Ep. 108 - Sharpen Your Hiring Skills | Dave Yoho

owners of small businesses, managers in small and large businesses who have on their own mediocre or less than mediocre hiring skills. If you've never done it before, you're forced to do it. And unless you do it right, it isn't going to work.

This is the Wealthy Contractor Podcast brought to you by G4 Marketing. Interviews with today's top home improvement entrepreneurs about marketing, sales, money, mindset, and lifestyle.

Now here's your host, Brian Kaskavalciyan.

All right everybody, welcome to another episode of the Wealthy Contractor Podcast. This is Brian Kaskavalciyan with G4 Marketing Group, and today I have got an amazing, amazing return guest, one of my favorite people in the home improvement industry, Mr. Dave Yoho. If you don't know the name Dave Yoho, I don't know where you've been. If you're in the home improvement industry, this man, that man right there, if you're watching on YouTube, he's sitting next to me on the screen. If you are listening, this man has created, and I'm not exaggerating, more wealthy contractors than anybody ever. And when I say wealthy, I mean like all levels of wealth. We're talking a few million to tens of millions to, dare I say, hundreds of millions. And so let me give you— that's kind of the informal of Dave. Let me give you some formal. Dave Yoho has been involved with the home improvement and remodeling industries for over 60 years. By the way, he's only 61 years old. Look at how good he looks. He founded Dave Yoho Associates in 1962 to address the needs of industry companies through consulting, seminars, and educational products. And by the way, his seminars are some of the best in the industry. Consulting-wise, he works with the top home improvement companies for the last 60 years— not 60, since 1962— and his educational products are second to none. We'll give you links so you can go check it out. Dave Yoho Associates teaches a scientific-based step-selling system that is applicable in the fields of sales, marketing, recruiting and hiring, and management. By the way, that is the man that if you use a step selling system today, you can thank this man for it because he's the one that introduced it to the home improvement industry. Did I say anything that's not true there, Dave?

No, I like— I, I say thank you for that nice introduction. Despite all the nice things you've said, I've got to be good or they'll tune out.

They will, that's right. The other thing too is you've written a number of books, you've done training, you've spoken all over the world. But you, you've got a great book. It's called Have a Great Year Every Year by Dave Yoho, and it's a fantastic book. This is my copy that you signed for me October 10th, 2012. Yes, so this is my copy of his book. So Dave, we are in interesting times, aren't we? We are actually— just to give everybody point of reference, we are recording this on Election Day. I, I just thought about that. We're recording this on Election Day. What a crazy year it has been. I want to ask you, so we know that home improvement this year has We all got scared in March, and about 6 weeks later, the floodgates opened up and we became busier than we've ever been. I want to know, just personally, I want to know what your take on all of this is and how you see it over the next year or two. By the way, this was not the topic, uh, we're going to talk about how to deal with hiring, how to deal with labor shortages, and all that good stuff. But I just want to ask Dave how— what he makes of this and what he sees happening in the future. So Dave, what do you make of all this?

