Navigating Internships for your business – DBA Small Business Show 7

Greetings, folks, and welcome to the DBA podcast, episode seven for Friday, March 27, 2015, here in New Hampshire. Durham, New Hampshire, that is. I'm Dave Hamilton.

And I'm Shannon Jean. Out in sunny California. I can't believe it's the 27th already.

It's the 27th. I still have over a foot of.

Snow in my yard, so that is scary.

I know.

Yes, yes, yes. And that's nuts. But good stuff. That's how it goes.

It's warm in here. That's right.

Yes. That's the most important thing. Yeah.

Yeah.

Cool. Cool. Well, hey, today I thought we would. We let a little teaser. Last week we were talking about employees and motivating and different things like that, and we touched on the topic of interns, and I thought we would spend a little more time on that this week and talk about what, you know, what's the story with an intern program at your, with your business, why you should have one where you can get them, you know, how to, how to take care of those people, and thought we'd jump right in and talk about that.

Yeah, I, I, like I said, I am the engaged listener on this one. I, well, because I, I know that I have not. I. Well, we haven't ever done interns, so we've never taken advantage of it. And I know that that's probably a big mistake that we've. Well, it's, you know, it's an overlooked opportunity is what it is.

Yeah, that's what I was gonna say. Yeah. It's not a really big mistake, but it's certainly a big missed opportunity to. For a number of different way, really. When we first did our, let's see, the first intern program, I think we did. Oh, man. I mean, it's probably been 15 years or more. And, you know, the way we started it was very selfish. It was like, hey, you know, we've got this mountain. I think at the time it was probably ipods and to get through. And we had a finite amount of employees and certainly a finite amount of capital to pay them with. And we thought, yes, you know, somewhere somebody has to want to get their hands on this stuff. And we started checking around and kind of came up with some, Some ideas. And, you know, over time, we've developed this program and with a few different entities. And, you know, the reason why you want to have one is not just for the free labor, of course, you know, got you started, but it also brings in new blood to your organization. Typically, you know, maybe a younger person may not, but and it's someone that looks at things from a little different angle. It also introduces new personalities to your organization, which is, which is great and always interesting. And one of the most important things I think it does is it kind of gives your other employees a way to practice being a manager. Because we, what we would always do is we would get a program or get an intern in and we would assign them to another employee. And even though that employee may not, you know, officially have been a manager or a supervisor, they kind of coach that person and tell them, you know, here's what we're going to do and this kind of thing. And so it's been hugely successful for the various companies that I have that we've used them for. I think with Tech Restore Right now about 70, 75% of the employees that we have started as interns at one point. Some of them have been with us for over 10 years. Wow. Started started as an intern. And you know, where do you find these people? Lot some great. If you're in a technical business like I am, you know, local technical schools, there's DeVry out here, we have Heal, there's some other, you know, regional tech schools where people are going and those kind of places love their students to have hands on experience. If you don't have something like that, local community colleges are great resource and you want to go into their, you know, their employment department or their placement department, talk to their counselors and see what they have again, they're usually very positive, you know, responses when you go to talk to them. You can do some high schools have what they, out here, they call them rop. Don't ask me what it stands for, but it is like a work experience program. Sure. You need to look, look at what regulations in your area for, you know, having kids for underage workers.

Yeah, right.

Yeah, underage. And, and now in, when I'm talking intern, I'm, I'm pretty much talking non paid positions here.

Okay, that, yeah, that's what I was going to ask is because I know that some internships are paid.

Sure.

Yeah. But, but that's not, that's not the path you went down.

No, we just, you know, when we, so we went to a local school out here, Heald College, and we asked them, oh, do you have a kind of intern program? And they really, they said no. So the message here is like, well, if you go to one of these schools or entities and they don't have anything, well that's your opportunity to help them develop one. Which is what we did many, many years ago. And when we talk to them about, okay, well what's the goal of this program? What do you want your students to, you know, experience? It wasn't, hey, we want to wait for them to earn some extra money. It was more, we want a way for them to see what it's like being out in the. And I hate to use this term, but I'm going to use it anyway. The real world.

