Hiring Tips and When Layoffs Become a Reality, Part 1

The Small business show episode 388 for Wednesday, July 13, 2022. Greetings folks and welcome to or welcome back to the small Business show here at BusinessShow Co the show where we are using our business brains and small businessing and every single week. Sponsors for this episode include Shopify. We're@shopify.com SBS. You can get a 14 day trial and full access to Shopify's entire suite of features. And rate tracker presented by skysale Solutions, your trusted payments processor. Rate trackers is credit card processing Rate watchdog. I can't wait to tell you more about it and I will do so about them and Shopify a little bit later here in the episode. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.

In Lafayette, California, I'm Shannon Jean. Those are two awesome sponsors.

I love it when. Yeah, no, we've, we've been, I mean, I guess it, it's a sign that we're doing something right that we've got sponsors that we either use or would use. You know, I like Rate Tracker is one that. Man, I wish, I wish I knew.

No brainer couple years ago. I love that too. I, yeah, I love that, you know, really, you know, pointed sponsors.

Yeah.

Actionable success right on them. I think that's terrific.

Yeah, it's great.

Yeah, that is very, very good. So how are you doing?

Yeah, I'm doing good. I've had a productive week so far. We record this on Tuesdays. Sounds good. Yeah, I've had a couple of weeks where things have just been scattered. You know, I was traveling and then I had other stuff going on. I'm actually traveling at the end of this week too, but I've had a couple of really solid productive days here. I guess there haven't. Boy, and I should be knocking on wood.

Yes.

There haven't been any, like complete derailments of my focus and productivity this week, which, like those derailments aren't a terrible thing. Right. They generally are where opportunities lie. So if I go, you know, months without getting derailed, it means either I'm not trying hard enough, I'm not doing the right thing, or my businesses are no longer interesting to people and all of those things are bad. But a couple of days of it is. All right, I'll take that.

Yeah, I like that. Sometimes those interruptions are really powerful. And it's true. Opening yourself up to that is a good thing. Last week on the show I mentioned I want to talk about this Mark Cuban Cost plus drug company.

Right. Yeah.

It doesn't really fit in a small business, you know, environment because obviously it's going to be this massive business. Mark Cuban's a billionaire and all that kind of stuff. And obviously, you know, Cuban has a tremendous business brain. Right. If you ever watch Shark Tank, he's always thinking about opportunities. Totally makes sense. But what I. What I was surprised to learn about this, and I think this company, the concept is, is terrific. It's a tremendous opportunity if you don't know what it is. Basically, they're removing a number of layers of middlemen that before drugs and medicine gets to the pharmacy, there's a bunch of middlemen involved. A lot of them are benefits things, and I don't know the exact name, but basically they're selling the prescription drug below what your co pay would be with your insurance.

Okay. Yep.

They don't deal with insurance companies. Another reason that they keep the prices so low. It's. It's a unique business and I, I would highly recommend you look at it just for this concept. But what I was surprised to learn, speaking about interruptions, is the whole thing just got started because somebody, some random guy in the medical field, I believe is a physician, sent Mark Cuban an email and just said, hey, look, this is. Look at, this is an opportunity. And I'll put a link in the show notes. There's a great podcast on how I built this where Cuban talks about the reason behind it. He's not necessarily doing it to make a ton of money. He wants to grow this business. They have a flat 15% markup on all the products that they sell. But it struck me how it, you know, if a guy like Mark Cuban, who I would imagine might be a little busier than I am, maybe, maybe.

You know, that's a good question. But. But I don't know. Worthy of a different conversation, but sure, let's go with that.

Yeah, I love that. Yeah, that's a good. That's a whole nother show.

Yeah.

But the fact that, you know, open the email and I get these kind of emails all the time too, and most of the time I just don't. No, that's kind of crazy.

Here. No, thanks.

But he was like, well, that's an interesting concept. Maybe I should talk to this guy. And they built this business. They're building a big plant manufacturing facility near Dallas. And, you know, they're committed to helping people. And it's a great opportunity, I think, to help people. At the same time, you grow a company. So just don't ignore those interruptions because you just never know where they could lead.

