Podcast Episode

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

Ryan Englin · June 22, 2022 ·

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

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Change Your Results With This Single Shift

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

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David, welcome to the show.

I am glad to be here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is not healthy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your business is your dream. Click To Tweet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I enjoyed it. Take care, Ryan.

Important Links

About David Taylor-Klaus

My clients are entrepreneurs & senior executives achieving success professionally but seeing that growth come at the expense of personal fulfillment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ryan Englin · June 8, 2022 ·

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

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

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

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

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Jason, Richard, welcome to the show.

We’re happy to be here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’re not the most social people.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you.

Thanks, Ryan and Jeremy.

Thanks so much for being on.

Important Links

About Jason Piasecki

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

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

About Richard Witham

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

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

Attract Talent With The TikTok For HVAC With Aaron Salow

Ryan Englin · May 25, 2022 ·

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

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Attract Talent With The TikTok For HVAC With Aaron Salow

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

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

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Aaron, welcome to the show.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m excited.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Am I paying for this?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I appreciate it. Thanks, Ryan.

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About Aaron Salow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blue Is The New White With Josh Zolin

Ryan Englin · May 11, 2022 ·

It’s no secret that there is a labor shortage in the trades and it’s no secret that a lot of the younger generation has turned away from it. There are so many things stacked against employers right now that make it a lot harder for them to make the next generation excited about getting into the trades. The CEO of Windy City Equipment, Josh Zolin, thinks this is mainly a result of the societal norms pushing the perception that blue-collar jobs indicate a lack of success. In his book, Blue Is the New White, Josh emphasizes how some of the most lucrative jobs out there are blue-collar jobs. Josh joins Ryan Englin in this episode to discuss how there is more than one path to a stable career and a great financial future. Success doesn’t always have to mean a college degree and Josh is here to clear that trade misconception.

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Blue Is The New White With Josh Zolin

I have known our guest for this episode for a little while, and it wasn’t until someone called me out and said, “How come he hasn’t been on your show yet,” that made me think, “I need to fix that.” Our guest is Josh Zolin. He’s the CEO of Windy City Equipment. They are a leading commercial facilities maintenance company specializing in HVAC/R and kitchen equipment.

He’s grown up in the trades and has been doing this for a long time. He wrote the book on what it takes to get started in the trades. It’s no secret that there is a labor shortage in the trades, and a lot of the younger generation has turned away from the trades and said, “I want to go do something else, be an influencer, a TikTok star or go into software development.” They have turned away from this.

There are so many things stacked against us as employers when it comes to getting the next generation excited about getting into the trades but in Josh’s book, he builds an amazing case for why blue-collar jobs are the way to go in the future. I’m excited about this conversation. Make sure that if you have thought about any way to bring new people into your apprentice program, training program, or maybe struggled or need a new set of ideas, this episode is for you.

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Josh, I’m excited to have you here on the show. What is one of the biggest myths that you see in the trades?

There are so many to choose from but first, thank you for having me on the show, Ryan. I appreciate it. I have been eyeballing this show for a long time, and it’s an honor to finally be on it. One of my favorite topics is the myths of the trades. The one that stands out over anything else is that the skilled trades are second-rate careers. It’s what you do if you can’t cut it in college or you are not smart enough to do what all the rich people do. It’s that fallback for a career that people don’t appreciate and give any merit to. If you can’t cut it going to the college route, you can always be an HVAC tech, a contractor, a carpenter or a bricklayer, whatever it may be.

It’s almost like that’s where the dropouts go. Those that were rejected by the system can go into the trades and make a lot of money getting to do something they enjoy. We won’t talk about that yet.

The sad part about it is that I’m sure that some of the older generation reading might be able to relate to this but there used to be a course in high school called the Industrial Arts. It is a shop class where all the “losers and rejects” were all sent because nobody thought that they would be able to succeed anywhere else. The problem is all the people that were sent there adopted this mindset, too. A lot of the people in the skilled trades think that they are in the skilled trades because they couldn’t do anything else. That’s one of the perceptions that we’ve got to shatter.

I’m going to date myself here but as you were talking about that, it made me think of the movie Grease. They were all the dropouts and rejects in a shop class together.

The skilled trades are more than just second-rate careers Click To Tweet

That’s exactly what we do in the trades. We sing and dance.

You wrote a book on this. You are a published author. Your book goes to a lot of schools. Wholeheartedly, if we don’t get in front of the next generation of workers and when they are young before they are influenced to be a TikTok star because that’s the thing and say, “There are these great lucrative careers that are never going to go away. You can’t be replaced with robotics and technology. It can’t be done.”

Are those things going to come and help the trades? Absolutely. We are not going to ignore that but you need human beings with their hands, eyeballs, and brains out there doing this stuff. Tell me a little bit about the book. What was your motivation for that? How is this something that our readers can use to help them start thinking bigger about, “How do I grow my future team?”

Technology can’t replace skilled tradespeople. I always have this image in my head of a Roomba trying to climb a ladder. It doesn’t work but in all seriousness, you are right as far as that’s concerned. The book was a passion project of mine. I own a company in the skilled trades. We repair HVAC and kitchen equipment commercially. I have lived it and been in the trades. Prior to being in the trades, I was on the opposite end. I never went to college but I wasn’t working with my hands. Let’s put it that way.

Once I’ve got involved in the trades and was able to see the opportunities that existed, I’ve got to thinking. I’m a lifelong learner. I try to learn in any way, shape or form that I can. While I was in the trades coming up the ranks, I couldn’t find any material, guides, literature, or anything to tell me what to expect, what opportunities existed, or what pitfalls to be aware of. There was nothing like that out there.

BCC 72 Josh | Blue Collar Jobs — Blue Is the New White: The Best Path to Success No One Told You About—Until Now

Fast forward a few years, I began to grow the company that I was working with and started to understand that the skilled trades were more than just a second-rate career. As I was bringing on new technicians and competing with all of these other companies in my area, I saw what these guys were making and what they were asking for coming in like full benefits and $35 an hour.

This was years ago, so you can only imagine what that looks like now but right at the time, that kept ringing in my head that there was nothing to tell the world that this was the case. Unless you were in the trades or you had family in the trades, there was no way to know that you could make this money, be this successful in the trades or there were these many opportunities and trajectories.