Yeah, right, right.

To have to do simple things like show up every day at the same time, set a schedule with your supervisor and stick to it.

Yep.

And so it kind of morphed from there and it became a requirement for them where they would either have to do some kind of extensive project or go on an internship for 120 hours is what they are. This, our program runs okay. And, and it's worked great.

And how many hours, how many of those hours per week? I mean, how long, over what time period does your classic intern or your typical internship run for you?

Sure. So that's where we're really flexible because especially if it's somebody we interview and we interview them just like a normal employee, we talk with them. We may bring in, you know, two or three at a time. And we're very flexible on their working around their schedule. Maybe they have another job or they're just at school all day. But what we really want them there for is at least a four hour window.

Okay.

Because it's hard to get started in projects and get things done if you're, you know, dropping in for two hours or an hour. It's kind of, it can be disruptive.

Right.

And so we, we shoot for that four hour window. Some, some interns come in and they may work a full day. Some, some come in and work straight through. If they have, it's like, oh, I'm going to school at night, I can come in every day. I'm going to knock this thing out in, you know, three weeks, you know, that kind of thing. That, that's rare. Typically they, they work maybe 20 hours, you know, 15 to 20 hours a week. And they, they come in and do that and okay, so it works, it works out great. And what we do is again, we go through a normal interview process. We have questions for them. We want to make sure that they can communicate correctly. We ask for a writing sample because we may have them communicating within the organization. We typically don't have them communicating to our customers and we don't have them in our case, working on customer units because we don't know what their skill levels are and we just don't want to put that at risk. Sure. That's not the conversation you want to have with your customer.

Yeah, right. I had some guy that works for free fix your thing, right?

Yes.

Sorry we screwed it up.

Yeah, it was a great deal for us, but bad for you. Yeah, yeah. So we get them to work on our stuff and, and we, what we do is we set up, you know, again, if they can show up for the interview, hey, that's great. That's, that's a check in the right.

Step box for that. Right.

Step two, do they show up for the next day or the next week when they're supposed to start? Great. Are they dressed okay? Do they come in, I mean, believe it or not, we've had this happen, you know, do they come in smelling like something maybe they shouldn't have been smoking in their car before, you know, they come in to, to go to work for you?

This is a concern, huh? I mean this has happened.

It's California, you know. And so we just have frank conversations with them and again they're, if they move in the right direction, we. One thing very, very important is you make your expectations very clear. I expect you to show up at this time. It's not, hey, I get there whenever I can because we're planning, someone's going to supervise you. This kind of thing. We tell them exactly what we expect and then what we, we, we spend just as much time asking them, what do you want to get out of this? You know, what is your goal here other than getting your degree or fulfilling this class requirement?

Do they get credit with their school for doing this? Okay, yeah, they get credit.

And like I said, it could be a class requirement or could be a graduation requirement, that kind of thing, but they definitely get credit for it and healed the one we do with that's where it's a non paid thing. And in the past we've some guys have come in and have worked so good and so hard that if we, you know, we wanted to hire them but they oh, I'm going to go do something else. Great, no problem. And we've tried to reward them, but we've actually stopped doing it because it kind of, it can cause issues if they talk to someone else and hey, I didn't get a bonus or I didn't get this, I didn't get that. So what we really try to do is make it rewarding for them as well and say, look, here's what we want. What do you Want to do what? What do you want to learn now in the Apple space? Which is fortunate, at least for the last few years or five years, whatever it is, most people are very interested in it and they like to get their hands on this stuff. And I mean there was a time when the first jobs we had interns doing was cleaning keyboards. You know, the wonderful sturdy extended to Apple keyboards that we, we had thousands of these things and you know, it was kind of this next test. Hey, come in. In the first eight hours we're going to have you do all this and they look at you and some of them turn around and leave.

