’m going to go the opposite way and prove to you how the opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea. It can work. If you think about the labor shortage concept, we will get to the point of a labor shortage until we bring technology to solve it.

If it is big enough, then you will see technology coming to play to solve the problem. Therefore, you know that this business is easy. If I have a labor shortage and there are no applicants for my job, if I can’t solve that problem, then I better figure out how to make my employees be more efficient using tech, changing the job roles and the structure. Those are my only two options.

Either I figured out how to carve out and pull the talent I need from the crowd that’s out there by out competing, or I better figure out how to make my employees the most efficient possible. Those are the only two answers. If you look through history, each time there will be a shortage, technology will come in to make the workers more effective, or it wasn’t a real shortage and therefore, the businesses were just complaining.

In my personal opinion, I don’t think that America’s employers are in enough pain yet to solve it using either one of those. Technology costs money and it requires change. Nobody likes to change. On the other side, it’s process improvement, efficiencies and holding your people accountable. When the economy is doing well, businesses are coming in and you’re dumb, fat and happy, it’s easy to ignore all these inefficiencies that we’ve created in our businesses. It requires change. There has to be enough pain for people to want to make that change.

I would add one concept to it. I don’t know the change where American companies aren’t seeing enough pain to spend the money. I even think the whole technology costs money is a misnomer. We haven’t reached enough pain where we, as companies, will reevaluate our approach and paradigm. When you reevaluate the paradigm of how things are done, that’s normally where this obstacle becomes a superpower.

We were talking about restaurants. There is a concept, a given paradigm, that is best practiced up. People walk into the restaurant. They wait in line and engage a real live human there. It’s our first interaction, and the businesses have set the stage where that’s going to be how they build this relationship. The biggest choke point for ordering food is that one point. If you think about it, everybody is complaining that there are not enough workers to do that job, but I can tell you as a consumer, I don’t want that job done.

I would rather order with an app, even if I’m still sitting in your location. If you make that pitch to the restaurant owners, they may say, “That costs too much money.” In all honesty, that option is off the table because it doesn’t fit our paradigm. This is how it’s done. It’s how everybody is doing it. This is herd mentality. We assume if it was a valid solution, lots of other people before us would do it because we’re not that smart and they’re smarter. In actuality, there’s no data that says it will work.

There’s a book I’ve been reading. It’s like, “We’ve traded out all the magicians and witchdoctors for economists and engineers.” What it meant was we no longer believe in magical solutions. We only do things that have been proven to work. What happens when new ideas haven’t been proven yet? They don’t get adopted. In the blue-collar world, if we follow what everybody is doing, we’re leaving off the table the new stuff. In the tech world, we crave being first. We try new stuff even if we know it’ll break just to do something new.

The money will always pay back in technology. Nobody can build you tech that goes against the given paradigm if you’re not willing to get outside of your paradigm and say, “Maybe there’s a different way to service plumbing customers or do some of this stuff.” COVID forced parts of that, but why wait for COVID? As a business owner, if you want to beat your competition, having a different paradigm than everybody else is the number one starting point that opens up the door to all kinds of new ideas.

We need to start treating people better so we can hire great people faster. Click To Tweet

It’s changing the way they think about it, their mindset and their approach. You mentioned restaurants and the fast-food quick-service model. Even sit-down restaurants have changed. You no longer have someone who’s there to take a food order, deliver the food and refill cups. They’ve got to be the mask police and the vaccine police. They’ve got to be these enforcers, and that’s not what servers are accustomed to doing. You’re seeing this mass exodus of servers leaving the restaurant. It’s because, “This is not why I got into this. It’s like a fight with people so I could kick them out of the restaurant. I want to serve people.”

It’s not just that that’s driving them out. There’s also something pulling them away. During COVID, we laid off all these restaurant workers. We thought they were sitting around and getting paid by the government. It was easy to hear that story and believe it. In actuality, the unemployment of teenagers, which is 16 to 25-year-olds dropped back down to almost normal within four months. It was only a couple of percentage points above normal when everybody opened back up.

They assumed all these people were sitting around not working. What happened was they went and drove for DoorDash and they said, “This is a way better experience for me as an employee. I can pick when I want to work and how I want to work. I don’t have to swap shifts. I can just clock out.” All these McDonald’s employees were suddenly getting tips. Not just the mask police. They didn’t have to clean up the table. They didn’t have to do any of that.

