06. Nail Your Employee Onboarding And You'll Retain Your Rockstars - Curt Janzen

Hey, everyone. Igor and Benji here at the Contractor Evolution Studio.

Today's episode is all about next level onboarding. So as business owners, we often forget what it's like to start at a new organization. It's really intimidating, right? It's not unlike your first day of high school. You're working through all sorts of insecurities. Will I fit in here? Did I make the right choice? Are people gonna like me?

This is.

This is how your new employees are feeling when they roll up to your shop or step foot on your job site for the first time. Now, the way that you make this person feel in the early stages of your working relationship can have really lasting effects, both positive and negative. So you do a great job of this, right? And you will have a bought in employee that is excited to bring their best to an already vibrant culture. But the reverse is also totally true, right? You bring somebody into a chaotic mess, they feel unsupported, they're a little bit confused about where they fit into the greater organization. And you can do irreparable damage here. So believe me, high performers, the guys and girls that you want, they're checking you out and making an awesome first impression. It matters. Today on the show, we have Kurt Janzen, co founder and CEO of Beyond Foam, a Calgary based spray foam contractor. Now, Kurt and his business partner, Kevin, they started the company back in 2006, but recently have made huge strides in their growth. In the last three years, they've doubled. They're on pace to do well over 8 million this year. They've got about 40 employees, and they've got more growth planned for the future. They're expanding so fast, in fact, that they're currently looking at buying some land and building a new shop to fit their rapidly expanding team. Now, one of the keys to their explosive growth has been creating a robust onboarding system that not only teaches new staff all the technical aspects of their role, but more importantly, it injects new team members with Beyond Foam's cultural DNA. This episode was a ton of fun for us. Kurt is so incredibly passionate. He cares so much about his people, and it really shines through. In our conversation, Kurt brings us a.

Ton of insight into the processes that make their staff onboarding system so powerful. In this episode, we're gonna dive into how he plans every new individual's first start day their first week to make them feel like a part of the team in a very short period of time. He's also built a really cool what he calls a human scavenger hunt that breaks the ice very quickly and helps every single new employee get to know the rest of the team very quickly. He also tells us about what's a funny. He calls it a no turd policy that allows a whole bunch of their existing staff to vet new hires. They rarely make hiring mistakes, but when they do, they get dealt with, so to speak, very, very quickly. Kurt's also taken most of his whole training process and he's digitized it using technology to collapse time frames and to get people up to speed in their roles very quickly and ensure a very high standard of quality on all their job sites. Best of all, what I love about this conversation with Kurt is he boils it down all of this stuff to very simple concepts that I truly believe any contractor can take and implement into their own business. So let's sit down for a very insightful and fun conversation with Kurt Jansen.

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Kurt, welcome to the show. We're really excited to do this with you.

Thanks, man. Appreciate being here.

So I wanted to start this conversation off with something that you'd brought up when we were talking about this. Kurt, you said you began this whole process by putting yourself in the shoes of a new employee. And I thought that would be a good place to begin the conversation. What did you mean by that?

So when we started trying to narrow this down to how do we onboard people the right way, we wanted them to learn a certain amount of things and we wanted them to feel a certain way as they went through that whole entire process.

You wanted them to learn stuff and you wanted them to feel stuff.

Exactly. It's not just drop a manual in front of their lap and tell them to read for four hours. It was meant to do something that would connect them to our company, connect them to our DNA, get them to understand what we were about, why we did the things we did. Because when they start seeing that big picture, when they start feeling that big picture, all of a sudden, their job can start when their wheels are spinning 100 miles an hour already. And so it wasn't just a knowledge base, because we could have done that very easily is just fed them with data, but they're not going to feel what we want them to feel here because there is a connection. There's something that we try and do differently than other construction companies.

Right.

This is something that we talk about a lot. Like, first impressions matter a great deal. And so what impression are you trying to make on your new people when they start with you? How do you want them to feel after a few weeks?

Yeah, well, I think it comes back to, you know, we have a core value. Like, we have our core values that we live by here. And whether that's, you know, the being relational or quality driven or pursuit excellence, you know, all those things that we try and really do on a day to day basis, like, that's important for them to see that and to get that overall picture of what we're doing, why we're doing it, and for us, those core values. I started asking myself, does this take like one day for them to learn it? Does it take three days? Does it take six months? Does it take a year? How long will it take to get somebody to feel the way we want them to feel? Because we feel like culture is a person. It's when you walk into a room, you walk into beyond foam, you feel a certain way. Right? And so if we set that up well at the beginning, what does their journey look like in our company? And so I'm a guy with momentum. I need momentum. If I hit a baseball and I round second, I'm going to third. Like, I'm not stopping. There's too much train moving forward. And so I kind of put that philosophy into this too, is when we start a person off at beyond, if we started creating momentum right from the get go, how fast can they get to third for us? How fast can they represent us well? How well can they produce for us? How will it change their mindset when bad things happen or obstacles come in their way? And all these things kind of came into that momentum of if they learn and feel the right things from the get go, what is it going to do to impact the rest of their journey with us?

And that those first few days, those first few weeks, that sort of echoes throughout their entire time with the company, either positively or negatively. And I think that that's something business owners can forget sometimes or lose touch of. Like, um, the experience that somebody has in the first few hours is something they're gonna be thinking about weeks later. And the, and the experience they have in the first month, that's something that's gonna, you know, they're gonna carry through years down the Road with you as beyond foam. So I think it'd be really good to start sort of with maybe just explaining for the audience like there's two sides to onboarding, right? There's right tracking and there's fast tracking. Igor, can you kind of unpack this framework thoroughly for us?

