Adam Robinson's Blog, page 10
May 24, 2018
The Best This Week for May 25, 2018
Thanks for reading The Best Team Wins blog. This week, we’re trying something new. Typically, readers would receive our weekly highlights over email, but we thought it would be valuable to share what we’ve been working on here to give you a preview of the content you can expect by subscribing with us.
As we get ready for the long Memorial Day weekend, I wanted to share a few things I’ve been working on, along with other things I’ve found valuable.
Book of the Week:
Perennial Seller by Ryan Holiday
This is a really unique book in the world of business because it focuses on one thing: creating products and work with true staying power. In a time when everyone is chasing the latest online fads, reactive business plans, and the cliché 15 minutes of fame, Holiday highlights what it takes to put true staying power into your work. The result is a way of approaching any project with an eye to help it endure.
Inc. Highlights
According to Harvard, This 1 Leadership Trait Separates Exceptional Leaders From the Rest
In surveying over 1,000 business leaders across more than 800 organizations, they found that leaders who exhibited (or were perceived by the team to exhibit) high levels of compassion had teams who scored higher on critical performance dynamics within their organizations. Teams led by compassionate leaders exhibited better intra-team collaboration, stronger commitment to the company, and far lower turnover rates than those led by less-compassionate leaders. Visit the original post on Inc. to see how leaders with compassion foster better collaboration, commitment, and loyalty from their teams.
3 Things Companies Do to Build an Exceptional Culture
Are you building a culture by design, or one by default? Over the past eight years, our leadership team has worked hard to design, implement and scale a culture that creates sustainable advantage. In this Inc. article, I outlined the three things we do at Hireology to give ourselves the best possible chance of success.
The Best Team Wins Podcast
This week Adam sits down with Dan Bocik, Chef and Owner at a tavola, to discuss how he’s built a great team at his restaurant through values-based hiring, hands-on training and a commitment to customer service.
Stream the conversation below or find us listed in Apple Podcasts or Google Play.
Subscribe to The Best This Week: Our Friday Newsletter
If you found this post interesting, stay connected to The Best Team Wins by subscribing to our weekly newsletter. Just enter your email in the form located in the right panel of this post and we’ll email you the best updates every Friday.
Hiring for Value Fit Instead of Skills in the Restaurant Industry
The One Leadership Trait Identifies Exceptional Leaders – Inc.
This week, I published an Inc. article that I wanted to share on The Best Team Wins since it’s something I think every business leader can take to heart. I came across a Harvard study that identified a single leadership characteristic that separated truly exceptional leaders from the rest – compassion.
The study surveyed 1,000 business leaders across more than 800 organizations and yet this was a common thread throughout different geographies and industries. In my post over on the Inc. website, I walk through the impact having compassion has on your team and organization.
Take a look and see if compassion is a value you have in your management style.
Inc. | According to Harvard, This 1 Leadership Trait Separates Exceptional Leaders From the Rest
May 18, 2018
Building a Great Company Culture with Trust and Transparency
David Ormesher, CEO and President of closerlook, joins The Best Team Wins podcast to discuss how he’s built a great team through a culture of trust, transparency and healthy relationships.
Connect with David on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Follow closerlook at on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.
Transcripts:
Adam Robinson: Welcome to The Best Team Wins podcast, where we feature entrepreneurs whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has lead to incredible results. My name is Adam Robinson and for the nest twenty-five minutes I’ll be your host as we explore how to build you business through better hiring.
Adam Robinson: Today on the program, David Ormesher is the CEO and president of closerlook, founded in Chicago in nineteen eighty-seven. With offices in Chicago and New York City, closerlook has a hundred employees doing some pretty incredible things.
Adam Robinson: And we are here today to learn from you, David. Thank you for being on the program.
David Ormesher: Thank you very much. It’s my pleasure to be here.
Adam Robinson: So we are here to focus on the people side of closerlook. But before we do that, let’s set the stage. Give us thirty seconds on what you do.
David Ormesher: So in a nutshell, at closerlook, we help physicians and patients learn about the latest in life giving drug therapies.and we do it through a unique combination of relevant and medical content and storytelling with the latest in digital marketing technology and analytics.
David Ormesher: And this, we found, helps everyone. Physicians are equipped to make the best decisions. Patients receive the best therapies, and Pharma brands receive the achieve the best market share of growth.
Adam Robinson: And if listeners want to learn more about the business, what’s the best way for them to do that.
David Ormesher: Easiest best way is to go to closerlook dot com.
Adam Robinson: All right.
David Ormesher: Or they can always email me at DO at closerlook dot com.
Adam Robinson: Okay, so. You have been in business now thirty-one years. Is that correct?
David Ormesher: That’s right. We weren’t doing digital thirty-one years ago. But yeah, we’ve been in business for thirty-one years.
Adam Robinson: Amazing. Congratulations.
David Ormesher: Thank you.
Adam Robinson: So let’s if we could, dial it all the way back to the … I guess this would be the Bush Senior administration.
Adam Robinson: So let’s talk about this. Different time certainly. Pre internet hiring was different in many ways. But in many ways, I can imagine, the same. So take us back to the building of your early team there. Who was coming with you from the network and who, you know, who did you have to hire in?
Adam Robinson: Set the stage for us there.
David Ormesher: Sure. So I started the company with a partner. We were both producers, directors in television. And we made the jump and said, “Hey, let’s start our own production company.”
David Ormesher: In my mind, sort of one of the criteria was, can we actually grow the company to the point where we needed to start hiring people? And I still remember getting to that place and I was actually at a Chicago advertising awards show at the Briar Street Theater back before it was taken over by Blue Man Group.
David Ormesher: And I began networking with this woman sitting next to me. And you know, I think with hiring it’s a combination of your network. It’s technology, but there often a high degree of serendipity. And it turns out she was an experienced producers who was in transition. I was looking for a producer, so I invited her to my office the next day for an interview, and hired her on the spot.
David Ormesher: And she became a key part of the team for the next three or four years.
Adam Robinson: And when you were getting that first hire off the ground, I mean we often talk on this show about early people must be utility players. It changes as you grow. Talk about your mindset in those early days of utility value versus specialist mindset.
David Ormesher: No. I think you nailed it. I think those first hires, they have to be generalists, because there’s a lot that you’re figuring out. A lot that you’re sorting out. Very often during those early years. You haven’t made the key decisions to focus. You’re trying a lot of things. As an entrepreneur you’re very opportunistic. So as you’re building your team, you need people that have that level of flexibility and willingness to go along for the ride.
David Ormesher: Bring their own set of skills and their own experiences but being willing to jump in wherever the need is.