Yeah, you never know, huh? Yeah. Right, Right. I mean, that's the kind of thing is these. You know, there's. There's a lot of. There's that whole. It was a graduation speech, like a college, I think, graduation speech that was delivered and then it was turned into a song with someone. More like beat poetry with someone reading the speech over, just a chord progression underneath it. Okay, groove. And. And it's all about sunscreen. Well, really, it's about everything except sunscreen. Sunscreen is in the beat. It's. It's just. Here's a bunch of advice. I can you. But I don't know what I'm talking about. Except at the beginning, I told you to wear the sunscreen and wear that. You know, it. Like, it's all these things. And. And, yeah, and one of them. One of the little anecdotal things in this. In this piece I'll call it, is that, you know, don't worry about life's interruptions. Those are the things that happen on a random Tuesday, and you have no control over them. And it's. That is great advice. Like, do not sit down and fret about, you know, when is the other shoe going to drop? Because it will. The whole point is you don't know when. And if you sit around worrying about it, you've wasted a bunch of your time. And. But. But, you know, I. And as soon as I heard that in this. Whatever it was, maybe I read, I. I've experienced this. This bit of words, and I'll find a. I know I'm talking about it in this very vague way. I will find a link to some version of this so that you can all either read it or hear it. But that whole idea of the, you know, the surprise that happens on a random Tuesday afternoon. Of course we're recording this on a random Tuesday afternoon. So I realize I am tempting the gods here. But you know that that whole concept really hit me hard. It was like one of those powerful bolts of lightning the first time I heard it. And it was like, yeah, don't worry about what's going to happen on a random Tuesday afternoon, because you don't know. That's the whole point. But be aware that these things do happen, and some of them are really crappy and can totally screw you for years, and some of them are really amazing and can totally set you up for years. And it's just how life works.

That's right. And kind of this business brain concept that we've been Leaning into is to just prepare yourself. Some of those things you can't prepare. So just, okay, we're going to adapt and embrace the good things and mitigate the negatives. Right. So it's, it's fascinating.

I am. There's another mindset approach that I think is valuable that I have learned to adopt and integrate into my life. And that is the approach that pilots are told to take. When you're flying your plane and something bad happens, the worst thing you can do is react immediately. Because when you're flying a plane, you have altitude, and altitude means you have time. And if you start changing your relationship with altitude by intention, you may be cutting into valuable time. So what they teach pilots to do is, is the first thing you want to do is stop and think about what you're going to do. And then once you come up with a plan, think one more time before you start to implement. And I think that's a really powerful way to approach those random Tuesday afternoon incidents because you can. A gut reaction. I'm sure we can all come up with examples where an immediate reaction saved the day and everything was great. However, most of the time, taking a moment, not overreacting, not reacting too quickly. Breathe. Okay, here's the scenario. What does this actually mean? Now let's take action. You don't want to ignore it because not taking action unintentionally is still an intentional act, but. Right, right. You know, but, but that whole mindset of, okay, you, yep, the plane's still in the air, so we haven't crashed yet. Now let's figure out what our options are. Let's look around. Let's check all the instruments. Let's get all the data. Okay, now let's go. You know, I mean, there's. There's the risk of going overboard into, you know, analysis paralysis. You don't want to do that either, but take a look, breathe, then take action, and go.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I like it. Yeah, same makes a lot of sense. Yeah, that's very good. That's good. So I'm excited today to talk about, you know, we've been kind of not necessarily dooming and glooming, but we've been trying to prepare our listeners for, hey, things are slowing down. You know, chances of a recession, if we're not already in one, are really good. So here's how you cut costs here so you could react, build your revenue stack. But I want to talk about hiring and creative ways to hire things that we've talked about on the show before, but also some tips for from some outside resources that that we want to share with you. And then next week I want to talk about the dreaded layoff if you have to go that route. But I'm excited this week to talk about hiring. I have a really interesting tip to start it off that I'm excited to share with you.

Well, I am eager to hear your tip. I'm also eager to tell everybody about our sponsors. Can I do that first?

Shannon Absolutely. Yep.

