Prepare for Everything: Back Office Management | Podcast Ep. 60 | Toolbox for the Trades

Angie White, the back office manager of Mercurio's Heating and Air. Welcome to the Toolbox for the trades podcast.

Thank you. I'm so excited to be here. I've loved listening to them and I love that I get to talk to you today.

I know. I'm super excited. And I'm even more excited that we get to dive deep into the back office side of things, because I feel like that's a world that we don't really touch on Toolbox yet. And I know that you've got a ton of valuable insight to share with our audience. So I'm just going to start off this episode the way I do every single one, which is how did you get into the trades?

It was totally an accident. It was. I have a degree in special education and elementary education. And long story short, I was just looking for a job in the summertime to tide me over until I was going to start teaching in the fall. And I started in my first H Vac company and I never quit. So I ended up not going into teaching and I ended up just. Just staying in H vac. So I didn't even know that heating and air conditioning was even like an industry before I got into the. Got into the trades. And I even had to ask in my interview what H Vac meant. I had no idea. And he kept saying the word, and I'm just like, what do you mean? You're like, wait, what is that?

I used it in a sentence, please. And he's like, I've been using it in all of these sentences. Why don't you get it yet?

Exactly. Yeah. So it was unexpected. Total. Totally not on purpose. But I've loved it so much I stayed.

That's awesome. So can you tell me a little bit about the progression of your career and how you got to be back office manager today?

Yeah. So I have been in the industry for about 15 years or so. The first company I was with, I was the sales lead coordinator, so I basically helped out with the sales and install departments. And then I moved with my boss to another company where I became the office manager. And I was there for just a super short time. And then he became part owner in another company, so I moved with him to that company. So basically the first three were the same boss and there I was, the office manager. And I didn't know anything about accounting at that point in time. It was just that there was a need for that to be done. So the other owners started training me and teaching me what I needed to know about Doing the accounting responsibilities. And over time it just kept growing and everything that I learned was on the job and or self study. So it wasn't like I never went to school for any of it. And then eventually about three years ago, Mercurio has recruited me to come here. So here I was the. I was initially the customer service manager because I did a lot of customer service throughout the years and I was customer service manager at the previous place as well. And eventually we just got so big that we had to kind of separate the back office from the front office and it was just too much for one person to manage all of that. So we have a front office manager now who deals with the customer service and she and I have actually worked together at three companies and she has been in it like a year or two longer than I have. So we have a really strong office team here. We know what we're doing and we work really well together. So it's great that I don't have to have that responsibility and I can just focus on the back office items. Got it.

And back office encompasses for you in this role? Accounting, hr, Anything else?

Yeah, a lot of admin work. So making sure that our licenses are up to date. You know, we have individual licenses for our technicians and we have to make sure those are up to date. It includes vehicle administration or management, where we're making sure that our vehicles are getting the oil changes done on time. You know, we have GPS that tells us when it's time to get those oil changes done. So just making sure that we're actually going in and doing that. It also involves, at the moment we're doing a massive inventory overhaul. So it involves a lot of inventory management. So anything administrative or creating processes for the company, even if it doesn't relate directly to my department, that's kind of what I help oversee.

Very, very cool. I have a couple of questions, but before we even get into those, I would love. Could you please tell us a little bit about Mercurio? So what's the annual revenue look like? Number of techs? Do you guys focus primarily on residential or commercial? What does that look like?

Yeah, so I'd say we're like 97% residential retrofit, maybe a little bit of light commercial thrown in there, but for the most part we're just in people's homes and no new construction whatsoever. We have about 60 employees. Ish. We're just. We're going. We're. We're between 50 and 60 this last month and keeps kind of going up and down, but we're almost at 60, and about 2 thirds of that is the field. So that would be like service techs, install installers, install helpers, our maintenance techs, and then the rest of that would be our sales office and management team.

Got it. So you got about 40 technicians in the field, sounds like.

Yeah, we have a lot.

That's awesome. And you guys are in Washington, right?

Yeah, we're in Tacoma area, a little bit south of Seattle.

Awesome. Very cool. Okay, so first question that immediately came to my mind.

What was it about your first boss.

That made you follow him from company to company to company?

He was great. He. We worked really well together. So I'm someone who works really well with a big picture person. And he would say he wanted to accomplish some sort of goal, and I would tell him how we could get there. And that was a really great working relationship where it was really easy for me because I'm not a huge big picture person. I'm a detail person. And processes. I love creating processes. I live for an emergency where I have to fix something. I love that so much. And so it just was great that he could tell me what he wanted to accomplish and I could tell him how we could get there. So that's why I kept going with him and why I stayed for so long. And eventually it was just time to move on and get a new boss. You know, they are getting older and it is time to move on with maybe a company that I could be at for a little bit longer. So, yeah, it was sad to go. And I miss working with them. You know, I miss the company that the last one I was just at with for nine years. I really miss that company a lot. I miss the people I worked with. But Mercurios, I love. I absolutely love Mercurios. It was, you know, whenever you start a new position, it's always a big transition time and you don't really know if it's going to work out and. And you have your doubts, but I loved it and it just. It really worked out. Mercurio's is a fantastic place to be, and we've grown significantly in the three years that I've been here. We've almost doubled in size in the last three years.

That is awesome.

Yes. There's a ton of growing pains that go along with that, though. So we're figuring out a lot of stuff. We're not perfect by any means, but we have a lot of good processes in place.

