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We’re going to be discussing in a series of podcasts that I’m going to be doing on the realities of hiring in the 21st century and the realities of hiring in 2019 and beyond what we’re dealing with. What I’m personally dealing with, this is a challenge for me. So if you are a solo operator, if you are a business owner, I got people listening to us from across all kinds of platforms in many types of fieldwork, looking at pest control. And I think we need to make pest control sexy again, you know. And so, you know, we have to look at what the reality is. And there is there seems to be a disconnect. Between the reality. And the grass on the other side. From both parts. From from the employee side and from the ownership side, and those of you who have ever listened to me understand that I am pretty fair and equitable. I look at I try to look at both sides. I look at my situation. I have empathy. I try to put myself in the other person’s shoes. And as a public speaker, as a person who’s done counseling, I have to put myself in the other person and try to understand the other person’s point of view. I give you an example.
I just had to fire one of my employees two weeks ago.
And, you know, we’re looking now for a new replacement for that. And. You know, we did nothing wrong in this situation. We supported that person, made sure they had everything they needed, gave them all the encouragement we could give them, was there for them. You know, did whatever we had to do that the person chose that they were going to violate company policies, not show up to work clock in and not work. And not be where they were supposed to be at the time they were supposed to be those places. And this went on for only a little bit longer than I would like to admit. But when we got wind of it, I immediately started digging in, building a case. Took me about a week to build my case. And then I. Brought them in on a Thursday and basically terminated. However, the reality of what I have to go through to find another person is painful. The reality of what I had to do as an employee and employer was painful. It was painful because.
I have a conscience, and my conscience, sometimes to my detriment, controls me and on what I have to do. And regardless of whether this person was completely wrong, they were stealing. They were completely wrong in the process. I still have empathy for people and I had to put myself in for two days. I had to prepare myself emotionally and mentally for this because I was livid at first that how can the person do this? I was in disbelief. You know, it’s kind of like you go through this process of I cannot believe this.
I’m in disbelief. Second, after being in disbelief, I was enraged. Then after I was enraged, I was worried. And then after I was worried, I was just depressed about it because I had to terminate somebody who at the end of the day has to go home, is a father, has to take care of his children. But even though this wasn’t on me. Is still weighed heavily on me and being an employer.
Is going to weigh heavy on you if you’ve never done it and I’ve done it for a while. I mean, this is probably tech number nine and twelve years guy.
We’re growing now at a pace where it’s becoming very difficult
and we’re gonna be discussing why it’s so difficult to grow and why, you know, the majority of people in the pest control industry are solo operators, 50 percent probably are solo. One man, two men shows a wife at home and maybe a second help. And that’s it.
That’s as far as they want to get because of the nightmare of having to hire. And it’s harder today than it was 10 years ago. Extremely hard. I think the percentage of hardness is probably a hundred percent harder than it was 10 years ago. And the reason is we have an employee market. It’s no longer an employer’s market. And I had to do all this prepare for this lunacy the night before I could not sleep. It really weighs heavily on me to make these decisions. And so that is why I say from the beginning is you’ve got to hire really slow to not be in a hurry to put somebody in a truck. That you vet and the problem that you’ve got to understand is that the majority of people that are gonna steal from you have no criminal record, complete background check. You can’t verify this in an interview. This is the challenge you have about people stealing from you. You can’t verified an interview. You can’t get it from previous employer because they’re never gonna divulge that because they’re afraid of getting sued. The only thing you can confirm these days when you’re hiring somebody is the day they started.
The date is finished. You might be able to get starting salary and ending salary and whether they’re recommended for rehire or not. You might not even get that. Most of the time, employers, especially seasoned employers who have H.R. departments and and who work for companies, they work for a larger company. It’s even harder to verify. You’ve got to do it in writing and you’re only going to get start date ending date position held. And that’s it. That’s all you’re gonna get in a back. You mean when you check references? What you’re really checking for that person is really employed there or not. Are they lying to you that they were employed? They make up their position. Know what did they do? I mean, you’re getting intel and you’re putting a puzzle together. And the way I look at hiring is you’ve got to get all the pieces. There’s five steps to hiring, which I’m going to discuss in a future podcast. But in this podcast, I want to discuss the the heart ache of of why it’s so hard to hire these days. And what are you going to. What do you got to look at?
First of all, employment is the lowest it’s been. Unemployment is the lowest it’s been in 50 years. You got to understand that in the employee market.
What does that mean? That means that.
It’s simple supply and demand everywhere, no matter what business you’re in. Everything is supply and demand. The less of a supply there is of qualified people. The higher the price is going to be on the product that you’re gonna have to pay for that product because it’s not available. It makes it much harder to find source out get. That’s both good and bad.
