Episode 254: Winning at Business and Life with Jeff Morrill

This is Professor Pete Alexander with the Winning at Business and Life podcast, where business leaders share their insights. It is 6 questions in 7 minutes because successful business leaders are busy and rarely have more time to spare. So let's get to it. Question number 1: In a few sentences, please tell me who you are and what you do.

Hello, my name is Jeff Morrill, and I'm an accidental car dealer. And what I mean by accidental is that I grew up thinking that I was going to do something perhaps in politics or public service. I couldn't find a job out of college doing that, so I started working as a service advisor in the service department of Don Byer Volvo in Falls Church, Virginia. And after acquiring some skills in, in that field, I, I knew just enough to, to buy a bankruptcy dealership in Boston, Massachusetts with my brother John. Since then, that was in 1998, we've bought various businesses that generate over $100 million in annual sales revenue. We're really proud of the alternative experience we offer at the car dealership.

Well, Jeff, it's an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. I like how you say the accidental part. It's good. A lot of people can relate to that, including myself. Question number 2. What is something that makes you smile and/or laugh about working in your industry?

The funniest thing, I think, in the car business is the terminology. Every industry has its jargon, but there are just so many great ones in the car business. And I think that I always get a smile when I see the way that people refer to cars, the insiders. Like if someone drives in a car that barely arrives under its own power and wants to trade it in, the term for that car is a sled. And if it's blowing a lot of smoke out the back of it, like a James Bond smoke screen, we call that a crop duster. And if the customer is a heavy smoker, and that affects obviously the resale value of the car because people can smell it years later if it's really penetrated the interior, we call those cars an ashtray. And this is more of a technical term, but sometimes odometers get replaced or fail on older vehicles. Sometimes they're over the limits and that's called true mileage unknown. That's what actually gets written on the title, but we refer to cars as TMU. And, um, and if a person's really rough with us, sometimes we, we talk about the person as being TMU too. But, uh, the last one I'll share with you is the, the name of a, of a manual transmission car, you know, which aren't made in very large quantities anymore, but we call that a handshake. That's the terminology.

I do too. And I've learned some really great ones that I'm going to share with my son because he's really into cars right now. So this is really great. Thank you so much. Question number 3, I have a fictitious book with all the answers for business. What chapter would you think most companies should read?

I actually wrote the chapter in my book, Profit Wise: How to Make More Money in Business by Doing the Right Thing, with exactly this theme in mind. And the chapter is on hiring. And I think that most businesses end up— their hiring practices end up looking for people who look good in flight suits instead of looking for pilots, which is really what they want. Another way to think about that is they're looking for, for people who look good in uniform instead of soldiers. And, and their practices, their hiring procedures are not very well reflected upon or, or implemented. So they end up reviewing— excuse me, uh, they end up hiring people that are good at interviewing rather than people that are really suited to the job and suited to the company and suited to the culture. I think, um, another thing I'd want to point out in that chapter is, is, uh, it starts even with the kind of recruiting ads that companies run. And I talk about this in my book, that so many companies think, uh, don't think very creatively during the process of writing the ads. So they end up looking for people that aren't exactly who they need. And I'll give you an example of the recruiting ad that requires 5 years of experience and a master's degree for maybe a sales position or a fundraising position at a nonprofit. And when you think about it, yeah, if you're a surgeon, orthopedic surgeon, yeah, you need some, some certain level of experience and education to do that job. But so many jobs in business in particular, those skills can be learned quickly by intelligent people. And if you raise the bar too high in terms of qualifications at the advertising stage, then you really limit your pool of people and end up limiting the quality of the ultimate hires that you make.

That's very insightful. And it's interesting, as you were describing that, I thought about so many different job listings that I used to see at companies that I worked where it had just exactly that. And it was ridiculous because it was like, who wrote that? When literally it was, it was somebody who, who could if they were intelligent, as you said, they could learn the primary role of the job very quickly. I mean, what do you need to have such, you know, this huge bar to try and climb over before getting hired? It's really, really insightful.