Well, I think you have to look at this as a transitional stage. At the end of February of this year, people were real embracing what a great year it was about to be because they just finished 2019. And if you didn't do more business in '19 and you weren't doing well in January and February, you're probably in the wrong business. Now, large, small, successful, moderately successful. Yes, we have, we have clients that last year did as little as under a million. We have a few clients who did over $100 million. We have one who does close to $500 million. So, and then they're all retailers and they all started somewhere. And all of them, including most of the people on the phone, have experienced what we call transitional stages. So right now people say, I don't need any more leads because I got more leads than I can handle right now. Or somebody will say, my big problem is backlog. And if you say those things, you're talking about consequences You're not talking about solutions. So as a preface to anything that I might offer you, here's what I'd like to say. Number one, you cannot know what you do not know, for never, never ever apologize for not knowing something, because you cannot know what you do not know. And the second phase of that is you cannot find out what you do not know until you can say openly, I do not know. And the third thing about that is to do and not to do. Now that's a big process here, because if you know what to do, someone has shown you what to do, and you're not doing it, then it's as if you didn't know. So what about a transitional stage? Well, probably if you're under 25, you haven't experienced too many. If you're over 35, you know what it was after The recession that went from probably, I'm going to say, 2000 and probably 2007, and went up to 2012 or '13. There were 5, 6 years in there, very critical times. This is one of those times. Now, right now, if you have more backlog, if you have cycle time problems, how long does it take you from the time you got the job till you install it? This is not going to go away. This is going to be a problem that you have to face. And these are some of the realities of what we are about to talk about. In this transitional state, it can throw you off balance. In every good issue, there are weaknesses. In every weak issue, there are opportunities. And so we have people now getting leads better than they ever did before, better prices than ever before, but they can't get the work done. And we have people who have started to solve the problem by putting in process a plan. And you're not going to snap your fingers and have it go away. The other thing is that most— everything that we're going to talk about today will affect your earnings, the net pre-tax earnings that you are trying to achieve to stay in business, the cash flow that you need to run your business. The rules have changed. A lot of things have changed. And so that's my brief overview. I just released a thing on the subject. It's called The True Cost of COVID-19. I don't want you to associate everything with this pandemic, because it's all too easy to say, well, if it hadn't been for that— But the truth is there is a true cost. And you understand that your business is run by you. The decisions are made by you. The actuality of doing something— he talked about step selling— on a regular basis. We now have the customer at home more than ever before. We have the opportunity to sell a job with the profitability that we're entitled to, but if you can't get it installed, if you can't process it, you've got problems. And a lot of this hinges on the subject matter that I agree to talk about is what are you doing about hiring? What are you doing about training? And what are you doing about maintaining? None of these are easy to do, and you didn't go in business seeing those as a challenge, but it is a challenge. Your business will be built on the quality of people that you hire. And if you've never hired anyone with a strict regimen, with a step system for hiring, then you've made a lot of mistakes. And I have the things called the reality. If you have turnover, that turnover is usually because of one or two things. It's a mishire to begin with, or it's a mismanagement. Mishire, mismanagement. And that's governed whether you have 5 employees or you have 50 or you have 500. That is the problem you face. And the second is that you can hire somebody and the environment which that person is existing in, not only this pandemic environment, but the environment of your operation. It will affect— you can hire a high-quality person, and you may not be able to get that to work for you. Now, I feel like I'm making a speech, Brian. You tell me when you want to stop and put this in a more pointed direction.

I like what you're saying, and I'm taking some notes because I want to unpack some of what you said. I want to unpack some of what you said. Let me ask you this, though. I'm just kind of curious. What is your take before we start talking about actually solving some of these problems, like dealing with getting the work installed and hiring the right people and putting them into a good culture and managing them effectively? What do you see happening? So today we have an election. Whoever your candidate is, you believe that when that person wins, things are going to get quote unquote, better. The other side, again, whichever side you're on, thinks it's going to get worse. What is the reality of it? Do you see much changing over the next— short term, let's talk in the next year or two.

Now, Brian, I love and admire the work you do. I'm going to disagree with you. The people who live in the world that say who gets elected on this day will affect my business. It will affect your business if your attitude says you will have it affect your business. Now you're talking about politicians who make rules and laws, and we can scream and holler, unfair, unfair, they shouldn't do this. Whatever it is, that's what happens. But you can't ask me to take that attitude because I won't. I was born in 1928. Figure it out, that's 92 years ago. When I was born, 1928, we started into one of the worst recessions that the world has ever heard of. Because in 1929, the market failed. It was called Black Friday. That was in 1929. 4 years later, the banks failed. People lost their mortgages, their homes. The people listening, this is probably true of your grandparents or their parents. And people lost their homes. And we no sooner crawl out of that, we go into World War II. We only had a population of 130 million people. And as the nexus of that, we came out of it a generation that was suffering from the war. It's attitude that makes the difference. And I did build a big business. When I did $60 million in business in the early '70s, when anybody who did $1 million was a hotshot, and we didn't have computers and we didn't have cell phones and we didn't have some of the things that we teach today weren't available to us. And I'm not bragging about that. I'm saying the companies that are in business today that want to succeed have to be an attitude of, what are we going to do about it, rather than moan what's happening. And so if you're not doing anything to improve your cycle— what is your cycle? From the day you get the job to the day you get— what are you doing about that? Or what are you doing about getting a deposit? What are you doing about doing a presentation that sticks with people and they're willing to pay more for the right kind of work. All those are attitudes that you as an individual listening to this program have to absorb. Now I don't want to come on here sounding like— and I've made over 5,000 speeches and people hire me to whip up an audience or close the program or get people energized. I don't want to do that here today. What I wanted to tell you though This is a great business. It's $325 billion, $325 billion operation. And just when you look to someone else in admiration, I tell you, yes, we've done work for all the major DIY firms, for Lowe's and Home Depot, BJ's. We've done work for all those people too, or the people that work under their lead mechanisms. And you think and you look at that enterprise. I'm going to tell you the real reason most people have problems is they do not understand the business that we are in. And some of you listening today may not understand the business you're in. And so that being said, again, the reality: if you don't have the right people or you don't have enough of the right people, It has to be a learning experience. What can be done to help you know more about the kind of people you manage? One final thing, and I don't mean this as criticism, purely a matter of observation. Owners of small businesses, managers in small and large businesses who have on their own a mediocre or less than mediocre hiring skills. If you've never done it before, you're forced to do it. And unless you do it right, it isn't going to work. But if you don't do it right, you usually hire applicants with mediocre selling skills. So all of this boils down to what I call Dave Hill aphorisms. Here's my aphorism, right? You want someone You want to find someone and you say, can they do the job? Will they do the job? And do they fit my organization? Now, I've oversimplified that, but that's how I went to school. I learned arithmetic and the ABCs by understanding the basics before I went on to higher education. So, Brian, that's my comment there. By the way, I hope we took it in the right direction.