We’re going to look at both the reality of where the marketplaces. We’re going to be discussing the psychology of the marketplace. I think there’s a big shift in psychology that we haven’t had to deal with in 10 years. I’ve been hiring people probably for 20 something years now, more almost probably 20, 20, some years that I’ve been hiring people. I’ll put my hiring experience was I had an H.R. department and I needed somebody and they got me three qualified individuals for me to look at. And I basically had to choose the best one that I thought. So my experience is really in management and leading people, not recruiting, hiring and recruiting are two different things. I had to hire and fire people. But I didn’t have to recruit them. And now that as I’m a solo operator, recruiting is something that I had to learn to do. It’s an art and a science. To give you an example of how hard recruiting is. Most headhunters that do recruiting for a living make a really good salary at it. And then second, that their rate, what they charge to find you somebody is somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of first year salary.
So if you want to hire somebody to hire for you, you better think about you’re going to be paying between three thousand and a thousand to nine thousand dollars for them to do their job with a 50 percent retainer upfront. That’s the reality. If you don’t believe me, go look for it. I’ve done a lot of work in the last two years of learning to recruit. I have over two thousand applicants right now. I believe that I’ve gone through resumes in the last two years and I’m looking at the trend. See, I’m a guy that looks at data and I look at the trend as long as I know where the data is and where the trends are. And I know where the numbers are. I know where to play the game. The reality is that here’s the the mentality shift that has to happen and a solo operator or a small business person that doesn’t do recruiting for a living, doesn’t do hiring for a living. They make a lot of bad choices. But the reality is they refuse to look at the data.
Everybody refuses to look at the data until they get hit in the face. I know what I’m gonna do. I have an opinion. The opinion is based on what I feel. It is not based on most of the facts. It is mostly based on feeling. And this is why I post a lot of things for those of you that listen to me.
I’ve listened to me on this podcast for five years now and watch what I post online on my blog, on my personal Facebook page, on my on my pestgeek page. The listeners group. And by the way, if you’re listening to me, you need to sign up for the listeners group. There’s a lot of things going on in there that we’re gonna be discussing that is only gonna be for the listeners group. But.
You find that you’ve got a really difficult time of placing me, of figuring me out because what I what I talk on the podcast and how I write. It’s almost like two different people. And the reason is I’m a terrible writer. Second of all. I’m a goad. I’ve decided that that’s what I am in life. You know, people ask, what are you gonna be in life when you grow up? I want to be a firefighter. I’m going to be a a policeman. I’m going to be a doctor. I wanted to be a business owner. And second of all, I figured out, you know, who are you? What do you do best? And what I do best is I’m a goat. Literally the translation of a prick. I prick people into action. And I provoke people into giving me the truth. And I’ve learned that a lot of the time you will not get the truth out of people unless you provoked them. So think of me as a provocateur of sorts. But in any case, where we’re at in this employment market and and you’ve got to look at two sides, you’ve got to look at the employee side. Look at the employer side. Most people that are doing the hiring and are doing hiring have a disconnect.
What they’ve done is and I can tell the difference when when I’m talking in groups and when I’m posting something, I know immediately by the response whether this person has a clue of what they’re talking about or not.
And most of the time they’re either solo operators or they’re or they’re a technician and they have a mentality of what they think hiring should be like. In other words, the always the responses you need to pay more. You need to pay more. You’re not paying enough. How do you know what I’m paying? And how do you know what my markets like and how do you know what my percentage of payroll is? You have no clue to make that comment. You’re making that comment because that’s what you’ve heard and that’s what you believe you’re parroting. But the reality is that every market, every job, every position, every company has a limit on what they can pay for a position. And what happens is the moment you decide you’re going to pay and you’re going to hire. You find out. That you think about what you’re paying, but you’re saying I’m not going to pay more than what I’m making, and most of the time you’re going to have to be paying more than what you’re making initially to get the right person. So what happens is there is a disconnect between what you know, what you think you know, what you expect to do and what you’re actually going to have to do. Once you’re in that position, see, there’s some today. There’s too many posers online posing as if they’re real entrepreneurs, they’re real business people, they’re real consultants, they’re real this. They’re real that. When the reality is they’re not doing it, they never done it. They’re giving their opinion on something. They don’t have the facts on it, but they’re parroting what they’re hearing other people say.
But not based on their feeling of how they felt working for three or four companies in their end, their experiences limited base to them only, so their opinion is based upon their limited experience. I can expect you tell me this is what my experience has been. I can respect your experience. I have a hard time respecting your opinion as a professional opinion or what I should do and what anybody else should do based on your limited experience. So when I have these discussions, I can immediately find out by the response who they are because I looked him up immediately and I find out who they are. Some of these guys that are giving me their advice have never actually run a company. They know they do their their subtle thing. Others that I look at, I said, man, the guy is on the top 100 of P.C. T. This guy absolutely knows what he’s talking about.
This is the guy I like. I need to listen to whether you agree with him or not. And where we’re going is helping people grow. We want to help people grow. We want to help people get better. We will always want people to do better. I’m one of those guys. And the reason I’m investing my time is I’m sharing my journey of what I have already, an experience in what I’ve devoted several thousand hours to.
