Episode 13 - Deep Dive on Hiring The Right People

Hey everyone, welcome back to Owner Occupied. We are here with episode 13. As usual, I'm super excited to bring this episode to you. Russell and I really get into it on hiring. And interviewing. So we have a really extensive discussion and bring out our best ideas and concepts and kick around some really interesting questions around how to hire the right people, how to find the right people, what are some tips during the interview process. We discuss how can you know if it's time to hire somebody or if you just need to look to improving systems and operations already within your business. We discuss— I'm hiring right now for a high-level role, so we, we kind of talk about that a little bit. I share some of my experiences interviewing higher-level folks and where we are there. And then we wrap up also with some great ideas around how you can gauge employee loading. Russell has some really unique ideas around how you can get a sense for what your team is up to and whether they're busy or not and really put some put some new light on that in a way I hadn't thought of before. So let's dive right into it. I can't wait to bring this episode. Here we go.

Hello, Peter. How's it going?

Hey, it's going well, Russell. How are you today?

I'm doing well. You have a little vacation coming up or time with your family. Is that, is that right?

Yeah. So my sister's coming into town tonight with, with her son who's about my daughter's age and they, they're like best friends. They're so cute together. So they're spending a few days with us and I'll be taking a little bit of time off work to spend time with them. And yeah, it should be really nice.

I think, I think the time off question dovetails nicely with our topic today. And that's hiring. You've mentioned before, and I think it's true for most of us, that employee expenses are a grossly disproportionate share of our expenses. You've also written about low-code, no-code tools you can do to take care of automated tasks. And you're in the middle of a big hiring, so it's a good time to talk about sort of your decision-making process on that. I'm curious, when do you, how do you make that decision to hire someone versus to try and patch together a different solution that's far less expensive?

Yeah, well, as you know, I'm a big proponent of using software and automation to speed up or gain efficiency in small business. And there it is sometimes difficult to determine if you're noticing that your team is sort of at capacity or nearing capacity. And by that I mean everyone is busy all day, every day. Just as a side note, I mean, I like to run for property management. I like to see our team running around 80 to 85% loaded on average, which means in theory, if they get in, you know, at 9 AM, they should be wrapping up most of their important tasks with about an hour to spare, half an hour to spare at the end of the day. So they have some slack if there's urgent items or something comes up or we onboard a new property or something like that. So Um, when I noticed that we're nearing the limits and it's feeling like everyone is having a hard time staying caught up, I do have to sort of confront this decision, which is, is everyone at the company— first of all, are they performing well? Meaning, am I getting the most out of my employees that I can in terms of productivity and performance? And, you know, that's probably like a separate discussion, and I'm I'm still learning a lot about that. I think I have a long way to go. But assuming that's true, is it now time then to hire somebody, or is it possible we could go in and look at how everyone is doing their work and gain some efficiencies? So in the past, I've— it was easier when we were smaller because I was much more connected to what everyone was doing, and I had quite recently been doing all that work myself. So I had an intuitive feel for how long things should be taking, how many properties and units we could be managing given a certain number of team members. But that's getting harder now. And so I do find myself grappling with that question like, man, it seems like everyone's really busy, but I don't know if it's time to hire or do I really just need to dig into some of the systems and processes and maybe there's some bottlenecks there or things could be updated. So I don't think there's any quick and easy answer there. I think it's probably some combination of talking to your team and your managers and asking, kind of digging in on what's consuming everybody's time. I have found that employees are notoriously unable to articulate what is consuming their time. And I don't know why that is exactly, but if you were just to ask one of my employees, like, so could you just gimme like, what is actually taking up most of your time during the day? Cuz it seems like you're really busy. And they'll just kind of rattle off, you know, they don't seem to be very thoughtful about that or, or able to sort of clearly summarize disparate tasks in maybe a few chunks. Like, well, it's actually the new client tasks and everything that's associated with that that's been consuming a lot of my time recently. So, You know, I don't know if the answer is some sort of a time tracking app on their computer, or maybe someone needs to be checking in with them every hour and like, hey, what are you working on right now? Um, yeah, so I don't, I don't know what the answer is. It's a little bit of intuition, a little bit of investigation and talking to your current team. And you also have to stay abreast of what's possible within your industry in terms of efficiency and automation, because new tools are coming out all the time. And your current tools are being updated and upgraded. And I have found that it's been, it's paid off for me to keep up with that stuff. And when there's like a new release notes for Airtable, I'll go in and read those and figure out, and I have found different times when I've been like, oh man, this is great. I can now plug this into this other tool that we're using. And that eliminates a whole handoff that we were doing manually, stuff like that. So. Yeah, I think the short answer is it's a hard question and it's difficult. And I don't know that I know how to give like, I'm not even 100% confident in our own company, you know, when we make those decisions. So it's tough. How do you think about that?

