Building a Robust Training Culture in the Trades | Podcast Ep. 169 | Toolbox for the Trades

Hello, contractors, and welcome to Toolbox for the Trades. My name is Jackie Abel, and today I am chatting with Ken Midget. Ken is a former business owner turned educator who's taught over 100 students in Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley the plumbing trade. He joins me today to talk about the importance of building a training culture and how you should look at training as a profit generator in your business. I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did. Ken Midget, you are the plumbing market director at Interplay Learning. Today we are going to be talking about building a training culture, thinking about training as a profit generator, which I think is very cool. And we're also going to talk about how you created an apprenticeship machine in Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley. I'm so excited to get into it. Welcome to the podcast.

Hey, thanks so much for having me, Jackie. It's an honor to be here.

Honestly, Ken, after talking to you, the honor is all mine. Truly, you are a wealth of knowledge, and I cannot wait to crack open that brain of yours and release all of your knowledge onto our listeners. What an interesting image I shared with everyone listening now. Anyway, let's kick off with an icebreaker. I would love to know, Ken, if you could have an unlimited supply of anything, what would it be and why?

Yeah, I put some thought into this. Not a whole lot, but I think. I think the number one thing that I would like to have more of is time. And why is because I. I'm constantly honing the knife, right? I'm constantly doing this. I don't want to be good at something. I want to be great at something. Sometimes you have to make sacrifices on the personal side to invest in your career. So I would like to have enough time that I could eliminate those sacrifices, and that would make me much better, and I would probably get there a lot faster to the place I want to be. I've always been thought of as a domain expert and a thought leader in any of the places I've had my career. So I want to stay in that position. And more time would certainly give me that.

I think that's a wonderful answer. The first time I thought of this icebreaker, my answer was easy. Lacroix. I can very easily purchase my own Lacroix. You know, service titan has not left me destitute. So I have to think, I think, better for my answer. But, Ken, you are. You're totally right, man. You are a wealth of knowledge here. Like you were mentioning, you have become a thought leader in the plumbing industry. I found out about you from Paige the plumber who I got to have on this podcast a couple of months ago, who spoke so highly of you. She called you coach, which we'll get into in a moment. But let's actually start at the beginning. I want to hear how you got into the trades, what brought you to where you are today, which is primarily an educator, really, in the industry. So how did you get here?

Yeah, crazy. I didn't go after plumbing. I'm going to say what I say to everybody who found me. I was probably one of the worst students could imagine in my high school years, but it wasn't. If it wasn't for athletics, I probably would have ended up in prison. It just was a not a good student. And it's just I didn't learn the way I was being taught. Shot out of high school, went right into the plumbing career, got my journeyman's, got my master's own, two successful PhD businesses over 25 years. And then this opportunity came up to teach, which I've always loved, kids. During the second business, I learned to work on it instead of in it, and afforded me more time, no pun intended, to get involved with coaching youth soccer and reffing youth soccer, which I did. And I really kind of found my passion with just working with that age, all kids. I just loved it. And then to spin it into the interview with where I worked at lcti, Lehigh Current Technical Institute, and it is in eastern Pennsylvania and Lehigh Valley. I just had this passion to teach and share my knowledge of the industry and business and everything I could give back to the industry. That was my thing is giving back. That was number one reason. I just was passionate about it. And you know, when you're passionate. Some people disagree with that statement. When you're passionate about something that you never work a day in your life. Well, being an educator, I worked a lot of days in my life, right, Dealing with high schoolers, you know, eight, nine hours a day and then teaching post secondary at night sometimes. It was challenging. So you definitely work. But I did love it. I did love it. People ask me to this day, you know, do you miss the classroom? And I said, absolutely. I miss my students. I miss some of the co workers. Although I am involved with a lot of my alumni now because I'm out of the classroom, but I definitely miss it. I miss the things that I experienced when I was in the classroom with them. Those aha moments are just a wonderful thing to witness.

