Success Secrets Exposed - Tricks to hiring and keeping the right people

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Welcome to Success Secrets Exposed with Sally A. Curtis, where we share stories of challenge, success, and inspiration, along with practical tips and strategies to move you forward to your success. And now here is your host, Sally A. Curtis.

Good evening, good morning, and g'day to you all. Welcome to another episode of Success Secrets Exposed, where we have conversations with today's thought leaders, changemakers, disruptors to bring you tips, tools, and strategies to help you grow. For those that are new to the show, I'm a content repurposing whiz for speakers, authors, coaches, and consultants. I help them turn their existing content into new profits, in essence, helping them turn their books, for example, into 2 years' worth of social media posts. But today we're gonna be talking with a very, very special guest and a very, very special friend of mine about the tips and tricks to help you hire and keep the right people. Now, Mike O'Hagan is a dear friend. He's a multiple business owner and in multiple countries. He's always been an employer, and he built his first business with a $200 investment and turned that into a business generating $23 million annually with staff of 500 people here in Australia. He also has another business in the Philippines where he has 1,000 office workers and office staff. So today he's going to be sharing with you tips and tricks on hiring, retaining, and creating staff who are profit centers for your business. Now, what's also important to note is Mike has also experienced significant downward spirals as well. So he has a diverse range of outside-of-the-box and incredibly practical tips to share with you today. This is what makes him a sought-after business and Staffing for Growth speaker. So please let me— help me welcome Mike O'Hagan to the show.

Good morning, wherever you are. Good evening, or whatever it is in your part of the world. Great to be here, Sally.

Thank you. Welcome. It's good to have you here. And I know it's bright-eyed and bushy-tailed time in the Philippines for you now that you're back there after being able to go back home after being stuck in Australia for a while.

Yeah, I flew up here last week or just on a week ago. I've only just got out of quarantine by one day. So,

oh, there you

go. The real world. It's been bizarre.

Very much so. Very much so. So I know you've got so many practical tips and outside-of-the-box thinking to share with people, but I know I highlighted your backstory very, very, very slightly. Can you share a little bit about that backstory? story because I think that's so significant with what we're going to be talking about today and the changes that you've made over time in your own businesses.

Yeah, sure. So a long time ago in my 20s, one day I was working for a multinational company in a warehouse, just doing a pretty menial sort of job. And I'd applied to be a a manager and they turned me down straight away and I got a bit upset about that. So I decided to go into business for myself and very quickly I started buying and selling things and was very successful at doing that. Within a couple of years, I had a couple of shops and about half a dozen staff and everything was going well, but I was working 90 hours a week, 7 days a week, and my staff were only working 40 hours a week and I was being paid the same amount of money as them. That's when I decided that this whole idea a small business is, it sucks. It's not a very good thing for a lot of people. And so I went on a bender trying to find something that I could duplicate and scale and grow. And I found that in short-distance furniture moving, a company called Movers. And that's the company I spun up to. And it was actually just on $30 million we tipped out and over 500 staff. And that's my history. That grew up very well. I actually got, I sold that business or moved that business on about 3, 4 years ago now, so I don't have it anymore. But during that, when that, of course, as that grew, of course, we went up and what everybody knows is the global financial crisis in 2009, around about there, really, really hit me very hard. We got into a lot of trouble like a lot of businesses are today with COVID and we struggled and we'll come in a little bit later about the story about how we got around that. Move the staff one country to another to save the business.

Yeah, but it was the same. And what the key takeaway here is, is during that global financial crisis, which is similar to now where people are sort of doing the, oh my God, what next? You had that downward spiral. So you've got experience of how to transform a business out of that, which is some of the tips that we'll actually get into today as part of that story. Some of the things that I do notice that you talk about a lot is also the ways of Hiring the right people. So when you first started Minimovers, you would have hired a version of the right people, and then after the GFC, it was a different version of the right people. So talk us through some of your insights around hiring the right people.