Once I was able to move up in the ranks, even more doing what I do, I thought it was time to inform the people that needed to be informed. What I mean by that is parents, educators, children, children in high school, and high school agents. The book highlights what it means to be in the trades, who should go into the trades, how you move through the trades, and how this industry can affect your success, however you define that success.

It was very difficult to walk this line but it’s written in a way that speaks to young people with the language that young people use while also providing enough facts and references to where educators can see it as a viable resource. Walking that line was a little bit tough but once I released it and I was starting to get all this feedback and everything, it was a great success. I’m blessed that people loved the book, and that’s fantastic.

People are naïve to think that every single person and every single student in the school system will fit in their neat little box and will want to pursue a college education. Click To Tweet

I’ve got to understand that if we want to make a difference in this industry, it’s got to start well before high school. That’s my main demographic. Some of the languages I use in the book are very questionable. You can’t put it in front of an elementary-aged kid but that’s how deep this perception is ingrained in our society.

By the time kids reach the age where they are going to determine what they are going to do for their career for the rest of their life, they already have an ill perception or no perception of the skilled trades because they haven’t been talked to about it when they were younger. That’s the ultimate reason why I wrote the book and the basis that it covers. Hopefully, in the future, there will be an edited version I can give to.

I have read the book, and it’s a good book. It’s a quick read too, which I liked. It didn’t get hung up on a lot of stuff. There are some great testimonials in there. You bring up some examples of people who didn’t think they could make it in the trades, and they made it. It was great to see that you are not just theoretical about it. You are walking the walk and taking people through it.

It’s a good book for anybody who wants to think about, “Is there another path besides college?” A big piece of the book is you are comparing and contrasting this to the typical way of getting out of high school, going to college, getting a degree, hopefully, getting a decent job, and spending the next decade paying off your student debt. That’s what we tell our kids. I’m with you on that.

One of the things that we talk a lot about over here at Core Matters is that the industry has done itself a disservice. You were talking about how the kids don’t get taught that this is an option for them at a young age. Just so we are clear, it’s not the kids that are choosing this. It’s their parents saying, “No kid of mine is going to be a plumber because a plumber smell, and there are butt crack jokes.” There are all these other things about being a plumber.

“No kid of mine is going to go tell people they are a plumber. I am not going to tell my friends that my kid is a plumber. My kid is going to go do something respectable.” That’s the mindset. This is unfortunate but there is a whole group of companies out there that have been causing people to look at these industries as lesser than because of their marketing, the way they talk about the industry, and frankly, the way they have treated some of the people in the past.

There’s a funny story about that speaking of plumbers. I’ve got a podcast as well, the same name as the book, Blue is the New White. I had interviewed this guy named Bob. He’s a plumber by trade. He owns his plumbing company but when he was in high school, he went to his counselor and said, “I want to be a plumber. My dad is a plumber.”

His counselor looked right at him and said, “You are too smart to be a plumber. Go to college for Computer Programming.” He did. He failed and flunked. He was down and hard on himself. He got back into plumbing and got a multimillion-dollar business. That dude is pulling seven figures a year personally. If he would have listened to his counselor and not gotten back into the trade, God knows what he would be doing. You are right. It’s a sad truth.

Something that you do well in the book is for those parents that are open to the kids reading the book, which you work with a lot of schools on the book, it opens our eyes to say, “There is another reputable path, and it’s something that I can be proud of.” Look at you in HVAC, you’ve got your company and own podcast. Just because you go into the trades doesn’t mean you have to stop at being a technician. There’s that belief, “I will be a plumber for the rest of my life,” but your friend is making seven figures. You are never going to do that working for someone else.

It’s that perception that has been ingrained into us, “A plumber must fix toilets all day long for the rest of his life until he dies.” That’s not the case. When you talk about college education and route, it’s important for people out there to know that I’m not anti-education. I’m pro with the right education for the right individual. We are naive to think that every single person and student in the school system fits in this neat little box. They are well-equipped and suited for college or even more so that that’s what they want to do. Even if they are well-equipped and suited for that environment, some people love to work with their hands.

The right decision may not always be college. Click To Tweet

What I preach about is we know that college is astronomical in price. You had commented on paying off student loans for the next decade, and it’s sad but true. It’s a trillion-dollar debt crisis in the student loan industry. Not many people know but they are not forgivable. If you were to go bankrupt or anything like that, you can’t forgive the student loans. You still owe on that. It’s a very impeccable system for those who write loans but not so much for the individual.

For me, it boils down to the ROI. College can be beneficial if you know for a fact that you want to be a doctor, a lawyer or a CPA. Hats off to you. We need you guys too but for the buildings that you work out of, don’t forget who built them. It’s the bottom line. When you talk about the skilled trades, the available apprenticeships, some of the unions that are out there, and stuff like that, you can get paid to get this education instead of paying an arm and a leg and digging yourself a hole of debt through your formative years.

In the book, I’ve got spreadsheets and diagrams of the typical wage when you come out of college compared to your typical wage if you were to jump into the trades right after high school. It surprises some people that those wages are very similar to one another. Some startling statistics revolve around that as well.

This is the stuff that needs to be talked about, Ryan, and nobody is talking. You and I are talking but this has to circulate through the school system because it’s about the success of the next generation. It’s not about the success of the school, the counselor or the teacher. It’s about the collective success of our entire economy, our country, and each child.

I’m going to shift us a little bit after that because it was a great tee-up why you do this, the book, and the value it can bring. I work with a lot of business owners all over the country. One of the questions they always ask me is, “How do I find people that don’t know the trade exists? I want to build an apprenticeship program. I’ve got a robust training program. I will take someone who has the foundational behaviors and skills that make for someone being good in the trades. I will teach them the trade but I can’t find them. I don’t know where to get them, how to get in front of them at the schools or do these things.”

What advice would you have for those people that say, “I’ve got this apprenticeship program?” A lot of people are saying, “He’s maybe a military vet.” You’ve got out of the military, and this is a great career transitioning, so you have to work with your hands and have that team environment that you had there or these kids coming out of high school that doesn’t want to go to college but feels like their parents are forcing them. Can we get in front of them and let them know these opportunities existed? That’s what you do a lot with the schools. For those business owners that are thinking, “I’m ready to build for the next generation but I don’t know how to get started,” how can they get started with that?