That's incredible. So just to recap here, you had a very successful life as a Plumber. As a plumber, service entrepreneur, you had two businesses. You had a great reputation in the Lehigh Valley and Eastern pa. And the way you told me the story, there was this plumbing program at the. Within the local school network for high schoolers that was not doing well. It was failing. They wanted you to come in and make an impact. And by the end of your tenure there, you had a waiting list for kids who wanted to get into this plumbing program. So tell me a little bit about what this plumbing program looked like. And I know everyone listening, their ears perked up because they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait. You got a waiting list for people who wanted to become plumbers? Like, you had people. You were sending apprentices out. I think you said you did, like 150 job shadows a week. That's incredible. So talk to me a little bit about that. How did you get these. These kids interested in plumbing? How did you get them drinking the Kool Aid, so to speak?

Yeah, coaches, Kool Aid. By the way, my students always called me coach. So how did I get to drink the Kool Aid? Well, high schoolers are this, you know, unique breed of, of people in an age bracket, and they're extremely impressionable if you catch their attention. And I started by just exposing them to all the possibilities of all the things and what you can do in the trades.

Right.

And, you know, there's more to plumbing than just playing with toilets.

Right.

I also built tremendous rapport and relationships with almost every single student that I, that I came into touch with. You know, I just, they, they. I just kind of bonded with them. I wasn't the normal teacher. I went to wrestling matches, I went to baseball games, football games. And so my students knew that I was not the average teacher.

Right.

They knew that I was going to be more than a teacher. I was going to be part of their life, try to boast them into their career. That brought itself over into me being an entrepreneur, if you will, in the classroom and thinking, how can I get these kids to be interested in actually going into the field like you? I can keep them interested, show them all kinds of neat stuff in my lab, but how am I going to get them interested in pursuing this? I created this environment where to get on a job shadow, you had to have the right behavior in the classroom. You had to have the right grades. You had to have the right grades in your academic functions and zero disciplines. And eventually these job shadows became a form of competition to do the next step, which was cooperative education, the workforce development thing. So I used to sell this to them before they would even go on a job shadow and say, you know, these are the best. This is the best gig in town. You're going to go work for a plumber. The hours are going to count towards your apprenticeship because you got to serve your fourth, your 8,000 hours in Pennsylvania and your time there, you're going to get paid for. And guess what? You're not going to be messing around at McDonald's or Wawa or convenience store, at a gas station or bowling alley. It's going to be the greatest gig in town. So I actually started to get traction with it. We started the job shadows and the results from the mentoring. I realized it was such an impact because I had contractors that these kids would go out and spend the day on a job shadow and they would call me that night on my phone and say, mitchell, what are you doing with these kids? Like, they're just like, they're so much different than what we expected to see come through the door. Their shirt was tucked in, they had a belt on, they weren't twiddling their phone. They were engaged with the guy in the truck. All these things that were. I was mentoring them and teaching them to do were starting to happen on the job site. So as they started to really take off, you're right, it wasn't abnormal to see 100, 150 job shadows between 1012 students with seven or eight employers in one week's time. And by the end of that week, those employers would call me and say, I want this student, I want that student, I want this student. And then I would have a detailed discussion with the student.

The.

On the following day, I had all the other stuff out of the way. All the things of, do you have a car? Do you have a license? Are your parents going to go along with this, so on, so forth. So it really was like a week's time from that job shadow to actually being on cooperative education. Then when I started to get more of those people involved and it also, it came down into the junior, the 11th graders were doing it, not just the seniors. And they would. Those students would come in to my lab twice a month. That was a regulation put on by the school. And when they would come in, they would have bling, they would have watches, they would have new trucks, they would have fancy clothes, new sneakers, all this, all this, all these toys. And the people in the classroom would see this and think, how are you doing this? Where are you getting the letters to buy this stuff? Where's it coming from. And they would say, because I'm working, dude, you should listen to this guy. He can get you there. And then that just kind of. It just scale. It went to scale. Like within 18 months, it was done. Everybody wanted to be out the door. They turned into overnight angels for the most part. I had zero disciplines from that point forward. I'm going to say that was in maybe year four, year four, all the way up to year 12. Basically no disciplines because they knew. So that's kind of helped that whole classroom management thing put things right into place. I was also fortunate to have a very large advisory council and CTE education, at least in Pennsylvania, you have to have an advisory council. Typically, Most programs have six to seven people. I had 60 in my advisory counsel.