Yeah.

Because they just, they don't want to do it and say, wow, they're not into it. And so again it's this lesson. It's like, well, I'm not going to ask you to do anything that I have not done. So we're going to do this, we do this all day long. So you need to participate. This is why we, you know, we want to get some of this stuff done and we kind of have this 80, 20 rule. 80% of the time you're going to be doing things that we want you to do, but 20% of the time we want you to tell us, hey, I really would like to learn this. I really would like to take apart this iPad Air 2. I really want to know how the retina screen separates from the glass. Those kinds of things or cool. Yeah, so, so we want them and the best ones typically know what they want. Oh, I want to see how this I want to do, you know, how does your whatever work. And so those people are, are wonderful. You know. And so I think that's, that's been one of the reasons for the success is we do listen to what they want to do. And it may be that 80% of the, you know, you're going to do 80% of the intern up front. Internship up front is going to be stuff we want you to do. The last 20% is going to be, you know, that depends how it gets broken up. Sure. But, but it's a great thing and you know, it's a huge benefit for your company. Even if it's just you having someone help you be accountable. And Dave, you and I have talked about this before. Knowing that someone is going to show up to do job, whatever not only helps you to stop and put your thoughts together about, okay, what part of my job can I give someone which helps you move from being that self employed person if you want to becoming a manager, business owner with you know, multiple employees. It kind of eases you into that role.

Yeah, that's true. Because that, that's one of the, I mean, I've always said that the, you know, the hardest thing you do in when, you know, once you've started a business is hiring your first employee. And part, a big part of what makes that hard is by the time you're hiring your first employee, it means you've got presumably some free cash flow. Right? And, and now what you're doing is taking that free cash flow that you have worked so hard to generate and giving it to someone else. Now, I mean, you're, you're hopefully getting done out of it, right?

Yeah, sure, yeah.

But it's a job you've been doing because you had to do it, right? You know, at least at some level. Now maybe you didn't have enough time to do it properly, but, but it was, you know, things were getting done and you have someone, you know, and, and you were generating this cash. Now you're taking this extra money, usually a significant amount if it's enough to hire an employee. Oh yeah, right. And, and you know, and, and just giving it away or not keeping it for yourself. Giving it.

That's right, that's right.

But, but that's not, that's not the only part of what makes that the hardest decision you'll ever make. The other part is exactly what you're talking about. You know, you're, you actually give up some, some of that, you know, really hard earned flexibility when you hire someone else because now you're accountable to someone. You're, you know, it's not that you're accountable to your boss, but it doesn't matter. It goes in both directions.

It's worse than being accountable to your.

Boss, you know, because, because you have to come up with all the ide, at least initially. Right. For that person. For what, what are they going to do? Right. That was the hardest thing for me when I hired somebody. It was like, I have to tell you what to do.

Holy crap. It changes it from feeling accountable to your boss to feeling responsible. It's responsible employees and you're, you know, especially when you're first getting started, you're responsible for everything. What are they going to do that day? And often. And I can, I can remember, you know, okay, well what, what am I going to have them do? And it can stress you out because you totally, you have to really think about it like, well, what can they do? And intern, if you will, is kind of like an employee with training Wheels, you know, it, you're, you're kind of safe and you can have them do something that you're like, well, you know, this isn't maybe the best use of their time, but I can't think of anything else. And it gives you that opportunity to have that interaction. And I think it's phenomenal. And I could tell you any field you can find someone that wants to come work for you, that doesn't want to, doesn't want to get paid. And I can tell you, we, So I started my first, first Mac related company, Mac Rescue, back in 94 and the year before that I had a buddy of mine, we were in college and we trying to find a way to get into the business. We loved the Mac and we're like, guys, could you imagine how great your life would be if you could actually get paid to mess around with these computers? And there was a guy and I mentioned here on the show running a company called the Mac Garage down in San Luis Obispo. And I didn't have the foresight, but my buddy Chris did. He's like, well, let me call that guy. And he called him up and said, hey, we just want to come work for you. You don't have to pay us anything. And it just so happened that the timing was right where this guy Don was kind of bursting at the seams. Too much business, working out of his house, getting ready to move to a commercial location and you know, had two college students dropped in his lap to do whatever he wanted to do. As long as we could do it on a Mac or this kind of thing, right?