That’s not an easy question to answer by any means. It’s the question I have been trying to answer for the last years ever since the book came out. There are a couple of things that we can do. Number one, from marketing play, we need to appeal a little bit better to that next generation. This is the intangible long-term stuff. A big reason why nobody wants to come into this industry is because of the reputation of the industry. It was different years ago. That’s what the parents remember. We are not in the same position we were back then.

We have to market it and let them know, “It’s hard work but we are using a ton of awesome technology that these young people are using as well. Our industry is starting to use that technology, too.” That could create some more of that appeal. When people think of the skilled trades, they think of tools, irons, and hammers. It’s a hard concept for them to even understand that there could be technology involved.

Above and beyond that in working on your blue-collar culture, which you know something about, to get in front of these students takes a big push. I don’t like talking about what everyone is already doing. Everyone is already recruiting out of trade schools, posting these job ads, and looking for apprentices. It’s about how do you get them before they decide to go to college because the right decision may not be college?

It takes a bigger push in the high schools, getting in touch with the school counselors because they hold the key. If you can convince the counselors that this is a good career path, they will convince the students that this is a good career path. We might be focusing on the wrong thing. We are focusing on the individual, not who influences the individual, which is why I wrote the book.

All of the stuff is around us revolves on skilled trades and it’s just being taken for granted. Click To Tweet

Reach out to your local high schools, bring my book if it helps, have a meeting with the counselors, and say, “This is what your students can do. Coming in, I will give them $18 an hour to start, $19 an hour sometimes, not having any experience whatsoever.” That’s what this industry is demanding. It’s amazing. If you do the calculations for $18 an hour, and chances are you are going to get raises over the next four years, what are you going to be making in four years? Put this in front of the counselors. Show them so they can help do that recruiting for you. That’s a big thing that we miss.

The other thing is also to encourage your team to have and adopt that same mindset. You alluded to it in the show, “I don’t want you doing what I do. We don’t want you being in the trades.” That’s a big thing with some of the older generation that are in the trades. They think that college is the best path because that’s what they were taught so that’s where they are pushing the next generation because they think that it’s better when in reality, it’s a different day and age, and may not be the case anymore.

There are a lot of companies out there, especially if they have been around in the community for a while. They will sponsor a Little League or get involved in some of the youth sports. They do it to give back to the community but there’s always that ROI like, “I’m investing in these kids. Maybe their parents and they will take notice.”

I could see, especially if you are sponsoring a high school football team or something like that as part of your sponsorship agreement, everybody gets a copy of your book. Not to sell more books for you, Josh, but that’s a way to get the books in front of the students. What we need is for them to get this message. That’s why I thought it would make so much sense for you to be on the show with me because there is a lot that we can do to get in front of the kids but it’s going to take a team effort.

You are not going to do it by yourself. None of our readers are going to do it by themselves. It’s a little bit of effort over a long time. This didn’t get broken. I always ask people if they have ever remembered that picture from the ‘30s. It’s a New York skyscraper, and everybody is sitting on the I-beam eating lunch.

I have heard stories of kids growing up going, “I want to do that when I get older.” It used to be cool to be in the trades but it’s not anymore. The trades are cool. Don’t get me wrong. That’s my entire focus but for whatever reason, knowledge work has come out, TikTok and all of these Facebook things. That’s what people want to do. They all want to be an influencer.

It’s pivoting how we talk about what it is that we do. Everybody wants to be a TikTok star, and that’s great. I wonder what the world would look like but if we were to pivot the conversation like, “These phones have to charge. You have to plug these phones into something to get them to work so you and your friends can be on TikTok. Do you know who supplies that electricity? It’s electricians.”

This stuff is all around us, Ryan, and it’s taken for granted. You walk past that sock on the dryer one million times a day, so you don’t give it a second thought. How do you get to work in the morning? You need mechanics. How do you remain comfortable in your office? You need HVAC. How do you get the electricity for your TikTok? It’s all electricians. How come you are not exposed to the elements? It’s glaziers who make the windows.

When you look outside your window, and everything isn’t rubble, it’s because people are out there paving roads and planting trees. It’s everywhere. You can’t throw a rock without hitting something that’s a result of the trades. There are so many different ways to relate it to anything that you do. As an industry, we are failing to do that. We are perpetuating. “Come fix HVAC and toilets.”

What are some things that you have seen work? You have been in the industry for a while and wrote a book on this. What are some things our readers could do if they want to start getting in front of the next generation? Not even go to the schools.

If you really want to make a difference, you have to do things that you haven't done before. Click To Tweet

You’ve got to start speaking their language. Everyone doesn’t want to hear it but I’m going to say it. Be on TikTok. I hope that doesn’t sound super hypocritical. I’m not on TikTok yet, but it doesn’t mean I don’t know that I should be. If we want to make a difference, we’ve got to do things that we haven’t done before. If we want to attract a generation that has never been in the trades, we have to do it using ways that we haven’t tried.

Social media is a big one. You are seeing more because there is a lot of tradespeople. The thing about tradespeople is they take a lot of pride in their work. When you are in the trades, working with your hands and fixing this stuff, you want to show and tell people because it’s awesome. You get a great sense of accomplishment.

Where I’m going with that is that there is a lot of tradespeople out there that have Instagram and TikTok accounts, maybe a little more Instagram than TikTok at this point. Also, Facebook groups and they are starting to filter in on LinkedIn a little bit more. We are getting there. We are just not all the way there. If we could, as an industry, we would be able to change some minds. Not all the minds but some.

If I had my guys on TikTok showing how we use cranes to set units on rooftops and stuff like that and we’ve got people directing using hand signals, there are people out there that would be interested. How about the view of the sunrise or the sunset when you are up there on the roof fixing a swamp cooler or whatever it may be? Using that same thing to highlight some of the things that the trades allow you to do that you wouldn’t otherwise have an opportunity to do.

There’s a resort at the bottom of the Grand Canyon called Phantom Ranch. I don’t know if you have ever heard of it but there’s a waitlist to get on it. You have to wait for three years. It was years ago that they called us because they had a problem with a piece of equipment. I had to send a technician. There are only two ways to get down, mule or helicopter. Unfortunately, they weren’t willing to spring for the helicopter but he did get to go down on a mule. He put his tool bag on one mule and him on another.

This is a true story but he went all the way down the mountain and got them fixed. He was able to stay at that resort overnight for free and got paid to stay overnight. He got his hourly wage plus per diem. He stayed in this resort that you couldn’t otherwise get a reservation to no matter how hard you try. If we could highlight some of this stuff, and that’s only one small example. I have heard people flying all over the world for repairs and things like that. It happens all the time. To answer your question, we need to up our marketing game a little bit.