Real quick, what does CTE stand for? For folks who may not be familiar?

Career and Technical Education.

Got it. Thank you.

Right.

That was quite the luxury on my part to have all that. So I had all this resource to place these students. And I'm going to say by year five and six, it started to really become competitive. Like employers were really paying attention and becoming more and more assertive and involved to want to get these students because they knew when they came out they were going to do the right things.

Right.

They were going to be there for the right reasons. It wasn't going to be the typical answer that you hear sometimes. This kid doesn't want to work. This kid doesn't even want to be in your program. Why are you sending them to me? So this would be a lot of the other answers from some of the other programs in the school. I think my business background answered a lot of those questions As I went through this process, I knew what to do to make this student the model person to go into the working world.

Yeah. You knew what they were looking for. Yeah. You knew, like, what a model technician would look like or what at least a model apprentice. Right. Because so many folks I talk to now, we, okay, labor problem. We know about it. It's here. It's been here since I've been in the trades, which has been six and a half years, and I'm sure it was even before that. It's going to continue for a while. So you have to think about those green texts, Right. Like, who has like the. The baseline social skills presentation, Punctuality, enthusiasm, what stuff that I can't teach, but that will make a good student and that can become a great plumber. So it sounds like you really helped these kids exercise that muscle so they could be Primed and ready to go. When they went over to those employers.

It really just became a machine. And, you know, when you get to a point in your teaching career that you can. My lab was the size of a middle school gymnasium. It was. It was very big, tall ceilings. And then in one corner was the classroom and had about 35, 40 seats in it. And we always lectured, you know, right after the. Right after the Pledge of Allegiance in the morning or right after everybody got in. And I would walk into the classroom and they would just go silent in like 14 seconds. Like, you know, when you have presence, just like when you stand on a soccer field, the same thing. Your players are quiet, they're ready to start training. It's the same. Was the same experience in the classroom when I knew that when I got to that level, the gloves were going to come off, these kids were going to compete to get out the door. And when they would see all pictures of, you know, 45, 50 people sitting in a room, and I would show them the next day after these meetings and say, see all these people here, Know what they're called, stakeholders, know what their job is to hire you. So it just was constant, constant, constant thing to do. And they. They knew a lot of things hinged on it.

Yeah, I just want to, like, kind of break down what I'm hearing from hearing you now describe this a couple times to me. I'm hearing that at the beginning, you took a real vested interest, and that was in your students. And that was also aided by the fact that you really enjoyed working with kids and in this environment, and you were passionate about the stuff you were teaching them as you went along. You brought in reinforcements who had gone through the program and were finding success, showed like, hey, the proof is in the pudding. Look at all of these things that, you know, these kids, recent graduates, early graduates, are able to buy and how they're able to live with this skill set. And then you were able to use your business acumen to really, really, like, down what it means to be employed and what kids should be thinking about if they want to be successful in the workforce. And I think that's so important. And I'm really. I have to give you so much credit. I mean, how many people do you think in total went through your program when you were running it?

Oh, my goodness.

How many plumbers are out there that we can thank Ken Midget for?

Yeah, I taught a little under 13 years, and the senior class varied in size, but it went, you know, it could be as little as six. And it had as many as 20, depending on the graduation year and how they came into the program. And what I will say is that every eligible senior got placed. So at graduation, they walked right into a job, you know, making 20, 25 bucks an hour. Right, right in Lehigh Valley. Just walked into a job. And that was all positioned, organized. Some of them that, you know, didn't have their license right away, didn't have transportation. You know, we worked around some of those blockers. Not so much the license, more about the transportation. We would use public transportation, and they would leave the school and go to the employer's shop. I mean, we just learned to work around obstacles. A young, young woman, she now has her master's. She works for a plumber in Lehigh Valley. She did not have the money for a car. Her parents did not have the money to support her, nor did she have a license. That employer hired her. She took the. She took the public transportation to the employer's shop. The employer gave her the driving lessons and gave her the truck after she got the license, literally while she was in school. That's how much they. That's how impressed they were with her. Wow. And, you know, she's just. I mean, I, you know, I. I love all my kids. I just, you know, I can't say enough good about them. They're out there now in the worker. I'm just so proud of them. To come back, to answer your question, I don't know if I had to pull a number out of the skit, out of the. Out of the air, I'm going to say between 125 to 150 kids over 12 years, 13 years.