Yeah, yeah.

And it was a huge experience, a huge benefit to him, but more even to me because I really saw how it could be done. Some ways that I really liked, other ways that I was like, oh man, I'm never doing that, you know, and slowly, I mean, we got to spend, you know, a year or so with this guy as he grew his business and we helped them and we interfaced with customers and all that stuff. And so, you know, if you flip it on the other side, if you're someone that is interested in doing something, there's no better way to get experience than to show up and say, hey, I'll do whatever you tell me, you know, within your business, you know, if you can do it and not have to require it to get paid, you can get some real hands on experience.

That's fascinating. Yeah, no, it, it, it makes perfect sense. Okay, now the. You said when you started, obviously you'd had some Experience, not. Not in an official capacity through your school as interns.

But.

But obviously you knew the benefits of this from both sides of the equation. Right, Because. Sure, because you, you know, you showed up and the guy took you in. Right?

Yeah, it's really good. That's it. Yeah. Which set my course. Set the course for my whole life.

Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. In many ways. Right?

In many ways, yep.

So. So you knew this going in and you helped this, this school near you, a technical school, is that right? That. That you worked with or work with still?

Yeah. So, yeah, the school is healed college. And they do not all just tech, but tech is part of their engineering or networking, that kind of thing. And. And so, yeah, they're the ones that we approached years ago to set this program up.

Yeah. Okay, but. So you set it up with them. What if. If I'm going to ask for me personally right here, but it's a good example for anyone. Uh, I'm five minutes from the University of New Hampshire, so big school.

Yeah, yeah.

Quite likely already has an internship program.

Quite likely they do, yes.

So do you. Have you had any experience with that or. Or even if you haven't, what advice do you give me? Right. I know that. Especially publishing Mac Observer. But even with. With some of the other things that I do here, there are excellent opportunities again, for, for both sides, for the interns and for us to. To put this together. And it's ridiculous that I'm not taking advantage of what's five minutes from my house. So, you know, what. What path do I take? I mean, do I just call the college and start asking about an internship? I mean, that's what I would do. If you got better advice.

Yeah, no, no, I think that the key is, is to get into their. If they have a placement center, which I'm sure they do, to talk to them and, and, you know, discuss what you're trying to achieve. And. And they may already have a program in place. It may need to be modified or they may, you know, oh, we don't really have anything in that department, but they may point you go, go talk to this guy and this professor, and maybe he knows somebody. You know, it could be something very informal or, you know, formal. And ours didn't start out very formal. It was like, okay, well, we think we have some people that would come over and would be interested in seeing what you guys are doing. And then we formalized it over a few years and just kind of stuck to that. That recipe that the key is just letting them know you're there.

Yeah.

And they're. And maybe, you know, writing a job description for what you would have the intern do. Right. And so that you can just describe it. Here's in this section, you know, whatever business entity you're working on, let's say you want to, hey, we need some help with our podcasting business and sure. We're going to do marketing. So we want to go into the business school and talk to the marketing department and see if they might have some interest or. Da, da. You know, or you could have somebody. Maybe it's not an internship. Maybe they need to do a case study.

Right.

We've had, we've had that before too, from a marketing standpoint with one of our businesses. And we had a, a guy who was getting his master's degree or his mba and he came out, did a whole case study on us, and it was actually a customer of ours before and said, hey, you guys, I want to do a case study and look at these different opportunities where your business is heading. And it's, it's just getting the word out that, hey, I'm here. If anyone, it may take a week or it may take a year to find someone. Sure, someone. And, or, and I would imagine multiple someones would love to be involved, you know, in what you have going on out there.