I mean, I absolutely love that you just identified yourself as I Love creating a process. I love putting out a fire. I love a good emergency. You are probably. There's probably a bunch of people listening right now. Like, man, I wish I had an Angie at my team. That sounds great. Can you talk walk me through your problem solving process and maybe pull a recent example because Mercurios has experienced so much growth. How do you go through that process of okay, how do we solve this and. And what are some takeaways that folks listening can maybe think about and put into their own practice?

Sure. So I'll use our recent heat wave as the most recent example. I think we just had massive heat, record breaking heat for the Seattle, Washington area. Oregon had it too. So in the Pacific Northwest we were inundated really early with heat. It was in June. And normally we have a joke that it doesn't really start to be summer until after the 4th of July. And so that means that no one was expecting this. And a lot of people around here are will turn on their ACs if they have an air conditioner. A lot of people will turn it on like a little bit at a time. Maybe you know, they might start in July for a day or two if it gets a little bit warmer. But for the most part, people will be kind of stingy with turning on their ACs. But in a normal summer we would go and people's systems would break down a little bit at a time over the whole summer. We might get a big pop if we get a heat wave or something like that. But normally it's later on in the summer after people have already started to turn on their systems and found that they weren't working when they turned them on. However, because our heat wave was in June, everyone turned on their systems at the exact same time. And that was a really big deal for us because we had a lot of people who are not used to turning their systems on early and they broke down. They aren't used to having to maintain them. And there's so many people around here who don't even have air conditioning. I'd say I don't know the actual numbers, this is just a guess, but there's at least I'd say 50% of our area doesn't have air conditioning, if not more. And so it's a. We knew it was going to be a really big busy time for us. So we saw it coming on the Tuesday in advance. We saw that the weekend was going to be over 100 degrees. And so I started thinking about what do we need to do? Because normally we would have like one or two on call technicians. We're going to need to have more. We're going to need to have a salesperson to be able to do, do what we call a turnover where if there is something that has broken down, it's not worth repairing, we'd want to replace it. And so we'd need to have our sales team available. We would need to have just our office team available. But it was really last minute. So as someone who, even though I'm not, I don't work in the customer service department, I still support them and I still answer phones as a backup measure if they're not available. And I did it for years. So I was just like, I'm just going to jump in and I'm going to help out. So I recruited some additional technicians to be able to help us. I got a salesperson to, we call them comfort consultants, but it's just easier to say sales. So I got him to be on call with us as well. And we just started returning phone calls. We have an answering service and so typically the answering service would send a emergency calls to our on call technician. They would return the call to the customer and then he would schedule himself out there. Well, we had so many coming in, he couldn't handle that and do work as well. So we're talking Friday night. I jumped on the phones and just started returning phone calls for him. And I was working till 10 or 11 that night. That Saturday I worked the entire day. Sunday I worked the entire day just returning phone calls and just scheduling the people that had been willing to work on the weekend with us. And my team was fantastic. They were willing to take whatever calls I threw at them. I was very selective in what I threw at them. I was not going to do every single customer. We prioritized if it was a new install that wasn't working, obviously we need to get that working. We also prioritize people that are on our maintenance agreements. And then a lot of it ended up being about education we discovered. So a lot of people don't understand how air conditioning works around here, which sounds crazy, but they don't know that if it's the hottest part of the day, you can't turn on your AC and expect your house to cool down immediately because you know, your floors, your walls, your furniture, all of that stuff also has to cool down. They, they don't know that part. They don't know that you can't try and heat it or sorry, you can't try and cool it down. To 60 degrees. So a lot of people had systems that were actually working, but they called because they thought they weren't working. So a lot of it was me just over the phone problem solving with them and just saying, nope, your system's working totally fine. Give us a call in a couple days if it's not working correctly, but give it a few days to cool down your house, if it can even get there, that sort of thing. So a lot of my processes were just thinking ahead to what was going to be needed and really figuring out what. Who would be needed, what would be required of us as a company and as the people that were working on call that weekend, what would be required of us, how we could make sure that we weren't scheduling the wrong customers. That was really important to me. I didn't want to burn out my technicians in this heat that we're not used to. You know, someone from Arizona is listening to this and just thinking, that's insane that this was even a thing for them. But it's really, really, truly a thing for us up here. We don't get heat like this. So the process was just thinking ahead to all scenarios that could happen. And that's what I always do. If someone wants to talk about coming up with some new procedure, I think about all the bad things that could happen, and I'm not joking. I truly think about all the bad things that could happen. And. And how can we solve that now before it actually happens? And so that's just. That was my process for that. And then the front office manager actually jumped in and helped me over the weekend, too, because I told her as I was going through it, it was even worse than I thought it would be. So you can also, on the fly, make decisions as well and just say, hey, I need this assistance. I can't return all these things, customers calls. So, yeah, it's about planning in advance and anticipating. And also it comes down to experience, too. You know, I've been doing this for forever, and I knew how it was going to be. So did the front office manager. So she was totally willing to jump in. And so it's partly about experience, but partly about planning ahead and on the fly, making changes as you need to.

Thank you. That was a wonderful detail. And I know in case anyone's not watching the video, I was making reactions to Angie as she was saying that, but trying not to make noises to interrupt. The big thing I got from that was just your ability to think about all the pieces that had to come together to make Mercurio successful and profitable during that tremendous heat wave, but then also being very mindful of not burning out your technicians, not making sure that they had everything they needed to do what they do, which is service, not necessarily worry about scheduling themselves out. And this actually dovetails really nicely into the next thing I wanted to talk to you about, because obviously a big part of this dealing with the Pacific Northwest heat wave was who else do we need on the team to bring on to make this successful? And when you and I first spoke, you mentioned you had a ton of experience with hiring. And I would like to. To hear all about them. Like, mainly, what are some of the biggest lessons that you'd like to share with our audience from a hiring perspective?