Let people know that this stuff is cool. I get a lot of it, especially if you have been in the trade in a while, you take it for granted and you are like, “It’s the same thing over and over,” but it’s not. For the people that don’t know, the stuff that you do is cool. At your company, you recorded all of this stuff and got your technicians walking people through it. I have seen some of it and I was like, “This is cool stuff.” I’m a little geek when it comes to some of the stuff in the trades.

The idea is we do need to up our game and let people know it’s cool. I love what you said, “Go where the next generation is.” Don’t expect them to come to us anymore. They are on TikTok. There are probably social media I don’t even know exists because I’m not that generation but that’s where the high schoolers are. Go get in front of them there. One of the things we coach is to stop putting so much effort into getting new customers. Start putting your marketing effort into getting new employees. That’s right in line with what you said.

Josh, I enjoyed it. I love how you talk about this. The passion and excitement come through. I know there are people reading who want to get ahold of you either because they want to buy a bunch of books to give to that Little League team or want to consume more of this content and be more around the ideas that you have. Let us know how we can get ahold of you.

I’m @JoshZolin everywhere on social media. My mainstay is LinkedIn, so if you look me up on LinkedIn, you will be able to get ahold of me. No problem. Also, BlueIsTheNewWhite.com. In there, you can sign up for the mailing list and stay in touch with everything that we are doing as far as marketing efforts, podcasts, and anything else that we do to help the next generation become more aware of the trades. It has been fun. I appreciate it, Ryan. Thank you so much for having me on the show. I’m very happy that somebody else is in my court with this and all of your readers as well.

Thanks for being on the show, Josh. I have enjoyed it.

About Josh Zolin

Since I have already found my life’s work, instead of my “credentials” how about just a little about me –

I believe that nothing in life worth having comes easy. The quickest, most efficient way to achieve your goals and dreams is to work for it, day in and day out; as hard as you can, for as long as you can. Life is short so if you want to make a difference, start now. I believe in integrity and honesty in business and in life. If you are not strong enough to tell the truth, you are not strong enough to succeed.

My life is simple; I love my family, my friends, and my work. My goal is not to be rich and famous, but to be remembered by many as a good man who made a difference.

Windy City equipment is my Primary business (Cooking Equipment/Refrigeration/HVAC repair) and we are currently trying to set a new standard for what it means to be a service company. We have free how-to YouTube videos, social media presence, interactive webpage, and now even a mobile app. This, of course, is coupled with recruiting and training the best technicians in the industry and making customer service the highest of priorities with a heavy emphasis on communication.

SchaiHi Partners is my secondary business, which is a full-fledged real estate investment firm. We acquire property of all types, all over the country and create Win-Win situations for all parties involved in every transaction.

In 2019 I published a book called “Blue is the New White: The Best Path to Success that No One Told You About – Until Now” in an attempt to shatter the common misperceptions about the skilled trades to today’s youth. Shortly after the release of the book I started a podcast that highlights the successful people in and around the trades to expose all the great possibilities that exist in the industry.

Bulletproof Your Business With These Five People With Tersh Blissett

Ryan Englin · April 20, 2022 ·

Without these five crucial people, you can’t bulletproof your business. Ryan Englin welcomes Tersh Blissett, the Founder of Service Emperor and Host of the Service Business Mastery Podcast. To make your business succeed, you need to have these five as your best friends: bookkeeper, insurance guy, lawyer, banker, and mentor. To make this strategy work, you need to have accountability. Take the time to check on them to see what they do daily. If you want to learn more about bulletproofing your business, you’d want to listen to this episode.

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Bulletproof Your Business With These Five People With Tersh Blissett

It’s not every episode that we get to have someone who’s doing something different in the industry. We talked to a ton of experts that know their stuff, are working with their clients, and are getting amazing results. Our guest is someone who’s doing it. They are in the trenches, building a business, and doing something completely different, and it’s an HVAC company.

In fact, he’s got two competing businesses in the same market, serving different people without any brick and mortar presence. It’s doing amazing that he was named Top 40 Under 40 in the NEWS HVACR. He has his own podcast, the Service Business Mastery podcast. His goal is to give back to the industry that has done so much for him. I want to welcome to our show, Tersh Blissett. Thank you so much for being here.

I appreciate you having me.

I hear so many times out here, people got some good ideas. They know what works and what doesn’t work. They know what everybody is doing. You’re out there doing it and I love it. Tell me, what is one of the biggest myths of the industry from what you’re seeing right now?

One of the biggest myths, and it’s been proven to be a myth, is the fact that you must have a physical office space for you to attract good technicians and employees in general.

I’m confused. I don’t have to have a shop. I don’t have to have a physical office space. I can grow my business and people think I’m legit.

I’ll give you another caveat to that. You can physically appear to be way larger than you are without having the office space.

Help me break this down a little bit. How do you do this?

Enjoy the process, not the results. Click To Tweet

Our service area morphs and mutates depending on where a technician lives, instead of basing our service area and our geographical reach strictly off of our office location. A lot of people will take their office and then say, “We’re going to do 50 miles in a circle around our office and we’ll service that area.” We’ve taken a little different approach.

Every time we hire a new team member, we start marketing to the area where they live. They have a remote “warehouse.” Let us say it’s a storage unit and that storage unit gets replenished with a truck’s worth of inventory, then we start targeting his or her location. If you look at our service map, it’s not a perfect circle. It’s like a little finger sticking out where it morphs and mutates in all different areas.

I’ve worked with some people that have done this in the trades. They target their marketing around wherever their techs are, but they still have a shop. They still have a place where they can go and do their Tuesday stand-up meetings and can meet with the crew. They’ve got a place where if the inventory runs on a truck, they can come and pick up some extra inventory and stuff like that. That’s not needed to grow your business. That’s what you’re telling me.

Yeah, that’s correct.

How do you wrap your hands around that? How do you bring everybody together so that you feel like a team?

It’s typically once a quarter but the rest of the year, every month, we physically meet up and we’ll have a gathering together. We will meet together once a month for a breakfast event at one of our client’s restaurants. We do a little bit of commercial work. We’ll use their restaurant to meet up together, rub elbows and say hi to each other.