All right. First up is Rate Tracker presented by skysale Solutions, your trusted payments partner. Look, payment processing is confusing as it is and so are the rates and fees associated with accepting credit cards as payment. What if there was a free solution that allowed you to easily and automatically understand your bottom line credit card processing, rates and fees every month? There is. Rate Tracker is a free and simple way for you as a small business owner to know your cost to accept payments so you don't get lied to or taken advantage of by your payment processor. Too many times those payment processors have intention left their merchants in the dark. As a responsible business owner, Rate Tracker is your tool to level the playing field, take back your hard earned money. Rate Tracker makes it simple for you to understand your costs to accept payments and provide you with free access to trusted payments experts like skysale Solutions, which can give you free advice on how to optimize your payment acceptance program. Visit sky-sale.com ratetracker to to sign up for the only service that's dedicated to helping you know your numbers, keep track of your payment processing costs and alert you immediately if there's ever a rate increase. Sky-sale.com RateTracker and our thanks to Rate Tracker presented by Skysale Solutions for sponsoring this episode. You know we love that sound here because that's the sound of another sale on Shopify, the all in one commerce platform to start or run and grow your business. Shopify is a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere, giving entrepreneurs like us the resources once reserved for big business, customized for our needs. With a great looking online store that can bring our ideas to life and tools to manage our day to day and drive sales, making your idea real opens endless possibilities. It's a journey, but that's the beauty of entrepreneurship. And Shannon and I, we have both used Shopify for many different things over the years because they get it and they get it done. There's no reason to reinvent the wheel when Shopify's got it right there. And it's not just us. Shopify powers millions of entrepreneurs just like us from first sale to full scale. Every 28 seconds that sound happens because a small business owner makes their first sale on Shopify. So you can get started by building and customizing your online store with no coding or design experience. Plus 24. 7 support. You're never alone. Go to shopify.com all lowercase for a free 14 day trial and get full access to Shopify's entire suite of features. Start selling on Shopify today. Go to shopify.com SBS right now. Shopify.com SBS and our thanks to Shopify for sponsoring this episode. All right, Shannon, let's. So we're putting the laying people off thing till next week, which is great because I like to, I like to, you know, procrastinate on the terrible things, which is probably going to be the first lesson not to do. But be that as it may, we have the opportunity to put that off till next week. Let's talk about hiring, which is a whole lot more fun, I think.

Yes, I agree. Absolutely. And you know, before we get into some, some specifics, I have a, a tip that I heard that I really like and I've never used it before. So I was like, wow, this is really interesting. So, and the, you know when you're trying to hire people and you want some references. Well, lots of companies now really won't give you any information for fear of, you know, liability, you know, or they can't say anything negative. They can say, oh, I only, we hired, hired them on this date, you know, so this person, their trick was what they would call or reach out for a reference caller email. They would say, please respond to me if you highly recommend this applicant as super great. That's it. So if you got. That's it, just respond if this applicant is super great and if you highly recommend, and if you get no response, don't hire that person.

Yeah. And okay, so there's, I mean, I, I like this, but there's some risk in there. Like emails get stuck in spam emails, you know, So I guess there's more to it, right? Like if I were going to do this, I would give it a better chance of succeeding by maybe just putting the person's name in the subject line, nothing else. Not I need a reference. Right.

I like it.

If you're coming to me, I'd put Shannon Jean as the subject line. That's it.

I like it.

Right. Because if you had worked for me and I got an email from you from some rando three years from now with your name in the subject line, be like wait, why is that name in my world again? You know, that kind of thing. So yeah, I mean you have to kind of be careful in.

Yeah, you have to give it some new, some nuance and adjust it to fit your business or your style. But I love the concept of. Oh yeah, hey, just only get back to me if you can highly recommend this applicant as super great and that's it. You know, I thought it was a powerful thing if, if you've used something like that before, you know, share it with us. Feedback@businessshow co. I'd love to hear about it because it just kind of hit me, I was like, man, that's brilliant. You know, I thought that would be great.

I like it. I like it. Yeah.