That's incredible. That's really. That is. I mean, when you think about the ripple effect, if that's. Let's make it 150. How many homeowners are those kids serving? How many kids go on to make impact in their communities amongst their friends, amongst their families, and are spreading the good word? I mean, Paige Knowles, like, sung your praises to me when I spoke to her, which was.

She's a very special student. She's a rock star and her sisters.

And I just, I need to. I want to commend you on that. And I'm so happy we got to kind of kick off this. This episode with you talking about the influence you had here, because I think it will be very inspiring to some of the folks listening who are trying to get more young people into the trades. And, man, I mean, it's really not that difficult. It sounds. It sounds like taking an interest in them and showing them what's up, being honest and real with them about what kind of value this career can provide.

Yeah. And of course, there's the part where you have to transition from being a business owner to an educator.

Right.

That's. That has its own set of challenges. And there's, you know, in Pennsylvania, there's a program set up for that. It's 11 years, and you go through this process and you go to college at night, and then you get. Get a certificate to teach your discipline. But there's that part of it, too that's, you know, a little bit draining because I, again, I had to go back into the academic environment, and that was challenging for me.

Dang. Dang. Oh, I didn't realize you had to do that. Wow. Ken, as someone who just did some. Some continuing education recently while working, my hat goes off to you. That is very hard to do.

Yes, Yes. A lot of people quit when they come into it. Cause of it. A lot of new teachers just quit, can't handle it. They drop off.

I want to pivot a bit because I think in your experience, you have, you have a lot to say here. And one thing that you and I spoke about was this idea of building a training culture and incentivizing training in the workforce. So tell me about why that is important, why a training culture is important to folks who are building a service business or running a service business.

Yeah. The number one reasons why, reason why you need to train and why it needs to be a culture is for growth. It's going to be very challenging for you to grow and grow at the pace you want to grow and grow in the right model. So let's talk about all the things that you want to encapsulate in that growth.

Right.

You want to have high ratings with Google. You want to have good reviews all over your market areas. All those things, all these little pieces add up to the big puzzle to, you know, where you're going to be. You want to have low turnover.

Right.