I don't think about it systematically. I think about it as human beings and individuals. And so, I tend to hire what I think are all-star performers. Somebody does something extraordinary that if I deliver that for a client, there's a high impact for the client in that. And so I tend to be more sporadic in that once I've hired that person, There's two things I can't deal with. I can't deal with stupid and I can't deal with lazy. Stupid I can't fix and lazy I don't have the patience for. And so, but other than those two things, if I've made the decision to hire them and I know some business experts think differently, move on, that sort of stuff, but they've got something and I've made a commitment to them. And so then I just figure out how to add value to what they're doing. And so, I'm getting, I always get the thing I hired them for. And then I'm, now I'm just trying to add, how else can I add value to what you're doing in the day? And then for my business, and I'm, this is where I'm looking and some consultants gonna hear this and call me and rescue me. But for a lot of the creative and talent work that I have, so I'll sign a new client And it is all hands on deck for a month as we develop new strategies, material, figure out how to win for this client in a new way. And it's, it's disruptive to everybody's schedule. It's abusive. But once that material is created and placed, everybody gets that time back on their on their call, except my phone rings on the way home and we've got another one or we've got another potential one. And the same people writing a proposal are doing work on existing clients. And, and so everybody's day is structured different. And so I have some folks on the team who, who thrive in that environment and some who would be listening to this podcast and say the world would be a better place if Peter Lohmann were running this company instead of Russell Chaos.

I don't know about that. I think one key distinction between your business and mine is that I think your business is project-based, right? You get a new client, you have a project for them, uh, it kicks off, it's intense, and then your, your project sort of has a natural slope where it evens off and you've put everything in, you put everything in place and, and everything's kind of running for them. Whereas property management is not project-based, it's very much, it's reactive. So a tenant calls in with an issue, you have to deal with that, a tenant pays rent late, you have to deal with that. And so what, it's very predictable, right? So everything that you do in property management is extremely predictable. You know, a certain percentage of tenants are going to pay late, you know, you're going to onboard a certain percentage of new clients. Every month. And so you can create very repeatable systems and processes to deal with that. And it helps smooth out the workload, which is nice. You know, there's, there's advantages and disadvantages of both, but I think they probably require very different approaches in terms of deciding when it's time to hire. And, and even the types of people that you would be looking for.

So, well, I'm, I'm curious in this latest hire that you're doing, it's a significant hire, someone with a lot of responsibility, an expensive hire, not, not one of those 2s, 3s, and 4s that we've talked about, but more of a leadership role touching everything you do. So is this a hire that's taking work that you're currently doing and giving it to someone else? Is it taking work off of your offer your existing team? How do you— how's, how's that looking?