So for sure. So hiring, you know, you'd think that during a downturn. But what I've, I find really kind of interesting right now is there are certain sections of the employment market that I believe are really going to take a hit and lots of people are going to get laid off. We're going to talk more about that in a few minutes. But there's still massive demand for other areas that were just short workers. And I'm sure you've experienced it trying to go anywhere, interacting with companies that are short. Hey, we're due to Covid or whatever still powering through, trying to get people to work. And at least everywhere around here in California there's help, want, assigns, you know, non stop.

Oh yeah.

You know, out here in California, you know, like starting salary for managers at the Walmarts are over $200,000.

Seriously?

Absolutely.

For a manager at Walmart is going to make 200k to start.

Yep. I think it's like 210 or something like that to start. Yeah. And out here, in and out, you know, one of the greatest hamburgers you'll ever have if you, you know, fast food. Yeah.

Especially if you go animal style.

Yeah. 1850 an hour for to start the 22 that goes to. So I, I forget it was within six months or something like that. 12 months. $22.50 an hour.

Wow.

Still some, you know, real lack of, of workforce in certain areas. You know, management and even, you know, lower level. I hate to say lower level, but that's not in a derogatory manner. Just different, different types of employees that they're hiring out here. So I follow this guy on Twitter I really like. His name is Nick Huber. It's you know, at Sweaty Startup and we'll put a link in the, in the show notes but I like it because, you know, he's a young guy. He's, he does a lot with real estate, buying self storage units. Not a sexy business, but it's, it can be very profitable.

Absolutely.

And just doesn't hype it up pretty much. It's not like, you know, I'm going to make you a millionaire overnight. Just hard work and looking at things in a different manner. Kind of like we talk about using your business brain. Right. And so he did a thread with some great hiring tips that we've talked about before, but some that we haven't and I'd love to delve in. I think he's got, you know, five or six of them that I think are worth, we're sharing here.

Yeah, no, this is a great thread. They, that when you shared it with me, I, I, I dove right in and the first one, all of these hit me really hard and they reminded me of a lesson that I, I have learned and I think I'm pretty close to having fully integrated the learnings from this lesson. But it's, it's, you know, it was maybe five to 10 years ago that I learned this lesson probably in the five to seven year range, probably while we've been doing this show. Because one of the benefits of doing this show is we dig into things and then you know, obviously realize, oh, well, I'm, I'm doing this wrong in my business, so maybe I should make some changes. But they all kind of have this approach that entrepreneurs, business owners are, have a different mindset than employees and it's okay. And it's this last part that I had a real problem with. I never, I always wanted to treat people how I would want to be treated in their position. And that obviously doesn't work well because I am not in their position because I am the first to admit that I am patently unemployable. So.

Yeah, me too.

Right. So if I, if I'm someone who is saying out loud that I am patently unemployable, how could I relate what I want to what someone who wants to be an employee wants? And there's nothing wrong with either one of these things.

That's right. Everybody has a role to play.

Yeah. And it's all fine. And so the first one that Nick Hubert at Sweaty Startup puts on here, the first mistake I'll make sure to highlight that is over complicating the job. And he says, entrepreneurs love chaos. We love making decisions and we're good at it. We thrive with uncertainty. Employees want the opposite it's like, oh.

Right, yes, Clear and simple frameworks. They don't want to make hard decisions or solve complex problems all day. And we've talked about this on the show before and it's definitely worth revisiting because don't make the mistake of thinking that your employees are just like you. They're absolutely not. And so this concept of we give everybody complete, you know, all this autonomy and everything else, that that's not the best way to do it, you know, and you're going to have people within your organization that some of them like to have more autonomy and do things on their own and others need, you know, day to day guidance.

Yeah, this isn't hard and fast binary. This is. But it's a good approach. Yeah, of course.

Yeah. And they still, they still need a clear framework of this is the job. These are the tasks that have to get done. You know, here's my expectation. And then, you know, certainly giving them independence, I think is really good. We're going to talk about delegating here in a minute. So, you know, that's the other side of the coin. Right. And so it's just important that like Dave said, that your employees don't think like you and you don't want them to.

