Secret to Find Hard Working Employees YEAR ROUND [Mike Andes]

Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes. And today I'm going to be talking about how you can hire great employees for your home service business. And using a framework that I came up with that seemed to just really help me give clarity around what actually attracts really good talent, allows you to be able to train them really well and it also allows you to be able to retain them in the long term. So I'm going to go ahead and throw up on the whiteboard here and just kind of draw this framework out. It's nothing super fancy, but it's helped me a lot when it comes to finding and getting great people. So let's go ahead and break this primary down into three different sections. The first one, first thing we have to do is attract great talent. This is going to come in the form of putting up ads, ensuring that you present yourself just like you would advertise to a customer. Think about advertising to prospective employees. Why should they want to work for you? What is your unique selling proposition? These are things that we think a lot about when it comes to customers, but when it comes to hiring, somehow we forget the fact that employees and your team members are also prospects. They're people that have options depending on the job market. Sometimes it's really, really hard to find team members. Sometimes it's really, really easy to find team members. But the economy is something out of your control. The bottom line is just like customers, you've got to figure out a way to get find more customers. You've got to find a way to find more team members if you want to grow your business. So the first thing we need to do is attract them. You got to figure out if you're using indeed or Craigslist or Facebook or whatever platform you're using to advertise, or if you're just using word of mouth in your trucks that people see and they can scan a QR code or they can go your website, you say now hiring on your job, on your trucks, you've got to attract people. So I could take a whole video about how to attract them. I mentioned a couple there. In terms of platforms online, as well as using your trucks, giving referral bonuses to, to your team members, et cetera. But ultimately you have to attract great people. Then you've got to train them. Because even a great team member, if they're left untrained, they're not going to be efficient, they're not going to be profitable. And especially if you're paying them based upon performance, which I recommend for all home services, they're never going to make a lot more money if they're not trained correctly. And furthermore you need to make sure they get trained up quickly so they actually become profitable. In home services and entry level positions you're going to have a lot of churn you not only because we typically can't pay super super high wages, but also because it's more labor intensive and a lot of people look at as a foundation or a stepping stone to something else. And it's more of a part time gig, maybe six to 12 months. Now obviously I would love to be able to keep people for a couple years, but the reality of situation is that in home services, the average tenor of frontline team members that are fresh in terms of they don't have skills that are education like a four year degree or some sort of certification or license, they usually last about three to four months as a blended average in the home service industry. So our goal is how can we make them as profitable as quickly as possible and again making sure that they're given P4P pay for performance so they also get more money very quickly. It doesn't take them six months to get a raise. It doesn't take them a year or two years to get a raise. I want them to get trained up a couple weeks, be profitable for the business and be able to make bonuses on pay for performance. All right, the next one is retain. Because if you are burning through team members every seven to 10 days and I've seen businesses in home services that literally every seven to ten days they turn their team members and there'll be occasional team members that last two or three months, but a lot of team members last one, two, three days and their average is literally a couple weeks long in terms of retention of their team members. And that's just not going to work. Ultimately it usually takes a minimum. If you're picking someone that is completely green and completely entry level, it takes a minimum of two weeks to make them efficient. Just to learn your processes, your systems, how to do the job, how to do things safely. A minimum of two weeks, a lot more if you're doing technical or skilled labor. And so it's imperative that you at least keep them two weeks because you're going to lose money in those two weeks. You might put $1,000 or $2,000 into a team before they actually become profitable for the business. And if you're running a 20 profit margin business now, they need to generate 5, 6, $10,000 in revenue for the business before they actually make a profit. And get above break even. So if you can't retain them for at least three, four, five weeks, you're gonna have a really, really difficult time making a profitable business. So we gotta attract them, we've gotta train them up, and then we've gotta retain them as long as we possibly can. And there's three ways to do these things. So all three of these come down to three different key areas. And I want to talk about each of these. The first one is actually the hardest one because it's kind of like, how do you define culture in the United States? Well, there's so many facets and ways of looking at it. And the same thing is about culture. The culture of your business is very multifaceted. It takes a long time, typically, to change a culture. It's not something that overnight can be changed. And so the culture, though ultimately of a business is why a lot of people will stay or they will leave. So when it comes to retention, extremely important. Also, a culture can attract great talent. So at every single level, attracting the person, training them up. So onboarding them, getting them started, and then retaining them in the long term, culture is a massive driving indicator of that. And a lot of times it's very easy to point at compensation or other aspects of the business for the team member, but those things are fast. I can change someone's compensation tomorrow and be able to make the job more appealing, but it's a whole lot harder to attract talent if you can't afford the wages of bigger competitors. And for the vast majority of small businesses that are doing under $50 million in annual revenue, it's difficult to compete with the wages of publicly traded companies that can have great benefits and a whole lot of other really great compensation plans and a very clear hierarchy. And things are in systems and procedures. It's to compete with that, but it's also one of your benefits, is that you can have a culture that potentially they can't compete with. And so think about all three aspects of attracting training and retaining your team members. From a culture perspective, what is. What kind of culture is going to attract great talent? What kind of culture is going to lead to a great onboarding and training experience where there's a culture of care, training, fostering up people for success, and then retention. Why do people want to state your business? What do you do to ensure that there's a culture and a team environment? All right, the next aspect I've already talked