Adam Robinson: So now that’s evolved over the last thirty-one years of course. What has been the biggest change in your approach as the company has grown and progressed over the years?
David Ormesher: Well I will say, about … Boy I would say probably it’s probably eight, nine, years ago now. We made a hard turn. We made some very interesting strategic choices to focus. We had been more of a generalist agency. Certainly in the digital space. But I made a decision to go all in on the pharmaceutical industry, and exclusively digital.
David Ormesher: We wound up resigning a number of our favorite clients, had been with us for many years that were not in healthcare. Were not in Pharma. But it freed us up to focus kind of a laser focused approach on this particular sector.
David Ormesher: And with that came a litany of other choices. Because now we knew exactly who we needed to hire. We knew the capabilities we needed to hire for. And at that point we actually began hiring for various specialist roles in content, in creative, in technology, account management. Project management.
Adam Robinson: This is fascinating. We could talk for an hour I’m sure just on your decision to burn the ships and go full on into a particular vertical. We’ve certainly lived that experience here at Hireology. Adam Robinson: How did that change your talent strategy? You mentioned specialists certainly. Did you find that that shift made it easier? Or less easy to find the team that you needed?
David Ormesher: Well it kind of … it’s a sword that cuts both ways. It made it easier to determine who we needed to hire. What roles we needed to fill. But then finding those people that fit those new roles was actually much more difficult.
David Ormesher: We always would try to in the early days kind of think, okay so we would love someone who’s got deep capabilities in an experience set. Like creative art direction, animation technology. And we would also like them to have some experience in the pharmaceutical industry, because it’s a highly regulated industry with a lot of unique aspects to it.
David Ormesher: It’s hard to get both. Sometimes we would try to hedge and stress one versus the other. And we always felt like that was a bit of a mistake. So it was clear who we needed to hire. We just needed to work a lot harder to go out and find the people who fit those new roles.
Adam Robinson: Where did you learn how to hire?
David Ormesher: You know, our process here to be honest with you, it evolved because I was pretty good at messing up. I learned to hire by messing up. And it took me a couple years but I finally realized that it was too easy for me to fall in love with someone, and then fall victim to confirmation bias.
David Ormesher: You know, I like this person. So then I looked for all the reasons to confirm why they’d be a good fit. And dismiss evidence that they might not. And that always got me in trouble. So it was really that sobering realization that lead to the closerlook process, that we built to allow for my own blind spot.
David Ormesher: And one of the very fist things we did was, it didn’t matter how much I liked someone, there was a larger group, usually a cross functional group hiring interview. And if they didn’t agree with me then they could shoot the candidate down. And it didn’t matter how much I liked that person. If they didn’t pass the larger group test, then they didn’t get hired. Adam Robinson: So one of the best practices I’m hearing you developed is the CEO gets vetoed by the team.
Adam Robinson: Is that unequivocal? Do you have an override?
David Ormesher: Rarely. The only … I’ve probably pulled my trump card once or twice. But it’s always been then that candidate, whether they know it or not, they’re on probation for the next ninety days. Because everybody know that I pulled the trump card. And you know, in reality, I found that it never works. It’s not a good idea, because the benefit of getting everybody’s involvement is then you actually have a whole team that’s invested in the success of that employee.
David Ormesher: When you’ve just got a hiring manager that makes a decision, or me that makes a decision, I’m the only person who’s really on the bubble. Everyone else is like, “Well, I don’t know. I’m telling you.”
David Ormesher: But you know if you’ve got ten people around the table who’ve all say, “Yep, we believe in this person.” Then they’re all vested in making sure that that candidate succeeds.
Adam Robinson: That’s great. So describe for listeners, then, your current hiring process. How do you push candidates through the funnel at closerlook?
David Ormesher: It’s not unusual for it to follow a three stage process. And this can be done in a day. It could last over a week. But typically if someone passes the normal early filter of their resume and experience, they’ll get hired by the person they’re gonna report to. The hiring manager.
David Ormesher: If the hiring manger says, “okay. This is exactly what I’m looking for, then typically they’ll get interviewed by essentially the competency. Do there might be three or four people from the competency that is gonna interview them and that’s really a deep dive into their skill set.
David Ormesher: The thinking there is these people are gonna be in the trenches with this person. And they’re gonna like, “Okay, is this person gonna have my back when times get tough?”
David Ormesher: And so if you know, if they’re a developer they’re at the white board and they’re solving a problem, they’re writing code. Literally in real time.
David Ormesher: If they pass the competency test, then it really is a culture fit. And typically then that is a larger group of eight to ten. Could be completely cross functional. People that are not in their competency. But that’s really more of a … We’ve got a strong culture here. People know whether someone’s gonna be a fit or not. And that’s the final test.
Adam Robinson: Is there a set of defined core values that you or the team uses to guide these decisions? You know, as far as culture fit or right fit goes?
David Ormesher: There’s definitely a set of core values for closerlook. And in many ways what we’re looking for in the interview is is this person a good fit for those core values. And so a lot of the questions are around that. Is this person gonna work in an environment for which there’s a real commitment to high integrity, to high performance, to transparency?
David Ormesher: Is this person curious? Curiosity is a core value at closerlook. Are they gonna ask really interesting questions and jump into the mix? Do they understand the connection of head and heart? From the very beginning I’ve had this phrasing. You have to teach the heart to move the mind. Do they understand what that means?
David Ormesher: Are they the kind of person who takes their work very seriously but themselves not so much? Do they have a healthy sense of humor? This is all part of the closerlook culture. And this goes back to those very early days when the gut check that I’ve realized I needed to make was if I brought in someone, particularly a senior person who was very savvy at managing up to me. But then we got to the second stage interview and they began to let their arrogance show because they felt like, “I talked to Ormesher. He likes me. I’ve got this in the bag. I don’t really need to impress these people.”
David Ormesher: You know. We try to sniff that out. That arrogance. We try to sniff that out very early.
Adam Robinson: That’s great. So how then do you start somebody into the organization? Or onboard them into the organization to ensure that they actually live those values that you’ve screened for? And that’s a big question. But how do you make it real from the get go once someone’s added to the team?
David Ormesher: We’ve got a pretty comprehensive onboarding process. And a lot of it is relationship oriented. Again, I go back to this fairly involved interview process. And frankly it’s probably got more overhead in the interview process than any of us would really like, but it’s born out because when that new employee walks into the door, they’ve already had in depth conversations with a dozen people. So it’s not like they know their hiring manager.
David Ormesher: They actually are bumping into people at the coffee pot and the hallways and in conference rooms. Or a coffee talk, which is our Monday morning all hands meeting. They’ve already met people. So already they’re beginning that relationship building process. There, typically, that first day they’re out to lunch with their team.