Yeah. So I think that, you know, everyone. People will talk about hiring and they say the same stuff over and over. I'm going to share a little bit different perspective because I do think about all the bad things that could happen. I think about things from a liability standpoint. And that is a really big thing for me is making sure that hiring and liability and hiring is really addressed. Because there's a lot of stuff people do that they shouldn't be doing. Everyone knows you shouldn't be asking things about, you know, someone's gender or race or things like that, things that are really obvious. But there's a lot of little minutiae that also should be discussed as well. One of the really big parts is when you're in interviewing people and you're taking notes, anything that you write down can be used against you in the future. So you want to make sure that everything you are writing down is A, factual and B, is not talking about a protected class or protected something or other that would possibly could be used as a discriminatory hiring practice. So, for example, if someone tells you that they have three kids, don't write it down, don't remark on it. Even if they tell you, you're supposed to pretend they didn't tell you and just move along. You're not allowed to use that as a hiring decision. And so if you're writing that down, then they can say in the future that you decided to not hire them because they had three kids and you were worried about daycare. And so you're supposed to actually be keeping all records for a year from your hiring decisions. So if you. And that's by the eeoc. So that's the equal employment opportunity. And you need to make sure that you're keeping all these records. So I do. I. Even for people that you don't hire. You have to keep all of those records. So don't write directly on a resume. If you're going to make notes, keep it factual and not about their families or anything that they might tell you about gender or race or where they're from or anything like that.

Interesting.

Yeah.

When you first told me that, I was like, oh, that is interesting. And a learning for me because, I mean, especially right now, the way that I do interviews. I'm constantly like, how do I remember Angie? Pacific Northwest, you know, like all of these things like blonde hair, glasses. It's interesting to consider as you're hiring, what is a protected class and what's not.

Mm. Yeah. And it's. It's really important. Let me pull up my notes about this because I totally have notes. I prepare for everything. Oh, my goodness.

An interviewer's. Interviewers. An interviewer's dream. Dream.

Yeah. I prepare for everything. So, yeah, some. Some things that are protected status or privacy rights information would include family status like kids and pregnancy. You cannot discriminate if someone's pregnant. Another thing that we already said was the ethnicity, the race, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, age. Age is a really big one. You can. Age. Age discrimination is gonna. Is really something you have to be very, very careful of. Either too young or too old, doesn't matter either way, it can go anyway. You want to make sure that you're not writing down that information. Also disability or medical history, if they tell you that they were on, that they were not working because they broke their foot or something, don't write that down because you could use that as a discriminatory measure in your hiring. Not that you would, because we all know we don't discriminate. Right. But anything you write down can be used against you. If that person thought that, that there was something wrong with your hiring practices and brought it to the eeoc. I have been. Actually, this is something I didn't tell you previously, but I've been a part of an EEOC investigation and it was found in our favor. But it's not fun, it's scary. It was not related directly to this, and people will report you for things that even you haven't done. But if you don't have the documentation to back up up your hiring decisions, then you're going to possibly be in a world of hurt. So you really want to be very, very, very careful about what it is that you're writing down physically.

Got it. And speaking of, I'm sorry, keeping these notes after the interview takes Place. What kind of process and recording, documentation, procedure, process do you have for folks for when you're hiring new people on at Mercurios to make sure that everything's in order and you. Everything at, you know, at your disposal in case something like this comes up.

So we use. So we use indeed a lot for our hiring. So I want to focus a lot on talk about right now about the people that we don't hire. So I don't. I keep basically all of that information in Indeed. Any notes I'm making, indeed, I'm very careful about those as well. So a lot of those notes I keep in indeed. And I trust that indeed is going to. Going to make sure that all the people that were for that specific job are attached to that job. So when I'm writing notes on a piece of paper, I don't really care about filing them into a specific job. I just file by name. So what I do is if we decide to not hire that person and I've interviewed them and I've taken notes and I have it on a piece of paper because I was in front of them and we were just discussing. I have a. I have a file in my drawer that I put them into, and then when it gets. I just scan them and do it by name. So I don't care about what job they were applying for, because a lot of people apply for multiple jobs, and so I don't. I don't care what job it was for. And. But if I need to pull up anyone that was from that job, I can do it. I can do it by name, then. And indeed will tell me who applied on that specific job. If I need to. If someone was to say that you. If someone was to come back and say that you were discriminatory in your hiring practices. From this position I applied for, I can see an indeed who applied for it, and then I can pull up all of those names in my scanned folder. So, yeah, I have a. I have a physical file until it turns into a digital file. If I was. If I had the time, I would just scan it right then and there after everyone. But it's a lot easier to actually just give it to our intern and just tell her to scan it.

Love an intern. Love an intern. That's why. That's why we created interns. Exactly. So if anyone's listening to this right now and again, Mercurios, you guys are fairly, fairly decently sized operation.

Right?

If anyone's listening to this right now and is like, holy cow, I have Four or five employees. I want to grow, I want to scale. I don't know if I have the bandwidth or the time for this. What would you say to them?