In the last five years of learning that I’m still learning. Talking to headhunters and recruiters and people that actually do this for a living and what the actual expert looking at the actual data that we’ve collected over two years now, three years of hiring over two thousand applicants, looking at all the resumes and looking at the experience of who’s applying. Looking at profiles, psychological profiles, looking at experience profiles, profiling people and gathering the data ourselves in our market. Now, this is limited to our market. But what I’m going to be sharing with you is, is is pretty much a national phenomenon. Okay. And then you have the market. You got two extremes in the market. You either don’t have enough people applying because there isn’t enough people in your market to apply for that position because you’re limited in how many populations you have to going to an exasperating end of the spectrum where it’s unmanageable and you have to develop a system to weed through it because it’s unmanageable.
And this is where we’re at. We’re in a major market. We have in one county, we have almost 2 million people. One point eight million people in one county. OK, so we have an enormous amount to choose from. And it’s overwhelming for me based on having to run a business, being honest on the road, having to do the admin work, being a manager, being a husband, a father, a podcast, and then having a ministry, you know, how do you find time to do it? I got to streamline everything. And you’re saying, well, aren’t you going to be short? Cutting this in short kindnesses is I one point I have to get to the truth and I have to make the best decisions with the data I have. Those are the risks. Those are what you have to do. You. You can’t sit there and say, I’m going to spend the next year figuring. Because, you know, it takes you three to six months. The average national right now is six months to hire and the person will quit. Usually 60 percent of those people will quit within the first 60 days because they find out this job isn’t for them. You spent six months looking for somebody going through the entire process of hiring, interviewing. The person will quit within the first 60 days. That’s the reality of what you got to look forward to. So I got this great study. Ninety seven percent of America is employed roughly. We’ve talk about the unemployment rate in America. We don’t talk about the employment rate. We don’t look at it from the positive. We look at it. We tend to have a negative view on things. OK, so so ninety seven percent of people are employed.
Ok.
That is tremendous amount of competition compared to 10 years ago,
2009 were roughly it, 12 percent was on the books, but a 24 percent of America was really unemployed or underemployed because they were working two part time jobs because they got displaced. Well, then people were available. Everybody was available. You mean you put on an ad and there was ten thousand applicants for you. Today you put out an ad and you’ve got a thousand unqualified applicants per every one that’s actually qualified. And we’re gonna be discussing also in a series of podcasts that I’m going to be doing on the qualifications of a pest control technician. And what you need to look for in the soft skills. All right. So now you’ve got ninety seven percent of America is employed. All right.
Pretty much everyone that can work is working and everybody that can’t work. And there’s something seriously wrong with them, like illness, diseases. They just don’t want to work there. They’re basically comfortable living on on welfare and they don’t want to do better. I mean, that’s really what you have in the situation. But this this company called the Randstad Group did a study. And before you say, well, you know, those numbers, you know, they don’t make any sense. You know, you can make stats, do anything. Yeah. Guys, look, you can make stuff, do anything. But the reality is this is a twenty three point three billion dollar global provider of human resources. So before you sit there and think you know more than these people about doing surveys and figuring out where they need to hire until you’ve pulled out three billion dollars in revenue, I think you need to hold your criticism because I mean, I get that and a look, guys, when you call me and you. You put that on my post and stuff like that. It just shows that you don’t look at the real information. You’re not in the game. OK. You’d either need to be in the game or you need to just, you know, really keep your opinions to yourself because your opinion really doesn’t matter to somebody who’s growing. And the problem is that I found with a lot of the guys that aren’t growing is there hanging around the people that are keeping them down.
And this is the reason I stopped going to a lot of these associations and networking and all this, because 90 percent of the guys I sit across the table from are all discouraged, saying, I can’t find anybody. You’re better off being a solar producer. It’s too much trouble. I did it before I went back to being myself by myself. And they don’t want to grow and they don’t want to get anywhere. But if you want to grow, understand there is pain along the way. But stop associating with people that are telling you why they can’t grow. I really don’t care for your negative comments. I don’t listen to them. I really don’t care. It makes me laugh most of the time when I hear this. But I just want you to know that I’m being transparent with you and this audience and where I am and who I am. And everybody who knows talk to me and understands. You go online and you say something stupid on my platform, I’m gonna really shut you down because I want and encourage people to challenge themselves to be better, not for people to sit there and be negative on on why it is you can’t do something. I mean, that’s the easiest thing to find on God’s green earth. But this is the twenty three point twenty three point three billion dollar nat global provider in America alone. They got fifty seven hundred associates.
And there place more than a hundred thousand people in jobs. So they know what they’re talking about here is when they did a survey. They found out we’re going to be breaking this down a little bit.
But almost half of people are considering. Leaving their job to freelance.