We also meet virtually every day. Throughout the day, we’re constantly checking in on each other through Microsoft Teams. We used to use a program called Slack. We’ve transitioned over to Teams. It’s a constant check-in on the team. Our office staff lives all over the place, not necessarily in or around our service area because they are on Zoom all day. They have a Zoom that stays open. My wife is the office manager and she has a computer monitor that’s dedicated to Zoom. She has all the office staff in that. If someone has a question about something, they hit unmute, “I have a quick question.” It’s like you have your own virtual cubicle. That’s how we do that.

You’re able to keep people connected, at least in the office, and then the techs once a month, which a lot of techs are used to that. That’s why if you get into being a tech, you get to work remotely. You don’t have your boss on you all the time, and that kind of stuff.

BCC 71 Tersh Blissett | Bulletproof Your Business — Bulletproof Your Business: You can physically appear larger than you are without having the office.

We’ll meet up and then we also do a truck replenishment inventory. They have to do their own inspection every Monday morning, which is all turned in with photos and readouts of all pressure. It’s a van inspection and then pictures of the back and inside of the van. It’s nothing like, “Pick up that piece of trash off the ground.” It’s just accountability and nobody’s van gets sloppy.

I can tell you firsthand, I’ve worked at places and I have owned places where we were in the office every single morning and a technician quits, and then all of a sudden, you go and look at their van. They legitimately have been living in this van and nobody has caught it. Just because we have the physical location doesn’t mean that that’s going to solve all these problems of van inventory, making sure everything is clean, and all that stuff. We do a little bit more towards that because we’re remote and create checks and balances that way.

I’ve heard some people that we’ve coached. They will walk the tech out to their car after an interview. They take a look inside the car and they know, “That’s what my truck is going to look like in a month or so.” It’s a way to tell if they are doing it, but it sounds like you’re doing it day in and day out. I love it. You got this Service Business Mastery podcast and you get lots of great guests on there. What do you think is holding business owners back from not only being able to go virtual as you’ve done and reduce expenses, which is a very hot topic, but also being able to grow their company and keep moving it forward?

Mindset and relinquishing control of the reins on things. That’s what I see. Most often, it’s like, “I don’t want to hire a bookkeeper because I want to make sure all of it comes through me.” If you hire one, you’re holding them back from performing their tasks because you want to be able to check on everything that they do. That’s automation, in general. You’ve delegated something but then you haven’t truly delegated it because you want it to come back to you constantly. That leads back to ego, in my opinion. If there’s somebody out there that says they get 150 phone calls a day, it’s because they allow that to happen and it’s to feed their ego.

It reminds me of Mike Michalowicz’s book, Clockwork. He talks about the four Ds. Have you read that one?

I know Mike well. I love Mike to death.

You need to check on everything your bookkeeper does. Click To Tweet

He’s great. He’s like, “Most of us think we’re delegating but when we say, ‘Go do this and bring it back to me for approval,’ we’re still in the deciding phase. We’re not delegating. Delegating means you never see it again.” I love that. He got me thinking about that piece.

If you want to know what to do to fix your business next, check out Fix This Next by Mike Michalowicz. Julie and I are in that book. Mike did a case study on our business.

I love his stuff. It seems like he’s got 2 or 3 books coming out a year so I’m struggling to keep up. It’s good stuff. I know that you brought up bookkeepers. I know there are a lot of people reading going, “The bookkeeper.” How do you relinquish that? How do you find a bookkeeper you can trust? What are some thoughts you have on that?

Honestly, there are a lot of them out there. I like to call them part-time bookkeepers. They are part-time in their businesses but they are legit full-time bookkeepers, accountants, CFOs. We have them specifically for the trades. I have interviewed several remote bookkeepers from all over the country. The great thing is they don’t have to be in your office to be great bookkeepers.

With technology now, we use Dext. As soon as an invoice is printed, the picture is taken, Dext transcribes and sends it over to QuickBooks. A bookkeeper doesn’t have to do manual entry as much. There are still some checks and balances. This is AI. There’s a lot of that automation there. You don’t have to have that person in your office to make sure that all your receipts are typed into the computer somewhere.

I have Canadian friends who have remote bookkeeping companies. There are US companies all the time. I would interview several of them to make sure that they understand your trade because whenever they are setting up QuickBooks and setting up classes, they have to understand the different divisions and everything like that. There are so many of them out there. Your mind would be blown by how easy it is.

You’re not paying one person’s full-time salary with a quarter of the amount of money you’re spending off somebody’s full-time salary. You could be paying for three different people’s part-time salaries. You could have a good CFO that works 2 or 3 hours a week in your business. You could have a good bookkeeper that works a couple of hours in the business, and then some controller. That’s an option. The thing that you have to do is you have to think outside the box. The next time you go to your HVAC networking event and somebody is like, “What’s your bookkeeper do all day?” Don’t be afraid of them saying, “You don’t have a bookkeeper in your office? That’s not normal.”

What’s not normal is not having a shot. Let’s put it out there. That’s not normal. It sounds like you’re the king of abnormal things and challenging the status quo. I love it. I’m always looking for people that are disrupting the industry. I go back and people ask me all the time, and I focus on hiring frontline talent, skilled laborers, technicians, “What happened to the trades?” I tell people all the time, “Remember that photo from the ‘30s of the ironworker sitting on the IBM eating lunch in New York City?” There were kids that are like, “I want to do that when I grow up.”

It was cool to go into the trades and work with your hands. Something happened in the last few years and it’s not cool anymore. What I believe is it’s because the industry as a whole had that mindset of what the newspaper did around the turn of the century. They were like, “The internet is not going to beat us. The internet is going to be a blip.” The newspapers held out and then all of a sudden, where are all the newspapers? Either they are gone or online.

What happened with the trades especially is they said, “These white-collar jobs, Facebook, and all that stuff, there’s going to be a ton of people that still want to go into the trades and work with their hands. We don’t have to change. We don’t have to think differently.” Here we are, it’s one of the hardest hiring seasons in the history of the industry. It’s not because we didn’t do anything different and there are fewer people out there in the world. It’s just that there are fewer people that want these jobs where nothing has changed.