My DoorDash driver barely even talks to me. They walk in, drop the thing and they’re out. It was a better experience for them. The restaurants are going to have a hard time bringing those people back because they’re no longer desperate enough to do that job at that pay. If you think about how those paradigm restaurants were forced to put a QR code on the table with their menu, what percentage of them realized that if I were staring at your menu, I’d most likely want to order?

There should be an order button there, but it’s not there. Thanks for not printing menus and passing COVID that way, but as a consumer, you threw me into a buying situation but isn’t letting me buy. Instead, you’re going to pay a labor person to come and take the order when I want to hit ‘Buy Now,’ check out and be done.

I’ve always wondered why I can’t do that. We’re starting to see it a little bit more, but it’s not being adopted at the level we need to. You said something I want to dig into. I want to talk a little bit about the ATS and how this tool is so amazing for these business owners that don’t even know what one is. I’m going to say the majority of our readers have no idea when I say ATS.

You mentioned something about the consumer’s perspective and thinking about what the consumer wants. One of the things ApplicantPro has done well is said, “Recruiting is not a situation where the employer gets to dictate and the employer just gets to do.” We’ve got a job seeker out there and consider what they want. You have done that. If you could, tell me a little bit about how you got started in ApplicantPro, what the tool is, how it works and why you are so different.

From the time I was ten years old, I wanted to be rich. I started down this pathway. My parents both got sick within a year of each other. This concept of being self-sufficient became a thing for me. As I tried different things, worked in small businesses, tried and found my groove, I landed at a tech company where I was an accountant. I have an Accounting degree. I ended up at this tech company where I was able to see what was going on and how to get into marketing.

At the same time, I owned a blue-collar parking lot sweeping business. I had one employee. That’s how much it would take to run the parking lot sweeper, and I had twenty employees during a given year. Do the math on that. I only have one employee at a time, but I went through twenty of them. I was asking them to go out at 3:00 AM all by themselves, sweep a parking lot and make sure it hit a certain quality level. Most likely, they didn’t think their boss would ever see it. There was nobody to QC it and check it down.

I went through tons. That was probably my first real hiring experience going, “This sucks. This is a lot of work. These guys are not like me.” This is our first takeaway. I grew up on a farm. I wake up every morning to milk the cows at 3:00 AM. I was trained for this for a long time in my life. I own the business, so I care about that quality enough. Nobody needs to check my quality.

When we assume that an employee is like us and you’ll hear this when you ask a blue-collar business owner, “What’s your PTO strategy?” They’re like, “I don’t get paid when I’m not working. Why should they get paid?” It’s because they’re the employees and you’re the business owner. When you sell your company, are they going to get the payout? No. That’s because you have a different role.

Immediately, what it does is we view the world through our lens of who we are, but that’s not how you achieve superstar or competitive status. The very first thing they teach us product managers is you need to get in the customer’s mind. You hear this, “The customer is always right.” In marketing, you focus on your target customer because we aren’t the buyer. A plumber is not the buyer of plumbing services because he would do it himself.

The buyer is somebody who can’t even understand. It’s somebody who isn’t handy and doesn’t do those things. You immediately set the stage up, “I am not like them. Therefore, I need to figure out where they’re at, what they’re thinking and what they care about.” Most people you explain that to are like, “That totally makes sense when it comes to marketing and selling to my customer. I’m not my customer.”

If you then say, “That’s the same thing as hiring. You’re not the employee. What you would want in a job, you would never want to hire me as an employee.” I took an assessment once at this trade show I was at and the person is like, “Nobody is ever going to give you a job.” I’m like, “Pretty much. They don’t want to hire me but because of that, I would want to hire me.” Therefore, I don’t know what the people want that I want to hire. I’m going to have to sit in their shoes.

Employee referrals are very important. If your workplace is a crappy place to work, your employees aren't going to refer. Click To Tweet

There’s this book. I read it when I was probably five years in business. Some people are selling assessments that said, “We’ve got all these clients. We want you to build some hiring software.” I’d been building websites and web directories. I’m not even programming. I have a part-time mom who’s a developer who works for me. I’m like, “We can totally build some hiring software.”

We’d never even logged into another applicant tracking system, which is what we were building. We’re building a tool to track applicants, capture the application online, let the HR or business owner look at them and leave notes and stuff to the point of hire. We’re running assessments or background checks along with it. I never even logged in and looked at one before. I just unpacked the problem and started solving it.