By the way, Mr. Yoho, I set you up with that question. I was hoping that was the answer you were going to give. Because the reality of it is, right, it's up to us. The business that we create is up to us. And yes, there are going to be things that happen out there that we're gonna like and that we're not gonna like, but ultimately it's up to us. And that's part of the reason I'll plug my book, The Seven Secrets to Becoming a Wealthy Contractor. This is all about mindset. This is all about deciding what you want and then going after what you want, but using, you know, using your head to do that. So I appreciate the answer. By the way, everybody, I've been listening to this man on stage for at least, what, it's 8 years, 9 years, um, and, um, he— the attitude, uh, that he speaks of, he lives, and he's the embodiment of it. And I'm glad that you brought up your age because God bless you, man, 92 years old and you're like, you have more energy than people a third your age. So, you said something in there, we're gonna unpack what you said. You said that people don't understand the business that they're really in. Can you elaborate on that? What do you mean by that?

Well, just to show you, I hear all this statistical data on retail sales and new home construction automobile sales, and we're comparing that to a $325 billion industry that is fragmented. The commonality of what we do, whether you're a small remodeler, a large remodeler, whether you are a small specialty company just involved in roofing or siding or bath replacement, or whether you're a conglomerate and you have various divisions of your business, Here's some universal truth. Unlike all the other things you might see, whether you go out to buy a table, a chair, a suit, an automobile, you're buying a finished product. We, you and I, running businesses like this are selling an unfinished product that we have to project into visuality so that the people we're presenting to can see and feel that expression. And it's more, than just having a good— we design visual presentations for people who have never had a sales presentation, and we do it remotely. We don't even have to come in to see them to do it. But what you're trying to do in that impression is be highly customer satisfaction oriented. Hear that word, customer satisfaction oriented. And customer satisfaction oriented is not a word, it's a group of words. It means the word is What are we saying about it? So the word customer satisfaction, whether they buy from you or not, did you give yourself the best shot? And that calls for visualization on your part. And the person who says, well, my, I don't, I don't see myself as a salesperson. I, well, what would you like me to call you? We have, we represent physicians, podiatrists, optometrists, We represented a legal group at one time. And we teach the fundamentals of customer satisfaction in every case. And it starts with the phone call you take. And it starts with the way you build a lead. We call that selling the value of the visit. And all those things we have to think about, understand, and then relate to a third party. So along comes some of the big box stores, and yeah, but look who we are. We're Sears. Yeah, well, Sears one time had almost a $1 billion retail home improvement business. Today they're probably under $300 million, and that's big potatoes for some people, but small potatoes for a billion-dollar company. And these companies believe it is their trademark, their brand, and someone comes in and says, sell this product. This is the best siding in the world. This is the best roofing in the world. This is the best plumbing in the world. It's how you take that presentation to a customer and present it to that customer at their value level, akin to their buying habits, and then do the best you can. And then you'll come out and we'll find out how good you are. Because if you say they're price kickers and that's all they were interested in, lower price, That's got something to do with you and your presentation. I don't mean to be critical, but some industries, that's just the way it goes. You really think you have to have the lowest price. If you're in the roofing business, I'm going to tell you that your competition may not be able to sell their way through wet Kleenex. I'm not talking about high-pressure selling. I'm talking about selling. Selling means conveying a set of circumstances to a third party who doesn't know you, who you've got to teach that you can be trusted. And that's— they use the word, fancy word, rapport. Rapport sounds so great. It really means harmony. What kind of harmony are you putting into what you're trying to say and do? And so the big companies come along. They're nothing new to me. The big companies come along and they know where they're— right now they're in an acquisition stage. We're buying up this and buying up that. Solve this problem for me. How come so many of these people have a backlog now? Because they didn't plan for it last year when things were not as good as they are this year, but good. Or the year before that when things weren't really good and you didn't plan for that. That's called cycle time, and you have to plan it and work to it. And every company is different. A guy will say, well, yeah, but we're out here in Fargo, North Dakota, you know, and all around us are the oil companies paying big price. That doesn't change anything. Tell me about the Depression. Tell me about post-World War II where we had a recession again. Tell me about all the changes we saw before there was recession. And recession brought change. And the main thing is to understand the needs of that customer. And I'm not being altruistic here. The customer of— when I was doing $60 million when people were doing as well as $1 million, I became a wealthy man. Yes, I became a wealthy contractor, but I did it by formula. Everything is by formula. How does it fit the current situation? Again, Brian, you ask such questions, I get off on a little bit of a tirade here.