I would say just keep them in a file. Don't worry about the scanning part. You don't have to worry about. About. You can piece it together afterwards. Honestly, that's my filing system for at home. I will piece things together afterwards if I need it. But honestly, I just throw things together in big chunks and you so rarely need to access any of it. So I don't need to be. You don't need to be super organized with this specific thing. Just keep it. That's the only thing. Keep it for a year. And then once the years come up, you can put in your shred bin. That's an important thing. If it has any documentation that identifies the person, like a resume with their address and phone number and stuff on that. Shred it, don't just recycle it. People do go through your recycle bins. I've had that. At my previous company, we had. This is a total side note. Never, ever recycle customer information because people will go through that, steal it, call your customers, pretend to be you, come out, do the tune up. And then when you call them a month later to do the tune up, they're like, we already had you guys do it. And you're like, no, actually, that was not us. So we have had that happen. Literally. True story. So never recycle any of your customer information or recycle any of your employee information. That's always shred if you have to dispose of any of it. Total side note there, but yeah.

I just want to say to anyone listening, going through your competitors, recycling is not a real lead generation strategy.

Don't do that. It's a really bad idea. Yes.

This, this podcast is either going to be named Think about all the Bad Things that Could happen or Prepare for Everything. I'm not sure. I'm probably going to go with Prepare for everything.

I think about all the bad things. That's what I do. It's okay. Noted.

All right, let's, let's, let's circle back to hiring a lot right now because you've done a lot of it, right? So in your quest to become better at hiring, you mentioned that you did a lot of research and training. Obviously, you know, you've been part of an EEOC case at this point. You've done this before. You know what's going on. Can you share some of the details of the Research or any trainings or programs you took to level yourself up in this. In this part of your career.

Yeah, so when you asked about that, I really had to think back. So the reason why I went through training was because, first of all, I had no one to teach me. Everything that I learned was on the job. And since there was no one to teach me, I feel like it's just a generational. This is the way we've always hired. This is how we're going to continue to hire. And it just keeps getting passed down. Well, we were making not fantastic hires for a long time. And if. If there's ever anything that's going wrong, and it repeatedly goes wrong, you have to look at yourself and figure out why it's going wrong. It's not their fault that you're hiring bad people. It's not. And they're not bad people. I would like to say that for the record, they're just not the right fit for the position. But it's not the candidate's fault. It's your fault if you're doing it incorrectly or if you're not preparing them for the position. It's really important that you have correct hiring practices that will take you to hiring the right people. So I started doing a ton of research and I took a course that I don't even honestly remember where it was from. I can't. I'm not going to be a great resource for telling people where they can find this information because this was back in 2016, 15, 14, somewhere around there.

A millennium ago.

Yeah, it was a long time ago. And I am a voracious reader. I read constantly. And so I read so many books about this. I don't have a specific one to be like, this is my end all, be all. I honestly don't even remember all the books that I've read about this. And so I don't have a great resource. What I can say is that we have a payroll processing company that had an HR component to it. I did a lot of studying on theirs. Specifically, it's adp. A lot. I know a lot of people use adp and they do have really good HR resources. So back then I did a ton of research on that. The other thing that is going to sound surprising is the Harvard Business Review is what I read. I read a ton of Harvard Business Review articles and I subscribed to their magazine for a few years. I love the Harvard Business Review. It gives you so much about hiring, but also about business practices in general, not related to H vac. But it completely changed. Especially article I read completely changed the way I hire customer service representatives. At that time, we were. I wasn't used to thinking of them as being autonomous individuals. And what we really. What you really want in a customer service rep is someone who can make decisions on their own without having to consult with a manager every single time. And someone who is someone who will take initiative. And this article helped me see what it broke it down into. The different types of customer service representatives and the best traits of those. So I started putting my job ads towards those specific traits that I was looking for. I got more people that were interested because it wasn't just another customer service job. It was a customer service job with autonomy. It was a customer service job with a lot of flexibility in making decisions. And so people were more interested in that than just being a number where they had to do everything by the book. I am not someone who likes doing everything by the book. I love rules. But I also want my CSRs to be able to be able to think outside of the box and to be able to help customers and do what's best for the customer in that specific situation. So I started to get in way better CSR candidates after putting those ads in. And then we started screening and asking questions that were specifically related to what I was looking for. Telling, you know, things like, tell me about a time that you had to make a decision and your boss was not available to help you with that decision. Things like, has your boss ever asked you to do something that you disagree with? I think that's an important question. That's a total side note here. But it's an important question to ask everybody candidate because you'll find out if these people are reasonable or not. And you'll find out that if it's something that you would have asked your employee to do and they disagreed with it, you don't want to hire that person. So that's a total side note of a question. But that that was. Those are really telling things is being able to change the way that you hire for specific positions based on the research. I'm all about research. My dad is a molecular biologist. So I have grown up being around research. And it's been something that research is where I love to go. Also in special education, we learned all about the best practices based on research. It's not just on gut feelings. So reading these Harvard Business Review articles, a lot of them are based in research. And so I was able to make decisions about hiring based on the research, not just on this person who's an expert telling you to ask these five questions in interviews, that sort of thing. So over time, and it's all about refining too, I'm still constantly refining the questions that I'm asking people. It's going to always change things that we asked 10 years ago you might not ask today or you find that you aren't getting a, a good response from candidates or the response that you're hoping for from candidates. And if you have, if you have a question that you ask every time and you don't get a good response or you don't get an expected response every time, change the question. Don't use that question. It doesn't make sense to keep doing things the same way if it doesn't work. And so be open to be flexible and be open to changing the way that you do hiring in case it's not working. And I'm not, I'm not perfect right now. Honestly, I just hired a dud of a person who didn't work out after two days. So you never know what's going to happen. You know, you might love the person, you might, you might jive with them. Personally I love to this candidate, but after two days it just wasn't working. So you never know. You truly don't know. But you can do the best that you can to try and get the best candidates in. And you just have to examine yourself and figure out what is your bias. And honestly, this is, I'm going into another tangent here. I could talk all day about this, but my bias in this situation was that I loved this candidate personally. We meshed really well. And maybe that meant that she and I would get along great. But maybe it also was meaning that I wasn't looking at her qualifications the best. I wasn't asking her super hard hitting questions. Maybe in the interview because we just went on so many tangents talking about all sorts of things. Normally I asked the exact same questions of all candidates. And because for fairness reasons, you don't want to say that you're asking one person something. And again, the whole discriminatory thing, you want to ask the same questions of all candidates, but being able to look at that hire, recognizing my bias and making changes in the future because of that and it was a bias in her favor, it wasn't a bias against her. You know, we can have biases for people or against people and it's really important to recognize that and, and, and change that when you're making hiring as well.