That was many years ago. I was paying that employee $1,200 a month on salary to work part-time for me. We ran for two years before we hit breakeven. The total investment was $40,000 at the money. I was making it a full-time job while I was side hacking and running the side hustle to build it up to the point where I quit. Luckily for me, the fact I was naive was my superpower.

A lot of times, business owners, especially in the blue-collar space, they’re technicians. They were sick of working for somebody, so they quit their job and started their own business. They’re great at whatever that service is that they’re going to provide. It also means they’re generally not great at marketing, sales, hiring, admin and accounting. You turn all those things because they were just the technician.

Their superpower in their head might be that they’re the experts. If they stick on that for too long, it’s possible they become too blinded by the ballgame stuff because their customer isn’t an expert. Being naive can be a superpower just like being an expert is. That’s where we were at. I didn’t know any better. I didn’t know what the tracking software was supposed to look like. I didn’t know it was supposed to take six months to set up a new client.

I assumed that if I could make it fast, it would be fast. I didn’t know that I wasn’t supposed to help with sourcing. You’re not supposed to do that as an applicant tracking system. That’s a job board function. Sometimes being naive lets you blast through the whole inside-the-box and out-of-the-box thing because I didn’t have a box. I would go wherever the problem would take me.

When I got started in my marketing journey, before I started doing all of the hiring and recruiting, I never worked for an agency. I never had done it in someone else’s way. I went out and solved the problem. I totally resonate with your story, and I’m sure a lot of our readers do too. One of the things I like to do is talk about some takeaways for our readers.

I know that with an applicant tracking system, we could probably have a whole series of all the cool things that you could have in your business from automation to pre-screening people and automatically eliminating people you don’t want to talk to and some of these cool features. The applicant tracking system is a tool.

You give a hammer to my five-year-old and it’s going to cost me money. You give a hammer to a master carpenter, and it’s going to make you a lot of money. It’s still a tool and it’s got to be used correctly. I know you’ve got a couple of pointers or some tips for our readers on how they can get the most out of not just an applicant tracking system but their recruiting results. Could you share those with us?

I like your piece about it being a tool. Let’s apply it to something easy to think about. It’s a funnel that you’re going to stick in your trucks and put gas in. You could have a fancy funnel. You could have one of those that you can bend all over the place. Clearly, if there are holes in it, we have a problem. If you think about this like it’s a funnel, you’re throwing gas in your truck.

We have two core themes that are the driver. One, the funnel is worthless if you have no gas. If you’re not dumping more gas at the top of the funnel, you’re never going to fill the truck up. You could buy the fanciest funnel on the face of the planet, but without gasoline, it does nothing to get the job done, which is to drive your truck.

When we talk about hiring people, step one is sourcing and step two is screening and selection. If you don’t have a big constant flow of applicants into the funnel, it doesn’t matter how fancy of a funnel you have. There is no top activity. That is usually the very first part. Where we get messed up with this is we think it’s all hiring. We can’t start sourcing and tell we’re ready to hire because we’re going to have to put the money in that hiring that’s a big investment.

As a business owner, you should always be sourcing candidates for your most important jobs. That is a fairly cheap activity. You don’t have to hire them. You don’t have to be ready to sell and fulfill the service for every lead you get. It doesn’t mean you stop getting leads. When you have enough customers for the month, you don’t shut off your website or your Facebook.

You don’t put up the closed sign, “Don’t come back today because we already have enough customers for the day.” When it comes to hiring, that’s what we’re doing. As soon as we’re staffed up, we rip down all the help wanted signs. We pull our ads down. We shut off our career site and we’re like, “Until we’re ready to hire again, shut it all down.” That’s not what has to happen.

If you think about hiring like you’re running that funnel, you have to have stuff flowing in. Number two is funnels are constrained by two types of activities. 1.) Are you creating friction? How much friction is being created? 2.) How much motivation, the positive of that? Think about this like it’s Stephen Covey’s emotional bank account. Once somebody applies, I’m either making deposits between me and this job seeker or taking withdrawals.

If I want to make a job seeker take an hour-long test, that’s a withdrawal. I better have made a deposit before that or they’re not going to do it. Each step of the way, we have this industrial revolution mindset of breadlines. “You’re lucky I’m giving you a job. I’m paying you. Therefore, I’m the customer.” That’s not true anymore. While you might feel justified in approaching it, you can be justified right out of business.

