Why Employees Don't Want to Work at Your Business

For most small businesses this year, it will not be who gets the most leads or customers. It'll be who can find and employ the most people. They're the ones who will win the game. And this video is gonna share exactly the process you need to follow in order to find great employees and keep them for a very long time. If your hiring process in the past has been very willy nilly, sort of like you just have someone show up, you ask them a couple questions, you hire them on the spot, you try them out and there's been no process to it. I hope this helped. Over the past several years, most of your marketing budget has prob gone towards finding new customers, advertising online, doing print marketing, door hangers, door to door, knocking, whatever it is, you've been trying to find new customers. But for most small businesses, the constraint to their growth now is going to become who can they find and how many people can they find to actually do the labor and the work that's required to get their services done. So the framework I want to show you today is simply looking at your hiring process the same way that you would your sales process. Because for so many of us as we grow our businesses, we, we have focused so much of our time on finding new customers and we've created systems and procedures around the sales process. But now the constraint is going to be can we find employees? And at the end of the day if you just look at the sales process and compare that to your hiring process, that is exactly what you should be doing. So let's go ahead and pull it up. This is the sales process. If we look on the left hand side here, we can see, you know, you get direct marketing, someone calls in, you're doing door hangers like I said, or you're doing online marketing, Facebook, Google, whatever it is, they become a lead, they call you, they may fill out a form on your website, whatever it is, then you get a sales meeting, you maybe go out and do an estimate at their house or whatever sort of estimate proposal that you're going to give them and then that's a price proposal, you're going to give them an offer for the price. This is what I'm willing to do the job for. And do you accept it? May you send it over email, maybe you send it via CRM, whatever it might be, then you follow up, you might have automations, you might do it over the phone, you might go back to their house, whatever it is you you're following up to try to make the sale. Then once a customer accepts Your estimate proposal, you're now going to onboard them, maybe get their credit card information, get their email address, get them set up inside of your portal. That's onboarding. Then the goal after that is to basically retain them and then upsell them as many times as possible. That is the sales process, that vicious cycle we want our customers to stay in and that is buying from us and then buying over and over and over again from us. When it comes to the hiring process, most people have it down to, well, I'm going to put some ads out so people will call me and then maybe I'll call a reference or two and we'll see if they work out or not. They don't have any step by step process or guide to be able to find, train and retain great employees. So here it is. All I'm going to do is look at the sales process and draw a direct line over to my hiring process and draw cordalive. So, for example, in the sales process we talk about direct marketing. This is literally the equivalent of doing ads on indeed, ZipRecruiter, Craigslist, Facebook, whatever it is you can. You're basically running an ad for employees now. The same way that in the past you would have looked at the video and the creative and tried to figure out the right headline. You need to spend the same amount of time and focus on trying to create a very engaging ad to get employees to come work for you. What are the highlights? What makes you so much different working for you compared to your competition? Work on the pictures and the video and the titles. These are all things you should be testing and figuring out. Does it make sense to put management in training? Does. Does it make sense to put that I have health benefits? What does that do to the performance of my job ad? Again, because we used to nerd about that all the time on the sales process side. But that's no longer going to be the constraint for your business. It's going to be, do you have a hiring process and can you get good quote unquote leads? Which leads us to the next one is usually in the sales process. The next part of the sales process is you get leads. Well, when it comes to the hiring process, that's the equivalent of someone submitting an application. How do you submit the application? This is another thing that you need to think about when it comes to your hiring process. Is it something that's digital? Is it on your website? Or is it a matter of like, fill up this form and bring it back. That's not going to Work in a digital age, especially if you're going after a younger audience and especially if they're going to have if they're good and they're going to have five other job offers within 24 hours. How the application looks, what questions you ask on that application, and the ease of being able to submit that application or are all very important to whether or not the application ever gets submitted. Now the next step of the sales process is the sales meeting. When you go meet the customer, you maybe meet them at their house. You schedule a time that you're going to go visit with them. This is the equivalent of in the hiring process, having an interview. Now, for most people, when they're small businesses, interviews, you don't think much about them. You just show up, you expect the person to come, you ask them a few questions. There's no preparation, there's no setup. There is no real thought process that goes into how am I going to interview and make a good impression on this employee? Because if they're a good employee, they got five other offers within 24 hours. Remember that. So what do you want to do? Make a good impression. The same way that in the past you would have thought about making a good impression on the customer. You know, you would have combed your hair, worn a nice shirt, you would have maybe ironed your pants. That is the same sort of mentality and process that needs to be thought about when you are now interviewing for employees. The same way that you try to look good and have a great presentation for, for a customer is the same way that you should be thinking about your presentation and what the overall experience of having an interview is like for a potential applicant. The next step of the sales process is the price proposal. That's gonna be when you actually submit what your prices are going to be to the customer. This is typically gonna be emailed to them. Maybe you print it off, maybe call them. Whatever it is, you're gonna present your price to them. The same thing goes for the hiring process, and that is the job offer. It shouldn't just be a quick text or email. Maybe you call them, maybe