Yeah, for sure. And just before we, as we get into that, one point I want to make to what we were just talking about is when you're hiring really high performers and there's of course, like, you know, high performing companies, they do a lot to hire, to hire and bring on strong, strong people, there's really no point of putting them into a weak onboarding process because that's, that's the level that you set, right? So, yeah, absolutely. It sets the stage, but I'd say even more so you're almost telling them, here's the level of execution that expect for everything you do, whether you're a salesperson or you're on the tools or you're an operations manager, this is the level of standard of work. And if you come in as the leader really well prepared, all the stuff's dialed for them. I'm excited to get into all these details with you, Kurt, but when you get into it at that level with them, and that's the first impression that makes an impact on them, I've seen this, I've onboarded hundreds of people directly that, that sets the bar of what's. Of how we execute as a company, all of us. Right. And if that bar is weak, that mentally becomes their bar that they're looking at. Right. And if it's high, that's that, that that's what's going to set the precedent for the years and years to come in their career with you. So, yeah, I couldn't agree more. This stuff's super important. And yeah, there's, there's really two sides to it. Right. Like what you're doing on one hand is you're looking to get them dialed into your culture, right into the DNA of who you are as a company. The values you stand for, your purpose, your vision, and to integrate, like, culturally with people, that stuff is so, so important.

Right.

So that's one side of it and that I guess we're calling here, right? Tracking. And separately from that, we have this fast tracking concept which is really around, like, how do we get them as competent as possible in their role as fast as possible. Right. And, and there's so much that I'm super excited to get in here with Kurt because he does really amazing Things on both sides of this. But some of his, like, systems and processes around this fast tracking, getting them skilled up in the competencies is super cool. But I really do think we should start with this, right. Tracking concept, this cultural concept. How would you have someone feel like a part of the team as quickly as possible? Because I do think that that is the foundation to everything. It's like when you walk into a party, right? There's everyone always. When you don't know people, there's always a bit of that nervousness. Right. And that's. That's how even the highest performers feel when they. When they. When they come into the organization. So I think that this is the first point I'd really love for us to dive into, which is, you know, what are some of these really amazing things that Kurt does at Beyond Foam to get people to feel like a part of the team? So why don't we start there and then we'll get into some of that technical stuff after.

Sounds great.

Perfect.

Before we jump in, before you ask me your question, I'd like to say that we're going to talk a lot about Kurt and Beyond Foam. Kevin is equally a part of Beyond Foam and is a huge part of our culture and what we do. He's my business partner in this, and so I know we're going to be talking a lot about me and things that I'm doing. So I want you and everyone that's listening to kind of understand that there's someone that's behind me, beside me that is doing legitimately a majority of the work along this. So I don't want this to be the Kurt show. This is definitely the Kevin show that Kurt gets to be the face of in a lot of these situations, like this podcast today.

Awesome. Well, I know we're going to get into so much good stuff in the next little bit here, so perhaps for another episode, we'll certainly have one too. So that's good. But, yeah, so, Kurt, what I'd love to know here is, like, so if I'm a new member of your team, so I go through the interview process and I get hired. Paint the picture. Picture for me a little bit about, like, what. What does that. Even before the first day, coming to my first day, what does that world look like at Beyond Foam?

Yeah, that's. That's a great question, because it all starts, you know, it actually, and I think we're going to dive into this a little bit later on, but it all starts with how we build our ideal candidate, right? How do we find the right person to onboard to get to get to there? Right. And so now we fast forward, we have the right person and they come into the office, they sign their employment agreement, they understand their deliver, their accountability is that they know kind of what we are going to be, the metrics we're going to be judging them on. So they know this two weeks, a month, whatever before their actual start date. And so at that point, what we do as a company is we have, we try to figure out a list of everything that we would, they would need to get going that next day, you know, or the day that they start. And so it's a simple checklist for us. You know, do they need a phone, what apps do they need on it, do they need a computer, what programs do they need on it? Do they need a certain set of prep, reg.

Sizing, what kind of cards they have, like safety cards, all that kind of other stuff. And we accumulate all this information from them at that employment agreement signing meeting. And so now they've signed this agreement, we in the background are busy going to get their swag bags. When they show up, they have their shirts in their size, their hoodies, their hats. You know, depending on their sales or frontline worker, it's a different package for them. Everything's kind of sitting on their desk or on their workstation for them. So now let's fast forward again to let's say they're starting on a Monday, on Thursday or Friday, they get an email from me sent by our ops lady, Tammy, basically saying, hey, welcome to the team. I'm welcoming them to joining us. I'm glad they're coming. And I tell them this is what you can expect. You know, our crew show up at 7, they're out of the shop by 7:30. We want you there at 7:30. You're going to go and see X, the person that hired you. They're going to introduce you to tia, bring a lunch, bring some snacks, bring some water, we have lots of water and coffee here. Get ready to go because it's going to be a busy day of getting you onboarded. And that's kind of how we try and start it because the last thing we want is, you know, somebody wants to come in and they're, they're a balloon that's pumped up. They want to show off kind of their skills, what they can do. And if they show up and we start deflating the air and we start, you know, losing the momentum that they want to create in the company, then we are Doing them a disservice, and we're doing ourselves a disservice. So we want to make sure that, you know, whatever they're coming with, in with that energy, whatever it is, that we match it or beat it so that we're setting that bar for them.

You know what I think is so cool, what you just said, it's such a simple thing that anybody could do relatively inexpensively is they arrive and they get a present on their first day. You're like, here's all your stuff. Here's your computer, here's your equipment. Here's a nice hat, here's a shirt that fits.

What a nice touch. What a soft landing to make for someone who's probably totally nervous. Like it's their first day of grade eight. It's like, am I going to fit in here? There's some insecurities, and you just kind of open the. Open the relationship up with like, here's some really great stuff for you to use. We're excited to have you.

Totally. And one thing I'll add to that, to this earlier point of, like, setting the bar of how the company executes. Think of the impression that's made for them of, you know, on one hand, in most companies, actually, and I'd love to hear, Benji, kind of some of your background on this, but in some companies, you come in and nothing's prepared, right? They're like, there's no schedule, there's no agenda. It's like, what do you want to talk about? And versus, on the other hand, you walk in and you're like, here's your phone, all your apps are loaded. Here's your computer, all the applications you need. Here's your calendar. Everything's preloaded for you this entire week, where you are and when. Here's your swag pack. Everything's in your size, right. The first impression is like, wow, this company executes at a high level. And I better do, too.