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Well, and what I'll say to the listener is back up, go back 3 or 4 minutes and listen to what Dave just said. 2 or 3 more times because there's so much in what he just said. This is a customer-driven business. Any business is customer-driven. I, I say my own take on it is we are in the business of creating, keeping, and multiplying customers. And in order to do that, we have to effectively market our services. We have to get people to raise their hand and say, yes, I'm interested. And then we have to actually sell those people, or we need to convey our value proposition to them and get them to, like Dave said, trust us to do a job for them or deliver a product, whatever it is your business does. And so again, I would say to the listener, go back and listen to that 2 or 3 more times because there's a lot there. Now, with all of this said, the main topic we were going to focus on today is the people issue that's always present. It's, I think today, I think it's magnified, it's amplified just because of the situation. But this is always a problem, isn't it, Dave? Always been a problem.

You're always in a transitory stage. And keep in mind, right now, mortgage rates are the best that they've ever been, to my knowledge.

Yeah.

There's a great flow of money. And what perpetuates the untruth is the press. The press doesn't really get to those fundamental facts. And when the press wants to talk about something, they're using statistical data that someone handed them on a piece of paper. And we deal with the reality of small business. Just to give you an example, I made a 17-year study on language. What language influences people? It's called neurolinguistic programming. And incidentally, if you know my name now, Dave Yeo, you go on YouTube or you go onto our website. I have hundreds of things on there that I give away free of charge.

Yeah, valuable stuff. Very valuable stuff.

But at the same time, Brian, and you saw this in your own business as well, the fundamentals, the guy doesn't want the fundamentals. Stop answering the phone XYZ company. I say, answer the phone. Thank you for calling XYZ company. I started that 50 years ago because the customer wants to be acknowledged as being a person. And you go through the day. If you're calling for an estimate, if you're doing that, and some people have a rotary on their phone that picks up all these things and answers them robotically. And the true answer is when that person calls, they're giving up their time to call us. They had a lot of other options, now they're going to call us. So fundamentally, when they call us, we should be concentrating on what serves their needs best. How do we serve them? And you got away from, you got to get away from the way you were taught to speak. It's called the I-we-me complex. I-we-me. I think this, I feel that, my company does this. Now it's hard to reverse that to get it to second person. Instead of saying my company does that, and the second person would be saying something recognizing the project that you have here, Mr. and Mrs. Jones. You have certain basic needs. Can you tell me why this project is important? Why did you take so much time to call us? If this condition has existed for a long time, explain to me why you waited so long. Now you have it, what would you like it to look like? What would you like it to feel like when someone finishes work? Now, I relate that to the way if you're putting, let's say you're trying to hire help and you put an ad on Indeed, I should show you the posting Indeed or whatever it is. Any one of those things. And now you get someone calling you about the job. What do they want? No different than what the customer wants when you go to the house. Give us the price. We want the price. Why couldn't you do it over the phone? The people that are selling you, this can be done virtually. This can be— some sales can be made virtually. But you know, I've got a client that does over $400 million and he's doing great. He did, he will do this year somewhere around $15 million in virtual. You hear what I said? He does $400 million, $15 million in virtual. So when you look at that—

1.5, right?