So the position is Director of Maintenance Operations. And it's, it's essentially work that my business partner was doing. So my business partner and I are supposed to close on and buy this engineering firm this week. And he's going to go off and run that. We're 50/50 owners, both in that new business and this existing business. So he's actually been out of the day-to-day here at the management company for a couple weeks now, and his activities and duties have fallen on me. So I need this person to come in and take those duties back off of me. And the role is really over all the maintenance operations and activity at the company. We've got 6 W-2 maintenance employees that this person will be managing. We have a vacant turn coordinator position, Ian. That this person will be managing, and they'll be dealing with the client questions having to do with the properties. So everything having to do with the physical structures of the units and the properties that we manage will be this person's responsibility. The buck's going to stop with them to make sure that the properties are being well maintained, the units are getting turned over, the clients are happy, the guys, the maintenance guys are staying busy and are happy hiring and firing them. So yeah, it's, it's a parallel to our— we have a director of property management position. And the 3 of us, that director of property management, the new hire, and myself, that's the leadership team, or will be the leadership team at the company, responsible for setting the strategy, the direction, the culture, leading the team, you know, through the EOS model, that'll be the group that's in the level 10 meetings and the quarterly offsites and all that. So It's absolutely critical that we get someone who's, who's hungry, smart, knows how to talk to and manage blue-collar employees, but can also deal with the property owners, the clients. So it's a very difficult hire, in my opinion. And we've been looking for a while, we've done some interviews. We had a couple people that we liked pretty well, but we couldn't see eye to eye on salary. That may mean we're too low. I don't know. I'm still exploring the marketplace there. So yeah, it's, it's a big one for me. It's, you know, and due to the nature of the two roles, this role is actually going to be higher paid than our director of property management, because it's, it's actually a harder type of role with more responsibilities, in my opinion. So it's by far the highest salary that we've, or that we will have ever paid. So yeah, and it reminds me, I mean, you brought on a partner who was, who was high paid. And I don't think it's quite an equal parallel to that example. But it's kind of similar and scope that it was a big jump in mindset. And, you know, and I've mentioned a couple of times, you know, we need— I need a brain, not hands. We've got hands. I need another brain who can, who can think and plan and problem solve with me.

So, and so when I read that job description, you know exactly the task that they're doing and that you want done. You've got a good vision for it. So when you're interviewing someone, how do you— you're interviewing someone that's ticking the boxes as you go through. You've met some people who were price-ranged out. How are you approaching that process so that you got a culture fit, you got a job description fit? Do you have growth in mind for that person or that role? At all. It's not reflected when I look at it. It didn't seem reflected in that, that the boundaries were really clear. You knew what that person was going to be doing, and you know what you're going to— you're looking for.

Yeah, I, I think that's a fair summary. Um, when, when we're checking off the boxes during the hiring process, there's a few things I'm looking at. One is they need to have the right experience. You know, they've got to have experience with with residential structures, because there's just a lot of ins and outs of household systems that they need to be intimately familiar with. They don't need to be an expert, but they need to be very familiar and able to speak the language, both so they can talk to the guys and have their respect, but, and, and likewise with the clients. Um, you know, they need to have fantastic communication skills. Uh, they need to, just have a certain sort of gravitas, I guess, in, in, in a leadership role. Uh, again, you're managing a group of hardworking guys who are going out in the heat and the dirt and the nasty smells and dealing with people. And when they come into the office for a one-on-one, they need to be looking in the, in the eyes of someone that they can respect and feel like has their back, knows what they're going through, and maybe even been there, done that. Um, and we're also, you know, per the EOS model, we're looking for someone who, uh, who, who gets it, wants it, and has the capacity to do it. I think that's GWC is the, is what they use there. Uh, and we're also kind of scoring them against our, our core values to make sure that we feel like this person is going to be additive to the culture and and exhibiting the, the, the qualities that we look for in someone who's successful in this line of work. So, you know, and then of course, you know, you could spend— I just read like a— I think you and I were tweeting a little bit about this, like 10-page blog post, deep dive on hiring. You know, there's all these personality tests you can do. And, you know, you could obviously— there's people who their whole career is hiring people. And in terms of the role, You know, there's, there's a huge opportunity with this role because maintenance, the maintenance work that we do, it's actually a profit center for us. It's a small profit, but it is profitable. And so the more guys we add and the more work we can bring in-house, that's just more revenue for our business. So the right person in this role can come in and the sky's the limit in terms of what they could do and grow. You know, I can provide the infrastructure and the backend. If they've got the willpower and the know-how, you know, they can go out and start, you know, per our discussion with John Wilson, they could go buy a truck and outfit it for HVAC. They could go buy a truck, outfit it for plumbing, get the right guy in there with the right licenses, bring them in-house, and start billing out that work to our customers who own the properties and even maybe going out into the public and offering that service up. We already do this wood window restoration and small concrete work. For the public. That could be ramped up and dramatically expanded. There could be a whole marketing campaign around that. So, you know, this person could really take and run and turn this division into a multi-million dollar business on its own and, and be appropriately compensated as such. So although the role does have some sort of minimums, there's also huge opportunity in a way that's actually not true for some of the other roles at our company.