Yeah, right.

And how do you feel like when you show up at my shop, Benji and I got a shirt for you that fits you, you know, like that. That's a feeling that you're not. That you're not going to lose right away. Right? That's building a lot of that relational capital.

100%.

Yeah, I love that word. I just want to pause there. Relational capital. Can we just dive into that for a sec? How do you interpret that and think about that?

Well, well, it's. It's all Jocko Willnick, right? Just.

We all have capital that we put into people's lives. And sometimes we're going to ask them to do things and we're going to take away some of that capital. Sometimes as a company, we're going to be able to help them out and we're going to put that back into that relationship. And for all we're so relationally driven, the quality of the relationship is the quality of beyond for us. And that's kind of throughout the company. From me to an installer, from an installer to a client, from us to a vendor, the relationships are huge. If we always feel like we're pushing, putting more stuff into that capital bucket, then we can ask things from people and they're going to say yes, not because they feel obligated, it's because they feel like they want to contribute back and make us a success.

Yeah, 100%. Right? To Kurt's point, in the contracting world, it's people driven, right? It's human asset. It's people doing great work with amazing customer service, whether it's residential or commercial. But that's what that separates great contracting companies from the weak. And how do you do that? You build into your people with relationship capital. Right. And this early onboarding stage is such a great first opportunity to do that, to really build into them. So that's awesome.

There's a competitive edge available to a business that does this. Well, you know, I know we'll talk about this later, but like, this stuff isn't that complicated and if you do it well, you stand out in a way that you may not even realize. Like, you know, a big part of my role with Breakthrough Academy is just meeting contractors and talking about their business systems. And this onboarding thing comes up a lot, right? Like a fairly typical sort of old school approach to this is, hey, you're hired, welcome to the chaos. Hop in this truck with this dude. Follow them around for a couple weeks. We hope you learn something. If you don't, you're probably going to get canned. And yeah, good luck. It's like that, that you, you are not. I mean, A, that's not a really high performance practice, but B, you're really shooting yourself in the foot because this is, this is something that you can very, very easily be better at compared to your competition. The bar is very low, globally speaking. So I just think this is low hanging fruit for a business owner to invest in.

Well, I think we're going to play the game. How many times are we going to say this is not rocket science today? Right? Like it isn't. It's not. It's just common sense stuff that we're just going to, that we just kind of work through in a systematic way.

Totally awesome.

So on that note, guys, I'd love to get into some really practical stuff because what I'd love the audience to see in here here is just. Is exactly what you said, Kurt, is like this stuff isn't rocket science, but it's so cool and so powerful and yet most companies don't do it. So I want to kind of carry on with this. So we talked a bit about like how you set up for this first day of a new team member joining your team. How do you inject that, let's call it like cultural DNA into these new employees?

For sure. I think that I kind of have to explain what we do a little bit step by step to kind of get into that so that you see the big picture and then the than the little pieces. So when you show up the first day. So Benji shows up, he's got his hat and his steel toed boots and he shows up at Beyond Foam and walks his way to the office. He knows where that is because that's where he had his interview and all that stuff. How our process works is we've decided to build this human scavenger hunt. And again, we want them to learn things from different people in our company. And so that was kind of the mindset in creating it is that they're going to be going around getting the right information from the right people. And we did this very selfishly in the way that it's maddening when our operations girl gets asked all the time, how can you help me with my time card? Where that's our HR department, but they're bugging the wrong person. So it costs us something as a company every time that someone's flicking nickels at their head and taking their time. So if we can eliminate a lot of those conversations, a lot of then our business can be better. We're going to be more profitable, we're going to do better as a company. So the whole scavenger hunt idea came about because we wanted to put the right questions in front of the right people. Not just on Monday, but for the next 15 years. We want them to keep on going and knowing where to go. And how do you do that if you don't know their name? How do you do that if you have nothing in common with them? How do you do that if you don't even know if they're approachable? How do you do it if you don't Know where their office is. Some of those really practical, practical things we just put into a systematic way. And we use a program called Lessonly that helps us out with that. So Penny shows up, gets introduced to Tia, and Tia is my rock star assistant. And so she really is my implementer of my big ideas. And so she says, okay, let's go see your workstation. She walks you to where your workstation is, and that's where you see your package, your swag bag, your computer or your prep bag, whatever. And we have a couple different onlineing paths that we use. We have an office sales manage path, we have a frontline worker one. And then we have what we call our seasonal worker. And so Benji, he's, he's a muscular, stocky man. So he's on the tools, he wants to spray some foam for us. And so T brings him to the area where he's like, yep, these are your T shirts, your hoodies, your hat. This is your prep bag. And so now the first thing you want to do when you start working at our company is you want to learn how to get paid. That's why you're there, right? And so we show you the app that we use to get log you on. It's already on your phone, you're good to go, right? So you can log on, you can punch in your hours and you learn about that. The second thing she does is she teaches you how to get onto lessonly, which you already have that app as well. On your phone. You have your login, your username, your password. It's all there for you. And it's a very intuitive thing where you can go through and you watch videos, you answer questions, you do that kind of stuff. So step one is they're going to go and they're going to find out just a video of me talking. And the video of me talking is just saying, hey, welcome to our group of companies. And this is me, My name is Kurt, this is Kevin. We started this back in 06, blah, blah, blah. And we kind of just talk a little bit about why we started the business. And they get a little feel of, hey, you know what, These guys were just owner operators not too long ago. Now we're a company that's been more established, we have X amount of staff, all that kind of other stuff. And we do that through visuals of pictures of our guys talking just a little bit about our culture and what they can expect for the day. Just we want to outline that again that, hey, we want to be set up for you so you're set up to go. So after we're done doing that first one, what they actually do is the sheet says, now you got to go find Tammy. And so Tammy is our operations person and she's the one that gets bombarded with people asking her questions. She's the busiest person in our company by far. And so we want to make sure that people are communicating with her the right way, the right systems, knowing what to do with text, what to do with phone calls, what you do when you're sitting, what to do when you're off, you know. So by the end of a 15 minute conversation with Tammy, Benji would know exactly all the phone numbers that he needed to text if something went wrong on a day, or a client wanted something, or he would know all that stuff. And because it's in this program, he can always just keep on going back to it. He doesn't have to ask the question anymore. He just goes back into that level. That's phase two. And he can reread all that. How we inject our culture into this, because that's the learning part, the feeling part is we want Benji to know Tammy. Like, we want him to understand Tammy and get along with Tammy. There has to be a relationship there. And so we do something funny in this part where we tell you to Google a short person joke. Tammy's not very tall, and so you have to Google a short person joke. You have to tell Tammy that joke. If she laughs, you can stay with us. If she doesn't laugh, then you're done working for beyond group companies at that point. Right. And so it's just a little thing that we do just to get to know that person a little bit, create a laugh, create a story, create a little bit of a feeling in there. So that's kind of where we're at with that.