Thank you for being so open about that, I literally. My next question I wanted to ask you is, what. What qualifies a good hire and a bad hire? And I love that you were so honest there with, like, I've been hiring free years now, and I literally just had someone who I had bias against because I really meshed well with them. But then when we actually put them in practice, it wasn't a good fit. And I totally see that, too. That's something that I struggle with when I'm hiring because I'm a very extroverted person who loves to chat with people. And if I. If someone, like, gets on my good side and I'm just vibing with them, I'm like, of course I could spend all day with you.

Yeah.

But Kathy Nielsen, who's been on this podcast a couple of times before, on her solo episode, she was like, if you. You're csr, I don't have to like you. I just need you to do the job well. And I'm just like, oh, ruthless Kathy. But it's true. It's so true.

So true. Yeah, yeah, go ahead.

No, you go ahead, please.

Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I don't have to like everyone, and you don't have to hire everyone that you like. So that's what she said is absolutely perfect. And, you know, I make good hires, but I also make bad hires, and I think everyone does. It's not a science. There's no way for you to be able to know in advance of someone starting if they're going to be the best fit. You just do the best that you can, and if they work out, they work out. If they don't, they don't. And you hope that most of them just work out really quick.

On the. On the bad hire that just happened, what was the key moment that said to you, like, oh, crap, this isn't going to work.

When she didn't know how to use a laptop, which. But okay, so this is also bias for me. I realized not everyone has a laptop at home. I don't need her to use a laptop at work. She just needed to do some training on it because we didn't have speakers on her computer, and so. But we had speakers on a laptop. And so I just asked her to do some training on it. On our dispatching. Sorry, service time. That's what I'm talking to right now. So I asked her to do training on Service Titan, and she wasn't sure how to use a laptop. And at first that was alarming to me, but then I also realized it's also a privilege to have a laptop at home. A lot of people don't have laptops. So while that was the first thing that was alarming to me, her not understanding how to use one. And by use one, I mean, like, the mouse is the. Is the trackpad on your thing. She didn't understand how to use that. That was the first thing. But then started after that, it was when she called in sick, too, and she kept calling in sick, and there was a different story over multiple days. And I'm just like, okay, this is definitely not working out if you're calling in sick like this. But, you know, she was a great person. I think she. She probably could have worked out if. I don't know. This is me and my bias. Just talking again. I just really liked her. I did. She ended up moving, and she's moving to the other side of the state. So it's. It's. At least that's what I heard. So I don't know.

You know what? It didn't work out. It sounds like it just like passing ships in the night. It just wasn't meant to be. So thank you again. Thank you again for being so honest and open about that. So let's move on to a couple of the other things that encompass hr. So what are some common personnel issues that come up in the trades and how do you recommend that folks deal with them?

Yes. So those would be things like injuries and accidents. Those happen all the time and they're not reported, but they should be reported. And by reported, I don't mean reporting it to your workers comp. I mean just reporting it to the company. So you have it documented. I have, in all my years of experience, have had a ton of experience with people claiming that they weren't injured. And then all of a sudden they go to a doctor, it turns into an li claim, and you're just like, I don't know where this came from, because as far as I was aware, they were not injured. And then you have to dispute it. So one of the big things about injuries or accidents where something breaks or, you know, someone runs into your. Your garage door with a forklift or something, you know, like any sort of an accident that causes damage or is going to be damage to a person, then you need to document it. Even if it's not a workers comp claim, you still need to document it. Every state is different in how this works too. And in Washington state, our state actually does our workers comp. I know a lot of Other places have independent workers comp. So it's. Every state is different. I can't speak more than just very generically on this situation. It is important to know what your state requires and it's just really important to document absolutely every injury or accident. Got it.

And just in the case of like being able to look out on that in terms of like, oh, this is like a workers comp thing we're going to have to deal with in the future or just, just kind of being aware. And again, going back to the prepare for everything mindset.