That's a That's the part that I was looking at and saying, because by my disposition, I'm looking at someone and I do it from the first hire, from everyone in the organization. I know, I know what they like to do, what they don't like to do, and where they want to go. And, uh, for— we're at, you know, we're at 11 12 people now, and I know that for each of those, I'm thinking about how to help them get to where it is they wanna be, and I'm learning all the time. This person hates this situation, this person, you know, this sort of thing, and thinking, but I need you to do it, or I don't need to, I'm thinking about that constantly. But I start with where do they wanna go? And for this hire, when I think about it, You can terrify people. I listened to small business guys talk about incentive structures and, and you can terrify someone with here. You could work into an ownership structure of the— they don't want that. They want, uh, they, they want to know they're not going to get fired. They want a pay. They want to, um, I have, I have a great I have a great person on the team and they're responsive and wonderful, but they really, really want their job to end at 5 o'clock and they don't mean, it's not because they're lazy or unresponsive, but in their world, they give me everything from 7 in the morning, they take their break and 5 o'clock. And if I send an email, they're gonna respond to it. But they hate it. Like, and it's, it's— and so anyway, so when I do that thinking and I think about it in terms of your hire, you've almost got two kinds of people. You could get a maintenance person who could kill it on delivering and bonding with your team and delivering all of the maintenance services for your existing properties. And they're comfortable in that role. But they're not entrepreneurial in that they would never envision themselves running an HVAC company because I know everything there is to know about this property management, maintenance stuff that's on my plate and to go outside my comfort zone to learn a new line of business would scare me away. Whereas someone else might say, I could run that and I've got this huge opportunity with the right structure and investment where I can build out a plumbing division and make, make, uh, and make multiples of what I'm making on my day one job. That's almost, it seems like you'd attract two totally different people depending on how you advertised or marketed or what you pitch.

Like, That's right. Yeah. And we are kind of inadvertently doing that. We're getting two very different types of people who are interested in the position. Um, and it's, yeah, I have found that the, even the entrepreneurial types that we've talked to, and these are some of the guys that were asking for the higher salary, um, they even were not very— because I had proposed to a couple of them like, hey, what, you know, XYZ for the base. And then maybe we'll give you like 5% or 8% of the additional revenue that comes in as a result of you growing this division. And they were not super, you know, they didn't seem very interested in that. They were much more concerned with the base salary and the paid days off. And, and I think it was a reminder for me, and I think it's easy as an entrepreneur, you start to think that everyone thinks like you, um, but they really don't. Uh, most people, they want job security, like you were saying. They want to know they're going to have a job. They want to get that paycheck on Fridays. And there's nothing wrong with that, right? I mean, that's— we need folks. We need those people who are going to be our employees, right? Not everyone can be an entrepreneur. So, um, I'm trying to sort of put myself back in that mindset a little bit, back to when I was an engineer employee, and think about what I was valuing and how I was sizing up a prospective employer and what I was negotiating for during the— because the other thing you got to remember is that employers promise everything to prospective employees, right? When they're courting somebody, I think we've all had an employer, oh, you can be promoted, we're gonna— your company's growing, blah blah blah. They make all these promises and then, you know, never happens. So employees who have been burned by that in the past are not likely to very to, to take you at your word on, hey, you could take and run and grow this division. And they're already envisioning the worst-case scenario where that budget evaporates because you have a bad year, and you have a bunch of excuses as to why they, they can't do that. And now they're stuck with this kind of low base salary. So I get it, um, I get it. I just— it's tough, right? Because there's part of me, I think almost the easy route would be That first type of person, just bring someone in who knows enough, maybe an old maintenance person who's done that before. Like you said, it'd be easy for them. Uh, but that person would, you know, they would be okay. They would be fine. But I, I just, I think we need to get someone in there who's going to be very dynamic and, and think big and, and someone that's really going to help energize and motivate me. Because this person is going to be very much in it with me in terms of running the business.