Oh, that's a good thing. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you definitely don't want a bunch of clones of you running around. Just like you don't want a bunch of clones of your employees running around. You want everybody to bring, especially in a small business, in a larger business, maybe the idea of cloning people sounds better. And I obviously am not talking about actually cloning people, but people that think the same. But in a small business, if you've got somewhere between one and 20 employees, having each person think differently about things is only going to help you. You need to be able to keep everybody on task and focused and with the same culture. But having different people there is a good thing. And you are one of the different people that's there and you fill your role, but that's it. You're the only one that needs to fill your role. Unless maybe you have a business partner. But even then you want that person to be complimentary to you, not the same as you. So.

Yeah, that's right. That's right. The second one is, you know, this is kind of where I think the work from home crowd is going to be in for a bit of a shocker over the next year. And you know, number two is hiring. One of the mistake is hiring only in America. You know, Nick says if the job can be done remotely on a computer, it can be done just as well or better by someone. In this example in the Philippines, he says 18 of their 45 employees are currently there. You know, if you can be replaced large, I guarantee you large companies or even small ones are thinking of ways to save money, and it's going to be easier to replace you if you're not part of, like, the in person team and people don't have relationships with you. And so I think the work from home concept, while I love it and I do it and I hire people that do it as well, I think it's been overplayed a bit. And I believe we're going to get some correction. And some of those ways may come from offshore hiring like this.

Yeah, actually, I don't see it as a correction. I see it as us embracing this idea of remote working and working from home. And it's like, okay, wait. Like, wait a minute. This works. So why are we limiting ourselves to people who live in one specific spot? I remember years ago, I had a conversation with your glorious state there, Shannon, the state of California, when they came to me and said, hey, turns out you haven't been paying franchise taxes in our lovely state. And I said, you're damn right I haven't. Why would I want to be doing that? And they're like, well, you have an employee here. I'm like, yeah, but that doesn't matter. That's immaterial to the business. They're like, well, it doesn't matter. You have nexus here, so you need to pay us the. I said, we don't earn any money in California. They said, great, but you only then owe US$800 per year.

That's correct.

Yeah. Which many states don't do, by the way. Now, it's based on revenue, not just nexus having a flat minimum fee. But the state of California was very happy to charge me their minimum fee and of course, many penalties because I hadn't paid it for the prior seven years or something like that. And I said to him, if my employee came to me tomorrow and said, hey, Dave, I've been lying to you. I live in Bolivia. I could care less. In fact, I'd feel a whole lot better about it because I'd be able to tell you Californian people to screw off. But if you don't care where your employee lives and you're fine with them living in Bolivia or the Philippines, well, then open up your options to people that do live in Bolivia and the Philippines, because It really doesn't matter. We, in fact, we have one woman in the Philippines working for the business I never talk about here on the show. And she's been with us for that business is four years old. She has been with us for three of them. And she's wonderful, she's great, and we don't care. The weird one, the only weird part about it, and I actually haven't thought about it in years because she chooses to work what I'll call us hours, is that she's literally on the other side of the world. So she works when it's dark out for her. And, and we don't mandate that. Like when we hired her, we said, you know, you work whenever you want. That's totally fine. Like, we, you know, we can catch. We can sync up. We're all night owls anyway. She's like, nope, I have already been doing this for a number of years. I organized my life this way. I'll work whatever, nine to five based on Eastern time or something like that. And so she works when it's dark, she sleeps a little bit, and then she has her daytime to herself. So, you know. Yeah.

So I think, you know, you don't want to miss those opportunities.

No.

Look at, you know, a global workforce and see what makes sense for your. For your business. Right.

Yeah.

The next one is, you know, and again, we've. We've talked about this a lot, even just on this show. Firing too slow. You know, Nick, you know, says that, oh, your gut, Gut instinct is almost always right. In his case. Employees rarely improve. I'm not sure I agree with that. 100. They rarely get better or learn how not to make the same silly mistakes or bad decisions. Cut ties quickly. A weight will be lifted off your back. I think, Dave, I could probably speak for you and say we've both made this mistake. You know, I, I'm a nice guy. I like to consider myself a nice guy. I hate firing people. But you do have to act as quick as you can, cut your losses and move on. And, and you need to listen to your other people, your managers, your supervisors, because they will often be the first ones to tell you, hey, this person should go. And even though, you know, I have this concept that it. When you have to fire somebody, it's a failure of management. Right. You either hired the wrong person or you didn't train them correctly. But okay, that's just.