Yeah.

Right. No, no question.

No, I, I totally agree with that. Absolutely. It's, it's more this. And, and you're right. I mean, as we're sitting here, I, I looked and I found the University. University of New Hampshire internships website. And it. This is very formalized, as you would expect. Right. And so you've got to go through a, in order to, to, to do this, you would have to go through. Or I would have to go through a. Getting qualified by the New Hampshire Department of Labor, which is very formal.

Yeah.

Yeah. But I'm sure it's not, I'm sure it's not, you know, overly. It's not a huge burden to go through this, but.

That's right.

But yeah, you got to complete, complete a pre screening form to make sure that you're actually doing what you say you're doing.

You've got a, you're an entity, you know, a legal entity, I'm sure. And this is what you do. And you know, letting them, again, letting them know that you're here and then them trying to fit someone into what you want to do. And if they don't have a good fit. Okay, let's go talk to it. Maybe it's not them. Maybe it's the local community.

I was just going to say maybe it's one of the smaller schools nearby. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.

Yeah.

So I think it's a great opportunity, one that you should consider at any stage of your business. Once you're at the point where your. Your bandwidth is really filling up and you think, wow, this would be great if I could have somebody help me with X. Whether it be, you know, I mean, it could be anything from returning calls. I mean, there are interns that just want to learn about how a business works.

Yeah.

And, you know, it's often not exciting and sexy. It's often the run of the mill. We have to call all these people back. We have to do this. We have to ship these boxes, we have to pack these up. I mean, but that's a critical part of.

Learning that it's not sexy every day.

Yeah, yeah, that's right. That's right. And. And learning that. Okay. I want to, you know, this. This is a part of a business where I would like to hire somebody to do it eventually. Right. And so you can move on and do other things. And everybody who's going to be involved in a business need, you know, I would say, needs to go through it.

Yeah.

It's a great experience. So I'll post a few show notes up on the website@dba podcast.com with a few links and, you know, kind of some information about interns. And again, you always want to check your local. Whatever regulations that there may be and make sure that, you know, you're doing things by the book and so nothing comes back. And especially with labor, you know, if there's any kind of workman's comp or if there's any kind of different things or what if there's, you know, I'm sure there probably will be some kind of insurance requirement, you know, but it's. You just maybe your general business insurance policy, which we should probably talk about.

I was going to say there's another topic right there.

Insurance is. It can be really interesting. And so we'll make some notes for next time and we'll. We'll talk about insurance.

No, you know, you're. You're. You're right. It. The more I think about this, I mean, certainly there's. There's smaller community colleges nearby here that I could. And it could and probably should approach, but it. It's almost, now that I think about it, better for me to start with. Unh. Because if I go through whatever steps I need in hoops. I need to jump through there. As long as it's not going to be, you know, if it's something I can do in an afternoon, great.

Yeah, sure.

If it's going to take three weeks. Okay. Well, this is no longer worth our while.

Correct.

Right.

It can't be egregious, you know. Yeah.

And I don't think it will be because clearly they've, you know, they've kind of whittled this down. It's not their first rodeo with it, but going through that process and making sure that, you know, if they're happy with the way all I've, you know, all my eyes are dotted and T's across. Anybody else is going to be happy with it. And it actually relieves a lot of responsibility because I don't have to do any research. They've already done it all for me.

Well, and then you can use that.

Exactly.

To the local approved by.

Unh. Right.

Yeah. He's already proven. What would be great is if you are going to move forward is this kind of document your experience and then we'll circle back some point in the future and see how things went. Yeah.

Maybe we'll even have an intern on the show.

You never know.

That would be both sides of the equation.