I love the piece about just getting to know her on a personal level. Do you sort of set up questions or cues for other people in the organization? Do they know what questions to ask you or do they know what the project manager's personal interests are? How do you do that around the company?

100%. Yeah, we do that with everyone in the company. So as they, you know, and I'll kind of fast forward it, but they go from Tammy and then they're going to go see our safety person, which is normally all you do when you get onboarded. You get thrown down this binder, you have to read through it, you know, sign the pages that you read it, which you never do, and then you're kind of done. When they talk to Tia, they have to ask her, you know, you know, if she could be any animal, what would it be and why? And I told Tia, she's never allowed to answer the same question twice the same way. So she can't always be a unicorn. She has to be different things. Right. And so it just. It creates again another little bit of rapport. So the next day, you know, when Benji comes in, she goes. He goes up to Tia and is like, hey, how's the grizzly bear today? Right. Well, that's a culture thing, right? That's a feeling that now there's a rapport. There's something built between you guys. Other personal questions we do. We talk about recreation. Kevin and whoever's onboarding. We'll talk about where their favorite places are to vacation. I talk to people about sports. You know, what did you play? What do you like? What do you watch? We try and find some commonality in that. So we're doing all those types of things to make sure that they feel connected to us as people as much as they're figuring out what they're learning at the same time.

Yeah.

What I love about this is we talk about this concept of this cultural DNA and the name of the game with onboarding is how do you get someone new to get sort of injected with that cultural DNA as fast as possible? And what I think most leaders don't realize is that you have that DNA all throughout the organization with your existing team. And what people fail to do is just to think a little bit methodically, like, you know, as to what Kurt is saying around, like, how would I go do that? With some intentionality, while you just make sure that in their first day, their first week, that they have that time. And maybe it's in the form of a game or in the form of, you know, scheduled time slots with specific people, however it might look, but that you just get them to hang out and spend some time together. Because once that. Once that relationship is built, when that individual has certain things they're trying to figure out or certain problems, which they inevitably will in their first few months, they know who they can go to because the baseline connections are there. So I think that as a leader, it's definitely worth your time to think through a little bit. Like I said, whether it's in the form of a game or just schedules or however else you to want to actually bring some intentionality to how you have a new person meet the rest of the team in a very organic.

Relational Type of way you want them to fall into rapport as quickly as possible. And it might seem a little bit gimmicky, but me on my first day, knowing that my boss, Kurt, is into sports. What's your favorite team, by the way?

I'm an Oilers fan.

Okay. Well, I might make it difficult, but I know that you're an Oilers fan. I can make fun of you for being an Oilers fan. Right?

That's the point. And so that tiny little cue, knowing that, it gives me something to lean into on day two when I'm maybe a little bit nervous and I want to break the ice. As leaders, we forget how nerve wracking it is to do this, because we've probably owned our own business for a few years, and it's sort of an abstract concept. But these new people, they want to fit in. And if you can just make that a little bit easier for them in the form of a scavenger hunt, in the form of. Of getting them to ask questions, that kind of build. That relational side of it, I think that's huge. The other thing that I wanted to highlight that really shone through in this last section here, Kurt, is you guys go broad. It's not like on your first day, you're like, hey, so here's your job. You go dig ditches and this is your shovel, and go do it. You're like, here's this division of the company. Here's this division of the company. Here are these staff. This is where what they do maybe speak to the value in doing that. Why is it so important for somebody new to see the greater context that they fit into?

Well, if we want to be a company that, you know, wants to grow leaders and promote advancement, we got to show them what the whole big picture looks like. We got to show them that there's room to grow in our company, that there's room to gain more skills or to pursue different interests.

So if they don't understand the org structure in all 35 staff that we have approximately today, and see where they're at and how they can move around in there, that's going to limit them.

When I do my onboarding, part of it, when I talk about culture and org structure and that kind of stuff, I really show people, hey, Chad, who's a general manager, Lee, who's a general manager, Ryan, who's a sales manager, they all started by scraping walls and sweeping floors. Every one of them. They all work their way up in the company. And.

We'Re not going to promote based on how much time you've been here, we're going to promote you based on your ability to produce for a company. And when they can see all the different arms of our company working together for that same common goal, that just gives them that incentive or that vision that they can keep on growing within our company.

So good, good. They, they can see a future for themselves within Beyond Foam when you do that.

If I could just highlight one, one more quick point before we move on. I, I couldn't agree more with, with this advancement piece, one additional one that's a bit more immediate. I think that there is a power to understanding how one's individual work, like how my work influences other people totally today, tomorrow, next month. Right. So if, if I'm, if I'm a, a field worker, like a production person, how does my work influence the office people? What does the world of the sales people look like and what are the promises that they're setting to the customer that then I'll have to deliver on? Right. So every organization is, is very interconnected between what everyone does. And I think that there's a big power in everyone understanding what the different roles are like.