But, but, you know, in other words, it works. But I'm saying to you, you professionalize it in a different way, you can make virtual. We have a client, we just did a a major, major webinar for them, and their job is selling virtual. I'm not going to publicize them today. This is your nickel. But I do tell you that one of the keys is to understand that you can get this unfinished product into a visualized state and get it into someone's home to encourage them to come and give you the time, allow you to come and give them of your time, and they will put up their turn. In turn, they will put up their time. But get back to what I said about the basics. Here are the basics. You know, I tell you that most people, when they get out of the house and handle the lead, it's handled wrong. I don't care whether you're on your own, you have 3 salesmen, or 300 salesmen. It's usually handled wrong. People need to be scripted. Otherwise, the people who they believe, well, this guy was a good talker. 'Oh, this guy really dressed well.' And he had a, you know, he worked for 3 or 4 other home improvement companies. And I'm going to tell you, all the things you just told me don't amount to a hill of beans. What amounts to a hill of beans? Tell me what that individual's behavior is. Not what you think it is or what you believe it is. Well, you'll say, 'Well, this guy was a good talker.' And then I hired him. He was here for 6 weeks or here for 3 months. Why'd you get rid of it? Because you didn't sell anything, or you sold at the wrong price, they couldn't do the job right. What did you do? What did you do to establish what that individual, what did you do to establish what that individual was really doing? And we don't trust anything to judgment. I wanted to show you something I just brought up here. I want to show you something. Can you see this now? Can you see it?

Yep. Yep. I was going to ask you about this.

Yeah, because this is called DISC analysis. Now, I have some background in psychological training. I did extended— that was not my major in my undergraduate degree, is in business. And don't think you have to have a college education to do this. I have a client in Detroit. And I'm not going to mention his name, but you do know Brian Kaskavalciyan. He's my friend. He came to this country with about $42 in his pocket and he was 18 years of age and couldn't speak English. He runs a $68 million business in the Detroit area. But I get people to think about what can you learn in other fields that will help you? And that's what this is. The DISC is D-I-S-C. And I will tell you later that I'm going to tell you that here is a thing someone does electronically. It takes them maybe 9 or 10 minutes to do this electronically, and it produces a 30-some page report. Now, it doesn't tell you immediately hire or don't hire. Here's what it tells you. It tells you what you can expect from this individual's behavior. And he only did it for 8 minutes. And we show you what that looks like. So if you're hiring Andy, I don't care whether you're hiring someone to run your ops department or someone for a bookkeeper or a salesman or a sales manager or marketing manager, here's where this comes into play. And I think so highly of this, incidentally, this method of examining Profiles goes back 70, 80 years by Dr. Moulton Marston. And then it was converted by some wise people in the DiSC format. So some of you may have taken it. We spent $185,000, I'm going to say, 3 years ago or 4 years ago to put this in a format that fits this business. And it's all done electronically. And that's what we have our people— that's the way to interview. If I have this example in front of me and I read it for 20 minutes before I interview someone, then I know in advance what I want to ask and what I can draw out of that. And so we have that. We have one called a sales aptitude appraisal. If you're not a salesperson yourself, you can be duped into believing that a guy, a gal who talks well, dresses nicely is your best option. And if they work for a competitor, they know the business. Mistake.

It's happened to me.

Yeah, well, it happens to most people. And bravely you said that, Brian. Thank you for saying that. Because most people won't ever admit, well, yeah, you know, I hired this guy. I call it whatever happened to what's-his-name. Well, I hired this guy, hired this guy. Boy, they look great. They dress right. The people love them. How come you had to get rid of them? Well, they either didn't sell right or they didn't sell at all. So this is an appraisal of sales skills. And these are all pretty simple things. And again, we'll send you a copy of some of these things free of charge.