David Ormesher: Within a few weeks I’m sitting down with them. I like to meet every one of our new employees after about two weeks just to kind of check in with them and see how the onboarding is going, and whether it’s meeting expectations or not. And then I’ll come back five months into it. I have another one on one meeting with everyone of our new employees.
David Ormesher: We found that there was a period between six months and twenty-four months when sometimes new employees would wash out. They’d fail out. And I wanted to figure out what was wrong. It was just a misalignment of expectations. Was someone not listening? Or communicating? And so I said, “I want to meet with everyone of our employees at the five month point before they get into that window to really understand what’s working what’s not working.
David Ormesher: And are there barriers that they’re perceiving to their success here. And that is has enabled us to really quickly determine, is this person gonna be a long term fit or not? And if not, is there an elegant way to make the transition?
Adam Robinson: All right. So let’s look then at the leadership team. We talked about core values. We talked about onboarding, and of course, as you scale the business now, you’ve hired a pretty fair number of new people in the last year. What kind of leadership team is required at this stage of the life cycle to really make this land as you grow the business?
David Ormesher: Clearly at the top we’ve got kind of the seed level team, if you will. So I’ve got five people on my leadership team. Two of them have been with me for almost twenty years each. A third has been with me for ten years. And then I’ve got two that have been with me for less than two years. So it’s a great combination of long trusted relationships with the benefit of fresh thinking.
David Ormesher: And then below that there’s a team of about fifteen that really make up an extended leadership team. And they’re folks that we meet with on a regular basis. We have off site management team meetings with them.they really have bought into the business as well. And I would say the average tenure there is probably seven, eight, years.
Adam Robinson: Fantastic. Tactically then, with that team, those values and the process for getting people launched … Let’s talk tactically about management, you know, in a day in the life. Talk to us about the philosophy around rewards and recognition.
Adam Robinson: You know. What is the overriding philosophy at closerlook? You know, on the scale of money’s the biggest motivating factor versus career opportunity or intangibles? Where do you guys fall on that scale?
David Ormesher: It’s kind of a complicated answer. You know, one phrase that I latched onto years ago, that I heard first from a woman. She the executive director of a nonprofit called Icy Stars. Her name is Sandy Casterol. And Sandy has this definition of leadership as, leadership is creating opportunities for others.
David Ormesher: And I’ve always loved that. And part of what I see my role here at Closer Look is how do I create opportunities for others? How do I create opportunities for my employees? How do create new opportunities for our clients? But specifically since we’re talking about employees here, I really want to create an environment here at closerlook that is really defined by continuous learning.
David Ormesher: Where people are on small self directed teams that are close to the business that have a fair level of autonomy, but still have the ability to escalate issues or questions to senior people with a lot more experience.
David Ormesher: But I don’t want to micro manage them. I love to push them out on the edge where they really are as close to the customer as they need to be. So, I think for many of our employees one of the greatest values they get out of their experience at closerlook is that they’re learning things. They’re growing. They’re growing their own career.
David Ormesher: They’re learning leadership at perhaps a faster clip than they would anywhere else. We do a lot of the recognition piece. And we do it in a fun way.every Monday morning we have this all hands meeting. It’s a twenty minute meeting at eight forty AM called coffee talk.
David Ormesher: And everybody comes together. I facilitate it. But it’s a way to kind of check in on what are people working on for the week. But as a part of every coffee talk, we also announce people who are now nominees for our monthly eagle claw award. Essentially our employee of the month. But to nominate someone, you’ve got to write a paragraph about what they did the previous week that went above and beyond the call of duty.
David Ormesher: So during coffee talk I throw up the photos of the people that have been nominated from the previous week. Including the quotes that people wrote about them. And it usually catches them off guard, and they’re you know, a little embarrassed. But also very pleased because what they did was noticed. And then at the end of the month, the previous month’s nominees vote on that month’s eagle claw, and we have a big … You know, there’s a big award that they get.
David Ormesher: It’s kind of crazy. Kind of nutty. But it’s a nice fun way to recognize people. But then the real issue, I think that people want to think about, or ask about, it comp. And I would say this. In terms of compensation at the core, we want to be and we need to be market competitive. That’s without question. But after that it’s always a conversation. And if someone comes to me or they come to their manager and says, “I want to talk about compensation.”
David Ormesher: Then the question is, “where do you need to be to get happy with your total comp?” And once there’s sort of agreement around what that is, then our response is, “Okay, well, let’s see if we can frame a path of increasing capability, increasing responsibility, increasing value creation that gets you there so that it makes sense for both of us.
David Ormesher: I can’t just write you a check the day you ask. But it’s not unusual at all for someone to set a goal, and then together we say, “Okay let’s look over the next six to twelve months. How do we get you there? What’s gonna be good for the business? And good for you?” And if you hit these goals of increased responsibility and value creation, then it makes sense for us to write that check.
Adam Robinson: So what I’ve found, certainly in talking with some of the leading culture creators on this podcast is a lot of what you’ve described in terms of engagement, right? The coffee talks, and the opportunities to do more than just your job. It’s opportunities to engage with your peers, and to learn and to grow. And of course the comp philosophy and the actual pay check discussion that we just had certainly lends itself to that.
Adam Robinson: Curious. Over the last thirty years, have you seen a shift in any way about the prevalence of teams wanting more of that engagement? Peer engagement. Has it always been that way in your opinion? Or is that a more recent development?
David Ormesher: I think it’s always been true. I think there’s a lot made of sort of basic requirements of millennials and how they want more purpose and more engagement. You know. We didn’t have millennials working at Closer Look thirty-one years ago. We had a lot of boomers and some gen xers. I would say though, at it’s core, we’re all people, and we all get motivated by engagement by relationships.
David Ormesher: We all need trust. We all need relationships that are based in trust. I think in a business you can mess up in a lot of areas, but if there isn’t a bedrock of trust, it doesn’t matter how much you pay someone or compliment them. Your working relationship will be purely opportunistic and short term.
David Ormesher: So I think some of these core values … things like transparency … I mean one of the reasons I’ve always run the company with an open book philosophy is because it sends a message to everyone that I trust them with knowing our finances. You know. They become part of the family, you’re part of the family.
David Ormesher: There are certain things you keep in the family. This is one of them it comes as a shock to some of our new employees. But it says, “We’re really committed to transparency.” And that becomes a cornerstone of trust. And that really, I think, is the bedrock of good healthy relationships.
Adam Robinson: Is there one biggest lesson learned, or philosophy that you carry with you now as you continue to grow the team?
David Ormesher: I think it’s over communication. It’s always communicating. It’s never making assumptions. I think one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that communication is ultimately defined by what the other person heard. Not by what I said.