Yeah, we talk a lot about who's your. Who at beyond, you know, who's the person that, that's getting you to your goals because you have your deliverables, right? You have your accountabilities that you have to do in the targets. Well, who's helping you get there, you know, by training you or encouraging you or doing proper meetings and setting, you know, targets with you? Who are the people that are actually physically doing the work, that are trying to make times and to, to make their deliverables. Right. And so, so when they, when they come in here and they realize that, yeah, this is not them on an island and you know, unto themselves kind of thing, that they are part of a system that if everyone just does their job well, then we're going to succeed as a company.

Totally. So I think that's a really. There's some very practical steps there that we've just unpacked as far as, like getting a new person familiar with your culture. One thing I know you do unbelievably well, Kurt, is you actually go out of your way to get to know new people yourself, like, so just talk a little bit about the steps you follow to keep track of personal interests and know what their life goals are. What are you doing to keep a record of all that, to bring it up later on in conversation? Walk us through your process there.

We just cheat and Write everything down. It's really the biggest thing.

Total hack.

Yeah, yeah. It's not rocket science. So part of our questionnaires, as they're going through the lessoning, is we grade you on everything. So when we say, what are your interests? If you write nothing in there, you get a zero. If. If you, Benji, say, hey, you know what? I like skiing and I like going to the keg with my girlfriend. You know, if that's what I do like you like doing. Which would both be good things. Right? Then. Then we write that down.

We.

It's. It's in our forms. We just move it into a document for all of our staff that we have and what their interests are. And so we just. We keep track of that. And when we do our evaluations, when we do our career meetings, all that stuff. Stuff, we pull up that file, we look at some of those things, we make sure that we know kind of where they're at with stuff. And as other people in our company find out more information about them, we just have a place that we dump that information.

And then as a leader, sort of a performance manager, if you will, how do you work that into career development, into GSR meetings? Is that stuff that you do stuff with later?

Yeah, we definitely use it for stuff. Not more. More. So on the trust side of the relationships instead of the performance side. On the relationship, or maybe. Maybe I should put it more as a relational capital side is where we use those things. Like, we have a TV down in our office that has a pie chart that when you walk in, you can see what percentage of gross profit we are at at the month and what our goal is. And it's just in percentages. So every day when you walk in, you see that it's perfect of our performance culture stuff that we do, right? And when we. When we get. When the pie is full, we celebrate as a company, whether we go archery tagging, or we rented sumo suits and just beat each other up on the lawn in the front yard here, or we've gone to the train of terror and, you know, done the haunted train thing with everybody. We just do events with people because that's who we are as a culture, right? With COVID happening, some of that stuff has really slowed down for us. And so we still wanted to have that performance culture. So now we. Now we cheat and we use their interests and we buy them gift cards. And so now I know Benji likes skiing and he likes the keg. I actually already have in a folder downstairs in the office, a hundred dollar Gift card for Benji for the keg and a $50 gift card for Sport Check or whatever the source for him. And we try and be as personable with that as we possibly can so as we get to know something. You know, I met with a guy the other day that works for me, and he's done a little bit of jiu jitsu, and I'm a jiu jitsu guy. Well, I went out to, like, the best jiu jitsu place in town, and I got him a gift card for that place. Like, it's rock and you walk in there, it's amazing. And so I could have gone to Sport Check and got him a gift card, but I went to a place that I know that he's going to be excited when he walks in there. And so when he performs and he does stuff that represents the DNA of our company by, you know, cleaning up a little extra, making a client happy by staying a little extra long to finishing a project and not letting it go to two days or whatever it is that we just reward them immediately for that. And that's all part of of information network. They don't even remember that they put that in under onboarding stuff. They don't remember because we're giving them so much information that day. They don't remember. They said they like Japanese Village. That's their favorite restaurant. But when we give them that card, they're like, how'd you guys know that? Well, we cheated. We wrote it down.

This is just another huge gold nugget. I want to emphasize, like, do not underestimate the power of personalized gifts and incentives. If somebody was like, hey, you know, if you win this sales gift competition, there's a hundred bucks. I'm like, I don't care. Right. But if you said, hey, we're going to get you this hundred dollar thing that you're probably not going to buy for yourself, but it's totally connected to your own, like, personal interests. Then I'm. Then I really care. So that's a really good piece there, Kurt. You've got a. Before I move on, you've got a really great policy within Beyond Foam that I want you to talk a little bit about.

Yeah, I know what you're talking about. You're talking about the no turds policy here at Beyond Foam. So, yeah, if we get a turd as part of the group, we just flush it as quick as possible.

Typically at this stage in our company, I don't flush them anymore. Management doesn't flush them anymore. Frontline workers Flush them for us. So we get somebody that comes into the company, and for whatever reason, they got through our onboard or our conversion calls, they got through our interviewing process, all that kind of stuff. If we get a guy coming here like, this guy is a turd, we say, yeah, he's done. You know, like, we just do not accept that anymore. And it's not like we're perfect in the no turd policy. We've. We've hung onto some turds a little bit too long, and it's not a good feeling, but we just have drawn the line as a company. And if you're a turd, you're gone.

And that's another really cool benefit of having this, like, organization, wide onboard thing is this new person gets to touch and build relationships, hopefully build relationships with so many others. But to the point, right, if there is an issue there with the personality or the cultural fit or the performance ability, things like that, a whole bunch of people in your organization are gonna. Are gonna find out and tell you pretty quick.

It self regulates.

Exactly. It self regulates. You know, we want people to feel dissonance. If they don't fit our DNA, we want them to feel super, super uncomfortable. That's our goal. They fit our DNA. They're gonna love it. They're gonna thrive, they're gonna joke around, they're gonna work hard. You know, we're gonna have a lot of fun doing what we do.

I love it. I love a good no turds policy.

Kurt, tell me this. Like, you've implemented this. You've got some really phenomenal steps that we've just gone through. What kind of feedback are you getting from staff that have been through this?