Yeah, thank you. I think that we've tried to observe our own advice, and what we found is that it allows us to hire a much more diverse group of people too. If you're looking for people who are already well-established in an industry, for instance, if you're looking for tech people, technicians and they have to have a lot of experience because you don't have an apprentice program set up to, to help people that don't have a ton of experience, then what you end up with is all men because the technicians that are out there are all men. But we wanted a more diverse group of technicians and we found that, that if we look for people that have the skills but not necessarily the experience, we can supply the skills. Um, I'm sorry, supply the experience and help them develop those skills. And that means we end up with a diverse, more diverse workforce. And it makes us easier to fill positions that are otherwise very difficult to fill.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, and I saw that too with my experience in sales and marketing, that it was always easier to hire someone who had sales skills and teach them the technical, uh, aspects of the job versus a technical person teaching them sales skills, because a lot of it just had to be their overall personality as well. So it's a, it's a good example.

Sure enough.

Question number 4: Other than the generic work harder, have a great attitude, and care for customers, what advice would you give to other business leaders?

I talk about this quite a bit in the book because it's really the, the main thesis, but I like to use the term make sure you have love in your model. And what I mean by that, it's actually a phrase that my father, who's a teacher, introduced to me. He's now retired, but he always thought as an educator that his, his most important mission as a teacher was to make sure that he was preparing students for a life of service to the world. Because if he was just giving them the ability to earn an income or just giving them a strict set of skills that would allow them to perform a function, well, what's all that achievement for? I mean, to what end? If someone gets rich but they don't build a business that supports the community and takes good care of its team members and reinvests in, in the country that allowed that business to thrive, then what value is there in the business existing at all? So I invite, I invite other entrepreneurs to think about that, to think about how their business practices, how their HR policies, how their aspirations as a company, while they're accomplishing the labor, whether it's as a plumbing company fixing pipes or a landscaping company keeping yards clean, that they're also taking care of those important stakeholders that depend on the business.

That's very insightful. And yeah, it's, it's really building it. When I hear you talking about that, it reminds me of, you know, what is good for the world and your community. And it's just, I really like that a lot. Thank you. Question number 5: What other business leader like yourself would you like to acknowledge and invite to be on my podcast?

So there's a writer of The Courage Map. It's the name of a book. Her name is Francisca Iseli. And she has some very interesting insights on how to make the most out of a life, and it's a very interesting guest. I recommend her.

Perfect. I look forward to meeting her. And our final question, question number 6: Please tell me about your first job.

My first job was mowing lawns as, as a kid. Maybe I was 10 or 12. I needed spending money. My dad had a lawn mower. He said I could borrow it as long as I paid for the gas. And what an important thing that was for me at that time in my life. I was very socially awkward, I'm only slightly less so as an adult, but as a kid, it was very important for me to go through that experience of interacting with people in the neighborhood. And I learned so many skills about negotiating and about how expenses can wipe out a ton of revenue. Because even it cost a few dollars to produce the flyers that I would use to market. And I was only getting like $10 a lawn at the time. And I was like, wow, the revenue is not profit. You know, so all these very important things that an entrepreneur would need to learn, I learned them very young. And I'll add one thing that I think it's really important for parents. And I'm not a parent, I don't have any kids, but I don't see many kids mowing lawns anymore. And I worry that parents have have built their kids' childhood so much around organized activities that they haven't given them enough of that free-range quality to the experience of childhood to develop those skills on their own outside the eyes of adults. Because I was doing this out in the community without my mother or my father or any coaches standing over me. I had to figure it out. And I was charging too little for lawns. And I eventually figured that out because I was spending entire Saturdays and making no money. And those are important discoveries that kids kids need to make on their own. And I think they benefit from learning them early. And modern parents, I think, are well advised to make sure they're leaving a little of that freedom in a kid's childhood.

And I, as a parent of two kids as well, I totally agree with you there. It's, you know, the organized activities, it can get really crazy, especially like these soccer leagues and other leagues where it's just, you know, it's more military and you have to spend so many hours on that and you, you forget about some of the other important things that a kid can learn, as you, as you showed with the, with the lawn mowing thing. So that's a great story. Thank you. And Jeff, thank you so much for being on the show. How could people find you?

I love to hear from readers and listeners at jeffmorrill.com, and my name is J-E-F-F-M-O-R-R-I-L-L dot com. And if people want to check out the dealership, they're just interested in that kind of unusual sales practice that we that we talked about earlier. That's planetsubaru.com.

Perfect. This is Professor Pete Alexander with the Winning at Business and Life podcast. Find hundreds of previous episodes on your favorite podcast app. Thanks for listening.