David Ormesher: And knowing that everybody is hearing the words that I’m speaking through a variety of filters. I can’t assume that everybody is necessarily interpreting it the same way I said it. So saying it more than once, saying it different ways, but more importantly creating an environment of trust that allows people to raise their hand and go, “I’m not sure I got that.” Or, “I’m not sure I agree with that.”
David Ormesher: And creating that platform for that level of openness and candor, and wrestling with the issues. To me that’s what ultimately makes for a healthy company. Healthy culture. And frankly employees that are personally invested in the overalls success of the term.
Adam Robinson: As you developed this personal philosophy towards leadership, was there a particular book or individual that you can point at and say, “You know that was a really influential bit of learning that is really still something that you put into practice today?”
David Ormesher: Well, you know, there’s a guy named Dan Sullivan who runs a company called Strategic Coach. And one of the key insights I got from him was the importance of identifying and defining your unique ability. And how all of us throughout the organization … all of us have a unique ability. And part of my job as a leader at closerlook is to help people discover what their unique ability is, and then fashion a role for them that allows them to maximize their time working within their unique ability.
David Ormesher: And as we all do that as a team … as I find ways to delegate things that are not my unique ability to other people, and create a unique ability team, where those people now are working within their unique ability, that’s when we’re all working in flow.
David Ormesher: And I think … You know, one of the questions I love to ask when I’m doing an interview is, “Tell me about your best day ever at work.”
David Ormesher: And what I find when people respond to that, they’re basically telling me what their unique ability is. They’re telling me what was that day where they most experienced flow. And if I can discover that, then that tells me everything I need to know about what kinds of activities they need to be engaged in. Whether they really are management. Or whether they’re a specialist.
David Ormesher: And as we basically work people into these unique ability teams, I’ve found that’s where people are most productive. That’s where they’re the happiest. That’s where they’re really creating value is when they’re working within their unique ability.
Adam Robinson: If you were to come back on this show a year from now, and report whether or not you were able to successfully tackle what you consider to be the single biggest team or people related opportunity that you have in the business right now, what would you hopefully be telling us happened?
David Ormesher: Well we’re in this very interesting transformation now from, I would say, probably more traditional siloed functional org deign to small teams. And so I would hope that a year from now I can report that we’ve evolved to an organization based on small self directed agile teams that are on a continuous path of learning. And that are creating ever increasing value for our clients by listening better. And imagining more.
Adam Robinson: Ladies and gentlemen, that is the final word. You’ve been learning today from David Ormesher. CEO and president of closerlook. David, thank you so much for being with us today.
David Ormesher: Adam, my pleasure. Thank you.
Adam Robinson: Ladies and gentlemen, that is a wrap for this weeks episode of The Best Team Wins podcas,t where we’re featuring entrepreneurs whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has lead to incredible results. My name is Adam Robinson, author of the book The Best Team Wins, which you can find online at www dot The Best Team Wins dot com. Thanks for tuning in, and we will see yeah here next week.
The post Building a Great Company Culture with Trust and Transparency appeared first on The Best Team Wins.
April 22, 2018
Wagemark and Pay Stability
Jason Wenk, CEO and Founder of FormulaFolios, joins the podcast to discuss recruiting, Wagemark, values, and more. FormulaFolios has grown from #944 on the Inc. 5000 in 2015 to #10 in 2018 and Jason shares his learnings from this hyper-growth experience.
Follow ForumulaFolios on Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter.
Connect with Jason on Linkedin and Twitter.
Transcripts:
Adam Robinson:
Welcome to The Best Team Wins podcast, where we feature entrepreneurs and business leaders whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results. My name is Adam Robinson and for the next 25 minutes, I’ll be your host as we explore, how to build your business through better hiring.
Today on the program, Jason Wenk is the founder and CEO of FormulaFolio Investments. He has a business, he started in 2011, they have 72 employees and growing like crazy, doing all kinds of cool stuff in this world we call Fintech. We are here today to learn from him about the people side of his business. Jason, thank you so much for being here on the show.
Jason Wenk:
My absolute pleasure, Adam. Thanks for letting me share a little wisdom of this.
Adam Robinson:
We are here to focus on the people side of your business. Before we do that, let’s set the stage for our listeners. Give us 30 seconds on FormulaFolio and what you do.
Jason Wenk:
Sure, so as you alluded to, we’re a financial technology company. We very specifically partner with independent financial advisors, and we help them with two very specific problems. One is we help them find new ideal clients and then we empower them with technology so they can serve their clients better and more efficiently. Essentially allowing them to take care of more people better with less work.
Adam Robinson:
All of those sound like good things if you’re a financial advisor. It’s great-
Jason Wenk:
And it’s good for the client [inaudible 00:01:41]. We wanna help the [inaudible 00:01:44], and better advisors means better experience for their clients.
Adam Robinson:
If listeners want to learn more, what’s the best way for them to do that?
Jason Wenk:
Yeah, so we’re pretty active bloggers, and so if someone wants to learn more just go to formulafolios.com, so that’s just F O R M F O L I O S dot com, and I just encourage people to take a peek at our blog and they can learn a lot more about what we do.
Adam Robinson:
Fantastic. Alright, let’s jump right in. So you are now seven years into the venture, you’re growing like crazy, fintech is top billing in the growth world right now, it’s really the headlines of the financial pages everywhere. It’s gotta be pretty fun to be in the seat right now. How are you managing this growth from the people side of the business? It’s just such a tight market right now. Take us through … What does your world look like now from a recruiting and hiring standpoint?
Jason Wenk:
Yeah, so we intend to recruit from a couple of different areas. It’s interesting, one of the things that has been really effective for us is we have operations in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which is a Midwestern community, that’s where our company was founded and sort of our core operations team is located. We also then have … We started kind of as a creative outpost in Southern California. It’s now where all of our product and engineering happens.
And so you’re 100% right, we’re not a peer technology company, we’re not a peer finance company, we have to kind of have both elements well-served. And so it’s super important to have a desirable place to work. We’ve done a lot of things that make us … We feel pretty desirable. And so we’ve had a pretty good success, especially the last year, of just really attracting fantastic, incredibly talented people.
Adam Robinson:
Often this show’s guests are founders, CEOs, of service providers, technology providers, or of companies that work with owner operator networks, like franchise brands. Financial advisors … It strikes me that you’re selling a product, basically you’re selling a product to entrepreneurs who are running financial advisory firm. Is that a fair statement to make?
Jason Wenk:
Yeah, 100%.