That's fine.

That doesn't mean. Yes.

It doesn't mean that you have to then fix this person. Right. Yeah, exactly.

That's to help you in the future. So.

And I've been through this a few times. Yes, you're right. That other people in your organization will tell you this, but they won't necessarily tell you as clearly as you just stated it. Shannon. It might come in the form of a. Well, you know how Tim is. So he's going to say no to this, but I think we should do it anyway, Right? Like when people start qualifying how and predicting how someone else is going to reply in the negative or treat something and slow down the process or not get it done. I think Nick is 100% right. Your gut is almost always right. And you need to rid your company of incompetence asap. If you get the feeling that someone is incompetent, yes, it is your failure. You hired the wrong person. The only other failure you will continue to make is not firing them today. That's it. You know, there's. There's no way to take someone who is incompetent. And I don't. I don't like to use the term willfully incompetent, but some people really are. They're stubborn. They don't want to learn more. They don't. They want to do their thing the way they know how to do it or don't know how to do it. And when you find somebody like that, get them out. Get them out. And also look for people whose mindset challenges the culture you already have. Sometimes that's okay. Sometimes an evolution of your company's culture is a good thing. But be really intentional about keeping people who are challenging your company's culture. And I say this having seen it in others, and I also say it knowing that I've been that person in not just companies, but, you know, I'm a musician. I play in bands. I have seen myself change the culture of a band. And not necessarily for the better, sometimes for the better. But we all have our ways. And I have an ability to lead. I don't want to say I'm a natural born leader, but I certainly have the ability to convince other people of the way that I am thinking. And that isn't always a good thing when it's somebody else's rodeo.

Yeah, that's true. That's a good point.

You don't need too many cooks in the kitchen. Yeah. Yeah. The next one is one of my favorites, Shannon, and that is waiting too long to delegate. I. I continue to be guilty of this. Nick says that delegation is uncomfortable and you can do any task in your business. Better and more efficiently yourself. If anybody else says, yeah, that's me, raise your hand and you're in good company. Yep. But.

But it does. It does really hold you back, you know, And I constantly made this mistake, and even to. To this day, I know I do it. And I was like, well, how would I get somebody to do this? And this is a little. There's some nuance here. And how would they understand this? And you're convincing yourself that you're more.

Important than you're rationalizing. Yeah. You're rationalizing because you don't want many things. You don't want to pay for it. That. That could be one of the things, but it might not be the driving factor. You're rationalizing because you don't want to give up control over whatever that little fiefdom of your business is. Right. All those things. Nick says one thing that really hit home. As soon as you can't spend your time selling new customers, it is time to hire.

Yeah, that's right. You become the bottleneck. Right?

Yeah. Yeah. You're the bottleneck.

Growth.

Yeah. Yeah.

And a part of it for me is that I often think, oh, it'll be more complicated if I bring somebody else in. I'm trying to keep this simple for.

A couple of weeks. It might be.

Yes, yes. And. And I like, you know, we. We had Gary Von Meer from Tech Defenders on a year or so ago, and. And he had that 85% rule. As soon as he felt that someone could do the job 85% as good as he could, then he would step aside. You know, so your. Your percentage may vary. Maybe it's 80% or 70, I don't know.

Yeah.

But I thought that was an interesting way to look at it and to plan to step aside. You should be constantly. I mean, I always tell my employees, don't you want to work your way into another job? You'll get bored. So you should be doing the same for yourself. Right. Get out of the way and let these people succeed and grow your business.

That is a great. Yeah. Gary had the right way of looking at it. He knew, and he knows that he is going to take things that he's doing and hand them to other people. And he gives himself permission. Whether it's true or not is totally irrelevant. You're just playing mind games with yourself. Right. He gives himself permission to hand something off to someone where his gut tells him they're not going to do it as well as me. Well, they're not going to do it the same as you. Whether they do it as well or better.

Yes.

Like, that's all almost immaterial, right? I mean, it's not, but it is. You just need to get over that hump. And that's his way of doing it, is telling himself, if they do it 80% as well, then I can go do more. And now I've got somebody handling that. And, yeah, it's not perfect, but so what? I get to do more.