Well, moving businesses is a service business. It's all about people going out to your customer's home and supplying a service. They have to behave and they have to do a phenomenal job. Otherwise, you don't get anywhere and you've got to do more than a phenomenal job. You've got to really wow those customers so they tell others and grow your business. It's absolutely vital you get the right people into the thing. Like everybody, I started by hiring experienced people. That was interesting. Most of them, about 3 months after you start, you find out why they're no longer with their previous employer. And so experienced people have a core around them that they are moving from job to job, a lot of them, and for good reason. They're probably not that good at what they do or whatever, but we learned from each one of those. I then tried to subcontract, which is another way of doing it, which is contracting is quite normal in most countries. I tried to contract, then I was hiring somebody who wanted their own business and I was actually teaching them how to do it. You know, once they learned how to do it, a lot of them left me and became my competitors. So that wasn't probably the way to go either. Discarded the idea of franchising because franchising, in my opinion, was even slower. We had to find somebody who would buy the franchise, which was business to us that we didn't want to be in. And then we would still have training. And at the end of the day, I have friends with franchise businesses. They're all human beings, they're all the same. So they don't change that much. With the moving side of it, going down and owning the trucks and actually hiring completely inexperienced people, people with no experience whatsoever. We worked out very carefully what their core skills need to be. They needed to live in a certain area, they need to be physically capable of moving furniture, and they needed to be able to hold a conversation so we could teach them to communicate with the customer. And those were the 3 boxes that we looked at when we interviewed them. We weren't interested in any of the girls. And from that point on, we trained them. Well, the interview process actually consisted of playing a video showing you how to move things as a training thing. It was actually a training segment of how we used to teach people. And then after they watched the video, we would stand up and go outside and move furniture. And some of them would have an attitude about that. They would obviously not— there'd be no starters. And some of them enjoyed it and had obviously listened to the video. And that, to us, that demonstrated that they were trainable. And then we, from there, we trained them up and we ended up with, you know, nearly 500 people, just over 500 people. And all of them had no experience at all. We wouldn't even let them have a truck driver's license when they came in. We taught them how to drive the truck as well. Absolutely everything. There's only one way to do it, my way. Honestly, they're a lot loyaler. They stay with you, a different type of employee altogether.

Yeah, so that was one of the things that always fascinated me, and that was one of the greatest lessons I learned from you when we spent time together when I was over in the Philippines, was that, that real shift in mindset from not hiring experienced people to hiring inexperienced people. Because like you've explained, I found in my own business that I was getting hiccups because these people weren't doing what I wanted them to do. They were doing what what they wanted to do in a version of what I wanted to do. And that wasn't the way I wanted it done because it was all about speed and efficiency and all those sorts of things. And I found from my own experience, when we changed to hiring the right staff that were inexperienced and giving people a shot, the difference in loyalty was definitely a huge difference. But I also liked the way in which you've just They're demonstrating to them what the work is going to be like, and then letting them demonstrate their adaptability with them doing the work. So when you're actually seeing them, can you explain that a little bit? Because I think that, that, that element of demonstration, both from what you've done, but also what the potential new employee's doing, is in itself so outside of the box. Because when you go here in Australia, if you go and do an interview and you've got to do touch typing, you're in a room with everybody else and It's all about KPIs. You know, can you do this many numbers? But it's not about what is the extra stuff that they're going to bring to the employer. So I'd love you to just sort of talk about some of those elements that you see there from that demonstration of, you know, what's the difference with when you get the right inexperienced person.

So the employment process for those drivers was that we obviously pre-vetted them before they came in and they lived in the right area, physically capable, we could see, or whether that was part of moving the furniture, which is part of the recruitment. And whilst we were talking to them, the only time we never sat down and talked to them across the desk. These are guys that want to move furniture. Okay, so they're more physical and they're into that type of work. So the whole recruiting process, the interview was a test to test if they're able to do the other bits that we needed. And look, there's another way I can turn around. I did it with when I needed a PA. I needed a personal assistant. I've always had a personal assistant in the background doing everything for me, and they stayed with me for quite a number of years, and most of them have moved on into management roles in my businesses. But so I needed a personal assistant, and I wanted to go to the Philippines and use a Filipino. So it was just what I was doing at the time, and that was what my need was. So I wrote up a test And this went vaguely like it was, this is a written test. We want you to open a Word file. We want you to name the Word file with your surname. We want you to then write a letter to Mrs. Smith. Mrs. Smith is complaining to our business. She said that our fellas did this, this, this, and this, and this, all sorts of nasty things we described. We want you to write a letter so she doesn't bug us anymore, so she doesn't, she doesn't chase us anymore. And then we want you to email that. This is part of the— in the thing, email that to this specific Gmail account. So that was the instruction. We went very wide to the market. We went everywhere we could, paid advertising, free stuff, Facebook, LinkedIn, all those places. And every time somebody acted interested in the job, I had another little person in the middle doing this. They immediately responded with a reply email with the test. So then they have to write their little letter and send it in. And then we— so our interview process was simply reading those letters. Now, what we're doing is we were testing, is their English really good? Can they write a letter that's perfect? You know, were they able to talk their way out of a problem? Because it's my PA, they obviously have to do 10 things at the same time and be able to talk to people and sometimes, unfortunately, calm people down and do those sort of things. And they're all the skills that I needed in a PA. Now, people skills, you can't You can't. The only way I could assess them was to have them write a letter. And, you know, when you read the letters, you instantaneously saw who was suitable for the job. Now, that's an employment process where you're testing to a skill to get them that you want, and skills that you pretty well can't advertise for. You can't advertise for people's skills. You can't teach people skills. I can teach them. Now, my theory was that By the way, the whole process did not say what programs we use, you know, all that sort of stuff, because I can teach that in 2 minutes easy. You know, if they don't know Microsoft Outlook, we can just whack them into whatever, lynda.com or whatever there is out there nowadays, and just they can learn that really fast. But I cannot teach people skills, and I can't— I don't have the time to finish off their English. So I tested to the things that I couldn't teach And, and we did the initial assessment around what we can easily see. And again, you don't have to talk to anybody to interview them. The only reason you should be talking to people when you recruit them is to make sure that they fit with you one-on-one, that you can work together. Only reason. By the time you talk to them as the owner, you should have pre-vetted, pre-tested them. You should know that these are the right people for the job.