The fact of the matter is you are the one selling the job seekers and the customers something. You’re selling them the experience of working for you. Once you have that idea set in place, you’re like, “Will I create friction or extra hurdles for my customers to jump through to pay me?” If I did create those, I would assume it would mean I would get fewer customers. When you create extra hurdles that job seekers have to jump through to get to you, you better have made a deposit and have this positive balance running, or they won’t do it.

It’s not evidenced that nobody wants to do my job. It’s simply proof that you created friction without enough fuel to get them over the hump. We’re not Google. If I was Google, Apple or Facebook, I could make you walk halfway across America to apply for a job with me. The value of getting that job is so high that anybody would do it. I’m Ryan at ApplicantPro. I’m a big deal inside of Eagle Mountain, Utah, with a population of 50,000, but inside the Utah tech community, I’m nobody. I can’t act like I am somebody or people are going to think that I’m stupid. They’re like, “That guy thinks he’s all that.” That’s where you’re at as an employer.

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I’m sitting here shaking my head up and down. I always tell people when we’re building out the recruiting funnel and building that for our clients, “How long do you think you should wait before you reply to an applicant?” “When I get to it,” is usually the answer. We talked to somebody. They wait three weeks because it feels like that’s the right number.

They’ve got a firm that’s helping them source. They batch them every three weeks. What would you say to your sales manager or someone on your sales team if a lead came in and you’re like, “That was a big lead. What happened to it?” “We’ll get to it in a couple of weeks.” You’d think they were crazy. For some reason, it’s okay to treat an applicant that way. From what I’m told, it’s a lot easier to get customers than it is to get employees.

We need to flip the script and start treating these people better. I love what you said about making enough deposits. We were talking to somebody and they’re like, “We’re not getting any applications.” I’m like, “Let me look at your job ad.” On one of the job boards, there were 37 questions just to apply. Who’s going to do that? These employers have conditioned job seekers.

One of the things I talk about in a lot of my talks is that we have responsibilities as employers to fix this. We have conditioned job seekers to know that if they apply for us, there’s probably a 2 out of 3 chance they’re never going to hear a thing. What incentive do job seekers have to spend time jumping through your hoops and filling out your full application, when they know that the majority of the time is going to go into some deep, dark abyss and they’re not going to hear anything anyway? It blows my mind that this is how we think about this.

It blows our mind as outsiders that are looking at it differently. If you think about the product, the new idea, the adoption cycle, it’s like a bell curve. HR tends to skew on the skeptic side, and that pulls back or holds back the new creative thinking. This is handed down DNA from the industrial revolution. You watch The Men Who Built America series from the History Channel.

As an entrepreneur, you’re like, “I am not super excited that I came from a long line of monopolistic, aggressive entrepreneurs that were fine beating their employees down and beating them back.” Later in their life, they took all their money and donated it to charity, so their names are on all these buildings. At the end of their life, it looks like they’re great people, but during the initial phases of them going to market and creating monopolies, they were not nice to employees at all. They were a cog in the wheel, a tool and a resource.

Right off the bat, we call it a requisition. In bigger companies, HR has a manager fill out a requisition, “I’m trying to buy something.” That’s what you do. What a job requisition is, “Here’s my list of the features I want.” That’s the very first takeaway from a paradigm standpoint. The ATS is a tool. It’s going to amplify your paradigm. If an ATS or a job board is a giant megaphone that cheerleaders use and if you want to make sure that you have a good result, you better make sure you stick the words in her mouth because whatever she’s about to shout is going to be broadcast everywhere. That’s from a business owner standpoint where you have to start.

The first trigger is to switch from what it is I’m looking for to who. That’s what I always do with my clients. It’s the very first thing I want to know. Who would you clone into this job? Do you have somebody that you love? It’s two sides. You love them doing the job and they love doing the job. It’s those two things.

Our very first concept is “who.” If you don’t nail down the who, we can look at them and say, “I was thinking they a Bachelor’s degree but they don’t. I was thinking when they started working for me that they had ten years of sales experience but they had none.” With that who, we can then validate against our assumptions of what we’re looking for.

What we’re saying is, “I’ve identified my who. What did that person look like when they started doing the job for me?” If you take that one simple exercise, 50% of all jobs out there are overstating the requirements. Therefore, the whos or the people who love doing the job would never apply for that job if they had to do it again. They’re telling them not to apply. They’re telling them, “You can apply but we won’t interview you. We won’t select you.”