Adam Robinson:
So when you’re selling software products to entrepreneurs, speaking as one, I can tell you I’m not the best person to sell software to even … I know I need it, but I also think I wanna do it differently than all your other customers, what does that do in the mix of staffing, right? You’re building a tech product but you also have to service entrepreneurs who are, let’s admit it, pretty needy when it comes to questions and things that they buy. How are you managing that? That is a tough mix of staff to have. Technologists and high touch … Can I say babysitters? That’s probably not the right word, but it could be pretty accurate.
Jason Wenk:
Yeah, so we call that team our Business Development Team, which is, yeah, probably a fancy way of saying that we have a lot of egos to manage and a lot of different needs to meet, but we really divide our teams, into, at its core, really two teams. What’d I call the Operational Team and then the Product Team. So the technology side and a lot of the things from a marketing and branding perspective, all those things on the product development side don’t have a lot of interaction with our advisors, which is our customer, it’s really the operations side which is all the people that work in trading, and billing, and account opening, and all of those areas. And it’s very different skillsets. If anyone’s hired a creative, that’s a totally different sort of type of hire and person to manage that someone who’s maybe a phenomenal customer service employee.
And so we have to be able to do both. We have to have innovative, incredibly talented engineers, developers, designers, marketers, that’s what allows us to grow the company. But then it’s not lost on us that if the customers have a poor experience because they can’t get great service from people then we don’t have much leg. So it’s definitely a happy balance, but it’s also really rewarding when you get it right.
Adam Robinson:
Let’s go back to 2011 when you launched the business. As I understand it, had some existing technology, or at least the kernel or thought behind what became the system that you’ve got now. What was the people side of the business like in 2011, and how has that evolved as the business has scaled?
Jason Wenk:
Sure, yeah. It was … obviously we were much smaller, I mean we’re still not huge today but I think our acceleration has been a lot the last two, three years. In the beginning, probably like a lot of startups, I begged two friends that were working at my first company to agree to work for free in exchange for some equity in this new venture that we had no idea if it would actually work. And so the three of us, we all worked for free for three years, basically, on top of capital that I contributed. So that was the sort of core founding team. Our first couple employees was … We really had three employees. We had one person in sales, one person in service, one person in sort of, I would call it the bookkeeping HR keeping the office from burning down role. And so yeah. Super lean team, everyone wearing a lot of hats, working hard, we had a big vision of what could happen.
And we were bootstrapped. We weren’t out there seeking angel investments or venture. We built it slow, very deliberate, very under the radar. And so in those first years we went from, again, three employees and three founders, to eventually it became … we passed 10, then 15, then 20. It wasn’t until about 2014, about three years in, when we really started to accelerate the growth of the business and kind of figure things out. And from that point we’ve basically doubled our employee count and we’ll probably do that again this year.
Adam Robinson:
Let’s move more to some of the tactics you employ to keep the people that you want to keep. What’s your philosophy or approach to rewards and recognition? What systems do you have in place, and what should your team members expect approach-wise?
Jason Wenk:
Yeah, so there’s a few things that we do. I’m probably not the only person in the country that was inspired by Gravity Payments, so when I heard about what they had done I thought, hey, if I ever have an opportunity as a company, I wanna be known as a company that takes really good care of everybody. So inequity is something I just don’t stand for. And while we’re not quite as ambitious maybe as Gravity was, we did institute a company-wide minimum wage. We are a wage mark certified company, for those that don’t know just means our highest paid person can’t make more than eight times our lowest paid person. These are the things that they intentionally embody, that idea of doing good. And if someone doesn’t buy into it, so right at the very beginning if someone’s going, “I wanna make millions of dollars, I don’t care about everyone else here,” they’re not a good fit.
So we want people that they look at the collective rewards that we all can earn. Now we do some other things to be very specific to people who went above and beyond, but we’re a big believer in we can only be as strong as our weakest link. And so we wanna make sure that one of the best ways we can reward great, talented people, is give them other great talented people to work with. And one of the best ways we can do that is by having a compensation environment that makes it difficult to have less than stellar employees.
Beyond that, we’re very generous with things. We’re an investment firm, partially, so we have an extremely competitive profit sharing plan. We really try to promote sort of the financial wellness for our employees. We’re probably rare, at least in the HR sort of consultants we’ve brought in to kind of test what we’re doing, but we pay 100% of all healthcare costs for our employees, and it’s not a skimpy plan. We’re very generous there. Very flexible about telecommuting and kind of the way that we support those who maybe have long commutes, or they have family situations where it’s difficult. There’s a lot of things that, from a rewards perspective … It’s not about bonuses, is probably a better way to put it.
We pay people what we think they should be paid, and to the extent that if they’re great I wouldn’t want them to ever even have another offer that they would consider. So ironically we do that while mainlining a profitable, fast-growing business. And I think it’s because we don’t have to ask people to go above and beyond for us because it’s very apparent in the way that we treat people and that we run the company that that’s how we operate. It seems great for talent acquisition, but it’s also just the right thing to do.
Adam Robinson:
Well, what’s interesting about what you said, that the research shows that most pay, right? Pay, just pure, most pay as a factor in retention, is something like ninth on the list of what people value. The things that you mentioned, help me live the life I want to live with flexibility and a pay structure that gives me that freedom, pay stability is third, most pay is ninth. And the philosophy you [inaudible 00:11:21] is just spot on supported by all the research in employee retention. And so you’re doing all the right things.
You mentioned Gravity Payments, that’s a very famous example of Dan Price, the founder, who set a 70k minimum wage in their business. Pretty radical. And touched off all kinds of conversation about minimum wage, and value, and things like that. Give me your two cents on the 70k minimum wage. It sounds like you’ve done some thinking about this. Not necessarily for Gravity, but programs like that, do they value people equally or undervalue top performers to the extent that they leave? That’s the argument. I’d love your two cents on that.
Jason Wenk:
Yeah, I think it’s challenging if someone tries to make that pivot if they already have a relatively large organization. Because that’s going to get people really kind of ruffled up. I think if you’re starting a company and you’re relatively small, maybe you have 25 or less employees, as you grow if that was the culture that you set in place as you grow it’s not disruptive because you’re hiring people into an environment that they know how it’s going to work. I think it can be challenging, and I saw what happened with Gravity. There were some people who, it did, it made them very upset and they left.
But what happens is in the end, you sort of flush out the people who maybe don’t share what you really stand for. For us, we’re not in Seattle like Gravity is, so our Michigan office, much lower cost of living, it’s, I think, actually like the third or fourth most affordable housing market in the country. So there are a lot of things that are there. And for transparency, our minimum in Michigan is 45,000. Our minimum in California is 65,000. And so those aren’t absurdly high numbers, especially the California number, I mean depending on what part of California you live in that will barely pay for living. But it is interesting that it’s common, for example in Grand Rapids, for a recent college grad to maybe start at 30,000. In California, in some of those designer type roles, maybe someone would work for 40 or 45, and still have to live at home, or with a bunch of roommates.
