Got Recruitment Questions, Meet Matt Snow

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Hey everybody, it is the head coach at Contractor Coach Pro and your host here on Contractor Radio, Jim Johnson. And I'm super excited for today's guest. It's going to be a lot of fun. We're going to talk something that I think is one of the most passionate things that contractors have facing them that becomes an obstacle or a challenge. We're going to talk some recruiting and how to get more guys, better, talented guys and gals working for our businesses and creating something that is a very attractive opportunity at your business. And we're gonna bring in the pro. Like I've been following this guy for quite a long time. Anytime I hear like recruiting, this is one of those guys, bam, bam, bam. This guy, this guy. So we'll introduce him here in a second, but I don't want you to forget, uh, we do have a couple of things coming up here that we do at Contractor Coach Pro. One of those things is top rep. It is our high performance sales training. If you have not checked. I'll go to topreptraining. Com. You want to have a team full of professional top end salespeople, get them to top rep here in New Braunfels, Texas, right between Austin and San Antonio on August 21st and 22nd. Show up a day early, maybe you can go tubing with us down the river. We'll we hope to see you there. That is topreptraining.com. we also have a new program coming out for contractors that are smaller. Just getting started. You're under, under a million dollars, probably more like 500,000, 250,000. We've got contractor launch coming out and I'll tell you more moving forward into the future. But this is going to be some group coaching focused on five pillars, business acumen, just all the stuff you need to know for business. Your financial acumen, your marketing and lead generation on a budget, how to close deals and sell deals at high profit and then finally how to optimize your networking and referrals so that you can grow your business into that seven figure business that you need and you know you can do and then take it beyond that. So without further ado, thanks for hanging out with us there for that first few seconds and selfless, shameful promos there. I am pumped. I've been wanting to get this guy on for a long time and I want to introduce to you the president, owner, founder of Pivotal Recruiting Solutions, the recruiting guru, the master of magnetic, bringing people to an opportunity. We got our man here, Matt Snow. Matt, welcome aboard, man.

Hey, how are you?

I'm doing awesome. I have people call me all the time to be on the show, Right. And the number one and two people that call me are marketing companies is one, and CRM companies is number two. And like, I get tired of, like, doing that, to be honest with you. And I'm always looking for somebody that is in this recruiting thing, especially niche, like in our industry. I've had a couple on in the past, but you're the. You're the. The king of the. The king of the hill. It's good to have you on, man.

Thank you, thank you. I'm definitely honored to be here.

Yeah. So why don't you, like, for those of us in the audience, first question is, do you only recruit for roofing companies or do you recruit for other contractors as well?

90% of what we do is in the roofing industry, just because that's where I came from and that's what we knew coming in. Okay. But after a couple years, people hearing about us and how effective we were at bringing in some of the hardest recruits, door knockers, they asked us, hey, can you try this? Can you try this? And for me, any recruiting in any industry is pretty much the same. Be transparent, you know, show your compensation, have some good company culture, and the process is. Is the same. So we started taking on CDL drivers, specialty woodworkers. I've done mobile phlebotomist, which is somebody that sets up. Sets up a tent and they take labor stuff from you for. I believe it's my direct labs. So I've. I've definitely recruited some unicorns for sure.

That's pretty cool. That's. I didn't know that. So this is going to be for all of you that are listening in here, you want to learn some things about recruiting. So, Matt, tell us a little bit of the history, how long you've been in this industry, and then kind of what got you into the recruiting thing and where you at today?