Ok. I want you to think about the mentality of the workforce. Understand that perception is reality. What people think about is the reality. Whether you agree with that person or not, because you are a special kind of person in the world. But the reality is. That half of people are considering living to freelance work, taking whatever their expertise is, and just freelance added for other people because we are in a new era of entrepreneurship and solar partnership in this country like any other time in history. And when 20 years ago when you told your dad that your boyfriend was a freelancer. And you guys were thinking of getting married. Your dad would be like, you know, he’s a deadbeat, right? You know, he’s like, he’s not going to provide for you ever, because freelancer is a codeword where I can’t keep a job today. Freelancers code is code word for going out and going after it. And people that are freelancing and doing stuff on the side. To their regular job in their specialty is growing and it is tremendous. And you got to understand that if you’re hiring somebody, chances are they’re already freelancing something or they’re doing a side hustle. And the danger that you have with pest control is that they’re gonna start moonlighting. You gotta know that that is a reality. You can’t escape that reality. Almost half. Of our employees right now are considering leaving. For better opportunity and better locations, in other words, places closer to where they live. The commuting is getting really bad if you’re in Miami in the morning. It takes you an hour to an hour and a half to get to work. If you’re driving more than 8 to 10 miles to work, you need to find a job close to home because you don’t want to come. You will. Guess what? People don’t want to drive. Guess what, 50 percent of this job is driving.
Do you see a problem?
A third are considering leaving to work remotely.
They don’t even want to work in the office anymore. They don’t. There’s no need today for a lot of the jobs that need to be done.
To be done in an office. In other words, if if you are a receptionist and you’re transferring calls, most calls are done today over voice over IP. You can literally do that from anywhere in the world. There’s no need to have a person physically there answering a phone. There’s no need to have a person physically there to do routing or scheduling. Or accounting or bookkeeping or any of the things that most do, you have to be done. So when you’re hiring and you’re telling people you’re going to be coming here every day to work. I understand that a third of people really want a job now that they can work from home, and I know a lot of people that are working from home and we’re looking for people to work from home.
As a company. Now understand this. Eight out of 10 people expect raises every single year. And when they aren’t getting them, they’re highly disappointed. If you can’t figure out how you’re gonna give your people a raise every year, I understand that in pest control. You got to be able to raise your prices every year. And a lot of you have no experience in doing that. You’re afraid. We do it all the time. A rethink a year now. And guess what? We’ve only lost one client per year on average. Which is insignificant. The percentage we lose for raising prices because we have to cover our increased expenses to the client that doesn’t understand and doesn’t appreciate us is very small.
Here here is the thing. Almost two thirds of people. Will not even consider working for you unless they’re getting two weeks of paid vacation annually right from the get go. This idea that you’re gonna get a week and then you’re gonna have to wait two to three years.
To get your vacation when you’re already working at a job that you’re getting two weeks vacation. You’re not gonna be able to hire anybody when you tell them you’re not gonna be able to take a vacation for two years because you’re gonna be running around. And I’m growing and I can’t jump on a road for two weeks for you to work.
Why would they leave their current position to come work for you?
See, it isn’t that you can’t find good workers. Here’s the problem is that you can’t attract good workers. The good workers are already employed. They’re already doing something. And what you got? Most of the time, what you’re asking them to make is a lateral move.
You know, eight out of 10 will tell you that it’s the money. The reality is that we’re going to find out through this study that it’s not the money. It’s not the money. Most of the time you can get somebody else to work for you if you can get them what they really want. See, this is the whole thing about hiring is you’re putting out a job, you’re putting out a job, and most of you are offering a dead end job, especially when you start working for a solo operator. There are a lot of benefits. We’re going to discuss the benefits of working for a solo operator, but you don’t have a marketing mentality, you don’t have a competitive employment mentality. You have is I need to find somebody to get on the truck because I’m working 16, 18 hours a day. I’m pulling in one hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year. In revenue, I can’t grow anymore, I can’t handle it. I brought my wife home, just start managing the office last year. I’m thinking about bringing my wife to start so that I can get off of all that and I can focus on getting more business. And then you’re gonna get to the point where you just need somebody to jump in that truck that you can train.
The problem you have is you got an unrealistic expectation of what it’s going to take to bring that person over.
And the qualifications that you need for this job are high. The problem is you have set them the bar so high because you want another you that you can’t get that. And you’re going to have to understand that you’re gonna have to create S.O. piece. You’re gonna have to create a training program. You’re gonna have to create because people can’t work with solo pioneers. And the reason is everything is in their head. They don’t know what to expect. They don’t know what they’re supposed to know because a lot of you are terrible trainers, your great technicians. But when it comes to training other people and transferring that knowledge, you chair right. And there’s one thing that I’ve been able to do for two decades now is train people. I’m not a coach. I’m not a guru. I’m not a business development guy, although I can’t do that. I’m a trainer. Fundamentally, I’m a trainer. I know how to train good people to do the work. That’s what I know how to do it, I’m learning to hire and I’m learning to do this the hard way.