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah.

Number five is something I think we're also both guilty of micromanaging. You know, employees want guidance. Right. We talked about that earlier in the show. But they don't need you to pound them with questions all day long. You know, Nick says way too many bosses look over shoulders and distract their best people. Give them clear instructions and get out of the way. A very, very important and a powerful way to slow the growth of your business and to make people unhappy is if you're just up in their grill all the time double checking and, you know, you gotta let people do what they know how to do.

Yeah, Yeah. I. I'm actually. This is the one thing. This is probably the first one of these things that I learned, because I don't like to micromanage people. It. Obviously, it consumes my time. I was gonna say it wastes my time. It also does that, but it certainly consumes my time. It makes me feel impatient. And so now when I hire people and I say now, I mean, this is probably for the last 10 years, I've told people this. Look, I have a terrible habit of micromanaging, and I hate it. So if you. If you or me. If either one of us finds me micromanaging you, we're gonna say something, we're gonna figure out why it's happening, and we're gonna solve the problem, because neither one of us wants that. And. And I give them permission to call me out on it. In fact, more than permission, it is in the job description. You will tell me if you think I'm micromanaging you, because that's a problem, and it's probably a symptom of a different problem. But let's. Let's acknowledge it for what it is, and then let's go dig in and fix it so that we can both move on with our jobs. Yeah.

Yeah. Talking about it is really a good thing. And also talking about it with your other employees, too. So you could say, hey, if you see me micromanaging to a point where it's detrimental to what we're trying to get done here.

Yeah, exactly.

Please call me out on it, you know, and just bringing it up, is that because I think it's a symptom as well. If you, as the business owner, if you don't think things are going the right way, well, rather than try to micromanage people and, you know, square pegs into a round hole or whatever, you have that discussion. It's like, well, hey guys, I'm feeling the need to micromanage. Let's figure out why. Um, so I don't, you know, so we cannot do that. It's. It's important.

No, it's, it's key. It's. It's key.

Go ahead.

No, no, no, no, no. Go ahead.

Ok. Nick's last comment, which I, I've been down this road a couple of times and I have some comments on it, you'd be surprised, but is he thinks it's a mistake to set up complicated profit sharing or equity plans, retirement plans. You know, he's saying employees want a consistent paycheck. They wear, you know, and they rarely want the risk of uncertainty when it comes to compensation. If you're doing some sort of, you know, profit sharing kind of thing. And he says if you have to do it, share revenue and not profit. And I couldn't agree more.

You know, yeah, profit sharing is a nightmare because people don't have control over your expenses. They may have control over some of them, they may have control over some of your revenue, but they don't have control over all of it. So how can they? I don't know.

Yeah, yeah, it's very complicated. And I think that it's much more effective to give out bonuses based on performance. If you want to do that, you say, hey, you could do it with individuals if you reach these benchmarks. Or like my, in my case, we used to reward bonuses when they achieve different training levels. You know, moving up higher as a tech. And then you can also. I really found it helpful to do departments say, look guys, this is, these are our numbers. If we can hit this output number and keep the returns and defects at this low rate for 30 days, 90 days, whatever it is, we're all going to share and everybody's going to get a bonus. I think it's great. I think the, you know, 401k retirement stuff is, is great, but the lower level of the employee, the less important it's going to be. You're going to find those people are living probably paycheck to paycheck, at least here in California, and trying to get them to participate in something, you're going to be frustrated. There's better ways to do it. Right. And you can certainly still. We did it. I did it a couple different, a few different times.

Is that right?

Yeah. Matching contributions to try to motivate them, it's good for your business. There's some real big tax benefits. It's good for you personally. There's some great benefits in there, but you need to get creative on how you encourage them and your employees to contribute. And that biggest part of that is like explaining and educating them how you know, when you match that, what they put in, it's, it's free money. Right.

If you, if you're matching them. Yeah.