And by the way, this is not only for salespeople. This can be adapted to whether they're operations— sorry, marketing, Wherever they happen to be. We actually, we actually get those profiles here at G4, a marketing company. We actually get them from Dave Yoho Associates, and we use them in every, to profile everybody before they come in for an interview. Because Dave is right. For those of you that are familiar with DiSC profiling, it basically gives you the questions to ask. Here's what you're looking for. And then you can benchmark people and say, okay, For a salesperson, I'm looking for this, this, this, and this. For an operations person or an installer or installation manager, whatever you're hiring, these are the benchmarks. These are the, this is the type of person that I'm looking for. And this goes to the whole conversation of mishiring, right? Because most small business owners, and me included for many, many, many years, We did it based on gut feel. Oh, does this person feel right? Do they say the right things? And the funny thing is, Dave, I was having this conversation with somebody the other day, is that most of us are salespeople. Business owners are just inherently salespeople. And the craziest thing is, is that we'll have somebody in front of us We'll sell them on why they should work for us rather than them selling us on why they should work for us. And it's the craziest thing ever. I mean, I've done— I had done this for years and years. Now we actually, we have a process for it. So that's the interview portion. We use the profiling, we interview people properly, talk a little bit about bringing somebody into You called it the environment.

Okay. I want to stress something. Here's what a graph looks like.

Yeah.

This equipment produces it in color and you see it in about 8 or 9 minutes. Now, the reason I point this out to you, this is a particular profile. The D is for dominance. The I is for influence. The S is for steadiness and the C is for competent. Compliance. Now you could draw a bar right down the center of one of these graphs and say the people over on this left side of the graph, they're going to be marketing people, they're going to be people lovers, they like to talk and speak and interact with others. And incidentally, that's not the only reason that they should be working for you. They should be working for you because they'll understand the business the way you want it to be, and the way that is best for the customer, and that's called customer satisfaction. But this thing also points out the weaknesses in some of this behavior, because you can have somebody who speaks well, talks well, acts well, says the right things, and then they don't bring in any business. So it's also a guideline and tell you what you have to look at. You can hire anyone you want. I'm going to say if you're hiring people, You have to invest in your own knowledge of people. And let's say you are hiring someone to do selling for you, and he comes and tells you about the years he or she have had in selling and how successful they were. Now, Brian, in your life, did you ever hear a salesperson being interviewed that said, uh, the real reason, uh, I don't work there anymore They fired me because I was mishandling the leads. I wasn't telling the people what they had told me to say. I mismeasured the jobs most of the time, and I had customers who got upset with me.

And no, they'll tell you they were the number one salesperson.

Yeah, it's exactly right, but they were mismanaged as well, right? And so part of this looks at an individual and says, hey, profile yourself first. See who you can manage. There's a section in here on compatibility. Yeah. And then I produced this. This is a book. This is a tutorial, and a tutorial is a fancy way of saying, how do you use something? And so this thing, it was a tutorial. I produced this. I think it's 81 or 82 pages long. The whole thing is recorded by me.

It's recorded in, in, in a process Yeah, my, my business partner has that program. Big Brian, my business partner has that program because she's the one Addie is in charge of hiring here. And she not only does she get the profiles from you, the assessments, but she also studied that program and it's fantastic. So those of you that are listening, if you want an education on hiring, That's a great educational product to get your hands on.

Now, I want to make something clear. We're not on this program to do a commercial for our disc.

We just did, though.