Yeah, I love that question. You know, we've now, at this point, we've actually put every staff member, whether they've been with us for two months or 10 years through our onboarding program, because it's a living document, we want people to keep on. You know, we want feedback on it first off, and we want to grow it from the people that we've onboarded in the last short while. The biggest things are is just. It's an emotional connection. It's that they felt welcomed, they felt engaged, they felt like there was momentum. They felt educated and involved, like there's lots of words that they're using. I actually went around this morning and I asked four people who we onboarded in the last month, tell me something you liked and tell me something you felt. Because that's what we do, right? And if they couldn't come up with both of those. I was failing as what we're trying to do. And they all came back to me mostly with how they felt. And a bunch of dudes telling you, hey man, I felt welcome, you know, I felt good. I have one guy that we onboarded a couple weeks ago talking about the Oilers. He comes in, throws his garbage in my Oilers trash can because he says that's where it belongs, right? So we built enough rapport that he like, like there's that community, you know, that, that camaraderie that we have. So how many? And I don't see myself as the CEO. Like that's not how I picture myself. That's my title, it's my role. But people that start working here, you know, for whatever reason, they'll feel intimidated to go see the CEO. Now I got a sales guy that comes and throws his old bananas in my trash can, right? So my office stinks and not his. Right. It's just one of those things where, where when they start to feel like they have that relationship with me, I feel like they're gonna put out and produce and I wanna back up. Cause again, a lot of this stuff is a little bit selfish. I want people to feel dialed in culturally quick. So we're talking about that, right? But I don't want it to cost me $2,000 for every person to do it. I don't want it to take months and months and months of time. Again, momentum, trying to get things done quickly, just being rational with how long is it gonna take? And so I really wann in six hours, you know, I want them to leave after six hour day, exhausted, their mind just blown with everything that they're doing and ready to come back to work the next day to actually start their training part of it.

Amazing, amazing. I love it so much. So many good points there. Like to get it off on the right, start to get people in the right mindset and to set a really high level like standard of onboarding. So. Good. Um, let's, let's transition to, to another topic here just because I know Kurt, there's so many amazing things when it comes to what we can call fast tracking, which is this concept of like, how do you get someone skilled up as quickly as possible? So Kurt, like tell me a bit about that. I know that you, you guys have made some really amazing like standard operating procedures for all the main stuff that a lot of people do. You've have these like, these competency models to, to like have a checklist to be able to evaluate Whether it's you or a person kind of grading themselves, you integrate some really cool technology to do it. Tell me a bit about that. Like after they've gone through their first day or two, how do you work? How do you begin to work in like, bit of this, like technical or skill side of things?

Yeah, for sure. That's, that's a great question. It all started about seven or eight years ago when we started writing down, excuse me, on a paper copy.

What would, what you would call a log book. And so again, Benji shows up. He's not a skilled guy, he's just big and strong and he wants to work. And so we say, you know what, we have a program and then we call it like a level 1, level 2, level 3 helper, level 1, level 2, level three sprayer. And it's a comp model procedure where Benji can go in, he can verify skill sets, people sign off on it. He learns how to poly a window scrape foam off a wall, how to do density checks, how to do some technical stuff. And we have it all in there. And then as it gets signed off, he can move up. So you. Benji's not allowed to come ask for a raise until he has proven he's competent in certain things. So it's a roadmap. Do you want to make 18 bucks an hour, Benji, or do you want to make 90 grand a year? So this is how you do it now with using technology. It's really helped us amp that up. And it used to take us about a year to get somebody from brand new hire that just had some of the starting attributes or compelling qualities that we needed. Like they have to be a self starter, they have to, you know, client care, great communication, you know, some of those things to. Now all of a sudden he's running a truck and he's, he's producing for us and he's on his own. And so that used to take us about a year, ish, maybe a little bit longer. And so with the use of technology, we use a program called Lesson Lean. Again, we just moved all those competency models into a digital form. And so now we're using more videos, pictures, there's testing, there's questions, there's places them to actually video themselves doing it and then hitting enter and it uploads that we can verify the skill set. So it takes a lot of that extra work out of it and just makes it really streamlined for us without having all the paperwork done. This would have been an enormous undertaking because we've had some of these Systems in place for a while now. It's moving over, it's making them better. We call it a live document so that it's never complete, it's never finished, it's always getting better. And that, that's what we use, is that technology now to help us out.

So cool, so much good stuff. Coming back to the story, Benji is a new employee at Beyond Foam. What are some of these main modules that you've pre built that he's going through in his first week? What kind of stuff is it?

It's obviously very skill orientated. There's a Beyond Foam way to roll up an extension cord and if you don't do it right, right, people are going to bark at you. You're like, dude, that's not what we do here. And so Benji's going to have to learn that. But back in the day, 15 years ago, 12 years ago, it used to be don't lick that chemical, don't touch that and hurry. That was our SOPs. But now we've broken it down into ways that keep our trucks running. People learn things step by step in a logical way. How to start up equipment, how, how to shut down equipment, how to clean things, how to prep things, there's all those things. How to even go to the storage room and get the materials you need for the day, that's all in our SOPs now that as long as you can read, you can do it, there's really no stopping you. I put my 13 year old kid through some of our competency models just to see if he could figure it out and he does. We just try and make it it as simple as we possibly can.

We really live in a fascinating world from that perspective. And I'll jokingly say this, but even if someone doesn't read, you can have them learn so much of this through the power of video, right? And I'm joking, I'm sure they'll read. But the point I'm getting at is video is such a powerful tool that can be used as well to demonstrate certain concepts. Like I remember, you know, almost like 15 years ago, I, I trained hundreds and hundreds of people on ladder safety and fall arrest systems. Like in my painting company. When I think of the number of times that I've said the same thing, done the same thing, I'm like, man, you don't have to repeat this one more time with the next crew and the next crew and we work in these industries that are so like what you said, how to cover a window, how to roll up an Extension, Extension cord, how to. How to make sure that ladders are set up safely. I've. All these things are such repetitive tasks, right? Like, I would teach. Here's how you scrape sand and prime failing paint on siding over and over again. But really, I could have put just a little bit of energy into producing a great video with the instructions, with a great written sop, with a competency model, the checklist of all the things you got to do. And boom, now 100 people can consume it, 2000 people can consume it in its kind of most perfect example. So what I want to hear about is this Lessonly platform and just how you do it in there. And I've seen your stuff, and it's so cool. And I love how beautifully simple it is. There's written stuff, there's video. But in this modern day and age, like, we can take what we know really well within our organization, you and your key people, and put it into.