So is your salesperson integrated into— your salesperson's essentially focused on adding new units, correct? Are they— is that salesperson integrated in this, in the group, invested in the growth of this other division possibly, or this other maintenance operation? No, they're not. Um, and Is that, is that permanent? Or, well, maybe, maybe I'll start mechanic— mechanically, who's involved in the interview process for this person?

Myself, my business partner, and our director of property management. Yeah, the sales guy is really kind of a lone wolf. He's on his own, running around trying to drum up new business for, for properties to manage.

I'm hiring a sales guy, a head of sales, but I said sales guy and that really is what I think this person's gonna be, but for the print business that I bought. And he sort of had a disdain for marketing that I found very attractive in a salesperson. He's like, yeah, you can do whatever you want, but I gotta call people and I gotta meet with people. And it was not, it was not, it was not attractive to him when I talked about the digital marketing that we're gonna do and the verticals. And I, he was interested that I could introduce him to people, but he was like, I'm going to be out and doing things. If I hit these numbers, I'm going to get paid. Um, and, and for what I need, at least initially, um, that is certainly the case. Um, yeah, but, uh, one, one thing, and I should mention this, it might be helpful to you for for my experience, but I've interviewed hundreds of people. I've hired dozens and dozens through the, through the years in both private and civil service. I'm a big believer in the panel of an interview panel, a series of questions in addition to the conversation And for me, not talking. And even when you mentioned that you've got the leadership on, you've got the leadership involved in that interview process. If you're gonna do it, you might think about including Someone on your team who could grow or develop, maybe somebody that's on the maintenance team in the idea that you're not going to see the whole picture. You're going to see things that you like and reflect, and other people are going to see things, and usually, it's a reflection of yourself. We're all very self-interested, and so, we read ourselves into their situation. When you talk, I think how I would handle it. When I— but putting in a panel where other people are talking and you're forced to listen to those other reflections can be very helpful. And I still always make the decision, but having that decision informed by an admin person who notices something else, or a maintenance guy who notices something else, and for me, the sales guy who might think of a way where this person can help them make money. Yeah. Or think of an idea. But they also learn about other parts of the business. And because this person is so central, is going to be part of the leadership and the culture and values, you're also transmitting to the other people who are involved in that interview process what your culture and values are and why you're thinking of this. And even in what we do, what I would do after the initial interview, when the interview's over, that time where everybody says what they like, maybe for the standard questions, why they gave them a 5 or a 4 or 3 on those questions. Wait a minute, I gave that person a 22 and you gave them a 17, which, where did we disagree? Those are really valuable for the team. So you could be extracting value from each of these interviews.

Um, and that's a good point.

Yeah. And then even before I get to the conclusion stage or the offer stage or that negotiation, I might have a— if I interview 7 people, I might understand what the trade-offs are. Wait a minute, these are, these are 3 high-quality people. This— my team was excited about working with this person. I love this person. I would— but you then now understand what the trade-offs are. If I go with this route, I'm getting less of this. Um, if I go this route, I'm getting less of this, but this excites these people more. And having that complete picture let you know where there might be gaps in that new hire, where you're gonna improve them in this area, or you're gonna set an indicator or a measurement on some skill where you know that they're weak. So you're gonna focus on that as a growth tool right from the start, or you talk to them about it early. Just some thoughts on how to how to arrive at a decision as opposed to thinking, dun dun dun, I found the one. And there isn't the one, maybe. But you've, you've already arrived at the point where you'd have been comfortable with a couple of these already, right?

That's right. Yeah. We had some offers out and some hard discussions about salary and just couldn't get there. Yeah, it's, you know, one of the guys I think was, he was right about the right type of personality and experience level, but he was just commanding, you know, he had somehow worked himself up to a super high salary at his previous job and it just wasn't within the realm of reason for us. Another one of the guys was probably a little bit overqualified for our size of operation. He had kind of done something really similar on a much bigger scale already. Again, he was commanding a higher salary and probably rightfully so, but again, we just couldn't get there. Yeah, we'll see. I'm always open to being wrong. If it turns out that, "Hey, I'm just expecting too much for an XYZ salary," then we're going to have to get comfortable with that. I just don't know that I'm quite there yet, so we'll see.

