Employee Tried to Mow Lawns HIGH!

The minute we got back into the office, Larissa and I were like, what the heck do we do?

We can fire them at the drop of a hat. And they've signed off on that.

14 confirmed interviews and not a single one showed up.

60% of businesses will fail in their first three years. I'm Mike Andes and I'm on a mission to fix this on this season of business boot camp.

What is going on, everybody? It is Will, and we are about 30 minutes from our third coaching call with Mike Andes with visit boot camp. We are super pumped. Aren't we, little people? Aren't we pumped, Riley?

Yeah, we're pumped.

Are we pumped, Zuko? Are we pumped? Yes, we are a pumped family over here. Call number three.

Let's go.

Let's go over the homework from last. Last week, the biggest thing that we needed to do was break down the hiring process step by step.

Let's break down that step by step from the time that a lead would come in from. Indeed. To the time that they would be onboarded and trained. Not just like you got a job, but like the onboarding process.

So that is actually what we were working on today. Normally we don't wait till last minute like this, but we had a lot of stuff going on with Thanksgiving and everything. So we've got three pages of a standard operating procedure for our GM now. I'm like super meticulous. So I've got like all these different details into it, basically. So, like, what we. We're going to do is like conduct a phone interview. Here are kind of the questions. Book an in person interview if they pass that. And then here's kind of the email that we send out. I also added, and I think I, I learned this from you. We're. We're starting to attach a P4P video of like, like, literally a 45 second clip of like how we pay. It removes the ceiling. You can make more money. Because like last year we. I went through the phone interview questions and booked 14 interviews and not a single person showed up for the interview. Literally, like date and time they confirmed and like 14 in a row didn't show up. I was like, okay, we have to figure this out. Houston, we have a code green on aisle one. Let me tell you why. Because the Texas Workforce Commission just put out eight days ago. Eight days ago.

That.

Let me read this to you. For all you business owners out there, this is a positive thing. So they just recently updated the employee work refusal documentation. So the form, basically, if an individual refuses a job offer or fails to attend a job interview, you can easily report it using the form. So this is basically saying any job refusals or people that fail to attend job interviews that we can report now because they're, what happens is they go in, they try to claim unemployment insurance or something like that and they don't realize that like we last year had 14 confirmed interviews and not a single one showed up. This is amazing. So what I did is I started that email in the springtime when we have people that aren't showing up for the interviews that are scheduled. We are definitely going to report that because we don't want them to go and claim unemployment insurance when we're trying to hire them and trying to provide a good job for them and a good healthy work environment.

So.

So positive news everybody.

One thing I would add is text messages. Once once you confirm on the phone people like don't write stuff down, especially younger guys. They're like oh yeah, I'll be there tomorrow at 4. Totally space on it, right. I would really recommend a follow up text message right after you confirm the appointment as well as one the morning of that day. I've even done it where I do a third one like an hour before just to like, like that they'll get those, they'll open those up so but that everything else looks really good.

So we put them on each piece of equipment for like a three, four minute session of like see how familiar they are if they how to start it and stuff. We do a second interview and really just because we want to see if they can like come and follow up. And this is a ride along interview. We have them come out and ride with a team member for one hour and actually mow like a couple properties with that individual. They get to ask them as many questions as they want and then we send the email, we attach another video too as well in email. And this just says why we're different. You know we're a debt free company. We don't have all this massive leverage debt against us about to go out of business if something happens. We're faith based company, we don't work on Sundays. So we have in here to go through our mission, vision and core values because I think for a players that they gravitate to that and then calling the references. So again kind of following what your advice of like make sure, make sure they're glowing references like best employee we've ever had, stuff like that. And then so kind of what we're implementing now is like there's a website called bustednewspaper.com that has a lot of things that come up. And then scheduling a drug test. And then if they pass that, then we would call and say, hey, you have the job just contingent on, know, a good background check and a pre employment drug test. And then sending them the offer letter and everything like that.