A place where it's going to look, live and continue to live so so many people can look at it. So tell me a bit about that. Just for people who haven't seen it in your organization. What does it look like?

For sure? Yeah. And Lessonly is just one of many of these type of lesson programs that are out there. So we use this one because we like it.

And.

To explain, I'll kind of go through what. I actually had an epiphany last week where I had a couple guys come up to me and say, hey, Kurt, I want to get trained on how to sell concrete lifting. Because I'm out and about all the time. We're already lifting concrete at one person's house. I don't know how to sell the neighbor when they come and say, hey, how much will this cost? I have no idea what to do, right? And so I'm like, oh, yeah, no problem. I'll put on a course on Saturday morning. It'll take about four hours, three, four hours. And we can do that. I'll invite a bunch of people. And then I'm like, well, that's stupid. I have all the PowerPoint presentation made for this course. I'll just put it on lessonlease. So I literally go on there. I use a little app called Tiny Takes. I record my voice over top of the slides. I go through the slide presentation. You can add different segments in there. You can add more points, more bullet points. You can again ask questions in there. It took me about three hours to build the course that now 50 people can take tomorrow. And so, you know, if you're going to look for a program like that, you're just looking for something that you can integrate well, that it's easy to upload videos, it's easily easy to adapt it and change it. It's to easy, easy to take parts of it and move it to different paths, and we call them paths. So like some of the sales paths are in all of our sales training and some of them are just in the concrete lifting one. And we can slide videos back and forth in there and move things around. And so we just found one that's kind of simple to use. And as far as a user from your phone, from your laptop, from your tablet, it's really easy just to keep on just plugging and playing and just hitting the arrow button.

Yeah. You know what's so cool about this is you've got a, you have a mindset that sort of lends to creating these lessons and creating standardization. But that's obviously something you've learned yourself because I hear pushback on this a lot throughout the industry. I have this conversation often, more often than I should, talking about building a training system or creating a standard operating procedure. And someone will say, well, every job is different, like every customer is different. There's absolutely no point in trying to write some sort of process because it's too dynamic and ever changing.

Would you challenge someone who maybe is operating under that belief? Because in my opinion it's. Yeah, there's a couple things that are different, but there's a whole hell of a lot that's exactly the same every time, for sure.

Well, we spray polyurethane foam insulation. You know, it is one of the more technical things that will ever come out of a gun with pressures and temperature temperatures and substrate temperatures and humidity levels and all these factors. We drive around in quarter million dollar trucks that we're just letting Benji take out after six months because he's fully trained. Right. And they have to know that it's not if it's going to break, it's when it's going to break. And they have to be. Now, Benji has to be competent to be able to get that truck up and running or ask the right questions, that he doesn't break things more. So if I can do it in a business where that's just one product that we spray on out of probably what, 20 different products that we spray out of probably 15 different types of equipment, you know what? If I can do it, anyone can do it. And I'm not the intellectual guy, I'm not a Big thinker. But like I said before, right when we began, I'm a momentum guy. So if I can see momentum and how this is going to help move us forward, there's lots of good little practical steps that we can use. And really, at this point in our company, we are not the ones necessarily even building the SOPs anymore, making them better. We're not the ones that are creating the content as much anymore. We have people that are doing that for us, like, inside the company. Because Juan is way better at the paint machines than I am, than I'll ever be. Right. And you know, Juan used to make his living painting, so he's. He's videoing the SOPs. I brought in a photographer to videotape him, to edit the video down, to do all that kind of stuff. Cost me a hundred bucks. But Now I have 35 people that know exactly how beyond foam cleans the paint machine and those. So even though you might be painting something different, that SOP is done, and it's done the exact same way every time. And so if you think you're a company that's really in the weeds and things are so super different, then you got to pick the commonality things. You know, how do you. How do you bring a saw into a building? How do you put a hose into a window. Window without wrecking that hose? You know, all those, those common things. Shoot layups first before you start shooting three pointers. Right. Start. Start the easy things first. And then you're going to find that, hey, once you get bugged once, twice, three times, about the same problem. Once you've had spray foam over someone's dryer three times, you're sick of replacing people's dryer lids. Then you write an SOP on how do you prep a dryer? You know, like, those are. Those are the things that, that all of a sudden we get the common callback things. We build an sop, we train it, we make it mandatory for everybody to listen to it and watch it, and then we move forward with it.

Yeah. And I think if we're really honest with ourselves, Benji, to your point, and what you hear a lot of in the industry, like, to that question, what I would challenge people to do is look at, like, what your average employees, all the things that they do in any given day, write them out. And while absolutely different industries, especially more complex ones, might have stuff that takes a lot of critical thinking where situations are different, the reality is of all the tasks they do, there's a ton of them in there. Every day to the way that you kind of prep a truck before you get going, to the way that you clean stuff up, to the way that you roll up an extension cord, so to speak. There are standardized ways to do things and it's to grab the low hanging fruit because that's where you can actually hold expectations. If there was never a standardized way to do something, whether it's the way that you greet the customer or clean up at the end of the day or keep the shop tidy or whatever, you can't actually hold people accountable if you've not done the work to create, to set the expectations essentially totally.

So Kurt, on that note, you have had quite the journey over the last eight or whatever years. Can you compare and contrast a time in the past when you didn't have these competency models built out? You didn't have the sops written, you didn't have lessonly versus now. Like how much more confident and comfortable are you with what's going on around you? You run a big complex organization with many people doing many things every day. There's risk associated. Like has all of this stuff allowed you to sleep a little easier at night?

100%.