Yeah, brilliantly. And I think too, now with where we've come with all of the technology, when you were doing it, it would have been very innovative. and very, very, very outside of the box, whereas in reality it sounds as though it actually expedites the whole process. You get a better quality of person and somebody that's actually a better fit for what you're actually looking for. And now, as you said, with all of the different technologies, we can do that with so much more ease. Do you— did you find when— and I know this, um, the process of you sort of doing this testing, um, it's It's very part of who you are. Do you find that people struggle to be able to get, get a test— testing scenario up and running because they're not actually clear themselves in what they're actually really looking for?

Yeah, I think that's a huge problem that people really don't understand what they're doing for. The Philippines company we were talking about before, a company called Sure360, which has grown up to over 1,000 employees in a few years, very quickly. The big key part of what we do there is in recruiting. And if you go and listen to our recruiters talking to the clients, the clients really struggle to understand what they're looking for. And they normally start with what I call the stupid things, which is, you know, we want a university degree, we want them to be qualified in this. And I'm going, well, you don't want qualification, you want them to be capable. of doing the job. A number of people I talk to would say, for instance, IT coders and full program, full deck, full stack developers and stuff like that. You don't care about their degree or their qualification. You want to know they can do the job. There's plenty of people out there who are not qualified, they're really good at doing the job. And there's plenty of people out there that are qualified, very terrible at doing the job. And the bottom line has to be they can do the job. So get rid of qualification, get rid of experience, Just come down to this is the job. What do we need for them to be able to do the job? And if it's something you can teach them, and most jobs you're going to have to teach them a fair bit of it anyway, if you think go for the lesser experience and bring them up through training. So it's all about it's all about you know focusing on when they when they when they come to you that they sort of really don't know what they want. The other thing they have is a huge issue. This is a big one that everybody should take on board. We don't have any unicorns. There's not too many around, but people that call up and say, look, what we want is we want somebody who can code in C++. We also want them to be able to use Xero accounting system and understand bookkeeping in Australia. And we also need to be able to write really good English and develop content as well. Can you get one of those where you come from? No. Why do you think you can get one here? They're a unicorn. They don't exist, guys.

Yeah.

Back to what is there in the market. Okay.

I'm sitting here laughing because in my community we call that the— we just want the super VA, the one that can do everything. They're skilled in everything, where in reality people are skewed to certain gifts and skills, etc. So you might need to hire 4 people to achieve the super VA because people don't blend into one. It's one person with a unique skill plus another, plus another, which gives you a unicorn result. But it doesn't generally come from the one unicorn. So I'm really glad you've actually said that because that's one of my rants that I get right into.

It's just— and look, I can understand it because micro businesses is where you start. You haven't got those skills at that stage. You know, you've got into business, you're a 1 or 2 person business, maybe a 1 person business, and you're going to take that big step with your first staff member. 99% of us hire a friend the first time.

Oh wow, yeah, true, very true.

It's easier. We hire a friend and they fall into the role and they're a jack of all trades. They can do everything. And that's what most of us do to start with. But if you go to the market, then it gets awkward. It really does. Yeah, but you've got to learn the skill of finding out what the sort of person is you want in the role. Then you've got to learn the skill to Assess them properly, and then onboard them and do all those things as well. Set them, manage them, empower them.