Yeah. Yeah. Then you could get the, you know, the other side and how things. Where they found us and how it came. It'd be cool.

That'd be great. Very cool.

I think it's. I think it's a great thing.

Exciting.

I'm so. I'm sold.

So it sounds like it, man. Yeah. No, I'm glad. I'm glad.

And it's like many other things. It's. The reason I'm so behind it is because I'm a total product of it, you know, and it really. I didn't even think much about it until I sat down to do the show notes today and talked about. And I said, wow, man. I was interned and launched me, you know, where started everything where I'm at today, you know, so it really can have a profound impact on, you know, anyone.

Well, you know, and I've, I've said that for a lot of things. It helps when you're. When you're dealing with any, any, anyone or anything. If you've, if you've had the opportunity and this isn't always possible, but if you've had the opportunity to the other side of the equation, it really can give you a leg up. Because, I mean, you, You've created this program, you know, this whole 80, 20 thing. My guess is not everybody thinks about it that way. Right. But you were on the other side and you're like, well, wait a minute, I'm, you know, what's the quid pro quo here? You're baking the quid pro quo into the program. Not the potential of a, you know, unspecified bonus at the end and all. But you've learned, and you learn that the hard way. But yeah, yeah, but that's okay.

Yeah, yeah. If you get these people in, if they're not genuinely excited about coming in and working with you, it's not going to be the best experience for you or them.

Yep.

And so we have people, we spend a lot of time kind of pre qualifying because we don't accept every intern. And we walk around, we show them, we're like, hey, this is the dirty part of our business. It's like if you were in the restaurant business, like, you know, you're going to wash dishes. I mean, these are all these things because you want to, you know, you want them to come with their eyes wide open, no surprises. Here's the types of things you're going to do. This is what you're going to learn here. And then you ask them, does this kind of thing interest you? And some people, you know, like, oh, this is awesome. I get to do this and I want to do that and I can learn this. Great. And other people, you can kind of tell, you kind of look at them and they go, well, I really want to focus on, you know, Cisco routers and network security. And then we go, well, you know, this is probably not the place for, yeah, you should go intern at Cisco.

Oh, yeah, go somewhere else. Right.

Or a smaller third party networking company. So that's, that's what really pushes your buttons. And, you know, my, my internship with the Mac Garage in San Luis Obispo really was jumping into the business side of it, where my, my buddy Chris was really more jumping into the technical side. You know, I was just impressed that somebody could actually make a living, you know, moving Max around and adjusting, you know, the finder and this kind of thing, and dealing with member suitcases and fonts.

Absolutely. I made a lot of money with Font Da Mover.

Yeah, yeah, Fonty Mover and dealing with, you know, remember pagemaker and all this stuff. I was like, wow, this is unbelievable. You know, at the time I was running a landscape construction and, you know, design company, and I thought, well, I'm going to be. This is it for me. I'm going to be doing all this stuff. But, you know, the Mac opened my world up and being able to see this small business and the fact that this guy actually made a living and lived in a normal grown up house and paid his bills, that was it. Nailed it for me.

Yeah, it was cool.

It was good. So it's great. So anyway, I don't know how we're doing on time, Dave, if we have time to talk about another topic or if you want to save it for next week.

I think we save another topic for next week. We're coming up on the half hour mark. Here go we, which is, I think the perfect length, man.

Yeah, that's great. Yeah. So if you, if anybody, you know, if you're listening and you have questions about internships or you want some additional, you know, tips or, you know, feedback, certainly just, you know, email feedbackbapodcast.com we'd be glad to answer any questions and we can answer them on the show or just directly.

That's right. Feedbackbapodcast.com dba podcast on Twitter and I believe we're facebook.com dbapodcast if I'm not mistaken.

You got it. That's it.

Sweet.

Yeah.

Well, this is a pleasure, man. Always good talking to you and we'll. Yeah, we'll chat next week.

Excellent. Have a good one. Take care of.