Exactly. That way, if you have it documented and they've signed off on that documentation stating that this was the injury that happened to them and then they can't come back and say and try and claim. So let's say they fell off the back of your truck. This has happened to me very recently. They fell off the back of your truck and as far as you're aware, they only twisted their ankle. But then a week later they go to the doctor said that they also twisted their shoulder or something. This is not a real world scenario right now. I'm making this one up. But they, if you have documentation stating that they only twisted their ankle then and they're trying to get out of work, you know, because they twisted their shoulder and they can't do anything, they're trying to be either on light duty or on just workers comp. And you know, you want to trust everyone, but you can't. So if you have that documentation, you can submit that to the workers comp claim and said, well, they signed off saying they only twisted their ankle, they didn't say anything about their shoulder. And you can contest that. And then you are not responsible for that. It's the employee who just doesn't get paid or isn't responsible for it. So documenting the exact details, getting witness statements is also a really big part of that. If you, if they were a helper and the main installer saw them fall, you want to get his witness statement of what he saw, what the injury was, if the employee continued to work that day or not. Because you'd be surprised how many times the employee continues to work. And then two days later they go in and they're like, yeah, I twisted my ankle. And that's just really important information to cover your butt. You just want to. It's always cya, right. I'm not going to say what that stands for, but it's always covering your butt. Yeah. So that's a really big part, is the injuries and just documenting Everything in case something else comes up. Another thing, and you had asked this, I'm going to kind of moving on from the injuries part. Other personnel issues that happen are not finding enough skilled employees. And that's not really a personnel issue, it's more of a company issue. But people complain, they complain constantly about not finding enough skilled workers. Well, train them yourselves. That's a really, really big thing that you can be doing. You hire people that don't have any experience. You train at your, train people to, to do the job and eventually within a couple of years they're working independently as the full blown, journey level, whatever technician it is that you're needing them to be. It's really something that stop complaining about it honestly and just get to work. Training people from the ground up, that's really a really big one that we see. Another thing is high turnover is a big personnel issue and high turnover happens in our company in those entry level positions because if I should say, it doesn't always happen. But high turnover happens in the entry level positions because people are not prepared for them. And by preparing for, by preparing people for the position before they ever start, you can scare them off. I literally tell people in my interviews and every single time I'm hiring for a technician position where someone doesn't have any experience, I tell them, I'm going to try and scare you off now and you tell me if you still want this job. I tell them every single bad thing. Again, we're back to the bad things. I tell them every single bad thing about this job. You know, having to be in addicts on hot days, having to be in crawl spaces for hours at a time, having to work in the rain. I tell them and you know, be around dead rats in the crawl space or having to have big spiders around you. That literally the spider one. I told someone that once and he's like, yeah, I don't think it's going to work. I'm afraid of spiders. I'm like, why did you apply for this job? But at least I was able to scare him off so by telling people all the bad things. Also their schedule, that's a really big one for install and residential retrofit. Most of the time techs don't know when they're getting off. Installers have no idea when they're getting done with their work. It's just when the work is done. So making sure that people understand, at least in our company and most of the companies in our area, I'm assuming across the country, is that your Hours may be variable. You're going to have overtime that's required. And you're never going to be guaranteed to be at home with dinner with your family. And they have to be comfortable with all of that. If they're not comfortable with all of that, you don't want them working in this position because they're going to leave again. So I always try and scare people off and I totally scare people off and they don't want to work. And I'm like, great, now we know it now in advance of you starting. So that way you're not making it just, it's just helping you to not make as many bad decisions in hiring simply because you're prepping them for that.

You're being honest. You're not, you're not sugarcoating anything. You're saying you're going to be in crawl spaces, there's going to be spiders, there's going to be late nights. Are you okay with all that? And if the answer is yes, great, let's move forward. I want to talk a little bit about, you know, training from the ground up because that's definitely a theme that comes up up on this podcast. Yeah, everyone keeps saying, you know, yes, there's a shortage of skilled labor. We're solving it by just training people. So you mentioned that one of your duties on the admin side is to make sure folks are up to date with their licenses and all that stuff. Do you also kind of help support that initiative of getting someone up to an apprentice level, to a journeyman level?

So I don't really, I personally don't really do much with that. We have recently hired someone who does training for us. So he's able to do ride alongs with everyone in the field and do a lot of individualized training. And so that's what we're taking steps on for that we are. At the moment we don't have anything formal for training and so that's why we hired him because he used to actually be a technical instructor at a college. And so we wanted to get our training in house. We wanted it to be consistent for everyone and we wanted to get our technicians up to speed faster than they currently were being, I guess brought up to speed. So that is helpful. And you know, we do have certain things like that we put in place that didn't work. So we put in place a few years ago a training program for people on like how to do the tune ups for the maintenance technicians and it just didn't really work and it didn't work because it was bad content. It didn't work because we didn't implement it well, and we didn't have the bandwidth to keep implementing it consistently across the board for every new hire. And so we have learned from that, that we just need to have the manpower. So that's why we hired this guy, is just to be the manpower to do all of this training that we need assistance with.

Love it. I love that. So another big thing we talk about on this podcast is culture. So I would love to learn a little bit about how HR helps reinforce that culture at service businesses.

Yeah. So first of all, making sure you're hiring good people, I feel like that's a really important thing. You don't want to hire toxic people. You will always end up hiring someone toxic, and you don't know it until later on. But just, you know, hiring decisions are important in helping out with culture. Other things that can help is making sure that your management team is recognizing people for good behavior. Not just good work, but good behavior, because maybe they aren't technically skilled and they. Maybe they screwed up something, but the way that they fixed it was great behavior. You want to encourage whatever the good behavior is and have the people that you. You want, not just behavior, but. Sorry, I'm not talking about this. Well, you don't want.

You're doing a great job.

I'm sorry, my mind is totally blanking right now.

Oh, no, it's okay. I'll take a note of the. Of the.

Thank you.

If you want, I can give you. If you want, I can give you the question again. Or we can just move on to, like, what are some things to do to make sure folks are. That. To make sure your company's compliant and HR team is doing its job of protecting the company. You want to move on to that question?

Yes, that would be great. I did not get enough sleep last night, and so I'm just like, I'm running on coffee fumes right now.

Angie, can I just say, this interview has been spectacular. The entire time I've been like this, she's freaking killing it.