When I think about what we used to do and the manpower it took to make sure that we were doing things well and the cost to us as a company, it's exponential. Benji, I expect you to produce a million dollars worth of work a year. Like you're out there spraying foam. Your truck will do a million dollars worth of work for us. Right? So what is that? You are making me $120 an hour approximately. Well, if I can make hour long tasks, eight minutes, or if I can train your helper to do them, that you're actually producing and making me more money during those times, what is that doing for me as a company? Right, so think about on that financial system side first. And then as far as the sleeping at night thing, we used to hire, we used to have a full time person that would drive around and do what we call the pse, a pre spray check and then do a psi, a post spray inspection on every job that we spray to make sure the job was ready for us and that the quality was where our level wanted it to be. Then we started implementing our SOPs and now it's the type of pictures that they're taking and sending back to the estimator that triggers whether we need to do an onsite visit. It probably saved our company 120,000 doll a year the first year. And that's pure Profit now. Now, Chad doesn't do that. He's out making us money instead of costing us money by making sure jobs are ready, jobs are done well. And. And so once we got the systems done that, the guys are trained and they were verified skill sets, I don't have to worry about Benji going to a complex cantilever and us saying, hey, we wanted a vented airspace in this cantilever. There's three heat lines, there's a couple water lines. Here are the pictures. Go and do it. We know you're going to prep it, right. We know that you're going to spray it, right? We know, we know there's not going to be any callbacks on it. And you're going to take the pictures that we need to verify that that all gets uploaded into our system. We have that forever.

Kurt, there's so many gold nuggets packed into this, this last. This last hour. So I want to sort of finish the conversation just with your advice or insight, like, what would you share with an entrepreneur who maybe has an awareness that this is something that they should invest in for their own company, but they're a little intimidated by taking this on. Any sort of just words of wisdom for someone in that situation?

You know, for me and what has been. And this is where I get to pump BTA's tires a little bit. But for me, what it's been is I. There was a point in our company where we did not know what questions to ask ourselves. Right. You know, I look at Kevin and he look at me and I'm like, hey, have you ever run a company worth $2 million? I think, no. Me neither. I don't know what that looks like. I don't know what we're supposed to be doing. And then we did that at 3 million and a 5 million and a 7 million. Right. And so my advice is to find somebody that knows the questions to ask you first off and has a bit of a system of how to get there. And you guys do a great job for. Did a great job for us as far as just systematizing the questions in the right to build something that is real. And once we had that built, then the natural DNA of our company started oozing out of us because we weren't worried about so many of those little nitpicky things. Right. And so that's a horrible answer to your question, possibly. So on other words, I'd probably say start with the stuff that's the easiest to do and go from there. And once you nail down one thing, then go on to the next thing. Once you nail down that, go on the next thing. And obviously if you're on the tools, a contractor that's in the weeds 50, 70, 90% of the time, it gets tough to do that other than you've got to start using other people that are around you to help you. Hey, how would you write this down? Can you videotape me doing this?

Can we just accumulate data and do little small things one at a time? That's probably where you have to start as far as the implementation, the SOP Stuff. Stuff. For me personally, because of my personality, I'm a big picture guy. I had to start with the DNA of our company of what makes me tick, what makes me happy, what are the things that I want people to feel and learn when they get here on our team. And then the tasks started to fall out of that. I'm lucky in the way that I have Kevin, who really can systematize things really, really well. I call him socially awkward. It's only half true. But he's guy that likes to sit in the office and look at stuff and analyze and say, hey Kurt, this is a dumb idea. Hey, Kurt, this is a good idea. Have you ever thought about it this way? He really centers us as a company. And so having someone to bounce ideas off of talk about is massive for us. It's massive for Kevin and I. And then now as being part of bta, it's even bigger with Dan staff and our group, the boat group, avid contracting. Those guys that ask us these questions that really make us better. And to really circle back and to the first question you asked is why did you start this onboarding process? And it's because Dan staff said our first one was weak, it wasn't good. And that got my dander up. And I'm a competitive dude and so I'm like, let's make this thing great. Let's put the bar to a different level. Right? And so if he would have never challenged me to start something, I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you guys today. It would be a very different conversation.

That dense staff. I wonder if he did that on purpose. He knows what grinds your gears.

Oh, dude. Yeah.

He just throws out a quick chirp and all of a sudden you build a perfect onboarding process.

Yeah, It's a characteristic of a good coach. Guys, so, so many good things we talked about. I just, I want to close it off with a point that we've mentioned a number of times. I just, I really want to drill it home because I passionately believe this is true. And we've said it over and over again. And, and that is, it's not rocket science, right? Like, yes, I understand there's time constraints. You're working a ton. There's so many things you're managing in the business in addition to everything else you have going on in life. But from an actual like, intellectual perspective, like of the skills and the complexity it takes to do this, it's all pretty reasonable, right? What we're saying is like, think about the human experience of a new human joining your organization and how you want them to feel and how you want them to integrate into your culture in the community that you have. Right. You take the time to think through that and you implement. Some of these great basic things that Kurt talked about are so powerful. You think about how are we going to get this person skilled up at the beginning, right. How can I use the technology that we have available to us to pre record things so I'm not repeating them over and over again? How do I get to know this person so that can, I can make them feel valued and understand what they care about? It's all just very rational kind of human relations type stuff. And I think that's one of the biggest things that I'd love listeners to take away. We're not geniuses. Kurt isn't either. We kind of think rationally and simply about this. It makes sense on the back of a napkin, so to speak. And it's just about taking some time to do it. I truly believe that any entrepreneur in the contracting space can implement this stuff to a pretty high level. And if you do so, you're going to be miles better than the competition, light years. And it's going to echo in your people. And therefore we're in a labor driven business. It's going to echo in the experience of your whole brand that every customer has. So it's very powerful stuff.

Let's leave it at that. Kurt, it's been wonderful hanging out with you. It's been a ton of fun. Cannot wait to see you in person. Which fingers crossed, is going to be sometime soon.

Soon.

I got a big hug waiting for you.

I can't wait.

Awesome. And, and, and man, I just want to say one more time, I love what you and Kevin are doing. Really good job on, on all of this onboarding and training stuff and the way that you guys, you guys run your, your company. You're definitely a great example in the contracting space of what, what can be done. So keep up the amazing work, man.

Thank you.

All right, take care.

See you guys.

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