It's good self-awareness as you As you think about that, how did you, how did you set the salary? What was the process of setting what you thought the salary range should be?

Kind of a guess, just knowing what our other team members make. And then knowing, you know, obviously, I'm, I'm in, I know what I make as the owner, and I know what our sales guy makes. And I know what our director of property management makes. And I know what You know, sort of on the other end of the spectrum, I know what like a, a licensed engineer could make, you know, uh, I always kind of use that as like a, as a base just cuz that's what my degree is in and I was started out as an engineer. So, you know, you think about someone who's a sort of a mid-level manager, uh, at a larger company or, or a, on the leadership team at a smaller company, kind of middle of their career type person. Management experience, you know, but they're also not running a Fortune 500 company. So I don't know, it's, it's a guess. You see what you get, right? You know, if you're getting— if no one's interested and no one's applying, or everyone you talk to is like, hey, like, you're joking about the salary range, right? You know, obviously, you know, you're too low. And it's, it's kind of like setting the rent for a house, right? You just The market is— the market sets the price. You don't set the price. The market sets the price, and you're just in the process of discovering what the market price is for that role. So of course you start maybe a little low, um, because you don't want to overpay, right? But you know, you don't want to waste too much time either. There's a trade-off between, hey, this guy wants $5,000 more than I'm really comfortable with, but he can start Monday. You know, and this problem can be solved.

Yeah, it's interesting. I have a, I have a situation now for a hire, um, in my consulting business where I'm, I'm, I'm torn because for low-level, uh, writing experience and work, I know what I can, I know what I can get from a subcontractor and I know that for a little bit more, I could get an entry-level person. And the work might not be as good, but I get a lot more of it. And so I can do that. Or I can just pay more and get high quality, higher volume, and be— and really set that, that function. But for me, that For me, that difference in hire is maybe a $28,000 to $35,000 entry-level type person. And I could go a long way with that or a $60,000 person who— and really that's for me and my hiring process, that's not a mid-level person in that Somebody that's on a growth trajectory likely is not going to join my firm if they're making around and they're interested in that $60,000. They're looking at firms that are paying $80,000, $90,000 with a growth trajectory. And so I'm really looking at a late stage, someone who maybe is not planning on being a a 6-figure performer. They're just, they're looking for some security and, and to do their thing and not be pressured or stressed. So those are 3 really different approaches to it. And, and frankly, I'm in the paralysis stage where I can just, I can endure another really unpleasant month from a work-life balance and crank it out and get it done and spend some on on non-permanent solutions. Yeah. And, and punt on that until I find the right one.

But I'm kind of in the same boat. It's, you know, it's— you're— there's a trade-off between— you can always find someone to do it cheaper, right? But there's a value of your own time in managing that person and checking their work and training them. Right? So that you can't discount that either. You bring someone in who's very well qualified, very smart, you pay them a little bit more, but man, the value is high because now you're freed up to go and work on other even higher value tasks. So it's, you know, but you also can't burden your business with a huge cost structure in terms of salaries, right? I mean, right, at the end of the day, we're still small businesses and, and we got to make payroll. So yeah, tough decisions. And I feel like it's not getting any easier.

I'd say that's the hardest part of being a small business. I'm, I tend to be a more conservative person in my career. I've, I worked in government and represented companies and corporations. And I, and I always had a disposition to help small business. I'm, and I enjoyed it. But I find as a small business person, my passion is magnified multiples when I think about everything that I've put at risk. And the thing that keeps me up at night is the responsibility. One of my customers, they're paying me money to deliver a product, and then my and my employees who had other options, and I pulled them from that other thing and said, this is going to be good for you. Take this money, deliver this service. And I've got to pay that obligation, uh, every month in that commitment. And if it goes spectacularly well, I will, I will earn money, um, which the government will take half of. And if it goes poorly, um, if it goes poorly, uh, the government's not going to share in any of the downside, right? And may still come after me for, for expenses and fees.

Uh, and you can carry forward losses, I think, for a few years. But yeah, I get your point.