So you're doing great. And we only got a few more.

Minutes left, so you are out of the park.

Okay, good. I'm glad to hear that. Thank you. You're welcome.

Okay. Ready?

Yeah.

Okay, so we've talked a lot about, you know, how HR supports the overall business as a whole. Right. So for folks listening, and again, they're at all varying stages of their businesses. Some are going to be smaller, some are going to be bigger. Enterprises, what are things that they need to do to make sure that they're staying compliant and their HR team is doing its job of protecting the company.

Yeah, so the biggest part is making sure that you know your local laws. Every state is different and you need to know what the laws are for your specific state. For example, in a lot of states you're not allowed to ask what someone is currently making. It's illegal in Washington state to ask that. And a lot of states actually are starting to adopt this as well. You want to make sure that you know if your state is one of those. And again, if something's illegal to ask, you just don't want to ask it. You can ask what they are hoping to get as a workaround on that, but you can't ask what they're currently making. So knowing your current state's laws is the biggest thing that you can do to protect your company. The other thing is keeping meticulous records and keeping them for the correct amount of time. For example, like I already stated, keeping the records for your hiring decisions, the EEOC wants those kept for a year. So you need to keep those for a year. Don't keep them for six months and toss them. Keep them for a year. And then all documentation about performance needs to be fact based and not feeling based. Do not use words like it feels like this person is or it seems like this person is. You don't want to do that. You want to do facts. So you want to have something that they're supposed to be doing and measure them against that. For example, on a customer service side, you want customer service tech reps to be answering the phone within two rings. That is a fact. Is this person doing that? If they're not doing that, then you rate them. You can have a sliding scale. Most of the time they're doing this or hardly ever they're doing this. But making it fact based and not just saying this customer service rep seems like they are slow or this customer service rep feels like they don't care about their job. Don't use that. Just state the facts only. And that's really important. Again, if. Because an employee can come back to you and or can leave and report you to whatever government body that they want to report you to for whatever it is that they think you did and you don't have fact based things and if you're using your own bias with using feelings or gut feelings or whatever you want to call it, then that can get you in trouble. So documenting all of that correctly. Also payroll Very important for payroll that you understand what you're, what your particular state's laws are. Because every state has different payroll rules. And if you use a payroll processor like adp, you cannot count on them to be telling you what the rules are. They probably will tell you what they are, but you have to actually implement that. It's garbage in, garbage out. So if you're not putting the correct information into adp, they're not going to know if that person actually worked that much overtime, if you're calculating overtime rates correctly, that sort of thing. And so you have to make sure that you're putting good information into adp because they're not liable if your payroll goes sideways. You are liable even if they're not doing their job. I mean, it's on you that, you know, figure out that they're not doing their job. But for the most part, whatever you're putting in there is what you are liable for. So making sure you know your specific state's laws. And then another thing is ensuring that your management team has been through anti discrimination, anti harassment training is a really important part. Because let's face it, a lot of us are old school. And I'm starting to consider myself old school now in H vac, which is so weird to me. But a lot of us are old school and we're used to things being done a certain way, and that's not how things can be done these days. And we want to make sure that all management has been trained on what you can and cannot do with employees. And that covers your butt too, in case there's something that employee tries to come back at you on. So again, worst case scenario type of thinking, but just prepping and keeping yourself safe. And the last thing on this is being consistent. Always be consistent with your hiring and employment practices across the board for everyone. You might have different positions that have different ways you do your hiring, but everyone within that position should have consistency. So you don't need to hire a customer service rep the same way you would hire a technician. You can have different questions for them, but you need to make sure that everyone in the customer service is getting the same questions. You need to make sure everyone in the technician is getting the same questions. And that's super, super, super important again, to just protect yourself.

Love it, love it. I love worst case scenario thinking. Definitely the theme of this episode. So we wouldn't be totally covering back office if I didn't ask you at least one question about accounting, which I know is everyone's favorite subject. No one can get enough about accounting. Everyone spends their evenings and weekends just reading up on accounting.

It's riveting stuff, you know, but, you.

Know, when we first talked, you spoke about there being two components of having money in your company, either saving it or making more. Can you elaborate on that, that viewpoint of yours and how you think owners should think about that?