So you got to look at all that, all your limitations and say, why would anyone come to work for me? You got to make a list of the reasons why somebody will come work for you and get out of your. I need somebody to come work for me. Because the reality is that nobody cares about you. They care about themselves. It’s w i f em. What’s in it for me? Not what’s in it for you. And when you have a mentality that says nobody wants to work and you’re using that vocabulary. What you got to sit down in your own mind and saying is no. There are people who are willing to work. They’re just not willing to work for me. What do y need to do to get those people to want to come work for me? Am I a marketer or am I selling a dead end job? Am I selling the position in my selling a career? Am I selling something that somebody could really use in their life to better their life better, their family’s lives better themselves?
Or am I selling what I need right now because I’m being totally selfish and self-centered, because this is all I can focus on. And unless you can switch the focus, you’re not going to attract the right people, you’re going to repel them because they can see right through you and asked if when an employee is asking you.
What am I getting paid? How much time am I taking off? What are the hours that I have to work? Understand that that’s the new culture and a lot of you solo prenours who are in your 40s and 50s.
Don’t understand that culture, you have your parents culture. You were a Gen Xers. You have a different mentality. Then. This new millennial generation.
And you got to get a line if you’re going to attract them, you’re going to have to develop a company that attracts them versus something that what you want. If it’s always what you want and this is the major problem that we have with small business employers is the mentality is all about them. And why they’re not attracting these people is because they don’t have anything to offer them. It’s more of the same and they’re tired of the same. And they don’t want to go work for a small employer because there are no opportunities for growth. There’s no opportunity and meet. You don’t know how to lead, train and manage people. You know how to be a good technician. And people want to be or feel led. They want to feel secure. They want to feel empowered. They want to feel. And it’s all about the experience. Understand that we went from customer service to customer experience and everybody talks about the customer experience. Well, what about the employment experience? And this is what you have to understand. So unless you’re going to offer two weeks vacation, forget about it.
More than half feel their companies views profits over people. More than half have this feeling and you had this feeling because that’s why you quit. Most of the time. So why would you consider not having a mentality that profits over people? How do you bring that into your culture? Almost half don’t currently have enough growth opportunities for them to stay any longer. This is a double edged sword because the reality of the generation is they don’t have the patience or the perseverance to think four to five years down the line. Their thinking here now. You as a solo operator or a small business guy with 3 to 5. Are not going to have them in a management position in the next year. They’re going to be a technician. For two to three to four, five years until your company grows enough that you can put them in a management position, the problem is they are unrealistic of the expectation. They want to get into a company now and move up within the next six months. And when the challenges are where their expectations haven’t been met. Immediately.
Then. They basically are going through the next experience and it’s and it’s no longer about going to college, graduating, taking a trip around the world. Look, you know, seeing the world and then coming back and deciding what you want to do, this is about. I’m gonna figure out what I’m gonna do from the time I’m 18 to the time I’m twenty-nine, thirty years old, thirty five. And spend the next 10, 15 years trying to figure this out because college no longer is an option for a lot of people. It doesn’t provide unless you’re going to be an engineer. You know, you want to be an engineer, you’re going to be a doctor or a lawyer or have a specific a graduate degree that is actually useful. Besides having a degree in Interpol’s G. Which is gonna be totally useless. I mean, if you get a degree today in entomology, it’s gonna be totally useless because you gonna end up working for a pest control company. Unless you’re going to go work for a manufacturer and sell chemical. Or become a university, you know, person, but those people have their careers defined. The problem is the majority of millennials don’t have their careers defined. And what I’m looking at over two thousand resumes is that the average 90 plus, I would say 95 percent have had four to five jobs.
In the last four to five years, most of them are lasting six to nine months on their job. So they’re applying for me and I’m looking at this and I’m saying you will never make it here because I have nothing to offer you. That you’re going to that’s going to satisfy you for the next six months. And I’m not growing at a pace where I’m gonna make you a manager in the next. Why am I even gonna waste my time with you? You see, you don’t. You can’t bring them in. They’re like, I want an opportunity, but I don’t have the perseverance. I don’t have the long term vision. I don’t know who I am yet. I don’t know what I want to do and I want to experiment. The problem with pest control is I can’t have you experiment with us because it requires a certain amount of seriousness. There’s a high level of responsibility. There’s a high level of your. Think about it. You’re in a mobile chemical factory putting these in people’s homes and you have to have a certain amount of empathy. And we’re looking for is a set of soft skills. That will determine whether you have a chance of making it.
We don’t even know if you’re gonna make it in reality when we interview you. When I put you through my five step process for hiring, at the end of the day, I am taking the best educated decision I can make with all the evidence I have. But until I actually put you in the field and I actually test you and I actually have you working with me for several months, I have no clue whether you’re gonna make it or not. That’s the reality. We do the best we can with the tools we have to hire people. Six out of 10. Have left or are leaving because of the direct supervisor. And here’s the problem. The majority of small business owners. Don’t know how to manage and lead people. When I look outside of my city and I look at every home, every job that’s there, I said, how is that restaurant owner going to treat his people? How is that sub shop going to treats me well? How is that bicycle shop going to treat people? How is the corner place? You know that the little market going to trees me. How is that store that sells export going to treat its people when you’re working in an environment of six or less people?