So it truly has to be. The word culture is really the thing that you need to hone in on. It needs to be part of everything that is going on in that company. It isn't. Oh, we're going to train when we have extra time. It snowed today. Let's train. The truck broke down. No, no. It. Training is a regimented, scheduled thing. Owners get to decide how much and when. But it's a process that's just like anything else. Just like somebody's going to Clean. If they have a process to clean out your truck at the end of the day, guess what? There's a process to train, right? And that is how you will exponentially fix some things in your company that may be broken and you will experience the growth and you will have lower turnover and you will have a recruiting mechanism in place. You know, we all know that. I've heard it. I've listened to a couple of your podcasts already. Even before I even knew you, I listened to them. And it's not a secret that there's no talent out there, right? There's no skilled labor for you to hire to make your business grow. You're going to have to home grow them. You're going to have to hire for attitude and attitude and bring them into the fold and get them to adopt and get involved with the way your company culture is, right? So one way to do that is to have an ongoing training program, one that higher level texts are able to foster that information to the green text coming in and the lower level text, one that is safe for them to learn in. One that is learning at your own pace. One that they don't have to feel awkward because they don't have to ask a stupid, what they feel is a stupid question to get an answer to a higher skilled person and all these other things that go into place with that training program. Admin has to be engaged and involved with this. They need to be the evangelistic people of this program. Especially if you're, if you, if you're a listener and you have no training and you're going to get started. There's a lot of work that you have to do to get this to happen. But I promise you it'll be, it'll, it'll come back 10x if you just do the work. But you're, you're the leader, right? You own the company. You, you're the one that has to be at the helm and you have to prove the value of training. And to that end, you need to be doing stuff, share what you're doing in your professional development as a business owner. I took this course, I took Masterclass, whatever it is that you're doing. I joined a trade association and I'm going to classes with them, whatever that is that sends the message that you think it's important. When you're an admin person and when you're building this culture in the same process, you're thinking about, well, I mentioned about growth, right? The growth that comes from training, right? We'll talk a Little bit more about that in a minute. You know, the things that you need to think about in your plan is like, how am I going to implement this thing, how am I going to maintain it, how am I going to build this training culture, right? And I always hear this excuse a lot when I work for Interplay is that, you know, I don't have any time, I don't have any, I can't do that. That's the worst excuse to tell me. Because you need to find a way around the obstacle. If you're an entrepreneur, you walk in the door and there's all these bombs on your desk that are going to go off. This is just. The time is just another bomb, right? You either delegate what you can't. If you're going to take this on yourself as the owner or manager, you delegate the work that you can delegate and you get rid of the time problem and you invest in the training thing or you hire someone, right, to take care of that. I said this before and I'm going to. It's worth repeating. It has to be just as important as any other item in the business. You have to, you have to have that attitude and that has to shine with management and the techs, the people that are training. Having a budget, that's the first thing you're going to need to think about, you know, what's the mindset you need to do. And pro and going into the discussion about profit generator versus a line item, right? So we're going to talk a little bit about that. Starts with having a budget. You can't have a plan, you can't have a budget, you're not going to have a training culture. You got to start there. What do I want to accomplish? What are the weaknesses in my company? What are we making a lot of mistakes at? What are the market areas I want to go into? If I'm only doing plumbing, do I want to do electric? That's a training environment, right? That's a training mechanism to get people on board, start teaching them to be electricians. That's the growth side of it, right? So having this plan, having a budget and thinking about what kind of training you're going to do, are you going to do something all digital? Are you going to do something traditional in a classroom or are you going to have something hybrid, right? Are you going to build something, something? Are you, are your text going to classes at night where there's hands on environments for them to learn? All that's part of it, right? Back to the assessments you have to assess what you need, the business has to assess what it needs.

Right.

So that's a. Where's the growth area? Where's our weaknesses? Where are we spending a lot of time? Where are we having a lot of our callbacks? Those are needs, they're training needs.

Right.

So that needs to be done. And then each technician and each apprentice needs to be benchmarked. They're all going to come in at different levels when you implement this program, whatever that program looks like. So the worst thing that you can do is sit down an apprentice and put them in front that's highly skilled in math and give them a bunch of math courses. Why are you doing that? That's not a weakness for them.

Waste of time. Waste of time. And also I would imagine that would be boring to the technician.

Absolutely. And boring equals. There's a direct equal sign of engagement. Engagement, Engagement, engagement. That's another thing that we hear from customers all the time. How do I get them to do this work? You know, well, there's, there's ways to do that.

Right.

But these things, I'm telling you from the very beginning of this training discussion with the culture and everything else I've shared already, that's how you get the engagement, because the leadership is doing it.

Right.

So how is training implemented? That means that's part of the plan. So you have the plan of the weaknesses, the growth areas for the business. You've assessed your technicians and there's ways to do that, to know where their need, their training needs are. That's part of the implementation. So we're going to start them off with, let's get the technicians, get them as close to the same level as we can from a technical knowledge perspective and a hands on kinesthetic ability.

Right.

What I'm hearing here is, and you're given out great nuggets here. This is literally like how to start a training program at your business. So what I'm hearing is identify, take honest stock of where your business is now. Where do you want to grow? Where do you have some weaknesses? Right. Then from there, identify how those goals can be accomplished through your workforce. Right?

Yep.

Identify how much budget you can allocate to this training program. Build out this training program to fill up, fill to, to help turn those weaknesses into strengths. So you have like different levels for different things. And then look at your employees individually and see, okay, who needs what in this training program? Who needs more help learning this particular system? So it's like you really have to take a look at this from a Global view and then get really granular as you go deeper, deeper down. Which can sound honestly to me, you know, every day I'm talking to business owners and I am just constantly in awe of them. The fact that they're able to turn a profit. The amount of responsibility and overview that you get when you're a service entrepreneur, I cannot imagine. So I love what you mentioned earlier about delegation, but like, for me hearing this right now, I'm like, oh, this is a lot. So, like, what do you think is, like some of the first steps that people can start taking, like, to kind of make this vision more of a reality, if that makes any sense.