So what we’re trying to create is essentially, when someone comes in at an entry level type position, they’re not going to have a lot of financial hardship. They might not necessarily be wealthy, but they won’t have a lot of hardship. When we hire people in higher positions it’s also important that they understand that the only way they can earn more money, right? So if someone’s at our cap, they’re at the 8X multiplier, the entire company has to do well. And so it will. It does somewhat limit the people who are going to apply. If someone has the mindset … we’ve had an employee like this in the past. Where he came in, wanted to be a senior executive, and wanted to make a million dollars of income for himself a year. And it became very apparent that that’s not the cultural fit for us.
As the founder and CEO I’m very transparent about my pay to our employees, and I think that what happens is we have people who are … they’re eager to follow. And then those who will take our senior leadership roles, they’re also, they’re buying into this ethos of what we stand for. And then there’s other ways that we can reward people. So stock options and things like that are ways that people can participate on a larger scale. But if it’s just this general base pay, to me those who seek really high base pay and really high bonuses, and they think in terms of micro decisions, one year or thereabouts type decisions, doesn’t fit into our culture at all.
So our approach doesn’t mean it’s the right approach for everybody. And we’re obviously almost an entirely white collar type of business, so we don’t have to manage the dynamics of people who maybe are in manufacturing or things like that. So yeah, totally different world, not gonna say that our approach fits for everyone, but it’s worked really well for us, largely because we did this early. And I think it works best if you do it early if it’s something you’re interested in.
Adam Robinson:
Very well said. As we wind down the discussion here, what’s the greatest lesson learned so far over your career, being in the CEO seat, the founder seat, about the people side of startups or fast growing early stage companies?
Jason Wenk:
Yeah, and I think that it’s, again … certain things are cliché. There’s these things that we know, and even when you’re at young founder in your first years of maybe your first startup, that you’ve read and you’ve heard and you believe it to be true, but until you’ve experienced it it doesn’t really have … you don’t really appreciate the meaning. So I would say that firing quickly, doing it the right way, but firing quickly is important. You’re absolutely going to hire some of the wrong people, and so you have to make sure that you replace them earlier is better than later. In fact, I would say as a general rule as soon as you start to lose sleep over should you or shouldn’t you let someone go, it means you probably already should have let them go. And so that also then means that you have to focus really heavily on hiring great people.
A common mistake I see, especially because we work with financial advisors that are their own small businesses, we see them do this all the time. We try to coach them otherwise, but … Is they hire the cheapest person they can get rather than the best fit. And sometimes it doesn’t mean you have to spend a lot to get the best person, but just hiring based on the lowest cost to fill a roll is … it’s like playing Russian Roulette. You just never know what you’re going to get. But I’d say more often than not you’re not going to be happy. So spending the time it takes to get great people upfront will pay huge dividends in the end. I know when I very first started and it was really a one person business, that first big kind of grown-up hire, where it was a true manager, it completely changed my life. I was holding myself back by not giving up control to other people that were talented and could actually do a better job.
So making those first hires be really skilled and talented is so important. And then if you make a mistake, don’t lament on your mistake, fix it. And that means that treating people really well when they leave is actually always a good thing. So those would be my little lessons if I could’ve … Actually, I knew those things 10 years ago, I wish I would’ve been able to implement them. But until you make the mistakes it’s hard to know how important it is.
Adam Robinson:
Ladies and gentlemen, that is the final word. You have been learning from Jason Wenk, founder and CEO of FormulaFolio Investments. Jason, thank you so much for being with us on the program today.
Jason Wenk:
My pleasure. It’s bene awesome. Thanks, Adam.
Adam Robinson:
And that is a wrap for this week’s episode of The Best Team Wins podcast where we’re featuring entrepreneurs whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results. My name is Adam Robinson, author of the book The Best Team Wins, which you can find online at www.thebestteamwins.com. Thanks for tuning in, and we will see you here next week.
The post Wagemark and Pay Stability appeared first on The Best Team Wins.
April 17, 2018
Fitness Hiring and Recruiting
Carly David, Director of Recruiting and HR at the Club Pilates franchise brand, has helped double the team and works as a partner to franchise owners in how to find the best people for the job. She shares her experience as the HR Leader of one of the fastest growing franchises in the US on this episode of The Best Team Wins Podcast.
Follow Club Pilates on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram, and Youtube.
Connect with Carly on Linkedin.
Transcripts:
Adam Robinson:
In three, two, one. Welcome to The Best Team Wins Podcast, where we’re featuring entrepreneurs and business leaders whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results. My name is Adam Robinson, and for the next 25 minutes I’ll be your host as we explore how to build your business through better hiring. Today, on the program, Carly David is the Director of Recruiting and HR for Club Pilates, a franchise system based out of Orange County, California, founded in 2007. The corporate office has 40 employees, and the system has over 350 locations open and another 400 on the way across the United States. These guys are opening 20 to 30 clubs a month on average, just incredible growth. Carly, we are so excited to have you here with your perspective on the show today.
Carly David:
Thank you for having me.
Adam Robinson:
We are here to focus on the people side of Club Pilates, but before we dive in, let’s set the stage. Give us 30 seconds on the concept. What is Club Pilates, what do your franchisees do, and how could we learn more?
Carly David:
Perfect. Club Pilates was founded in 2007 in San Diego by a woman named Allison Beardsley, who was a Pilates instructor and really wanted to find a way that would make [apparatused 00:01:36] Pilates more accessible and more affordable to a greater number of people. She felt like she could create this by opening up Pilates to a group of classes with 12 stations. This concept really took off, and she ended up franchising in 2012 and ultimately sold the company to our current CEO, Anthony Geisler, in 2015. Really, since then, we’ve really exploded on the market, so as you mentioned, we currently have over 750 studios sold, about 350 currently open, and we’re probably on target to sell out of available territories by the end of the year with about 932 locations. I would say on average we open about 20 to 30 studios a month. I think this month, though, we’re on track to open about 40.
Additionally, we recently created an umbrella parent company called Xponential Fitness. Xponential Fitness is a curator of the best brands across every vertical within the boutique fitness industry. Under Xponential we have Club Pilates, but we also have other boutique fitness concepts such as CycleBar, StretchLab, Row House, and AKT, and we also plan to add yoga and barre as well.
Adam Robinson:
Pretty amazing growth. If listeners want to learn more about the Club Pilates concept or any of the other brands you mentioned, what’s the best way for them to do that?
Carly David:
Probably to go to our website, which is just www.clubpilates.com.