A lot of things come into play. Versus when you’re working at a large corporation that you can switch positions or move up.
Direct supervisor people don’t quit their jobs, they quit their bosses. That has been the number one rule. Are you a boss that is gonna provide leadership? Or are you going to provide micromanagement if you’re gonna micromanage them? You can only micromanage them until they learn their job. Then you have to let them go and you have to trust that they’re doing their job and you have to verify that they’re doing your job. And we have tools in place for that. Four of the 10 have left or are leaving because their employers don’t recruit, retrain, high performing individuals. Here’s the reality from both sides. I’m going to give you a shocking revelation here for both employers and employees. The reality is there’s the rule of five. If you have five employees in your workplace and you hire them, you’re gonna have one that’s a superstar. You’re gonna have three that are just OK. They do their job. They do it satisfactory. They’re not standing out. They’re not going over and above. They’re just getting it done. They’re doing it right. They’re just getting it done. They’re gonna go home to their family.
They’re gonna clock out and they’re gonna enjoy their weekend. And they’re not going to think about you or your company until Monday morning. And then there’s that fifth one. Who is the underperformers? You got A players, you got B players, and then you got C players. And when you have four or five employees, you’re gonna have see players. And the problem is you’ve got to learn to get rid of those players very quickly. And this is where resource companies will fail is they won’t get rid of the C players very quickly and replace them with at least B players. But you’re going to find that you’re gonna are limited and B players because B players are going to demand a lot more of everything when you’re producing when you’re the top sales guy. When you’re the top employee. You’re gonna be demanding. You see, you’ve got to be prepared for a demanding employee. He’s going to overproduce for you. You’re gonna have to be prepared to over give. And if you say everybody gets paid the same, everybody gets the same treatment. That’s not the real world.
That’s a fallacy.
You see, so. So when you’re making bad choices all the time because you need to fill positions, you need to put hot, warm bodies into seats. Your best people will start leaving because I don’t want to work for an organization that isn’t bringing in top people. But that’s the reality on both sides. Almost half want to leave their job due to a toxic work culture.
Half of people feel that they’re working in a toxic work culture. When you walk in every day as the boss and you don’t set the pace in your ranting and your raving and you’re going off the handle and you’re moody and nobody knows how to talk to you, I understand you’re not gonna bring in top people.
You’re screwed. You gotta learn. To be stable, you’ve got to learn to be levelheaded. You’ve got to learn to handle pressure. And you cannot tolerate toxic people in your work environment, culture is the name of the game. Culture is the name of the game. If you’re not building the culture of your company and you don’t have a culture in your company, understand that you have chaos. You either have a culture of what people are expecting.
Or you’re you’re just letting everyone do whatever it is they want. And a lot of solar nerds have this problem. A lot of people who have four or five. Companies, member companies have this problem because they’re afraid to let people know that they’re screwing up because they’re afraid to lose them because of how hard it is to replace people. So you just let them do whatever they want and then you create a culture where people say, well, they get away with whatever they want. I’m going to get away with whatever I want. And now you have chaos. I make it very clear we have the S&P standard operating procedures, protocol policy procedures. You don’t break them.
You start breaking them. I start breaking you. It’s that simple. No offense, but this is the way we do it. I listen to all my people. Nobody can say I don’t listen to them. But at the end of the day. This is I spent the research that you don’t have coming in with 1 2 years of experience and doing the work of creating S.O. PS so that the customer doesn’t get hurt, that you don’t get hurt, that everybody works and gets it done when s o ps fail. That is the time. But you know, s.o. piece will work ninety nine percent of the time. I’m not going to start tanking everything for 1 percent that it doesn’t work. And then when a guy starts nit picking to me about the 1 percent, I set him straight right there. I said you’re a dumb ass because the reality is it works ninety nine percent of the time. You have to manage the exception so you can’t throw that back on me. OK. This is the thing that you have to look at.
Over half want to quit because of the negative author’s politics. Everybody is. The culture is in a lot of places where you created a piranha pit yourself. You created a piranha pit, by the way, you compensate the way you pay, the way you deal with your people and everybody is out for themselves and then everybody is at each other’s throat.
So the reason that people are leaving half of America is looking to quit.
You got to understand that if you’ve got four or five people. All the time, half of your people are looking to jump ship right now. That’s a reality. That’s what you’ve got to stomach. You got to come to that hard reality and say half of your people are looking to quit potentially. And what are you doing to mitigate that? To deal with it? To set it straight. To make it right. Let’s see, player. You’re never gonna be able to motivate him. You’re never gonna pay him enough. He’s always gonna be a slacker. Nothing you do with a C player is ever gonna turn him around. I’ve learned that. You gotta let him go. You should have never hired in the first year, you could have figured out he was a C player. All right. So let’s get onto the next thing. Two thirds.