Yeah. Theoretically, uh, things can, things can work out and the tax person can do, do some things, but it's ugly. It's, it's ugly for, uh, It's ugly for a while, but even those loss carry forwards, they're still getting money. It's money. It's my money. They're just timing-wise on when they're going to take it and how the percentage of how much they're going to make. For some of the clients that I deal with, some of the, some of the service-based businesses and that sort of thing, contractors, the government's making more on their business than they are. From that percentage basis on the margin that they get after everything is done. That's an aside. So, but the process of narrowing in on this employee, when you think about it, there's two pieces. It's taking work off of your plate and freeing you up to do other things. Those seem like, for me anyway, those seem like I understand those better. I understand how that's gonna make a meaningful difference in my business. Um, it can be less so when you're talking about taking work off of your employees' plate that you described at the beginning of our conversation, running at about 80 to 85%, so that at the end of the day, if they had about an hour, half hour, You knew that. Um, how do you, I mean, you have to track that at least mentally. You've got a picture of what you think it is by talking to your employees, watching, listening. Um, is that, is that what you, how do you arrive at that number? Uh, what's your process look like?

Um, the process is not good. It needs to be a lot better. Um, ideally there would be some sort of an employee check-in system where at the end of every day they would kind of rate their loading for that day. And as I'm talking through this, I'm actually coming up with some ideas about how we could do that right in Slack. I'm sure there's like a little bot I could program that would, you know, it would ping every employee, all the office employees at the end of the day and say, hey, on a scale of 1 to 10, how busy were you today? Or how much free time did you have or something? And then it could assemble those and average them every week and then kind of report back on who was the most heavily loaded and things like that. But as it is today, It's just talking and it's a kind of a feel and a sense for how stressed everyone is and how responsive they are to emails and how quickly things are getting done. Part of why I don't like being remote, we've got several multiple employees who are remote right now, is I lose a lot of that intuition about how busy they are. I can't see their face. I can't hear them on the phone. I can't see them scurrying around the office. It's not that I really care if they're watching a YouTube video in the middle of the workday. I really don't as long as the work's getting done. But if I can't know how busy they are, I don't know whether I should be preparing to hire somebody or giving them a bunch of work that I'm currently doing. Or so, yeah, the— or new office, you know, we closed on our new office on Friday, uh, 6,700 square foot office warehouse flex space. We're moving in about, uh, 4 weeks into that space and we're going to bring everyone back who's currently remote. And I, I couldn't be more excited for that.

So That's gonna be a big, big deal. And as you approach in that 500-unit range, a new space, a new key hire, it can be a good time to implement maybe some new system for doing that. You have some key pieces in your work that, You know, somebody wants to rent a unit, you can't, hey, I'll get back to you in 3 days. Like, there's some pieces that can't slip, and then there's others that if you don't get to, it's okay, not just on your plate, but on your team member plate. So you can measure the stuff we can't drop. It's harder, I suspect, to measure the stuff that if it slips, it, we could have gotten to it if they didn't watch that YouTube video, but we'll never know.

Right.

That's right. Yeah. And then how I think about it, I'm curious how you— I fill up the— I think about filling up the time with, if you're not busy delivering product for clients, you— I have a marketing and sales plan and I start plugging their various talents in the different marketing activities, which theoretically, there's some pieces that won't stop, but I've sort of got those moving already. So any of that other stuff is extra. Like, it's not the end of the world if it doesn't happen, but I've got you, I've got something you could be doing so that you're not sitting around doing nothing. Do you, do you have those kind of filler activities for your, for your folks, um, where you can see if some of that stuff's getting done?

You know, that's a great point. I don't think we have a good setup right now for that. And you're kind of getting my brain moving a little bit on this. I think you're right. I think we could probably easily come up with a list of a half a dozen or a dozen types of activities that if they did get to 4 PM and they literally ran out of stuff to do, they could work on. And that would be a great way to gauge, you know, how busy everyone was. I'm sure there's stuff I could come up with, you know, whether it's in operations or marketing or sales or— um, yeah, there's definitely opportunities.

I usually develop that list based on, on marketing ideas that I have, or it'd be nice to haves that I know I'm never gonna get to.

Yeah.