I love that you’re bringing in technology and automation and the idea that people don’t have to be micro. There’s still that mindset of, “You got to show up at the office first thing.” I was like, “You’re going to make a guy drive 40 miles to your office so you can have a stand-up meeting with him, and then you’re making him drive 40 miles back to his first job?” They go, “It’s called accountability.” That might be what you call it but that mindset shift hasn’t taken place. I agree with that. It’s interesting what you say about the bookkeeper piece because I know that’s a tough point for a lot of people.

In reality, it can’t be a delegation of abdication. You can’t just say, “You’re a bookkeeping firm? Here’s all my bookkeeping. Goodbye. Don’t talk to me ever again.” You still have to have some checks and balances in place to make sure that things are processing smoothly. It’s a different thought process and mindset. My biggest pet peeve is to say, “That’s how it’s always been.” If somebody says that, it’s like, “No, thank you.” I question everything. Every single day, question why you’re doing what you’re doing. If you have a good response to that answer, keep doing it. Don’t be afraid to question why you’re doing it.

I tell people joining my team, “If you want to get fired here, tell me, ‘We do it that way because that’s how we’ve always done it.’” We got to be improving. It’s interesting that you say that though. Back to the bookkeeper thing, I talk to a lot of owners that are like, “I need a new bookkeeper.” I’m like, “What happened to the last one?” “She wasn’t doing her job.” I ask them, “What was her job?” “Do my books.” “What the heck does that mean?” “I don’t know. I’m not a bookkeeper.” Problem number one is to learn what you need to learn to manage a bookkeeper.

You don’t have to know their entire jobs like how to do an Excel spreadsheet and how to use QuickBooks or QuickBooks Online. What you need to know about is how to check your P&L. You need to make sure that you can check and inspect everything. You can’t expect anything you don’t inspect.

The truth is we're all people, and most of the problems in your business are caused by people. Click To Tweet

When it comes to learning this stuff, I know that you’re a big fan of hiring coaches. Talk to me a little bit about that. What’s good coach that you should be looking at to have in your business? How do you get started on this? Learning the things that aren’t doing the work, that’s where I find a lot of owners. They love the trade. Maybe they grew up in it so they want to be in the truck. They want to use their hands. They’re good with the field. When it comes to managing that office as they grow, there’s so much to learn. I know coaches are a great way to help with that. Talk to me a little bit about that.

I have multiple coaches for different reasons. Whether it’s mental so getting out of my own way and getting out of my own headspace, right down to CFO coaching, what you should be looking for on your financial side of things, business things, and peer-to-peer groups. Even mentorships with people who have done it in our industry and other industries. I find that extremely valuable. The biggest thing is don’t be afraid of feeling dumb or feeling awkward because you don’t know what you don’t know until you know. Once you know it, then it’s like, “I could have done this differently for so many years.”

If anybody has ever read The E-Myth Revisited, Michael Gerber talks so much about the technician. Many of us are the technician that came out of the field. We’re the service technician that came out into an office. You’re just doing it because you think the guy you worked for was an idiot and you could do it better than he could. You get in and you’re like, “That fellow had a lot more responsibilities than I realized.”

It’s a shock to a lot of people. It is something that you don’t have to do alone. There are lots of organizations out there. Don’t necessarily listen to what everybody else says in your groups. It’s not that they’re going to say anything bad about the organization, but they’re not you. If I was asking somebody, “How do you run a remote business?” What response do you think I’m going to get? “You can’t do it. This can’t be done. That can’t be done.” Be careful with who you’re asking these questions to, and interview all these coaches. There are tons of organizations out there and there are some amazing mentors and coaches. There are also some bad ones. It’s tough. Develop a relationship, talk with people and ask lots of questions.

One thing I’ve learned about coaches is that the coaches that specialize in one area tend to be better coaches than the generalist. Anybody that says they’re a business coach, I’m like, “What does that mean?” They’re like, “All areas of business.” I’m like, “So you’re a master of none of them is what you’re telling me.”

While they might be a great coach from that perspective, you’re still going to need someone to help you with the hiring, bookkeeping and scaling. Maybe they’re the coach of your coaches, which I can see a need for that sometimes. Find the coach that’s got expertise because the other thing is that coach is working on that same issue with all the other clients they have.

They probably have seen someone in your exact situation and have seen how they came out successfully on the other hand. The other thing I would caution you is that if a coach tells you something, there’s a good reason why they’re telling you that as long as they’re a good coach. They’ve seen other clients of theirs going through the same situation. Why wouldn’t you take their advice? Don’t keep throwing, “My situation is different. I’m different. You can’t do that in this situation.”

I’ve heard that so many times from other people in those groups with me. At what point are you going to realize that we’ve all been something like what you’re doing? I get it. It’s your baby, “This is my baby. My baby is different from yours. Mine is prettier. I can’t have the same issues you have.” In reality, it’s relatively the same home service business. That’s weird coming from me. I’m the guy that does everything differently. I’m the one that wears a three-piece suit and climbs through your attic. I don’t care. That’s how I stand out.

For me to say it’s another service company, in reality, we’re providing wow service and that’s what matters. Whether we’re doing it in a three-piece suit or we’re having a clean truck and park on the street so that our logo is facing the door, make sure we’re not dripping oil in the driveway, we’re all service companies and we’re all taking care of clients.

It’s interesting, I’ve worked with companies as small as one, the owner. I’ve been on teams that have worked with companies with thousands of employees. What I’ve learned is they all suffer from the same problems. The only difference is the bigger guys have more zeros in what it costs them when they screw it up. The truth is we’re all people and most of the problems in your business are caused by people. If you don’t know the person in your business that is causing the problem, take a look in the mirror because it’s probably you. I’ve learned that about working with them. We’ve seen it all.

We started doing something with some clients. We put together a list of about 80 things that could go wrong while we’re working together. We call it our turbulence list. It’s like when you get on an airplane, the pilot hops on and he’s like, “We’re at 10,000 feet. We’re going to be climbing to 30,000 feet. I’ll take the seatbelt sign-off. There’s going to be a storm brewing before we get ready to land and it might get a little bumpy. I’m going to tell you to put the seatbelt sign on, put your tray tables up, and we’ll get you there safely. We know how to fly through turbulence. We’ve been there before.” I got the same thing and it’s 80 different things. People are like, “Does this stuff happen?” I’m like, “If it’s on this list, it’s because we’ve helped the client get through it.”