ApplicantPro has 220 or 230 employees. We’re a tech company. We’re 80% female and 70% part-time. When I first started, I was hiring these moms, I still am, returning to the workforce after having 3 or 4 kids. Their kids were in elementary school. The job titles they were coming from are piano teacher and swim club admin person. Almost none of them had any tech experience or had worked in the tech world. They’d never done a screen-share with GoToMeeting as a good example.

Clearly, my ads didn’t say that as I was pulling them in. I went back and reviewed our ads for those same jobs. It’s like, “Experience sharing a screen on GoToMeeting.” They had set the requirements as being what that person had now, not when they started with us, which immediately brings down applicant flow to only people who have been doing the job for five years.

Those people aren’t going to apply to that entry-level job in the entry-level pay. Over time, business owners will constantly have to fight increasing their requirements. While we would love to be constantly leveling up and hiring better people, if we aren’t also leveling up the experience of working for us, the pay, the benefits and all those things, then we’re setting the stage where we’re out of touch. That’s going to go up. You’re just out of touch.

I tell people all the time to hire people that are going to feel like they belong and they have a sense of community at your work. Gallup talks about their employee engagement survey. One of the biggest predictors is whether or not you have a best friend at work as to whether or not someone’s going to enjoy that. Where is that on the job ad? It’s not. Instead, we have this laundry list of skills because there was one guy at one time who couldn’t cut it and he didn’t have that skill, so we added it to the list.

It’s about hiring people or even creating these job ads. What is the bare minimum, the things you can’t or won’t teach? That’s it. If you can’t or won’t teach it, then don’t put it on there because that’s something you need to have. It kills me all the time when we’re like, “You’ve got to know how to use this field management software.” You’re going to teach me how to use it anyways because you’re going to do it differently than the last guy. Why does that even matter?

More importantly, if the entire industry is requiring that, then the entire industry is fighting over only the experienced candidates. As a business owner, as the David, not the Goliath, if all the Goliaths are going to fight over the people who have experienced doing that, the blue ocean of recruiting that I’m going to have to carve out is to pick a different problem. This bracelet around my arm reminds me, “Choose my struggle.” I’m going to choose the training struggle because the hiring struggle is hard.

I’ll be the guy who trains them on that. Let’s solve that problem. That seems like an easy problem. Record some videos and set up a learning management system like Trainual or something like that. Done and done. Academy of Mine has a web-based system for $50 a month or some BS like that. In one day of recording, I could have it all built out. I’ve solved the training problem. I can hire people that everybody else would reject because they had never used and done it before.

I’ve got this blue ocean of people that nobody else is going after. If we all target the same herd, we all target the same species, then we’re walking away from the blue ocean. The diamonds in the rough are what we’re looking at. I hire people, not resumes. That was always my theme from the very beginning. I want to know if you have the potential to do well at this job. Not if you have the knowledge and skills because I can backfill that.

Somebody has the potential if they fit my values and my culture and the whole a-friend-at-work thing. It has to do with you don’t know why your employees are working for you. Most likely, the reasons are very different than your reasons for showing up to work as the employer. 1.) You don’t know why they work for you. 2.) Your ads don’t tell people like them that story of why these people work for you.

The core principle that I have been testing that has finally rung home is think about the last time you bought a house or a car. It’s 1 of those 2 things. We all have experienced buying a house or a car. Most likely, you didn’t buy a house that was equal to the house you’re in now. Why would you box up all your stuff, your entire life and move to a new house? That’s a huge pain. Here’s the real takeaway.

You would never buy a house that’s a downgrade unless you were forced out of desperation. You would never downgrade your house. Take that concept to your employees. Nobody is going to line transfer from one job to another job for the same exact thing for the same exact pay. Why would they go through all that work? They’re not going to downgrade. Why would anybody downgrade their job unless they’re desperate? Last I checked, my goal in life isn’t to hire the most desperate job seekers. That’s not my goal.

Every job offer, and therefore meaning the ad, has to explain how this is an upgrade to a target audience. This is an upgrade for you. This is better than where you’re at. If you hate that, that means I need to know why you hate where you’re at now. I can position my job as the solution to what you hate, fear, frustrates, what your wants and aspirations are. This is Marketing 101 stuff of define your target segment, identify what their pains and wants are and create the solution to that.