And then that it'd be nice to send an email that I'm probably not gonna get to, to a prospect, or somebody got a mention, or set a Google alert for my top 5 prospect names, and so that I get an email if they're mentioned in the news. And so, that sort of thing so that a lot of that can come to nothing. But if I'm, I do it when I'm fried, when I just can't think anymore. I go to that little to-do list and I, hey, congratulations on your award. I know that's not, and I get that out. I want them to know I'm thinking about them and that it's not, I can get so project focused or whatever. That I have to program some of those other touches in there. That's how, I mean, just little things.

That's great, yeah.

You can say, hey, that'd be great, but life's busy, projects are busy, your other stuff's going on. But you could also, I think, if you judged and said, I've set in the, getting reviews has not been a priority for the print business that I just bought. So I'm in the parking lot of the company and I Google print near me and we're on the third page as I'm in the parking lot. It's, and so just talking to the customer service reps, they have a lot of downtime when they have to be there, but there's downtime in between when the orders come in. And so just thinking about how do I teach them marketing? Can I have them watch a video? Can I show them the importance of reviews or have them Google some of our competitors. And, and if I think that our service is the best, and that our price is competitive, and that it's a good thing for customers to come here, it's good for their business, I want them to come here because it's good for them, that I need to make it easy for them to find me. And so the setting a goal to get to 100 5-star reviews, yeah, isn't so that I can make more money or just to fill up your day, but it's so that we can help more businesses get to where they need to go. Those little conversations with, um, with a CSR, um, who's— who can touch every single customer that's in and out— everybody touches the CSR, and, and they've got great personalities, and they're And they know when the customer is thrilled and happy and has a big smile on their face versus somebody who's in and out, eh, okay, thanks, pays the bill and is out. Maybe one of those gets a text message to, can I get a review? And the other one gets a note to me or the manager to call and say, you know, did it go all right? What can we do? Can we make it better next time? Those sorts of things. Anyway. Those, but you can also, if you have that mechanism task, um, that somebody's going to send an email out, how many emails did you send? And so if somebody's sending 10 emails and someone's never sending any emails, that's an end of the day. If you don't have anything else, do this. You've sort of filled in their day and it could be a gauge for, and you don't care if that it's not an essential activity, you then have a gauge for this person is being really efficient with their time, right? Or, or somebody's swamped, then maybe I can help them or engage with them in a different way to find out what's going on there.

Yeah, well, this has been great. I think we covered a broad array of topics on hiring and interviewing here and engaging employee loading. I've got some great ideas, I know, for for myself. Uh, it's funny, I know it's— it— I do some of my best thinking while I'm talking. It's actually kind of frustrating because I'll be thinking about a problem for days and then all I have to do is have a 5-minute conversation with the right person and a bunch of answers come flowing right out of my own mouth. Uh, it's fascinating. But, um, any last points here before we wrap up?

No, I don't know. I'm getting a lot of value out of these. I actually listen to it afterwards just to get through the pain of listening to my own voice and all my inconsistencies that everybody has, but I've got my own. But I've been taking notes and I'm shocked. I'm shocked when I go back how much I learn when I re-listen to it. I'm engaged in our conversation. I feel like I learn. I take notes during our talk, but I learn a lot when I go back and listen to it. I have no idea who else is listening or what value they're getting out of it, but I know we're doing it for the right reason. I hope other people are, and I just want people to know if something I've said, if you think you can be helpful to me, I'm really open to learning. I do take lots of advice. It may be one of my superpowers is that I listen and take advice. I take lots of advice.

Your superpower is taking advice.

I have people reach out to me if I— hey, Russell, you missed the point on that, or think about it this way.

I have no one in my life who thought their superpower was giving advice, so that's a refreshing change. Yeah, but yeah, I'll mention we're getting really close to 1,000 total listens across the whole podcast. We're averaging, for those who are curious, we're averaging around 75 unique listeners for every episode. Some of our episodes are approaching or have exceeded over 100 listens. We don't get to hear back from you as the listener very often. If you're hearing this and you like what you hear, we'd love just a note or a tweet or an email if you're getting value out of this. Our goal is to provide value for our listeners. We'd love to know what you're getting a lot out of, what's not so great, anything at all. So that'll wrap it up for today. Thanks everyone for listening, and we will see you next time.