Yeah, yeah. But let me tell you something. We're a big company. We do work all over the United States, Canada, some in New England, some in England, and some in Australia, English-speaking countries. And we work with this unit because this is for English-speaking people. There is, by the way, there's a formula today where one company is developing in Hispanic. But the reason to have this is to gauge someone's ability and then to do a competent interview. Because if you're going to hire on gut feelings, gut feelings work when you're going to have lunch, but they don't really work when you're going to be giving these people leads which may cost you as little as $100 or as high as $500 or $600. That's another thing. We call people and say, what's your lead cost? What does it cost you when you issue the lead? Not how many leads did you get at a home show, but how many of them do you convert to a lead that someone can go in the house and meet with the people? And whether you have 2 people, whether you're the salesperson yourself, you have to understand what you have yet to learn. When we go in to see, we're going to see a client soon, has 350 franchises, and each franchise has maybe 5 or 6 salesperson, and they're in a phase of this business. Now the guy is the head of it is telling me what he knows, where he came from and whatnot, and we have a contract with them. So I say, okay, I need you to take this profile. Why me? Why? Because you're going to be calling all the shots. You're going to be telling your sales management people, your regional people, how to train other people. So you have to know your profile. They have to know their profile. Now, with the money they're paying me to come in and see— it isn't me personally, one of our accounting sections will go in to see these people— these people are an investment. I want you to think when you hire somebody, whether it's an ops person, an installation person, a salesperson, a marketing person, they're representing your brand, your name. And you may be from some small town. Heck, we have one of our more successful clients who is from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and they are in the window business. They come from the remodeling business. They moved— the father, who has now passed away, came from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They did $58 million last year with 2 branches, and they were never in the specialty business until the guy who runs it now matured and he decided that's what he wanted to be. The attitude about what you want to do with people also concerns what adaptability you have. You're going to be dealing with different people all the time. And if you're not careful, you're taking adversarial one piece in. One person wants to say, I'll buy, and one person wants to say, I sell. But the truth is you don't know each other and you have to get in harmony. And this calls for adaptability. Never mind what your values are, what you feel, think, or believe. It's what their values are and making them happy with your having been in their home and they invested the time in listening. Now the aptitude, and we describe that when we talk about this, the aptitude for selling requires that that individual can adapt. Now I'll show you what happens here. In this thing we use, first of all, a graph. And remember I said these things are all punched in colors and I got to get to the right page here. So here we are. So this is not in color, but this is what it looks like if it is in color. This is the printout that you get if you print it out. If you see it on the screen, these are all color bars. And this shows you again the aptitude this individual has for selling. Can they use it? I do tell you this, you go online, you'll hear me talk about all these things. They require an investment, but you know, you invested in a truck, you invested in equipment, You invested in the rent, you invested in ads that you produce or however, direct mail or being in a home show. They're all investments. People have to be part of your investment. And much has to do with your attitude about the people you work with and the consistency. So that let's say you have I one time represented a company that sold printing presses. I don't mean little ones, I'm talking about things that cost $6, $8, $10, $12, $15 million, and they were from Germany. And they're a great company, great brand name, I'm not going to mention them. And when we oversaw their business, the head of their installation department was the most gifted engineer that could solve any problem. And when we did a profile on him, I said, this guy's trouble. And the trouble is it's my way or the highway, which is not bad when you're directing people. It's bad when you're working with customers. And he had situations where people had this equipment and they love it and they say, don't send that, and they named that guy's name, don't send him back. So this is your business. And any aspect of it requires that you study, learn a little bit more about yourself, what you can or you can't do. Now keep in mind, I was a successful contractor. That's not what prepared me for being on a program such as Brian Kaskavalciyan runs. I've made over 5,000 speeches, every state in the United States and 22 foreign countries. Because I also worked on my developmental skills, which I honed as a salesperson, which I honed with dealing with dozens and hundreds and thousands of people. And we hone it to get it to a level that when you train a person, they're adaptable to that training. Now, a lot of other stuff goes into the compensation system you use. And I got off on another track here. How much further?

You know, Dave, this is— This is amazing stuff. And I'm going to say to the listener that you have gotten so much. And I, and I've let this go longer than normal because when Dave starts talking, you don't stop him because what comes out of his mouth is pure gold. Now, what I'll say to all of the listeners is I'm going to stop here because he's given you a ton. And I would say this is one of those episodes that you're going to have to listen to 2 or 3 times. And unpack all of the information that is in here. Dave covered a lot of topics, what the real business is, talked about selling. You know, this is the thing that they are really known for, is helping people develop sales systems. But they also, you know, they work on marketing and management and all of that. But the one thing that Dave is probably best known for is the STEP Selling System. Um, he talked about that. We talked about hiring. He talked about the DiSC profiling and interviewing. And so there's a lot here. So Dave, I'm going to stop and I'm going to ask you to come back again another time and we will talk more. We'll see. Let's see where this thing takes us in the next few months. And I'm going to ask you to come back and let's have another conversation and see, you know, where we're at. But I think It's safe to say right now people are critical to your success. You got to get good at hiring. You have to study what works. You have to know yourself so you can know others. You have to invest in the process. You're investing in people, which is probably the biggest, uh, investment that you're going to make. It's the one that also can hurt you the most. And so there's, there's a lot to unpack here. So, Dave, I can't thank you enough.

I want to— I just want to touch on one more thing.

Yeah.