Yes. For them. And, and there's obviously tax benefits for you because the more your employees contribute you as the owner and the higher typically, hopefully earners, you can contribute more as well. And so the, the system is designed to try to reward everyone, but it can be challenging. Now in California, you may, may not be surprised, but there, and actually more states are doing this. I won't tear into California too much, but they've mandated that businesses that have over five people have to have a retirement plan now. And if you don't. Absolutely. If you don't have one, there's a state plan called Cal Savers.

Okay.

It doesn't cost employers anything, which I definitely respect, other than there is some management involved in your payroll to allocate those funds that the employee decides they want to contribute. An employee can opt out and there's some tricks they do, which I thought they can start with as little as 1% but over, over the subsequent years it automatically increases up to 8% unless they opt out because most people don't even notice it. Right. Small amounts. The other thing I do like about this plan, this Calsavers, especially for entry level employees, let's call them, is it's portable, you can take it with you wherever you go to work. Right?

Right.

Yeah, it's yours. The employee doesn't. Isn't involved at all other than again, managing the deduction with their payroll company. So it's not a bad thing. What I first, my, my total anti, you know, central control bias was like, oh, this is ridiculous. The more I read into it in preparing for the show, I realized, well, you know what, maybe that's not a bad thing because the, you know, people are going to have to, you know, we're going to have to support people when they stop working anyway.

Right? Oh, that's true. Yeah. Fair. Yeah.

It's just there's no way around it. You know, as a society that's, that's relatively affluent, you got to have safety nets. And this is a way for people to contribute on their own. They can choose their own investment things. And this is what I always found especially sticky in this retirement thing is your business kind of gets involved in like, how's the my investments are doing and how does it work and how can I contribute. And so you have like people coming to your office to describe all this kind of stuff, you know, and there's fees involved. So this might be a good solution for your employees. I just don't know how it impacts you as an employer. If you want to try to do another plan or something for yourself, I'm sure there's some rules engaged in that.

Sure, yeah. Yes, of course. No, I actually, I kind of like that now that you've described. At first when you said it, I was, I had the same initial reaction as you. Like, what do you mean you can't tell me what to do? I mean, obviously they can. They made me pay the 800 bucks times whatever, seven plus penalties. Yeah, that's not a terrible thing. And especially if it doesn't cost the employers, like, it creates this scenario that's super easy and potentially and very likely benefits employees. I actually kind of like it.

Well, from that perspective, I think it's great. I just don't know the ramifications for us as business owners, how it limits what we can do. Yeah, of course there's probably benefit to doing a plan yourself that allows you to save more and you to invest more. But you'd have to research it. If you're using this CalSAvers program or you're another state that has a mandate. I think there's a, a handful of them now. Let us know. Feedbackusinessshow.co. that's all I have for hiring. Thanks to Nick Huber, you know, the sweaty startup, you know, he's a great follow on Twitter. Get some good tips out of there. I think he's got a podcast as well. We'll link in the show notes. So next week, let's talk about the unpleasant part of layoffs and if you have to do it. And again, it's this interesting time where it's almost like you're shifting assets around in because you may be laying off some people, but you still have to be hiring for other departments. Yeah, we'll talk about what the best way to handle it considering your requirements of your business. And also, you know, you got to treat people with empathy and help them transition to something successful too.

So absolutely, that's what we're going to.

Talk about next time.

Sweet. Hey, you know, we would love to have you review the show, folks, because your reviews give us a sense of what you're looking for out of the show. We're talking about small businessing. We're talking about using our business brains. Is this what you want to listen to? Right. Please let us know BusinessShow Co reviews. You can also just go to BusinessShow Co in the show notes. We'll have a link where you can review the show as well. We'd love to hear what you think and if you don't want to do a public one review, that's fine. But please do email us feedback Business Show Co. Because we want to hear from you. That's how we know if what we're doing works for you or if you have ideas or you're like, wait, you did this one thing once and I really like that. And then you haven't done it since. Why ask us that question? We're here. We want to know. It's good stuff. Got anything else, Shannon, or is it time to go?

That's it, man.

That's all.

Again, share your hiring stories with us and we'd love to hear it.

Yeah. Back to small businessing. Make sure you check out shopify. Com, SBS and skysale. Com ratetracker. And do me a favor, would you folks keep living that charmed life? We'll see you next week.