Of people would be would be more satisfied if the employer better utilize their skills and ability. Here’s the problem in a small business and I’m experiencing this talking to small business owners, talking to people who are working for four or five member companies. The boss micromanages everything he’s involved in, everything he wants to do, everything. He doesn’t allow his people to grow. There are many ways to allow your people to grow.
Utilizing their skills eye, every time somebody comes to me with a bright idea, I consider it and I said, you know what? Give it a shot, see what happens. Or, yes, we can do that. We just can’t do it right now. We’re not in a position to do that right now. But. You know, how can I better utilize your skills and I look at what their skills and abilities are, what their strong points are, and I try to push them, literally push them sometimes to, you know, talk to what they tell me, look, I can no longer handle this. And then I say, OK, but you understand, I gave you a shot. You can’t come back to me and tell me I didn’t listen to you and I didn’t give you your shot at this. You’re not ready yet. What do we need to do to get you ready? Here’s what we need to do. That’s my job on a daily basis is coaching, teaching, training, dealing with these issues. You understand that if if you’re gonna be in the employment game and you’re gonna be in the growth game, that 80 percent of your job is going to turn to H.R.. They’re going to be your problems. Eighty percent of your problems in the company are gonna be H.R. problems that you have to deal with on a regular basis.
More than half.
Need to leave their current employment position to take their career to the next level. Understand this. If you are not going to be passionate about growth. And you’re gonna say I’m gonna limit this to two to three employees, five employees, because I don’t want to grow anymore.
Your duct.
People want to work a players want to work for A players, B players want to work for A players, C, players will work for anybody. When you see a guy taking a job every six months to a year, he’s a C player. He doesn’t have what it takes right now to keep a job or stay in a position, he doesn’t have the soft skills. He thinks he is actually more capable than he is.
But the reality is the company doesn’t see him as more capable because I know because I do profiling on all my people and I know where their strong points are. I know where their weak points are. I start working on them on this things so I can develop them.
Nine out of 10. Listen to this. Nine out of 10.
Would not continue to work for a company. With a bad reputation, public image, what people are saying about you in the public eye is going to matter tremendously to this next generation. If you got a bad reputation, if you got two and three stars, a lot of people are not going to kind of want to come and work for you because that’s what they’re looking on at light, especially the way players are going to do the research. The C players will apply to anything. The B players are saying, well, you know, this seems like a better position for me. This seems to be a better opportunity. Because it’s more pay, I get less hours. I get this, I get that they’re moving for minor reasons, usually pay and working conditions. But if you got a nine out of 10. That’s a high consideration that you need to consider. Sixty five percent roughly. Are going to leave their employ. Two thirds are going to lead their employer if they get caught.
In a.
You know, media negative portrayed. Problem. You’ve got to be real careful because everybody now is looking at what’s online. All right. More than half of employees feel pressure to stay on their job because they’re the primary financial provider. In other words, this is known as the golden handcuffs. I can’t leave my job because if I leave and it doesn’t work out. So they’re in a position where they don’t want to be, but they have no choice. They’re unhappy. I understand that an unhappy employee is not going to be a productive employee. You got to you got to see how you’re making your people happy. And you say, but that’s not my job on providing a paycheck from you got the wrong attitude. You’ve got the wrong mentality. You got to get intimately knowledgeable about your employees to a point where you understand what their needs are, what they want, and if you’re no longer able to provide that, you’re better off just being honest with them and saying, listen, I’m not gonna be able to provide that right now. Look, I told my people, I said, listen, you’re we’re looking at five to six years before you get promoted. Two to three years before I can do something different with you. If you can’t stay on long term, I can’t hire you. And I look at people that. Have at least four to five years with a bit of a job. If they have not been in a job, they disqualified themselves automatically.
When I get the resume. I have an automated process. It’s very simple. I can’t hire you, have you been in a job six months in the last five jobs? I can’t risk that because I got to do too much training, too many things. That tells me in your personality that you’re not going to stick around long. That you’re not mature enough yet for this type of job. You might be 21, 22, 24, but if you’ve been living at home with mom and dad and mom and dad is paid for everything. And you have and you went to school and you haven’t decided anything yet because you don’t have to. You have no pressure. Then you have limited yourself, and I’m telling you this as an employer. That you’re limiting yourself. You are cutting your own throat when it comes to the job market because you are displaying that nobody can depend on you and nobody can trust you. And this is what I’m looking at. Seven out of 10 who will stay in their current job because it’s easier than starting something new. People want to jump ship. They’re not happy. It’s like being in a marriage that you’re not happy and you’ve never been happy and you haven’t been happy in five years, but you’re in it because of the kids. At the end of the day, it isn’t gonna end well. Over a half don’t seek out to consider other jobs.
Because. They can’t start.
With less paid time off. In other words, going back. To the original issue. Of this study of of this that you need to be paying two weeks vacation or you can’t do it. And most pace pest control operators can give their people as a technician unless you’ve grown to five to six technicians, seven technicians and you have a floater.