In 1960, I had a fledgling company. By then, I only had maybe 2 or 3 offices, and I wanted to get into direct mail, and I didn't know how to do it at the time. And I called a friend of mine in New York who worked for an ad agency, and he suggested that I join something called the Direct Mail Advertising Association, DMMAA. And I called them and they said, oh, you called at the right time. I was living in northern New Jersey and they said, you called at the right time. We're having our convention in Washington, D.C. I said, okay, I'll come. Well, well, well, well, it's not that easy. You can't come unless you're a member. God, I'll join, I'll join. I said, he said, oh, that's good. Okay. Now we'll send you, mail you the application. You have to fill that out and then send us your check for $2,200. About what? What? $2,200. Why? Now, if you go back to 1960, that's the equivalent of saying, send me a check for $12,000, $15,000 today. Yeah. I invested that $2,200. With a lump in my throat. I went to their first convention. I sat next to a man who was with Reader's Digest magazine, and he talked about direct mail circulation and how they did it and the science of it. And I sat right next to him. And like you were saying, Brian, I took notes. And I didn't tell the people at the association, but if I never heard from them again, that paid, and I had to come down to Washington, D.C. on the train and be in a hotel. So I'm going to tell you about this. I just finished redoing this in 2019. It's called Recruiting, Hiring Sales and Marketing People. This is sold in segments. This has 8 segments to it, but it could be in CDs, but we actually sell it electronically. And so the package is maybe $600 if you had to buy it in segments, but you can get it electronically and they put a— it's for under $350. Now, whether you buy it or not, you're not going to change my life. And it's my hope that if you buy it, you listen to it and utilize these things, it'll change yours. But it covers within this thing recruiting, hiring, sales, and marketing. You'll see it online. And you'll see what will happen when you know this much about the interviewing. Now, I didn't realize, uh, that my staff just gave me a little hand note here that we've been on for 45 minutes. The time does pass quickly, uh, I, I tell you. And, uh, I, I truly appreciate the opportunity to meet all these glorious people online, the people who will hear this later when you post it in a different way. And again, I'm going to offer, if they'll— you tell them how to get in touch with us, the true cost of running a business in this current environment. I'll give you a reprint of that article. I'd be happy to help you in many, many other ways. Thank you, Brian. Thank you, Brian.

Yeah, thank you. What we'll do is in the show notes, we will put a link to the site so you can check out daveyoho.com. You could see all the resources that are available. You can go check him out on YouTube. Just put in his name. He's everywhere. He's the best. Dave, thank you so much. I appreciate you, and I hope I get to see you soon. I was just telling before we turned on the recording, generally I'll see Dave a couple times a year, and this has been going on for, you know, at least the last 7 or 8 years, and I haven't seen him in a year. And so it's nice to see you healthy and well, and you're absolutely amazing. So thank you very much. And to all of the, uh, for those of you that are out there listening, if you haven't already done so, go to thewealthycontractor.com, get a copy of the Seven Secrets book. Um, I buy the book, you just pay a small delivery fee. It's an important book. It'll help you with the mindset for For Success. Check out Dave's resources as well. So until next time, this is Brian Kaskavalciyan with G4 Marketing Group, and this is the Wealthy Contractor Podcast.

All right, so that's it for today's episode of the Wealthy Contractor Podcast. Let me ask you, did it help you look at your business in a new way? Did it spark an idea or ideas you hadn't thought of before? Do you have a list of action items that you can take and implement into your business or your life today? I really hope so. Now, before you go, make sure you subscribe to the Wealthy Contractor Podcast so you get access to the latest episodes as soon as they're available. We're always striving to provide you with great content, so you don't want to miss what's coming up. And a favor I'd really appreciate. We'd go to iTunes and post a review of this podcast. Let us know how we're doing. The Wealthy Contractor Podcast is brought to you by G4 Marketing Group, where we help contractors of all kinds create customers, keep customers, and multiply their customers and profits. If you're interested in reaching new levels of success for your company, visit www.gfourmarketing.com, or just call us at 305-856-8788 to schedule your free, no-obligation Wealthy Contractor Strategy Session. Now, during this strategy session, we're going to look at 8 key performance factors in your business, and we're gonna help you uncover opportunities for growth, for leads, for sales, and for profit. And finally, we started The Wealthy Contractor as a resource to help you, the home improvement entrepreneur, regardless of where you are on the wealthy scale, get where you want to go. We want to provide you with the motivation, the confidence, the resources, and the tools so you too can live the life of the wealthy contractor. Now, the wealthy contractor is a place where it's okay for you to want it all. In fact, it's not only okay, it's encouraged. So until next time, this is Brian Kaskavalciyan with G4 Marketing Group.