I've got in about 13 years ago with Peter Pesci from American Restoration Group. Shout out to my buddy Pete. I saw an ad said you can make over $100,000 a year selling roofs. And like most people that are not aware of the financial incentives in the industry, I just like, yes, it's got to be bull. This is not real. But I'm one of those guys that needs to touch fire to know that it's hot. So I went in for the interview and just started asking questions, you know, what's the metrics in this Industry, how are you guys making so much? And once he explained to me, you know, this, this was insurance approved construction, I started to connect the dots and became more and more interested in the opportunity. And you know, near the end of the interview he asked me, he's like, well, how much do you know about roofs? And I told him, well, I know they go on top of your house. So I came, I came into the, into the industry literally at ground zero. I'm not even sure I knew what a soffit was at that point, but I had great training, great mentorship and I'm the type of guy I don't really need to be pushed to do sales. I like talking to people, I like getting out there. As long as I've got a great product and something I believe in, for me it's something I enjoy. So I did my first year. I knocked out 80,000 and take home. And from then there was just no looking back. I kept going up each year, four or five years later they asked me to become a recruiter and ask if I could bring some people in and train them on, know my processes in the field. And it was pretty lucrative. So I said, yeah, I'll give it a, I'll give it a shot. It turns out I was great at it, connected with people because my story was transparent, it was honest, it was real life. You know, here's a middle aged guy going into an industry with zero knowledge of the industry and succeeding just merely because I was a sponge. I wanted to learn. I was humble, you know, I was hungry and it worked. So it started kind of lighting a fire in me. I became passionate. I'm like, I'm pretty good at this recruiting thing. So I continued to sell roofs and recruit and I sold a roof across the street from a national general contractor after the store. And I'm sure they were kind of peeved, but it wasn't my fault. I didn't read the storm report, I knocked the door, I got the contract. So that kind of started up a conversation with us and eventually they cornered me up to their office in Rockford and I had an interview there and they hired me on to be their national recruiter. So whenever they would storm in Nebraska, Colorado, wherever the storms would be, I would fly in, write the ads, meet with the people, do the interviews, turn them over to be trained and then fly back home. And after about a year of that, at the end of my contract, I decided that I wanted to spend more family time, you know, more time at least near my family than I was there, right? The money was great, but I mean, family is extremely important to me. So I made the decision not to renew my contract and asked my wife one night while she was making dinner, after a glass of wine or so, if she'd like to leave her cushy corporate job and start a recruiting company for the roofing industry. Which even when I say it out loud to this day sounds just crazy. It's like, what? I got a 401k, dude, you know, I got PTO. I'm not leaving nothing. Luckily, she thought about it for probably 30 seconds and she looked at me like I was crazy. I couldn't imagine what was going through her mind. And she said, yeah, let's do it. So we did it. She ended up quitting her job and we formed this company. I think the first year about 150,000, just me and her. Next year hired some recruiters, 300,000, next year 600,000. So we've continued to almost double each year.

That's pretty awesome, man.

It's been, it's been a, it's definitely been a blessing. And I was, I wasn't a seasoned businessman by any means when I started this, but I've been around business and business my whole life. Read Entrepreneur, Fast Company, Forbes magazine. I've always wanted to have the kind of money where I could supply everything I want for everybody in my family with no worries. And I decided this was, this was going to be my time because I had figured out that the majority of people that I was working for were not as smart as I was. So I said, well, why do I keep working for people that are dumber than me? Like, I can do this too. And once the initial jump was there, it's, it's been non stop. But my motivation and our motto for running the business, because there's so many ways and, and points to run a business on. You know, you're going to be ethical if you're just bottom line centered. You're only worried about profit, company culture, things like that. And we decided on a quote from Warren Buffett. Just delight the customers and you'll never have to worry about money. So that's what we did. We provided results, we worked hard and the people talked about it. And to this day, I mean, it's probably an anomaly for business. I've never made one single phone call to sell my service to anybody. Everything has come through referrals, people like Chuck Toki and you and other guys that recognize how much we care about what we do and that we're actually knowledgeable about what we're doing. It's been a great blessing, for sure.

Yeah. That's first off. A lot of that story sounds similar. Like you can tell I got hired before you. And they were less transparent. It was $75,000 to be a home inspector. That was the ad I answered. And so I was like, oh, home inspector, that sounds pretty cool. And now we're selling roofing. But like you up at the Dots together sold pretty good. Got. Hey, do you want to teach other people to do this? So as we have a lot in common on that. So you've been doing the recruiting thing for the last seven years.

Yes.

Is it different today than it was seven years ago? Just with all the things that have gone on technology Covid that all the reasons has it changed a whole lot? AI and all the other things that are out there?

Yeah, it's. It's changing constantly, I would say. You know, when I knew I was coming on the podcast, I didn't want to just, you know, just come on and talk a little bit and display my knowledge. I want to bring some actual fire to the listeners to help them save thousands of dollars on recruiting. Thousands, literally.

I like the sound of that.

