Mike Andes says three to five month training periods trap owners in daily operations and create constant turnover. When new technicians take too long to become proficient, teams stay dependent on the owner and lose one technician per month. The fix: shorten training so technicians can own their routes and solve problems independently.
We start putting these golden handcuffs on ourselves to the business, which is the business requires us to be there longer. It requires us to spend more and more time training our technicians, and it becomes harder and harder to let go of daily operations simply due to the fact that it takes so long to train new technicians. And if you have the average technician taking 3, 4, 5 months to be proficient in all the different services that we're expecting them to do, it can very well feel Like you just constantly have new team members all the time. You can never have a team that's confident, reliable. They constantly show up. Feels like your team is experienced because even if you have 10 technicians and the average tenure is 1 year, that means every month approximately there's at least 1 person churning. People move, people go back to school, people move to different industry. Specifically, if you are in an entry-level industry, they get other skills, they want to move on, etc. That means every month you have a new technician. If it's taking you 2 or 3 months months to get each technician up to a level of service where they can work by themselves, you— we're going to on average have 3 to 4 of your technicians always be newbies, always need training, and you're never going to get to the place where you feel like your technicians can take ownership of their job. They can do their route without you. They can take care of problems on specific jobs without your oversight because they've just done it so many times before.