I flew to Vegas twice from Savannah. I’m not a fan of crossing across the entire nation in an airplane. One of the things that I thought was great on the last trip coming back from Vegas to Savannah, that’s exactly what our pilot said. He said, “We don’t have a tailwind like we normally do so it’s going to slow us down a little bit. We can see that right before we land, we’re going to have a little bit of turbulence. Be aware of that. We already expect it, so don’t be afraid of what’s going on and we’ll get you there safely.” I was like, “That’s so amazing to hear because I’m not afraid of flying and falling out of the air. What I’m afraid of is that sudden impact at the end. That’s what gets me.”

To hear him come on the radio and say, “We understand that there’s going to be some fears coming from the plane. If I didn’t tell you it was coming, you’d be even more scared of what’s going on.” When it came, it came hard. I’ve flown a lot. I have lots of frequent flyer miles. That is the absolute worst turbulence I’ve ever been in. We dropped in the air. I’ve flown in the back of C-130s. I was in the Air Force. Those things are horrible to fly in the back of and it was not as bad as first-class in this jetliner. It was wild. If that pilot had not come on the radio and said that beforehand, I would have sworn we were going to die. I was like, “There’s the turbulence he was talking about.”

We flew to Houston and I’m waiting for the pilot that has the gumption to say, “By the way, when you look out the window and the plane’s wings are flying up and down like a bird, that’s normal. The engineer’s accounted for that.” I’m like, “Those wings are going to rip off.” We found that it not only puts people’s concerns at ease but it also helps them understand that there are things that impact our ability to get results in your business that you may not connect the dots on.

You lose a key account and people are like, “What does it have to do with hiring?” Are you kidding me? Half your team is like, “Are we still going to have a job?” Now you got to step up that retention piece if you lose a key account. There are so many things that are connected when it comes to it.

It cal also be the opposite. You’re failing on the hiring aspect. You’re allowing key employees to leave due to culture issues or not following up on processes you promised, and then all of a sudden, a key account leaves because you can’t support them.

Don't be afraid of feeling dumb or feeling awkward because you don't know what you don't know until you know. Click To Tweet

It’s all connected. That’s the thing about business. Hire a coach and work with a good bookkeeper. I heard those things. What are some actions they can take right away?

You should have five best friends. You need a good insurance guy or gal, lawyer, banker, mentor or coach, and CFO or CPA. My CPA firm has CFOs in them and that’s where my CFO is located. I say CFO, in reality, I mean CPA. You have a good accountant, banker, lawyer, coach and insurance. Brian is my buddy and my insurance guy.

I got three of those people that you mentioned all named Brian in my world. It’s crazy. My wife’s like, “Which Brian are we talking about now?” I’m like, “I shifted gears. I was talking about the attorney. Now I’m talking about the insurance guy.” Five people you should have in your business. This sounds heavy, find a coach, find a good bookkeeping firm, find the five people. What is something they can go do by the end of the week that helps push them in that direction and moves them towards those ultimate goals? What’s a good first step?

Honestly, if it was me and as a commitment to the readers, I’ll do it before the end of the week. The good news is it stays one day so I have a couple more days. Talk with every one of your team members and find out their why.

What’s that going to do for them?

The accountability aspect of it is an amazing thing. I’m assuming that you’re tracking KPIs and not just delegating by obligation. You’re looking at what this person is doing on a daily basis or at least some regular occurrence. As soon as they’re not tracking properly, it’s easier to have the conversation of, “You’re wanting to purchase your own house, your first house.”

In the end, we’ve worked this backward. We know that if you want to purchase this $200,000 house, it’s going to take you doing this and this. “What are you not doing right now?” “This and this.” “Let’s work towards doing that.” It’s not me emotionally upset with someone about why they’re not completing their tasks. It’s, “Are you sure that’s your why or do we need to have that conversation again?”

It’s funny, I get a lot of people to push back like, “My team doesn’t get emotional about that stuff. They don’t think about that stuff.” I’m like, “They’re human beings.”

“We’re a bunch of dudes. We don’t talk about that stuff.” You’d be surprised.

I can’t tell you how many are like, “My guys don’t have emotion.” When’s the last time they cursed out a superintendent? It just happened before this. It’s called emotion. We’re unkind. We’re channeling the wrong kind of emotion. People are giving up time with their friends, their family, and the things they do for fun to come work for you. It’s not just about the money. One of the reasons we’re having this issue around hiring and pay is everybody thinks they’re worth $10 more now than they are. I go, “It’s because you got crappy jobs. It’s because they know that in the industry, they’re going to be treated like garbage. That’s the bribe that they need to overlook.”

How would you explain to someone or build value if let’s say they’ve been interviewed at five different places. Every one of those places has said, “We need somebody right now. We’ll pay you $40 an hour.” Two years ago, that same position was $20 an hour. Your company maybe can’t afford $40 an hour or you haven’t figured out how to make that happen. How do you come in competitively and still have that conversation and win that person?

There are two pieces to that. Let us take the first piece, which let us say you want to compete on the price. There’s always someone willing to go bankrupt faster than you. Don’t ever compare yourself to what everybody else is doing. The employer that’s offering the $40 an hour might know that they’ve got a crummy culture and horrible work-life integration or work-life balance. They know they’re going to chew you up and spit you out in 3 or 6 months or whatever, but they got to push through this job that they know isn’t going to be profitable just to save face with the client. You have no idea where they are at.

Know that if someone is making an offer that’s too good to be true, the grass probably isn’t greener. It’s probably growing over a septic tank and that thing is leaking like mad, but they’re not going to let you know that on the front end. If you ever get made this offer or you see that there are companies out there making these offers that are too good to be true, there’s probably something deeper than that. That’s a problem. They’ve got to bribe people to get in there.

With that said, take a look at is your price competitive in the marketplace? I love what you do, Tersh. You’re able to reduce your overheads significantly by not having to shop, by not making your guys commute a ton, by keeping their jobs local so their windshield time is minimal, and by making them audit the inventory on their trucks once a week. You’re doing a lot of things to reduce any kind of shrinkage or reduce your expenses. It means if you’re charging what the market can bear, you have a higher margin you can pay your guys.

That’s exactly the thought process that we have, which is the reason why we pay them $40 when our competitors are paying $20 and $30.

Because you can. The competitors have 15% of their revenue going towards keeping the lights on in the office that no one wants to come to anyways. That’s one thing. Make sure you are priced right, and then if you are priced right, look at how you can reduce expenses by automating, systematizing, and being smarter than everybody else. That’s one side of it.