Yeah. So it's a super simplistic way of thinking about it, but it helps to also compartmentalize how you might want to think about making profit. So you can. The only way to have more money is to either save it or to make more of it. Saving money is things like asking vendors to renegotiate contracts or for discounts. We've gone. We do this on a yearly basis where we just go through every single one of our vendors, look to see what we've spent with them, and see if there's any way that we can renegotiate or get a discount. I can't tell you how many thousands of dollars we've saved just by doing that. And you don't. The worst you can get is a no. And who cares if you get a no, you're still going to use them. Or you might shop around if you're not super attached to them. But at least you're asking. And you're never going to get a yes unless you ask. The other thing is making sure that you go through your expenses with a fine tooth comb to ensure that all of those are actually necessary expenses. And I feel like that's a really obvious one. Another one that I thought of that is not quite as obvious is determining where waste is going in your company. And for example, installers come back with a truckload full of waste. You know, ends of things or things that they pulled off the customer's house, a whole bunch of stuff that gets scrapped or thrown in the trash. How much of that is actually reusable? How much of that is a piece of a line set that could be used on a different customer's home? And you didn't, you know, you didn't use all 50ft of that line set instead of you only use 30ft. So you still got 20ft left. How many. How much of that is being thrown away and how much, like a whole. We actually did recently an audit on this, and we found that installers were throwing away whole rolls of tape that they were throwing away copper fittings, and it was just like one little piece. Right. So that particular installer, it wasn't a huge dollar amount. Maybe, you know, 15 bucks worth of stuff, but times that by the number of install trucks you have times that by the number of days that you're working. And it adds up really quickly to a lot of money that's just being thrown in your trash. That's just one example. So where is the waste going in your company and what is the waste? Who is managing that? And just figuring out where can I save this stuff? And you've got to have a spot for that 20ft of line set. And that's not going to go necessarily with your normal boxes of 50ft of line set. You need to have something for like the scrap line set. So coming up with processes to determine where all this is going and where can you store it is a really important thing. As far as making more, obviously, I feel like the obvious choice is to increase your hourly rates and increase your prices. However, not everyone wants to do that. I mean, I feel like everyone's been forced to with all the equipment price changes. So everyone's been, everyone's been forced to kind of do that recently. But there's other ways that you can make more money without increasing your prices. Things like reviewing each and every invoice from service tax and maintenance tax to make sure that they're charging for everything that they did out there. That's a super important one. I can't tell you how much money you can find that is on the table that never got charged to a customer. And you can incentivize technicians to be charging correctly and to have enough revenue on their invoices. So I mean, that's a whole huge conversation beyond this. But I'll just touch on that briefly. Recommending proactive repairs and upgrades and any comfort issues for technicians when they're at the houses doing a repair. You know, you might see that, oh, maybe this customer is a good candidate for getting an air cleaner, like an electronic air cleaner or something like that. Or you might see that their part is almost broken and maybe you should replace it before it actually does break down. That sort of thing. The last thing is for replacement. Sell comfort, not equipment. That's super important is to be selling comfort to a customer. You're not just wanting to replace the box with another box. You want to sell that customer on the comfort in their home. So things like selling a variable speed system versus a single stage system, you're going to have more comfort with the variable speed. It's not really going to take much longer to install. It's just, you know, you're just replacing the box, but you've made a lot more money by doing that than you would if you were just doing a basic furnace. So selling comfort to customers by doing that is you're just increasing the profit on that job. Things like air cleaners for allergy sufferers or ductwork replacements. If I can't tell you how much ductwork is out there that people don't even look at, and a salesperson should be going in there, taking a look at the ductwork, figuring out if some of it should be replaced. Do we need to fix this ductwork for you, or is there another. Another way that we can make this better for the customer for comfort's sake? So selling comfort instead of just the boxes on replacements is really important, too.

I love that. Who'd have thunk that while I'm sure you were getting your master's degree in special education, that 15 years later, I'll be talking about variable speed systems?

Yeah, not so much. I wasn't really thinking that that was even a thing. So, you know, I mean, whatevs.

I don't know if I told you this, but you're actually the second teacher turned H Vac specialist that's been on this podcast, and the first one became the CFO of the company. And honestly, Angie, you know so much, I wouldn't be surprised if you get a C level job title if that's what you want.

Yeah, you know, I love. I really love what I do. I'm not super interested in really going too much further. That's not really something that, like, I really love knowing all aspects of H Vac and being able to help out in all aspects of a company, that really excites me and being able to have a hand, even though, like, it's not my job description to do a lot of the stuff that I do, I do it because it needs to get done and because I know how to make it happen. And I've learned so much over the years through my bosses, and I love that my team, I can train the exact same way that I learned so that they can also be equipped to help everyone, too. So, yeah, I love H Vac so much. I'm super passionate about it. I could talk for hours and hours.

Oh, my goodness. Well, maybe we'll have to have you back, Angie, you just gave so much information. I cannot thank you enough. I have a couple rapid fire questions for you, which you'll know if you've listened to the podcast before. But they're easy, so. So they're not too bad. Is that okay? Do it okay, ready? How do you take your coffee?

With cream and a little bit of sugar. Or if I'm in a really splurgy mood, I'll do like a vanilla coffee creamer.

Ooh, splurgy. Yep. If you could have dinner with one person, dead or alive, who would it be?

Oh, gosh, let's say Barack Obama. I went to his inauguration. I'm just totally giving away my political views right now, but I went to his inauguration and it was like the best moment of my life. Although I never go to another inauguration, but I would love to have dinner with him.

Awesome. What's the number one thing you're trying to learn more about right now?

Inventory management.

If money weren't an object, so you had unlimited resources, what's the first thing you would do?

I would probably still work in H Vac, but maybe not in a day to day role. Maybe more in a kind of consulting role where I could assist with processes. That's my thing. I love processes and I would love to do that.

Cool. You already gave raving reviews to the Harvard Business Review. Which I will. Plus plus 100 to that. Because honestly, I love the Harvard Business Review. It's a really great resource. What other podcasts or books would you like to recommend to the audience?

One of my favorite podcasts that is not at all related to this is Smart List and it's with Will Arnett and Jason Bateman and Sean Hayes. It's just a really, really fun podcast. It's just pure entertainment. That's it.

What do they talk about? Do they do Arrested Development stuff?

No, they have on like a guest who the other three or the other two don't know about. So one person will pick a guest and they've had like all sorts of people on. Everyone from political people to actors to sports figures. It's just really fun to learn about something I didn't know about or to just hear that person talk. Awesome.

What's the number one thing every contractor must do to run a successful business?

Make sure that you're looking at your invoices. Honestly, I feel like that's the really big one. Just make the invoices are huge. Making sure that you're charging appropriately is really big. Love it.

Angie, thank you so much for being a guest on Toolbox for the trades.

Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I've loved it.