Adam Robinson:
All right. Well, let’s jump in. A lot of exciting growth happening there. As the HR leader in the organization, I can imagine that’s putting some strain on the people structure in the business, and so let’s take it from the franchisor perspective. As you went through an ownership transition and investment of resources and capital and an acceleration of growth, from founder to more professional management, just take us through the impact that that has had on your seat and your function in the business.
Carly David:
Sure. I actually joined the company in January of 2017, so we had already kind of changed leadership at that point. We had about 16 employees when I joined the company, and a lot of the staff, when I joined, had been with Club Pilates kind of since day one and had been with our CEO at his first fitness company that he had before he bought Club Pilates, which was UFC, so a lot of these team members had kind of already been through a growth like this, but it was a really interesting time when I came in, because that’s really when we started to truly hit this, the progression of openings that we’ve really been on for the last year or so. Now, in the first quarter of 2018, we have almost 40 employees at the corporate level, so we’ve more than doubled, so it’s just been a really exciting time to really be part of this brand.
As we continue to sell more territories and open more studios, we’ve really been able to identify not necessarily gaps, but just additional areas of guidance and coaching that our franchise partners need, so as they need more support and as we want to help them through that process and make it as streamlined as possible, we’ve continued to add individuals within that area of expertise to our corporate team.
Male:
[inaudible 00:05:08].
Adam Robinson:
Was it then not always the case where you … Did you have more of a utility player mindset in earlier years as the brand was growing?
Carly David:
Well, like I said, I wasn’t part of that company at that point, so when I joined the company, we had probably 300 sold studios, so the volume was nowhere near what we had, so it was really a great time for them to bring on someone at the HR and recruiting level to really help with that growth that they knew was about to come. While I do manage all of the corporate recruiting and the corporate HR, I also work very closely with each of our franchise partners and really coach them and train them on how to go out into their networks and staff for their studios.
Adam Robinson:
Let’s talk about that. I mean, somebody with the breadth of experience that you have and helping do that, franchisees, as we all know, are typically coming either from another concept or position. They’re not necessarily HR pros, are great at hiring, but their business success depends on doing it right. What kind of advice or best practices do you or could you share with our audience that would help them learn some of the things you’re doing to help your owners be successful?
Carly David:
Sure. I think it starts with them truly understanding the, as you always say, kind of the people side of the business, so when they come for franchise training, we really-
Female:
[inaudible 00:06:41].
Carly David:
… work to make sure that they understand the different positions-
Male:
[inaudible 00:06:45].
Carly David:
… that they will be hiring in their studio. One of the main positions, and probably the first role that they’re going to hire, is going to be the general managers of their studio. It’s a really heavily sales-focused position, and fitness sales is a very different type of mentality and a very different process than you might have if you were looking at someone with a corporate sales background or a retail sales background, because selling fitness to an individual is a very emotional sale. Sometimes people are going to come to a mall to buy a pair of pants because they need a new pair of pants, and that’s the end of that story, but when our customers come to our studios, they’re either looking for a change in their fitness routine, or they’re looking to completely change their lives, so we need to make sure that the people that we are hiring at the studio levels really understand that emotional side of the sale and understand how to truly be the face of that business.
Then our sales reps as well really support that process, and then finally we have our Pilates instructors, which ultimately are our product. Our Pilates instructors have a wealth of knowledge about the human body and how Pilates can impact someone on a day-to-day basis. They have a 450 to 500-hour certification or education, so we really make sure that the instructors that we’re bringing on into our studio are fairly knowledgeable and able to teach individuals across all walks of life.
Adam Robinson:
Well, one of the concepts we talk about on this show frequently is whether or not your organization, in your case your franchisees’ organization’s ability to hire people fast enough is a limiting factor to their growth. Would you say that the availability of certified Pilates instructors is a cap on growth if not handled correctly in these markets?
Carly David:
Absolutely, yeah. That can be the case, but the way that we have kind of figured out a way around that is, we’ve actually developed at corporate a 500-hour comprehensive Pilates training program, so we are able to provide that education to anybody who is interested in becoming a Pilates instructor. The idea is that, in addition to going out into their network and identifying instructors that already have this certification, that they should also be hosting a Teacher Training at least twice a year with the goal of five to 10 students per session so that while they are continuing to hire existing instructors, they’re also working to cultivate their own staff and their own instructors.
Adam Robinson:
Well, what I love about that and, of course, a leading question because you guys are so good at this, if you’re in a supply-constrained talent market, you can wait for more supply to show up, or you can create your own supply, and what I love about what Club Pilates has done is, you are training people on how to create their own talent pool and supply themselves with that growth. I think it’s exceptional, and it’s rare, as you probably know.
Carly David:
Yes.
Adam Robinson:
Was that a program developed in the last couple of years, or did that training program exist earlier than that?
Carly David:
It existed earlier than that. Our Teacher Training program started to develop with our founder, Allison, when she was still part of the company, but I think if you would look at what our education program looks like then versus now, it’s very different. We’ve really incorporated a lot of online options, so basically, as I mentioned, it is a 500-hour program, but a portion of those hours are online training, and then a portion of those hours are the in-studio sessions, and then the rest of the hours are self-practice and self-evaluation and teaching.
If a studio, for example, does not necessarily have a Teacher Training in the next couple of months and there’s somebody in that area that is interested in becoming an instructor, they don’t have to wait until that studio has their in-studio sessions, because they can start completing their online hours essentially as soon as they enroll. Then we also moved all of our education content online to Canvas, which is a huge online provider that many major universities use for their online content. Having that structure has really, I think, enhanced the legitimacy of our program, and we’re also working to get this program accredited as well.
Adam Robinson:
Wow. Well, what a differentiator in your franchise sales process to have this available. I mean, as I said, it is rare, and it sounds like you’ve really professionalized the delivery of training and org dev using some pretty sophisticated learning tools.
Carly David:
Yeah. Our Education Department is some of the most amazing and talented women I’ve ever worked with.
Adam Robinson:
Let’s talk about your career path for a second. As you sit here in one of the fastest-growing fitness brands out there, what prior experience are you leveraging to maintain the right culture and structure as the organization scales as fast as it is?
Carly David:
Well, I, I think, have probably a very similar background to a lot of people who ultimately ended up as a recruiter. I majored in English in college and kind of felt like that meant that I can do everything and nothing with that degree, and while I was working in college, I worked in sales and really loved the opportunity to work with people and to be able to find them a product that would truly meet their needs and make them happy. When I graduated, I wanted to find a way that I could take sales and turn it into a longer-term career, and that’s ultimately how I ended up in recruiting.