you make sure that the presentation of your job offer is legitimate. It actually has maybe a DocuSign or some way of digitally signing it. These are things that are important and make you look professional. And for so long we've thought about that in terms of the customer. But what about the applicants and the employees that potentially might work at your place of business? They too should get a great presentation and thought about what that process looks like? If in front of them now, in the sales process, we would never give up. If we submitted a price proposal and never heard back to the customer, we would do what we would follow up. Maybe you have automated ways of texting and emailing and calling and trying to get a hold of customers that have not accepted a price proposal. The same thing should go for an applicant. For someone that's in the hiring process. You shouldn't just have them come to an interview. You send them a job offer and then just cross your fingers and hope that they accept. You would never do that for a customer that you spent time and energy and, and done a price proposal. All of that to do just what, Just let them ghost you? No, you're going to follow up with them. You're going to ask them if they have questions. You're going to ask them if they have price objections in the sales process. Well, in the hiring process, you're going to ask maybe potentially about their salary. Is that something we need to negotiate? Is there any questions you have? Did you even get my price proposal or did it go to your spam? Maybe this is the wrong number. We don't even think like that. We just send the job offer out and just cross our fingers and hope that people sign it or, or accept or show up the day that we tell them to. What are you doing in this phase? You are nurturing the applicant. So even after you give a job offer, that's not the end of it. It's not like, well, it's back in their court. Just want to hear back from them. You would never do that to a customer and you should never do that to an applicant that you've submitted a job offer to and extended the hand to come work at your place of business. You should follow up with them and see if there's any questions, if they got it or if there's any negotiations that need to happen. Now you might be thinking like, this is crazy. There's so many steps. Oh, I thought it was just like, hey, you just hire someone, interview them and see if they work out. No, that's why you're not successful. That's why people are not staying with you. And this is not the end of the hiring process. Because once someone accepts in the sales process, you're going to make sure that when a customer accepts an estimate, they're going to get set up with their credit card information, have a login and a portal. You're maybe going to send them a welcome email, say welcome to the family and all that. That's great. What about when an employee now accepts the job offer and now they've started their first day of work with you? What's your onboarding process look like? What does those first few days of being an employee at your business look like? And I'm not saying that we're perfect at Augusta Lawn Care or any of my businesses. We've miserably failed on sometimes. And I still have vivid memories of us messing up the onboarding process when we have a great employee. But because we weren't organized, we didn't have the manpower, we didn't have the systems in place. We had a bad onboarding experience that didn't allow someone to get up to speed, learn how things worked, and they didn't feel welcome in those first few days of doing business. Now we've thought about doing business to customers for so long, but now it's what is the experience like for an employee the first few days of work? You can't just sit. Tell someone to sit down. Here's your computer. Watch these videos for 10 hours, and here's 50 pages of the employee handbook. Like, that's not going to work very well. You would ideally have some sort of system to onboard them, get them to know other coworkers and understand how the business works, operates, and what the vision of the company is. But we're still not done. Because even if you get a customer in the sales process and you've onboarded them, what are you trying to do then next? You're trying to retain them. You don't want them to go and leave after a couple years or a couple months or a couple of weeks. You want to keep that customer, you want to retain them. And the same thing goes for the hiring process. We're going to train and retain our employees. The famous adage is, well, what happens if I train my employees and they leave? Well, what happens if you don't train them and they stay? You're just going to have a whole bunch of untrained employees not doing anything right. So you do want to spend time and energy and money training and retaining your employees. Now, to customers, we're going to send them monthly newsletters. We're going to send them thank yous, we're going to send them, you know, gift cards around Thanksgiving and Christmas and all the rest of it. Why wouldn't we not do the same thing for our employees? Communicate with them, make sure they know how their performance ranks and how they can improve. These are all things that an employee wants, and that's what's going to allow them to stay retained and inside of your business the same way that you would stay in touch with customers to keep those leads warm. You need to stay in touch and in communication with your employees in order to retain them. And that might mean spending some money initially and throughout the rest of their employee journey on training and development. Now, the last stage of the sales process is we try to upsell customers. You know, if we're selling them bush trimming, we're going to now try to sell them mowing. If we are selling them window cleaning, we're going to now try to sell them gutter cleaning. There's always ways to upsell in every single business. And the same thing goes for the hiring process, except now it's not customers. We're trying to resell our existing employees. What does that mean? Well, that means you need to constantly be reselling them on the vision and the idea of working for your business and the vision and goal of the business. Why does your company exist? Why should they come work for you instead of the competitor? Why should they refuse the opportunity to move across the country and work in a much fancier office? These are things that are going to be constantly put in front of them and it's your job to resell them. On the idea that working for you and working for your business is the best thing for them, their career, and that they enjoy coming to work every single day. I hope that helps if you're trying to find or retain employees in this very hard labor economy. But watch this other video where I talk about the one thing that actually makes businesses successful or makes them fail, depending on how they handle it. Check this video right here. I know it'll help you. I'm Mike Andes, founder of Augusta Lawn Care. We have over 80 locations around North America. And I'll see you tomorrow.