If you’re working at a big company, this fits your users well. Think about all the reasons why people hate working at a big company. It’s the red tape approval. They only get to do this one little tiny job. They don’t get to see it all the way through. Their boss doesn’t understand what he’s talking about because he’s the middle management. It’s all about the metrics and data. It’s unfeeling and uncaring. The boss doesn’t understand the customer.

If you go read employee reviews, those are all the reasons why people hate working for big companies. Your job as a small business owner is to be the opposite and to be the answer, “We don’t have red tape. You’re reporting directly to the CEO. I know what I’m talking about. I’m not going to tell you to do something that I don’t personally understand,” which means it’s about you. Here’s the real question. Why doesn’t the ad talk about the entrepreneur?

The entrepreneur is going to have a bigger impact on a team of 10 or 50 than the actual job is. It’s going to have a huge impact on what their life is like working there. There are almost no ads. Even ads for an assistant or an entrepreneur don’t talk about what the entrepreneur is like, what it’s like to work with them, what their personality is like, what their values are like, what they believe and what they hate. It doesn’t say anything about it. Nobody will write a job ad that says it, but you write an ad because, “I’ve done it.” Everybody loves those ads. That’s what they want to know, “What’s it going to be like working for this guy?”

We can keep going with this. There’s so much here that I agree with you on, and I love hearing this. You talked about getting that ideal employee. That’s one of the things we do in our Core Fit profile. You talked about rewriting the job ad. That’s something we teach in our program. There are many alignments here but we’ve got to wrap-up. If people want to learn more about ApplicantPro, you’ve got some videos out there and some training as well. How do they get ahold of you? Do you have an offer for our readers?

They can go to ApplicantPro.com. There’s a blog on there. We are very dedicated to pushing out valuable content for free. My goal is that my marketing makes a bigger impact on the world than my product. What that means is I want people to learn how to do stuff and use it without paying me. If they want to use my tools to amplify their results, I’m totally cool with that. I’m not going to put out a single piece of content that somebody can’t take action and get value out of without giving me money, because that’s not where I’m at.

You can go hit up our blog on ApplicantPro. If you use LinkedIn, you can follow me there. I believe that ApplicantPro has a Facebook page. You can follow me there as well. As far as receiving the content, that is valuable. As far as what it looks like from a small business owner, for the most part, we try to be more helpful than do-it-yourself. I know the same thing in why we have so much alignment around it. We believe that the system is only as good as what you put in it. Your results are only as good as your ads. They’re not going to do anything else.

You have a job ad template too that people can download.

We have job ad templates. If people sign up, I’m more than willing even to write some free job ads. As long as I have one requirement on giving away, I give away free job ads any time I speak anywhere. I’m more than happy to give your readers a free job ad. I have one requirement. I will not write job ads that you will not post. The only commitment I want is you will post it and try it out. What I can guarantee is it’s going to look different than anything you’re using or anything you’re used to, so people don’t post it and they never see the results. We’re more than happy to write some free job ads for your readers for sure.

We’ll have them reach out for that. Ryan, thank you so much. I’ve enjoyed it. I know we could keep going. We’ll have to do this again sometime. For those of you that are reading, there are two takeaways. I want to repeat them again. Number one is to get that job ad out there. Stop thinking about this as an HR document, make it an ad, attract people to your jobs and then create a hiring and screening framework. That’s what it comes down to. Have a system in place.

This isn’t a situation where you wing it. You would never wing your marketing. Don’t wing your recruiting. Don’t give this to the least experienced person because they have more time for it. I personally believe that as owners, we need to be investing at least 30% of our waking hours that we are working in the business working on recruiting. This isn’t something that we can discount and say, “We’ll get to it when we get to it.” It’s something we need to put an effort into, especially if we want to change that paradigm that Ryan was talking about. Ryan, thank you so much for being on the show. I enjoyed it.

Thanks. I hope to be back in the future.

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About Ryan Kohler
Founder and CEO of ApplicantPro, a leading provider of hiring software for over 6,000 companies around the nation. As an entrepreneur working with thousands of HR professionals, I understand what it takes to bridge the gap between your organization’s vision and the goals of HR.

I’m an HRCI and SHRM-CP Approved Provider devoted to sharing my knowledge and experience to help organizations of all sizes. I enjoy working directly with companies, managers, and HR teams to empower them to create a more strategic hiring process. To do this, I conduct free weekly webinars that provide HRCI & SHRM Continuing Education credit and present at SHRM events around the country.

If you want to learn more about what my team can do for your organization, reach out to me at ryan [at] applicantpro.com

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