about, and some people try to run away from it, but ultimately team members show up to your place of business to get a paycheck. And if you don't believe me, try not paying their pay. Paying their paycheck. This coming pay period, it's not going to work. And that's not nothing bad against them. They're coming for money. We as business owners show up for money. We are ultimately trying to make the business more profit. And ultimately the team members are absolutely entitled to every single dollar they work for. And their compensation is extremely important. So don't shy away from it. People like, oh, I don't want to do pay for performance. It's too much effort. You know these guys, they're making so much money already. Look, the team members are coming for a paycheck. If they wanted more risk, they go start their own business. So focusing on a compensation plan that is going to compensate them for their hard work and ideally pay them more. The harder they work, the better. And so this is why I'm such a big believer when it comes to home services, when it comes to pay for performance or P4P. And if you're wondering what that is, P4P software.com Mike or sorry, I apologize. Mikeandys.com P4P. Just the letter P. The number 4P is going to be free training, completely free, walking you through what kind of compensation you can build. The harder someone works, the more money they make. And I just truly believe that this is the way to be able to sell labor. Ultimately our goal in business is to be able to take $20 of labor, $20 per hour labor, or 25 or $30 per hour labor, and turn into a hundred or $120 per hour to the customer. And we do that by training, having equipment, and making sure that we get this $20 hour labor to be efficient at $100 per hour value to the customer. Now the harder they work, the more money they make. That's what P4P is all about. The reason I believe in P4P is because ultimately it affects the culture so much because all of these things are very multifaceted. The compensation is going to tie into the culture. And so I, I just see time and time again where people try to avoid compensation as a topic and they avoid trying to make a performance plan based upon their compensation and ultimately affects their culture. Because all of a sudden there's people that are getting paid more than someone else simply because they know the boss or simply because they're older or simply because they asked for a raise and they're the person that's actually not like is creating a lot of slack in the organization. They're the ones who, I'm not working past 4 o' clock and they leave the job. Whereas there's other younger, hungry, hungrier team members that are willing to work harder, they're way more efficient, they're way more profitable for the business, they're willing to go the extra mile, pick up slack, and yet they're making less money. That doesn't seem fair to me, especially in a labor business where it is a matter of how quickly can we get the work done efficiently into a high quality standard. And so I think it's very important to pay and have a compensation plan that effectively pays your team members based upon their contributions, not based upon their tenor. Whether or not they know the boss, whether they ask for a raise, whether they go to church with the boss. These are things that cause a lot of cultural problems because there's no standard in terms of how people are paid. Now there's other, there's other industries that are not based upon labor. And a lot of it might be their admin staff that you will have to create a different compensation plan based upon their departments or what skills they have, or potentially their tenure with, with the, with the organization. But when it comes to your field staff, I genuinely believe when you're selling labor, that is ultimately what we sell in home services. When you're selling that, you want to tie it to how long the job takes. And instead of the customer, the employee wanted to make the job take as long as possible because they're getting paid by the hour. So the longer the job takes, the more money they make. And then the business owner, the shorter the job takes, the faster it goes, the more money they make, you're going in different directions. And this is why ultimately a bad compensation plan will affect the culture, is because you're always wanting to go faster and they're always wanting to go slower. And so your incentives are not aligned, incentivize everyone to get the job done quicker and, and to a high degree of, of, of quality and compensate effectively. All right, the last part, potentially the most important part and the reason I put at the bottom is because it really supports everything else in this triangle and that is communication. If you cannot communicate effectively, I don't care how strong your culture, how well you compensate people, if you don't communicate effectively, it's going to show in your attracting of talent, in your training of talent and your retention of talent. And so communication is so effective, whether it be team meetings, WhatsApp groups, with your team having one on one meetings. I can guarantee the only thing you take away from this video is doing a one on one meeting at least monthly with your team members for 15 to 20 minutes, talking about their goals, their aspiration. Like it'll change your business, it'll definitely change your culture, it'll definitely allow you to retain and train and attract better talent. So these are things that you know, these are the soft skills, these are the things that no one likes to talk about in terms of communication. A lot more people want to talk about the dollars and cents, the X's and O's of compensation before they start talking about, you know, what. We consider soft skills in terms of communication. But if you have great communication, it will affect every single aspect of the business. It'll absolutely be the lid to your growth. If you can't communicate effectively to more than four or five people, it's going to be very difficult to build a seven figure business. If you can't communicate effectively to 20 or 30 people, it's going to be really difficult to run a above an eight figure business, a $10 million business. These are the type of things you'll have to overcome and become better communicator and a better leader in order to be able to again attract, train and retain your team members. So I hope that's helpful thinking about this. Ultimately, this all comes down to the fact that we as leaders have to improve in all these areas in order to be able to get great team members. You show me a great leader, I will show you a great team. You show me a great team, I will show you a great leader. And ultimately it comes down to what can you take control of. I can't control the labor market, I can't troll the economy. I can control whether or not I communicate, whether I compensate and whether I make sure that my culture is effective for the team members that are being fostered inside of it. And I actually care about their career trajectory, I care about their family, I care about them improving in their career. And if that means them moving on from my organization because they outgrow faster than what we are growing, that's fantastic. I want them to see them succeed and communicating that effectively and getting their response and their communication back to you and working together will ultimately drive this pyramid forward. Hope it's helpful. I'm Mike Andes, founder of Augusta Lawn Care and Copilot CRM. Thank you so much.