I'd love to talk more around that because that was something that I really experienced when I was over with you and when I was walking through Shore 360 and just seeing the staff in general, was that you had hired the right people because of your process. Yes, they were incredibly loyal. But I also loved that they were— you used the word empowered just then, but they were really empowered and they were excited about what they did as individuals, but equally as they worked together. So they were empowered as individuals, but they were empowered within the team or the little group that they worked in. And that's something that I would imagine you've done through all of your experience, but that in itself is such a significant element. So can you talk to that at all?

Look, I'll give you the secret key. The secret key is 80% is good enough. So one of the problems that I have, and I'm sure I'm no different than anybody, is I'm a perfectionist. I'm a perfectionist in what I do. And as a perfectionist, I'm so perfectionist, I want to micromanage everything. I want to get down and manage every single thing, micromanage and micromanage them. And boy, do we waste a lot of time and energy in there. And it took me quite a number of years to understand that. Give them the job, make sure they understand the job, make sure they understand the parameters. And then if it goes wrong, have a quick look to see that they knew it went wrong. And if they went wrong, most of them are kicking themselves that it went wrong. And just leave them alone. There's nothing else you're going to do. And they already know. If they don't know, then raise it with them in a way so they understand. But carry on. So the secret is you really got to get away from micromanaging. You've got to settle down at 80% is good enough. And to do that, you've got to empower your people to be able to make decisions and do things and go their way. And that comes from loyalty, and it comes from background and understanding. They need to understand what's acceptable, what's not acceptable. That's a little bit of an internal thing. You can't— none of this is in written instructions, by the way. When I just get so— the HR processes that they push out there, and they're all corporate HR processes, and they really don't work. You cannot write a rule for everything. There's no way. And the smaller the business, the less likely that it's going to be. So you need to— you get into the people that can make a decision, understand what's acceptable, not acceptable, and just get out there. The best way to do that is to have them understand what the end goal is. Yeah. Understand clearly the main goal. Our end goal is profit. Our end goal is really happy, well, happy customers telling other people. And whatever those other end goals are, talk to them in those terms so they understand ultimately what it is they're trying to do. And then understand in their role what their part of it is, and then empower them to make decisions, do things. Vital. You've got to get away from micromanaging. You will not grow and scale a business if you're going to be a micromanager and Get away from perfectionists. It's not a perfect world. Employees are not perfect. Things go wrong. Smile at them and carry on. Okay. And every time it goes wrong, figure out if you need to change something to fix it or it's not. Don't knee-jerk to everything that goes wrong.

Yeah, I think that's— we're sitting here laughing because yes, everybody wants the super VA or the unicorn. But they also sort of overlook and overlord them. And I understand the unicorn side of things because when you don't know what you don't know, you just want somebody to fill all of those gaps that you don't want to do and don't know about. You assume that externally they can do it for you, which is why people look for the unicorn. But then they get into the, I found this person, I need everything done right, whereas forward movement is the end goal. And I love that, that 80% is good enough. The key takeaways there for me was let them know how they can win by giving them the right parameters of what winning looks like and what is required to wow the customer and what's required within their role. And keeping them up to date and in the process of helping them achieve their end goal, which helps the team achieve its end goal, and then obviously the organization that achieves its goal as well. So within there, we've probably— if we step back a little bit, What are the tips that you've got around going through the onboarding process? And I'll call it that, and I know that's a very, very HR term. And I know from my own experience when people are putting VAs on, and when I did it for the very first time in the worst way possible, was I didn't provide any training. I just thought, oh, you know how to do that, go. So completely left them to their own devices. So there's obviously a little bit of guidance or onboarding or training, what are your suggestions or tips around that to help them work out how to win and, you know, understand that 80% is good enough so you can get on doing what you do best in your own business?

Oh, we don't exactly share 80% is good enough with the staff members. Don't give them that much leeway.

Understand that.

In yourself, you need to do 80% is good enough and move on. Okay. Otherwise you become a micromanager. Look, onboarding is about welcoming them to the team. And there's various aspects. Welcome to the company. This is what the company does. This is what the roles are. This is the structure. This is what's in it. And these are the team members. This is who you're working for. I do not like the corporate formal job descriptions. I think they're too exact. And honestly, in this world, everything's changing too quickly for that. Yeah. some serious issues. HR would come in and say, we've got to have a job description. I go, you know what, we do that. And then 3 months later, we make a change here and a change there. And then if you go back 2 years, you'll find that the job description that was given that person 2 years ago, which is still there, is completely wrong. It's gone, it's changed. You need to understand that these things happen like that, and you can't do anything about it, particularly nowadays. What happened to all of us in the last 22 months has been bizarre. Not one of us hasn't dramatically changed something in our business. And None of us had a business plan or an idea we're going to do that. It was gut feeling, let's do this right now, you know. Adapt. A lot of us survived because of that. So yeah, so keep away from the formal job descriptions. I like a video from the owner that gets in and says, look, welcome, welcome to Mini Movers, our moving company. And I am— I have a story, and I'm not going to tell it now, but I have a story that talks about the first job we ever did. But the 2 guys that I hired to go out and do the first job, and they did things that were amazingly good for the customer, had the customer jumping and wowed. And I talk about what they did and how the customer was and then how that customer told other people. And that's the basis of this company. That's what we want you to do. We want you to go out and create customers that are happy, right? And, and, and so, so my My welcome to the company is me telling that story. So it brings them into the fold so they understand where we came from and the story of the perfect customer. And it's called painting a picture if you want to Google it at all. It's a management technique.