Yep, yep. Well, the plans. The plan's the critical component.

Right.

And. And the budgeting. And who's gonna. Who's gonna do what?

Right.

Who's going to be responsible? And if you're an owner and you're delegating this, a lot of this onto your management, make sure that they have the bandwidth because, you know, it's, you're. They're just, it's just going to fail if they, if they don't.

Right.

And maybe they're going to need some ancillary help from outside. I think one of the key things, the key steps that a lot of the training programs don't get off to the right start with is that employers buy this training. Let's just say they decide to go the digital route and the simulation route and they buy this training and they hand it to the employee, hand them their login and say, hey, here's this training. Do it when you want.

Right.

Well, that's just like giving them a health insurance card. Like, you know, so what? Okay, yeah, it's great. I got health insurance and I'll just use it when I need it.

Right?

Well, training is not getting used when you need it. Training's an ongoing thing. It's ongoing, Right. So I think that's one mistake. And then the second part of that mistake is that they just have expectations, because I said so, that the employee's going to train, not going to work. Not going to work. You know the old expression of nothing happens till it's sold. You need to sell this to the employee, to the tech and you know the widthm terminology. What's in it for me? What's in it for me is that I'm going to sit down with you or I'm going to learn what your goals are personally and what, what your goals are professionally. I'm going to sit down with every single employee. I'm Going to, there's all kinds of creative ways. I've written articles about this that have been published about how to get this information and you're going to procure this information and then you're going to tie that. If this, then that. Meaning if you do this training, then this will happen and you'll get this increase in pay which will afford you to do. I'll just pick an easy one, a principal payment on your mortgage six times a year. Now I have ownership of that training. The light bulb goes off for me as a tech because, oh, okay, now I see it's connect. This is connected to me. And by the way, you're increasing the value of yourself which, which in turn creates job stability. This company's going to grow. There's going to be places for you to go to. Maybe you would decide you want to be a manager, maybe you want to cross train, maybe you want to do H Vac and plumbing. All these opportunities that you need to chat with the technician about and, and teach them that this is all doable and you're going to support this effort.

Right.

Once that happens, everything else is pretty much management. Once the technician realizes how it's going to affect their personal goals and professional goals and it actually, actually starts to become executed and they're starting to see the results. Every they'll want to train, they'll own that. They'll own that training. You'll sign it and they will own it. They'll want to do it. The second thing that will happen and this is kind of an intangible thing, but when they train, their confidence goes up. So just think about this tech that doesn't have any training. They're driving to a job site, they're not comfortable with the call, that what's written in the wording of the call, it's no hot water. It's not a good area that they're smart in. They feel insecure with it and they're already having anxiety because they're going to have to call the service manager or one of the higher level techs and have them step them through that training, step them through that call versus them. Knowing the content, presenting themselves correctly in front of the customer, being able to smile because they're not stressed out. All these little tiny details that add up to the big picture of a good customer service environment are now going to happen.

Yes, 100%. And actually I also do want to say this because I wrote this down. Training isn't turnkey, you know, purchasing training or just having something I should Say just purchasing, going with the digital option. It's not, it's not just set it and forget it. It's something that has to be actively done and worked on in the organization. And I don't want to make you forget your next thought, but one thing you and I talked about is the fact that people should be training, just dispatch jobs and that's a way to keep techs accountable and to keep them going on their training journey. Is that correct?

Yep, yep. And that's exactly where I was going to go next. So great, great frame up for my next part is, you know, one of the things that owners struggle with is how much time, you know, how, how much time should they be training? We've learned, and this is, this isn't a new phrase to me from it, from being an educator, but there's a phrase called microlearning. Even when you're an air conditioning contractor and you are in peak season, you can't tell me you can't have a tech do five minutes of training two times, three times a week. And what's that going to do? That's going to increase their confidence. And you know, when you're that busy, let's use that, that peak situation for the air conditioning contractor. You're doing more work which promotes more mistakes. Why not try to prevent some of them? Why not increase the confidence?