I wanted to share with you guys a story. So we make all of our employees that work with us sign a drug test form saying that there's any suspicion. Drug tests, like, we're able to test them out of the blue on any day, at any moment, while on the clock of like, hey, you got to go take a drug test. So we had never had to implement that ever. But this particular employee, everybody was already there for the day. We were all standing outside of our garage and it was on 4 20. This particular employee was the last person to show up to work. And we were out there talking for like five, 10 minutes. I think he actually like, walked up a little late that day. But the minute that he walked up late, it started smelling like marijuana right out of the gate. I could tell that this particular employee's eyes were a little red. He was kind of acting funny, kind of showed up late, right? So we didn't really know what to do. In fact, we actually sent him out on the route and gave him the keys, had him roll out. But, like, the minute we got back into the office, Larissa and I were like, what the heck do we do? Like, did you smell that? Did you see that? Like, we had no idea how to handle the situation. So I called a mentor of mine and was like, hey, how do I handle this situation? And he's like, well, if you had them sign the documentation stating that, you know, you can do random drug tests or, or, you know, a suspicion of marijuana or smoking or smelling like that at any time that you can take them for drug tests. So Larissa being the choleric personality she is, she was the one that actually drove out to this particular employee, picked him up off the route and said, hey, we are doing a drug test with you today. And at that moment, he basically had confessed that he did smoke in his free time to deal with certain, like, issues and stuff like that. All in all, like, it was a really good learning point for us because, like, we as like, decent human beings were like, okay, well, we kind of feel bad for him and this and that. Like, we want to work with him. But I believe what we had figured out, what that we were going to do is we were going to work with him we were going to do a follow up test in 14 days to see if he had got clean. It just didn't work out because by the 14th day he stopped showing up for his shifts, he stopped answering calls and he just basically like left on his own. But you know, it was a really good learning point for us. Again, we remove the emotions out of the, out of the whole situation and it's like, okay, we tell the team when they come in, like drugs and alcohol, zero tolerance for that. Now we're very like, hey, we just follow the policy. Sorry, I don't know. It's helped really remove the thought process out of it. And we're just following policy now.

My only concern is really, really good employees have like four job offers, usually within a day or two in this market. And so when you start adding time in to this, like, okay, we're going to give you a job contingent on three days from now or five days from now. That's when you sometimes lose your best people because they literally have. They can go get a job in a heartbeat. And a lot of the entry level guys, they need money this week, like they are looking for a paycheck. And so that'd be my only concern because I love this model, I would love to be able to use this. But what we had to do over the past couple of years is compress all of this massively, but then do everything you need to essentially outside the references, make a decision. And then after that decision is made and you actually give them a job offer, then they can do the drug test, they can do the background check and all the rest of it. So yes, you might end up having to let someone go after three to five days of them working for you. My concern is that in this labor market you're going to lose out on your best employees simply due to the fact that you're. The time it takes to get a job offer in front of them is so long because we've had it before too, where we've given job offers and they actually accepted and signed. But then we just said, okay, well we just need to wait for the drug test to come back or the background check. Well, now that's a week, week gone by. And then they text us the day before they're supposed to actually show up for work. And it's like, hey, I got another job. In the perfect world, this is the best way to hire. Having multiple interviews, having them on pieces of equipment before you even offer them a job, etc. But in the environment where you're literally going to struggle to get them even to show up to an interview. That is probably going to mean that 70% of the people that you just see in front of you, you'll end up hiring because you've already weed out 95% of people that contacted you just by someone that shows up for an interview. So I would recommend potentially saying, okay, let's make this first interview a little bit more longer. We actually get them out on a piece of equipment, see how they do in three for three minutes or whatever it might be. The job offer can always be rescinded and you can make sure in your, your hiring documents that you actually put a probationary period in there. That's very easy to fire them for whatever reason. So for example, we have a 90 day probationary period, which means anytime in the first 90 days we can fire them at the drop of a hat and they've signed off on that. If you said, hey, it's a 14 day probationary period, we want to get you hired, we loved you in the interview. Your references were great. Let's go ahead and get you started because again, like we're talking 78% of these guys need work tomorrow and they need work this paycheck. As we head into recession, they don't have unemployment to fall back on as much. They don't have stimulus to fall back on like they have the past couple of years. They need work like asap. And if they're a good worker, unfortunately they're going to go get two more interviews that same day because they show up to yours, they're to two others and they're probably on top of their game. They got a whole bunch of them lined up and basically whoever offers a job to them first is going to get them. Now then you got to deliver on all these things that you're trying to sell them up front, which is like culture, faith based values. Deliver on that in the first seven days in your training side. I feel like a lot of this is actually should be your training and onboarding because that upfront is a matter of just get good people in the door, then train them and if they're good people, they'll fall into the culture. And this is only, no, this is not the best system. It's not. It's just the fact that we have to work with in this labor market. Owners like Will will always be successful simply because they take action on the things they need to improve in the business. Every single week so far, Will has come to the table with the things that were requested from the previous week and actually executes against the things that he knows needs to be done in the business. I think today is a great demonstration of someone who does think analytically and breaks things down into very small pieces, as do many entrepreneurs. However, he doesn't let himself slow him down from taking action and actually having the meetings with managers, actually putting pen to paper and making the system and then carrying it out. That's what leads to business success. Execution, not perfection.