Yeah, I wrote down it's enrolling them in the vision by providing an example of the perfect vision.

Yeah, you tell a story, you put it into a story context. I discovered it was a management technique years ago, years after I started doing it. To me, it just made sense that when you come and work, I'll tell you that this is what we're about. So look, you set the scene for the company, you talk about the structure as it is now, you talk about the good things and the bad things. Look, if things around here change, they change all the time, they change without notice. If you're the sort of person who gets frustrated with change, I think you should go somewhere else. And be quite brutal. I like that. I really am. It's like, you know, you join the team and you're part of us, or I'm sorry, but you're not going to fit in here. Okay. And, um, and I think— and I— very rare for me to fire anybody. Most people resign because they just know. Um, and I think that's— I think that's a good thing. I think that's because they understand. And, and having said that, by the way, over the years, anybody I've ever fired didn't already know that that was coming and And didn't understand that they've got an issue. Normally, it was an external issue that's got nothing to do with work anyway, which was causing the problems. Yeah. Sadly, but that's just— but we do try hard to keep them. We do a lot before we get to that stage. But yeah, no, it's just about— so onboarding is about painting the picture and telling them where they're going and what's involved, and then some of the nitty-gritty of their job and your role in this to do this. This is your part of it. I had a corporate goal that was not shared with the workers but was shared with senior management and our suppliers that one day Minimovers would be a bigger brand name worldwide than McDonald's. That said, that's why we were building the computer processes, and that's why we were building the processes and what we were doing and how big we were going to grow it. So that was corporate goal. Then I had a goal for every employee, had the same goal, which was to create ecstatically happy customers for they create tomorrow's work. And that's it. So that was one goal for everyone. It didn't matter whether you're in accounts, didn't matter whether you're on the phones, it didn't matter in sales, it didn't matter in marketing, it didn't matter if you're out on those trucks moving furniture. It was the same goal. Everybody had to do that. And even if it's not your job, If you could do something to create a happy customer, you stepped out of your job and did it.

Yeah. And isn't that— that to me is just making that— it's just making it easy for them to know how to win and then create the results that the organization wants. So that's incredibly empowering. Yeah, that's brilliant. Make it easy. Fantastic. And have you got any stories? Can you share any stories around some of the staff and some of the ways in which people have actually done that through that empowerment that you've provided?

Oh, with the moving stuff, it's been crazy over the years. We see the moving business charges an hourly rate for everything, so how long we are on the job depends a lot on the customer. And some customers have, have a whole lot of relatives there and have everything packed up on the front footpath, and that's going to be a very quick job. And some customers have got dirty, dirty, dirty plates in the sink, and they expect us to wash them and dry them and put them in the boxes, which means we're going to be there for a long time. So we've had, we've had a customer decide they want to take the watering system with them. So the guy went and got a spade and dug it all up. We've had them climb up on roofs and get aerials down. We've stopped that now because the safety came down on us with that one. Over the years, we've just done some crazy stuff for customers, whatever the customers need, and because they're paying for it anyway, that we'll do within the terms of a normal handyman normal thing. We won't do anything you know, anything that trades required, plumbers or electricians, but will do anything else as you would. And, you know, I've seen them work around the clock. I've seen them do amazing things. When we had the floods, we had guys that worked over 24 hours. I know you're not supposed to, but there are sometimes times when that's what needs to be done, you know.

And what I've gathered from the conversations we've had and some of the stories you've shared, it's that was 99% of the time, the employee's choice to do that, to deliver in the manner that they want to deliver, to continue what they're doing. And that's where that strong empowerment, where you've had the ability to be able to employ the right people.

Sally, the internal culture meant that you would never have to tell anybody to do any of that stuff. It was a natural thing for them to do.