Right.

Why not help that bring, lift this person up, get them to be more confident, get them to have the knowledge to be able to use it in the field and practice and learn the kinesthetic side with their hands. That's the best thing to do. So even something is that small of an amount now, it's going to take a longer journey to get there. But you can still do that. It's doable. You can also do what you just said. It's right in the dispatch schedule.

Right.

Today's your Tuesday and Thursday, first hour of the day you're training. If your normal day starts at 8, you're not going out, you're not dispatched till 9 or whatever, you know, whatever that looks like. One thing we have discovered is it's better to have text training in the morning than at the end of the day because it's something they want to do. And you as the business owner, you get the benefit of that because if it you're lucky enough to match up what they just trained on in the field. Now you've taken through the full learning journey, right? They've learned the foundational knowledge, they've practiced in the simulation or Practice in your lab, in your shop. And now they're going to do the real thing with a skilled person helping them and watching them and supervising them and mentoring them. Now you've just cemented the entire knowledge base for that particular task.

Yeah, I just need to say here, I just think this one of the many reasons I love the trades. There's just so many opportunities to get paid to learn. I love learning so much and man, I just think it's so cool. And I love that you've been talking kind of about, you know, the. What's in it for me, because I think that ties in so well with what you did in the Lehigh Valley, which is showing kids like what this can do to you, what this investment in your time can do for you in your future. And I definitely heard that throughout your entire, all of your many best practices about how to run an implement training, how to build a training culture. And I think that's so important as owners look to really put, like to really pull the lever on this mechanism within their business to grow.

Yeah, I am. You know, you could tell that I'm passionate about this because it just comes out of me when I talk about it. I could talk for hours. I talked to a fire hydrant if it would answer me about this. I'm just so excited about it.

But anyhow, like fire hydrant, let me.

Tell you, moving along through this journey for, for the implementation thing, the next thing that's important that, that you must do is tracking and accountability, right? You're tracking who's doing what, training, did they pass it? And holding text accountable and everybody. If you're, if you're, if I'm an owner and I have management doing this, I'm holding management accountable to get these things done, right? And then that folds into your ROI. So there's some intangible ROIs, right? You can't really measure culture, you can't really measure confidence on a, on a scale, on a graph, if you will. But you can tell just by watching text and seeing that, seeing their interaction and seeing their job efficiency ops go, go up because their time when the job is going down and they're selling more because they're more confident about what they're doing. They're understanding how the benefits really fit the, fit the user, the customer. So some metrics to look at. Callbacks, right? If I had a business today, anytime there was a callback for attack, when they got done, when we resolved the callback, we'd have a discussion about it and they would go Right. Into the training that they need to do to fix the callback and then I would see the results of that training and then I send them out with a skilled person, make sure this person knows what they're doing and then we don't have any more callbacks in that area with that particular tech.

Right.

So there's an option, whatever your callbacks are prior to starting a training program, what are they? Six months, eight months in operational efficiency on site? Right, let's. I just talked about that a second ago, but that's a, that's a KPI or an roi, however you want to look at it. Turnover. What's your ratio of turnover before you start this training program? What's the turnover post? 8, 9 months, 12 months, 18 months? Your onboarding and your ramp time. So time to truck, we, we call that, that's the metric, we call it getting them into the truck. So on the H vac side, we don't have as much licensure and restriction. It's a lot, lot less friction to get that green tech to being able to do some basic maintenance stuff. What's that time period?

Right.

Are we going to put them in a classroom for three days doing some training, two days in the field, some kind of a miniaturized or hybrid boot camp to get this tech to be productive for us?

Right.

Growth is one of the easier ones to track.

Right.

That's more of an administrative side. Where's the growth? And these ROIs and KPIs, they fall into different categories of who's doing the tracking.

Right?

Sure.

Of course you're also going to see, and this is one of those intangible ones, but you might hear feedback from the higher skilled text. You're going to see that there's a better and more engaging rapport between the green or non skilled tech versus the skilled guy or girl.