So you got to have these realistic things on paper. This is what I can do. This is what I can’t do to that employee. Instead of thinking I’m not going to disclose any of this, I just don’t want to deal with any of this. I don’t want to tackle any of this because I am right now needing somebody. And if I disclose all this, I’m not going to get people to work for me. You’re going to lose them anyway. You’re better off having a list of things like this. What I can offer you. This is what I can’t. And you’re not going to get this for three, four, five years, but you’re gonna get valuable experience, you’re gonna get this. If in a year from now, in two years from now, you can go off to work for a better company. This is not a conversation that most of you technicians and most of you solo operators are willing to have with people because you can’t see yourself training somebody for a year and then having them quit. I would rather say I understand you’re gonna be here for a year to two years in that timeframe. I’m gonna invest this, this, this, this in you in order to get the most out of you that I can while you’re here. And then. And in the end, you’ll decide whether you want to move on. You want to stay here. But I know that I got a training system.
I got a hiring system, and I understand that that’s the game. I know where the game is, where the rules are, and I got to decide whether I can play that game by those rules. How can I break the rules to do better? What can I offer people that they really want in order to create the atmosphere of the company? Because you got to create an atmosphere and a culture first. And the problem, you have no mission and no vision. And we’re going to be discussing that in several podcasts that if you don’t have a mission and you don’t have a vision of where you’re going. How the heck do you plan to take people there? How do you plan to take your company there? You gotta sell the vision, you gotta sell the mission. People do not care so much about a lot of tangible things that you care about and care about. Where are we going? Where can I go? How can I grow? What can I make? And the money isn’t really that important. It’s the money to a lot of people that are applying is not that important cause they’re already making it what they have. They want the ability to do better as a person. Personal growth. Is gonna need to be more important in financial growth. Are they getting satisfaction out of their job? Are they in the right position? Are they in the right place? Are they feel utilized? Either they feel it is working for a company that really cares about them.
Does the owner really care about his people? You see. Am I able to have this work life balance? Understand that as an owner, nobody is going to work as hard as you. I’m up at 430 to 630 every day and I’m finishing work between 40, 30 and 60. I’m putting in 12 hour days like it’s nothing. But I’m used to that. To me, twelve hours is nothing. And then I’m cutting it off now earlier because I want to spend more time with my children, my children are growing up. My son is five. My daughter’s nine. I need to spend more time with my kids. I don’t want my legacy to be. He was married to the company, but I still have to put in 12 to 16 hours a day. I just do it around them. So I get to take him to school some days, I get to pick them up, I get to go to karate class, I get to go to a horse riding class, I get to go to all the things that they’re involved in in school because I work around my schedule. I think if you can create an environment where people can work a lot of things around where they can work, my technician knows he doesn’t have a set start time. If you have to take off early, you can’t.
And, you know, just come back and do your job and finish it. If you had to take time off. I work it out with him so I can give him time off. Man, I’ve worked you know, Frank, it’s it’s Thursday and I’ve already got 40 hours. You know, I’ve been doing this now for, you know, especially in the summer. I need to take two or three days off. You know, because I’ve been working, you know, six fifty five hours a week in the sun. It is different between working fifty five hours a week in an office and working fifty five hours a week in the field. It takes a toll on you. And I need to take two or three days off and I’ll go run around for two days for my people so they can take the time out.
But I know they’ve been putting in the work. I know what the cranking out. So when I know when you’re a producer and you’re in a player and you need to take that time off. Because my father’s sick and I need to take off. I get a cause and my dad just got run to the hospital. You know, he’s it’s bad. Take off. Just cancel all your appointment. I mean, everything that we do around our company is built around people. Not around the client, we are completely outer exterior company where we have only maybe one to two appointments a day, tops. If we’re lucky, our callback rates are in the single digits in the summer. They’re half digits in the winter. We’ve set up protocol policies and procedures. We set up a company that allows us to grow with the way the market is going to be and create an environment based on what we see in the next decade of what is actually happened. You need to have that vision. You need to if you’re going to grow, you need to get out of this. I’m going to hire a person, a warm body. That is totally reactionary. There are times when, look, we we we still take I write right now. Five to seven people that were vetting. For a new position, it’s been two weeks since we posted, so we’ve gotten hundreds of applications. We’ve got actually seven. Interviews and we’ve got now down to we had one in here, he got offered a job. We got another one that we’re looking at and possibly a third. So out of a hundred applicants. Hundred and twenty five hundred thirty applicants that we got right now for this one job. Only one will really qualify. And only is and then and we’re still looking at it. Is this the best option? Can we hold out and see if we can get something better?
Because we’re looking at everything, and at the end of the game, I put him through a five step process, which is what most recruiters put people through. And at the end of the day, 50 percent of those people that I hire will not make it. At the best, 50 percent will not make it past the year. That is the reality of where we are in this marketplace.