Yeah,

beautiful. I'll read something else. Another thing that I did, which I think is really, really clever, is I had a thing called a team bonus.

Okay.

And, and this is really profit sharing without the word profit sharing. So this is— and the team bonus was designed to pull everybody together and get them to make sure the other one's doing the right thing. So the team bonus, um, just understand that we have a guarantee that if we damage it, we fix it, which means if we break anything out there, we're going to fix it. And we do that internally out of our money. We— that's part of our charging structure. We've got an allocation for to cover those things, of course, as you would. So what I did was we were well overdue for a major pay increase. There was a lot of pressure on us, but the margins were a bit squeezed and it wasn't really— from that side, it wasn't a good time to have a pay increase. Probably very much like a lot of businesses are right now. And we'll get into the Great Resignation in a minute. But man, it's causing a lot of these problems right now. There's a lot of pressure on pays. And there's no people pressure on, but of course there's customer issues. So there's not much— so many businesses haven't got the same cash flow coming in, so they're in a big squeeze. I understand that more than anybody.

Yeah.

And so what I did was I took a percentage of turnover. I think it was 3%. No need to quote me, but I think it was about 3%. I took 3% of turnover and I put it in a pool. And then I went through and I listed all the things that can go wrong. Late for work, damaged something, um, vehicle, um, vehicle accidents, all sorts of things. And I put them all, listed them all down, and then I went to the staff and I said, okay, now the more money we take, the more we earn, the higher the pool will go because it's a percentage of turnover. So every week we're going to tell you what the turnover is and how much went into your pool. And you can watch that and you've got to push the growth of that. We've got to get out there and sell more, get more customers. That's how that grows. Then every mistake we make is going to cost you this. And I had a whole cost structure around how we would cost it. So then we, we would take that out. And then what's left over, I'm going to share amongst all the full-time employees during that whole period. So if you left, you didn't get it. And if you left, it means your workmates got more. Interesting. And then I'm going to share it every 3 months. I'm going to share it equally across all of the full-time employees in the company. And it was designed so that it was enough to buy a flat-screen TV. So it was a few thousand dollars. And so, and I did it quarterly every 3 months because I wanted it to be a big one. I found that if you give staff a bonus and you pay it every week, They mortgage themselves up to it.

Yeah.

Get used to it. And then when, if it stops one day because it's a bonus, they can't afford their repayments and you've got another problem on your hands. So I wanted it to be big enough. Now, that whole bonus was called the team bonus and we pushed it down. Everybody was in it. We really— and the whole company was driven around the team bonus. It means that the guy you're working with damages something, what he just did was take money out of your pocket. Yeah. So we mentioned that if you're with somebody and they damage something, it's money out of your pocket. And I used to sit there and go, I don't care if you guys damage something, I'm not paying for it. It's coming out of your bonus. It doesn't worry me none. And I used to do that. I actually got right up at one stage saying I was saying that to my staff. Of course I say it to my staff. It's not my problem. It's their issue, right? Yeah. But the bonus, the team bonus pulled everybody together and it made them The other thing we did with the recruitment is that they were selecting the people that they selected. Part of the recruiting thing was that once we select them, we put them on a trial period. During that trial period, their workmates ticked off through a formal process that they want them or don't want them.

Yes.

So they have to approve the next new person coming in as well. Yeah. Absolutely vital that your current staff helps select the new people coming in. You need it as a team. You need it as a team. And then if your incentive system, your bonus system is also pulling them together so that all the mistakes are costing them money and all the successes, like more customers, more money coming in, are making them money, then you're okay. Now, I never did it. It's like a P&L in a way because I didn't want to share the P&Ls with the guys. They didn't really— they wouldn't understand it, and it was not something I really wanted to get into that much. But the— this, this thing is like a P&L. It's a percentage of turnover and the oops is taken out, designed specifically to make your team work together, presented to the team in a team way, saying, well, it's about each other, it's about helping each other. If somebody's down and they've got problems at home and they're grumpy and they're actually making mistakes, well, you better help them. You better put your arm around them and say, it's going to be okay, let's get going. Okay?

Yeah.

That's what you want your team doing, team all rowing together in one direction.

Yeah, brilliant. And I'd love to dig into your insights now around the Great Resignation and this shortage of staff, because I can only imagine that, as you said, there is the pressures on pay. You've had a great experience where that's been highly successful for you, as you've just explained. But right now, there is, as everyone's talking about, the Great Resignation. People are looking for more out of the employment that they're doing. So how do employers handle this? What's some tips that you've got around this today?