You need to have five best friends for your business: insurance guy, lawyer, banker, mentor, and bookkeeper. Click To Tweet

The other side of it is, and this is the side we usually take, what is it that someone wants out of a job? Let’s get to their why. Why are you here? What do you want to accomplish? We had a client that found out that a lot of their entry-level guys, these $12, $13, $14 an hour guys, all they want to do is buy a home or provide for their family.

They say, “Great. Here’s what we’re going to do over the next two years. Here’s your career path. Here’s your savings plan. By the way, when you are ready to buy a home and you can show us that you’ve saved the money and you’ve done this, we’re going to match 50% of whatever you’ve saved.” It’s way cheaper than 400% turnover and dealing with it, and you’ve got guys that are motivated to expand their career because they want to buy a house.

They put this whole program and it cost them nothing. What it does is it saves them a ton because now you got people that are committed, loyal and are going to be there a long time. Figure out why they want to be there. We have clients all the time that call us and say, “I didn’t believe you could do it but we hired someone for $4 less than what they were making and we are pumped.” You’re excited about where you’re going and what you’re doing as a company.

How do you share that kind of culture before the interview process? Have are you going to say this successful where the conversation isn’t like, “It’s the devil I know versus the one I don’t?” It’s like, “I’m not even interested in that job because I don’t like where I’m at. I hate where I’m at but at least I’m making a paycheck.”

Do you have customer testimonials on your website? How many employee reviews or employee testimonials do you have on your website?

I don’t think I have any. On their profile page?

I’m talking about super easy to find and not buried somewhere. We put all this effort into finding out what our customers think of us. We put no effort into thinking about what are our employees think of us. When we do find out what our employees think of it, for some reason, we think it needs to be a secret. Get it out there.

We got a client that record it on their phone. They had their crew member set it up. They propped it up on a brick fence or something. You can tell this was done at the last minute. They got up there and talked about how awesome it was to work there and what it’s like to be a part of the team. They name-dropped and did all this, and then they emailed it to him. They’re like, “Boss, is this good?” He’s like, “I love it.” It’s raw, organic and real. It works. People are drawn to that. They’re like, “I want to be excited about my job like that person is about theirs.”

It’s funny you mentioned that because I interviewed a gentleman and we didn’t hire him. I can’t think of the reason right off the top of my head why we did not hire him. It has something to do with the location where he wanted to live, which is irrelevant at this point. I do remember the conversation that we had because when we do hiring events, we’ll do them in Zoom. It’s a whole group of people and they were all interviewed at the same time for different jobs.

One of the things he mentioned was, “Every time I see you on Facebook or social media, you’re always having such a blast.” Our quarterly thing is that the whole team gets together. My wife and I live out in the country, but we’ll have everybody come to our house and we’ll have what’s called Lowcountry Boil. We have crab legs, shrimp, and sausage laid out along our 16-foot long table.

This guy mentioned, “I’ve seen you’re having a Lowcountry Boil. You got this big old blow-up slide for all the kids of the families that work with you. You have videos of everybody having a great time. That’s what I want.” He’s like, “I know you don’t see each other every single day but I remember every time that somebody’s around and they’re wearing your logo and your brand, they’re always having a great time.” I was like, “That’s cool. I appreciate that.”

We teach a process called Building the Bench. You’ve probably got an email list of customers and people that want to work for you.

I do but it’s only because someone told me to do it recently.

Good for you. A great email to send that list is that same picture that he was talking about on Facebook. Send it to him with the subject line, “We miss you. Wish you were here.”

That’s a golden nugget.

This is your episode.

I’m loving this.

As soon as you popped open with, “Ask them their why. Find out what they want and what’s important to them,” that’s the heart of what we do. It got my brain going and my coaching instincts kicked in on that. I enjoyed our conversation. I’m sure we could keep going. We’ll probably have you back on again in the future and we can dive into this some more.

I know you’ve got some resources available for our readers. I know you got the podcast and you got some other stuff that you’re working on. You’ve been there and you’ve done it. You’re doing some amazing things with your businesses. I know you want to be able to give back and help the industry and help others. Tell me a little bit about how they can learn more about you and get access to some of these free resources.

Whether it’s Facebook Messenger or sending an email, we typically will put the guest contact information in the show notes but they still tend to reach out to me, which I’m perfectly fine with. I’m a connector in the industry and that’s why we have the podcast. It’s to connect people. One of the questions we get a lot is, “I don’t understand my numbers so I don’t know what to do next. I don’t know if we’re making money. We have money in the checking account.”

We’re doing Mike Michalowicz’s Profit First. I love him. If there’s cash in the bank, then we’re making money. If there’s no cash in the bank, then we’re not making money. A lot of times, they’re like, “I don’t know my numbers. I don’t know if I’m charging right.” We have some PDFs. In a lot of the different groups and everything, we have some great friends who have helped us out with knowing your numbers and sold hour numbers.

If you were going to be flat rate and you used to be time and material, a lot of people are confused on how to figure out their sold hour or how much they should charge per hour that they sell. We have a PDF on how to do that and work through it. They have to go to our website and the homepage there. Click the link, sign up for it, and we’ll get it sent over to them. It’s ServiceBusinessMastery.com.

Tersh, I’ve enjoyed our conversation. Lots of great wisdom from you. I love how you’re disrupting the industry and doing something different. It’s fantastic. Other people are going, “I want to figure out how to do that, too because if I give up that shop, that’d be amazing.” In today’s day and age, no one’s going to come to your shop anymore anyway so you don’t need it. Tersh, thanks for being a guest and I look forward to speaking with you next time.

It’s such a pleasure. I appreciate the invitation.

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About Tersh Blissett

I HELP SMALL BUSINESS OWNERS, MANAGERS AND TECHNICIANS FIND ANSWERS TO THE QUESTIONS THEY DON’T KNOW TO ASK. I spend countless hours each day networking with experts within service business based industries to find out what makes the best companies the best. I then pass that information along to you!

First thing…create a plan. What do you want out of your business? If you are a technician or manager thinking about starting a service business, why? At least put an idea down on paper.

Next, figure out your brand. The term can be so cliche today, but without your brand, you are just another number in the phone book!

Finally, subscribe and listen to my podcast. Hear from experts on what does and does not work for each industry. Give me feedback! Service Business Mastery Podcast on iTunes, Google Play Store and Bluecollarroots.com