So the, the. The very first thing you want to do in recruiting to decide where you're going to post whether it's applicant tracking systems, job boards, indeed. ZipRecruiter, Jorah, Bamboo, HR, whatever you're going to pick, I pick indeed. I spend a quarter million dollars or more on job boards each year. I've done several searches on similar web basically, which is a website that will Compare anything. Ford vs Chevy, Traeger vs Rec Tech, ZipRecruiter vs Indeed. And also put my own money in it.

I'd love to know what they said about Traeger vs. Rec Tech.

All day. I gotta be. I got a BFG on my Porsche 30. 30 chickens at once. That's great.

Wow, that's intense. So I, I'm sorry to distract you there. We. We. We were talking smoking before and we mean barbecue before we hopped on. So I had to.

My customers ask me, you know, what all do you do? I said, well, I don't want to do three things. I barbecue, recruit, and I harass my children. That's it.

That sounds about right.

I'm very serious about all three of those things.

All right, so I, I messed you up there. So you were going to bring some fire.

Yes. The very first thing you want to do is decide where you want to put your money. At, you know, to advertise. Hands down, anybody ask me, indeed. ZipRecruiter, you'll find that you'll get a lot of candidates that have just hit a push notification. It's very push notification centered. So anytime your resume says sales and somebody's job posting says sales, it'll get sent to them. They'll be kicking it with their buddies or doing what they do, see, oh, there's a new job, so and so's got up. They'll push a button, bam. They won't read the door knock and they won't read the climbing on the roof. They won't. So basically you're paying your recruiters and wasting your clients money on talking to people that really haven't even read your job posting. So it's good for the databases. About the only thing that I found fruitful as a recruiter, it's not for the kind of recruiting that we do. Indeed. You've got an average of the Average person spends nine minutes on Indeed. When they go on there, they spend three minutes on ZipRecruiter. And I'm only using ZipRecruiter not to pick on them. But just that's the most comparable thing in recruiting right now. Right Price wise, you know. But I would choose Indeed. So after choosing whatever you're going to post on, the next important thing is the job title that you're using. Because you need to understand that Indeed works off algorithm and is very similar to Google search. So just because you think restoration consultant is a sexier title than outside sales rep for a roofing sales rep, you don't know what that is, does not necessarily mean that anyone in their right mind is going to sit down and type in the job Restoration consultant so you can have the best possible ad. If you don't have the right title, your funnel will not allow people to see it based on what you've worn. So we use words like paid training. That's one funnel. Entry level. That's another one. Sales. That's another one. So now I've established three funnels for one ad. And the ads that I run have a constant stream of candidates. They don't trickle in, they're constant. So this is after seven years of learning this and having account managers and hollering at people and spending money. This is, this is, these are the next steps. Indeed. Good job title. The ad. The ad is super important. Traditionally, to sum it up without boring everybody to death, you take a regular ad like anybody would have now and flip it upside down. That's how an ad should be written. You don't open with 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 sentences about the company because you're going to lose the reader at that point. They're what's called a scanner, so they're looking for something. So you open with one or two small sentences. Contractor Coach Pro is hiring now due to explosive growth. Boom. Cut it off. Now it's bullet points. We offer work, life, Balance, upward mobility, PTO 401k, whatever you may offer. There's a whole list right on the edge of everything that you offer. You're like, man, look at all the stuff these guys got.

So everything about all the stuff they want?

Exactly. Gotcha. That's the hook. Once the hook's in there, that's when you bring the other stuff. There's responsibilities, requirements, and rewards. And all those things need to be transparent in the ad, not commensurate with experience. And based on all that, you know what that means to a candidate? It means they're going to try to lowball me. Yeah, nobody's stupid. Nobody's stupid. It'd be, oh, you. Well, we'll just see. I've got a meme that says, well, what's the job pay? So, well, it starts at 40, but it goes up to 80. And the guy's like, yeah, call me when it hits 80. Nice.

That's great. I really hate interrupting, but I've got some important information for you. If you haven't tried out Atlas Shingles, you should, because they put you first as a contractor. They want to give you a competitive advantage out in the field so that you can win more sales and be more profitable. Check out Atlas in your local area, find your local rep, get hooked up with them today and start making more money tomorrow.