Okay, so look, I want to set the scene a little bit because I think this is what's happening, and I'm pretty certain this is what happens right now. Today's the first day I'm kind of sharing openly what my thoughts are. We have in the world a thing called— in the 1930s, a thing called the Great Depression. The Great Depression lasted 4 years. It was a massive high unemployment area pretty well in most of the Western world. It affected most countries. That Great Depression, as I said, only lasted 4 years. Now, those 4 years had such an effect on the people that 3 or 4 generations after that, their thinking was influenced through their children. So my parents, who were born just after the Great Depression, all right, so their parents had said to them, My parents said to me, Mike, get a job with the government. You need to have a job for life, a secure job. Be careful when you borrow money, pay your house off. And all that thinking came out of 4 years worldwide disruption called the Great Depression. So what we do know is when we have a massive worldwide disruption, and we've just had that 22 months or 2 years of COVID which has probably been a bigger bigger disruption than maybe World War II. Maybe. I think it's pretty big. And the fact that it's captured every country, and it's captured every country, not the same length of time, but certainly every country's been involved in it. So now, as a result of that, people are going to have a different attitude and see things differently. So my observations are that I think a lot of people aren't looking long-term anymore. They're thinking more short-term. that this was a life-threatening thing. So, you know, saving for the future is really a bit stupid. Let's just spend it and live life now. Um, so less steady, steady, more let's, let's, let's live life, let's enjoy life. Uh, you know, um, I've seen a lot of attitudes, you know, I don't need the money, I can live on less and I'll be happier. So then if you go and look at the jobs, and I think this is where We are in life. I think, you know, technology and everything else is making our life easier and easier. You know, we've got gadgets in our house, we've got air conditioning, we've got all this stuff to make life easy. And one of the things that never really got easy was work. So a lot of people are trapped in a job which is a bit of a miserable job. Now, this is a lot— there's a lot of people, and these are kind of what we call the blue-collar work, you know, the moving furniture, the washing dishes, the whatever they are, there's a lot of jobs. And if you look around the world where there's great resignation, it's more the blue-collar workers that you can't— you can't get truck drivers anywhere in the world. All of them have resigned. It's just, you know, and so it's down that end. So it works a bit. You're doing a job which a lot of people think is a bit miserable, and you have to do it because you feed the family. So you do it, and then the pay is minimal. It's a low-end pay. So that's not helping you either. The job's not that good. The pay is not that good. Unfortunately, the boss isn't a help. He makes it more. He's negative. He wants push, push, push all the time. He's not there about making it friendly or happy or thing. And unfortunately, a lot of bosses are like that. And then along comes another crappy thing in your life, COVID. You know, this and suddenly this is, and it's like the straw that breaks the camel's back. And you go, you know, I've had enough. I'm not going to do this anymore. Now, I I've just come back from Australia. I can tell you that a lot of my truck driving friends down there have resigned, and they resigned basically because they were being COVID tested every second day. They just— I've been— I'm driving interstate, I, I, I do long hours, I put up with it, I'm away from home, the pay could be better, and now they started to pull me up and filling me out the stupid paperwork. I'm being tested all the time. That's it, I'm out of here. So we're seeing a massive great resignation around the world, driven— underlying driven is a change in attitude towards life caused by the COVID thing. It's like the Great Depression caused an attitude in the way you handle finances. This is doing the same towards life and you're just seeing it from a different point of view. I think we're going to have to change our workplaces quite radically. We're really going to have to make them into fun workplaces.

Yeah, I agree. And I'm seeing, having spoken to different people in America, it seems to be across the board in the great resignation over there with the blue-collar workers, but also the CEOs and the corporate workers are also having a similar exodus to find the meaning of life for them and have a simpler life and a change of scenery and all the rest of it.

So what do you Yeah, in the Philippines as well, Sally. It's everywhere. Yeah, we're struggling to get people the way we were. We're having to work a lot harder to get people. Um, yeah, I know the Philippines doesn't have a welfare system. They have a family support system, and all of them don't have to work, and they are not working. And the other thing though we're fighting with is, or having a big debate about, is work from home, which is a, another little issue in there. And, um, we'll see where that goes. Yeah, anyway.

No, that's totally right because we're having the same thing here from a corporate perspective. I was having a conversation with one of my communication experts a couple of weeks ago and we were talking about this, the Great Resignation as well, and that how the employers and the employees are saying, yes, we are more productive at home, but what the employers were talking about was that, yes, I agree, you are more productive at home and this is working for the organization. But what gets missed is, yes, productivity is good, but they miss innovation and they miss collaboration, which are the other 2 pinnacles that help organizations grow. So I'd love to talk about how we can change. You've used the word fun. People are definitely wanting to have a more joyful life, and if that includes employment, they now expect expect employment to be part of that joyful life as well. So I'd love to hear your insights around that.