Right.

Because they're coming into this picture enthusiastic and eager to learn on site because they did the work in a digital environment or they did a little bit in your shop and now they want the real thing. Their engagement's higher.

Right.

They want to learn. So you're. And that naturally progresses over into an experienced tech saying like, wow, like you're not going to sit in the corner and twiddle your phone and be on, on YouTube and Snapchat and all these other social media channels. You're going to actually listen to me and watch me do this so that you can do it. That's a wow factor for the, for the higher level tech.

Right.

You have to have some. I'm going to be closing it up with this. So if you with as far as the training program incentivizing, there has to be a program within the training plan for incentive. Incentivizing.

Right.

I said about the owner's responsibility and management, they need to be the ones evangelizing this. It needs to be a big deal. It needs to be important. And that said, when technicians hit completion milestones, there's some kind of benefactor for that. Maybe it's a day off. Maybe, you know, you have to be creative in those environments.

Right.

Going back to the tech, what do they like? Do they want time off?

Yes.

Are they a hunter? Are they a fishing person? Do they like to go to the fashion stores? What is their currency? Find it.

Right.

What's that text currency. Every single one of them have it. The ones that say, I don't know, that answer is there. You just got to dig harder to get it right. So completion milestones, I love that. Publicly and very transparently announcing those milestones.

Right.

When you have a stats meeting with your tax service managers and Sally finished this today. Joe finished this today. Harry finished that today. That is, it's got to be a big deal that they accomplish this. Some employers have been very successful and have really tied the knot in how they do this. They have a tool account. So when you get to a certain completion area, money goes into your tool. You can go to the wholesaler, you can go to hardware store, Lowe's, Home Depot, buy tools.

Right.

Some actually one of our customers that I was on site with actually had a vending machine. And the vending machine took these coins similar that you would see at a driving range at a golf course. And when you finish X amount of training, the tech got handed these coins. They went over to the vending machine and picked the tool they wanted. It just was crazy. And everybody's around this vending machine clapping and chanting, oh, get this, get that. You know, it's all a big deal. That's how it has to be.

Right.

And one of the other ones is pto. Usually, usually an employee will not complain about having time off. So when you hit this end of this journey, when you finish the entire water heater section and you've went in the field and demonstrated that you understand the work, we're giving you a day off, you know, it's got to you. And you figure that into where it's going to work with your dispatch schedule and make it work. And when the other techs that maybe aren't quite on board, start to see these things happening. They will get on board, the momentum will start.

That's incredible.

That's kind of, that's a very condensed version on what to do, how to do and how to think and approach this. You know, and if you have existing training and you heard nuggets and thought processes that we talked about today, you need to get started with them. You need to roll up your sleeves and spend the time and figure it out.

Amazing free podcast everyone. Free podcast here. Ken, that was so detailed and I really apprec appreciate you doing that. You've now pivoted to training and you're helping business entrepreneurs get their existing workforce excited and helping about training and helping those that workforce kind of close any gaps. They have very aligned with where your career has, your trade career has, has ended. And I think everybody listening here is going to learn a ton about how they should be thinking about training their techs.

Yeah, absolutely. And this is only the, this is only the foundational side of it. So, you know, it was a very quick, high level view that listeners need to understand. This is not something you're going to go back and get done in a week. Right now if you have people to help you organize your plan and help you decide where you want your growth to be and things like that and identifying the business goals and weaknesses, that certainly is a big help to have that part out of the way.

Right.

You can start to document that and think, how am I going to approach these goals now?

Amazing. Ken, if anyone wants to get in touch with you, how can they do that?

The best place to get a hold of me is LinkedIn. But you're certainly welcome to reach out to Interplay Learning my it's k midgetterplatelearning.com check my email probably three, four times a day. LinkedIn at least once a day. So if you message me and real easy to find me, type you type K Midget or Kenmigit into a LinkedIn search bar and I'm sure I'll come up.

Amazing. Ken, thanks so much for sharing your knowledge here on Toolbox for the Trades. I really appreciate it.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm so happy to just share this passion with your audience. It makes me feel good inside.