Quickly, I'll give you 2 resources that people should go and have a look at and think about. The first one is just go in and you can Google this and it'll come up. Google the FISH, the Seattle Fish Pike Markets. The actual resource is called FISH, just the word FISH, and it's based on a Seattle Fish Pike Markets, and it's a it's it was it was originally it was about getting more customers by having a fun environment. But I want people to go and look at the videos. There's many of them out there. Go and look through the videos. Have a look at the videos of the workplace itself. It is like that. I've been there. They're crazy people. They did exactly what they did on the videos there. They really do do that. But that's a fun work. That's what a lovely place to work—a fish market. With smelly fish and ice. Yep. They're having more fun and they don't have any staff turnover. So go and have a look at that. Also have a look at Zappos, with what Tony did with Zappos, with their call center and the way they put their money back into their staff. And look at that. I think there are 2 resources at the moment that you employers should all go and have a good think about. Go away and think about what can I do in our workplace to make this a place that people want to come to every day. You've got to move away from this, you know, people work here because they have to, because they've got to feed their family. You know, that's not going to work anymore, guys. It's disappearing. We've got to create workplaces that people want to come to. And I know from experience that they are a lot more productive. I used to have a call center in Australia, which was very much like Zappos. It was fun. It was crazy. And it got destroyed when I put corporate managers in there and they went through it with the health and safety stuff and they stopped us throwing screwed up paper at each other, would you believe? Because it could hurt somebody. How stupid can you get? We used to have paper fights in the middle of things. It was crazy, crazy place, but it was a fun place. People used to love coming to it. And man, were they productive. Totally productive. Very, very good.

I think that's the key thing there. If we just do a bit of a recap, People are wanting to be in fun environments. They're not wanting to be micromanaged. We as owners and managers need to know that that 80% is good enough. Staff need to know the ways in which that they can, that they can win. We need to make training more relevant, practical, demonstrate, involved, and empowering. So people feel part of the team and know how to win and help the company grow. Just as we close off, Mike, I know that you've— we will pop up on this, on the ticker, your calendar if people want to actually book a time with you to discuss with you how to go about hiring staff and finding the right staff and keeping the right people. You've got that and you're happy to talk to people around that. Obviously they can contact you via your website, which we'll have up as well. Is there anything else just in closing in the last minute that you'd like to share with

I like to give a little plug for the Philippines. I've lived in the Philippines for 12 years, guys, and there's a massive great pool of very, very employable people here. You're talking 100 million people, most of them well-educated, and they are going to be the answer for a lot of staff shortages around the world. If you're having trouble getting skills, and we're not talking about VAs now, we're talking about high-level stuff, CFO, accountants, not just a plain accountant, not bookkeepers. Accountants, they're a simple dime a dozen. But CFOs and high-level things, engineers, architects, all that type of stuff. And there's massive business opportunities in this. If you're looking for an opportunity to build a business, have a chat to me about that as well, because that's where it is. But the Philippines, Sure360 is the name of the business that we have here, and we're really good with this employment stuff. And it's, it is harder here as well, but we can find people. They're everywhere. Have a good think about that. There's massive opportunities here. So what happens in one part of the world gets counteracted in the other part of the world. Very much so.

Yeah, thank you. And as I said at the very beginning when I introduced Mike, I've spent time with Mike. I've been over in the Philippines looking at going through Sure360. I've seen the incredibly high-caliber people in that architect, in the CFO, arenas and was gobsmacked at the level of empowerment and loyalty and funding which I experienced within those organizations. So certainly do reach out to, to Mike to find out how he can help you grow your business as well. So thank you very, very much, Mike. And for those that are joining us next week on the show, we have a lady by the name of Pat coming to join us. She's going to be talking about the ways in which to monetize your book. One of my pet peeves is I see so many people write books and then not turn it into a profitable asset that actually generates money for them. So she's going to be talking to us how to monetize your book. But thank you very, very much for joining us. Thank you again to— for Mike for sharing his wisdom. Please reach out to either of us if you need any support in any way. We're more than happy to assist you and refer you to the right people. Thank you very, very much, and we'll see you again on the next episode of Success

That's it for this week's episode. Thank you so much for joining us, and I trust that you got some inspirational tips to move you forward. You can find this episode along with many more on your favorite streaming platform such as iHeartRadio, Spotify, iTunes, and more. See you next Thursday at 7 PM Eastern time for more Success Secrets Exposed with Sally A. Curtis.