My first solid recruiting position was with a staffing agency in San Diego. It was a very niche staffing agency and very, very high volume, so I think being able to manage a full desk for these positions really allowed me to kind of understand the speed at which these positions need to be filled, but also when you’re working in an agency, it’s a client-facing role, so you can’t just throw any candidate at that client. You have to make sure that the individuals that you are identifying truly align with the culture of your client, and so being able to manage the speed at which these positions needed to be filled, but also making sure that we were finding the right candidates, was what ultimately was going to make both my company and me money.
Adam Robinson:
Yeah. Well, absolutely, and looking at your profile, it looks like client-facing, recruiting and staffing roles, is serving you well, as ultimately franchisees are your customer, right, at the franchisor level?
Carly David:
Exactly, yeah.
Adam Robinson:
Do you think it’s important … I mean, as you said in so many words something that I believe to be kind of a sacrosanct truth in recruiting is the selling process. It’s not an administrative function. It is a sales job. It is a transfer of trust. You’re competing. Your offers or proposals, you’re closing deals, I mean, it’s very much the dynamics of a sales and marketing funnel and closing process. How do you transfer that mentality to a new owner of a studio who may, like most people new to the recruiting game, not understand that it is every bit a selling process?
Carly David:
Yeah, so that definitely is a kind of a long-term education that we need to provide our franchise partners, because I think initially when they’re wanting to open a business, at the end of the day, they’re thinking, “What do I need to do that is going to allow my studio to be successful and make money?” Sometimes staffing, it kind of falls by the wayside, because they don’t necessarily see that right away as something that’s going to generate income. They will come to corporate for a three-day franchise training, and I spend about two to three hours with them in training, and then I have a series of one-on-one coaching calls with them after training to really make sure that they’re understanding the sales … Excuse me, the recruiting process, and the different positions that they’re going to have in their studio and what is kind of the ideal candidate profile for each of these positions, and really just making sure that they understand that process and invest in it. I also kind of talk about what it could mean for them if-
Male:
[inaudible 00:15:54].
Carly David:
… they don’t invest in their hiring process. What is the cost of a bad hire, and how will that ultimately impact their bottom line? Really making sure they understand that.
Adam Robinson:
If you can share with us, what is the quantification of a bad hire for your brand?
Carly David:
Yeah, so I think I read somewhere that a bad hire could essentially cost an organization-
Male:
[inaudible 00:16:18].
Carly David:
… 30% of that candidate’s yearly salary, so kind of breaking it down to where is that money going, so that’s their time. That’s lost revenue for the studio. That’s the cost of having to retrain that individual and fly them to Orange County for that three-day training, so really kind of breaking down to what that means. What’s also been helpful is that I’ve been with the company, as I mentioned, for almost a year and a half, and I talk to probably at least 10 to 20 GM candidates a week. Throughout this last year or so, we’ve really been able to determine what works, what type of background, what type of culture fit, what type of personality really works within our studio environment and what doesn’t. By having all of that data, we’re able to help train and coach those franchise partners-
Female:
[inaudible 00:17:13].
Carly David:
… so that they can make smarter hiring decisions for their studios.
Male:
[inaudible 00:17:16].
Adam Robinson:
That’s great. That’s great. Is there a particular philosophy when it comes to assisting with screening that you adhere to, an approach that works, or just an overall, a process, if you were to sum that up? What would you describe it as?
Carly David:
Yeah, so I mean, I typically recommend that they conduct a series of both phone interviews and in-person interviews.
Female:
[inaudible 00:17:46].
Carly David:
What they’re really looking for is a couple of different things that are broken down between the hard skills of the position, which, as I mentioned, it’s a very heavily sales-focused position, engaging with their members, building new members, retaining them, really going out and kind of being the face of that studio within the community, so a lot of community outreach, because that is the reason that our clients are going to come to us, because they want that boutique fitness experience. They want that general manager to know their name when they walk into the studio. They want the GM to know what’s going on in their life so that they can give them that extra motivation, so they almost feel like that fitness experience is custom-tailored to them.
The other half is just truly understanding what our brand is about. I think there’s a lot of fad fitness concepts out there right now that I don’t necessarily think have the longevity just because of how intense they can be on the body, and so they come and go and come and go, but Pilates has been around for hundreds of years at this point. There’s a reason why, because it is truly the type of exercise where somebody could do it one or two times a day, and it’s going to really strengthen their body, assist with flexibility. There’s a lot of science behind the physical therapy and the rehabilitation aspect of Pilates. I think that really goes to what our motto is, which is, “Do Pilates. Do Life,” and so being able to have a regular Pilates routine will truly impact you and make a difference in how you live your life, from how you sit at your desk and drive in your car, to how you play with your kids, to how you walk your dog. Truly, it impacts every aspect of your life.
Adam Robinson:
You mentioned a key word, and that’s “brand.” I’m curious to what extent, because your organization is the … You have such strong brands and such strong brand presence in the market. What is the relationship between your market-facing consumer brand and the strength of those brands and your employment brand and ability to attract the right people? Talk to us about how you perhaps leverage or want to better leverage that in recruiting activity.
Carly David:
Yeah, so specifically from kind of a corporate standpoint, our employees absolutely do kind of live by the, “Do Pilates. Do Life.” We truly live and breathe that, but in addition, we have our own kind of brand as well and different kind of values that we find very important when we’re going out and recruiting individuals. We kind of talked a little bit about one, and that’s kind of the client-facing piece of things, so customer service is extremely important to us at the corporate level. Ultimately, at the end of the day, we are here to provide support and guidance to our franchise partners. We always tell them that we would treat their studio as if it were ours, as if their money and their investment was our money and our investment, so it’s important to remember that, as you mentioned, we are in a client-facing position, so customer service needs to be at the forefront in every communication and in your day-to-day attitude.
Then the other thing that I think is so important and something that we value at the corporate level is teamwork and communication. I think it’s so interesting at our corporate department or our corporate levels that, really, each department manages a very integral piece of the puzzle in getting a studio open. Our real estate works with them to find their lease. Marketing will assist their branding and their market presence. Recruiting helps with their staff development, manages their build-out. It’s a very well-oiled machine, and there really can’t be any ego in terms of who is more important, because without one person, without one department, the whole process falls apart, so we really have to work together and communicate strategically and efficiently so that we can provide that, the best support, to our franchise partners.
Adam Robinson:
Is there a particular book that has influenced either your growth in recruiting, staffing, HR, or ability to do this, or one that you recommend to new owners or partners who seek to be better at this side of their business?
Carly David:
Well, obviously, it would be The Best Team Wins by Adam Robinson.
Adam Robinson:
There you go. All right. That’s the free plug. Thank you very much.
Carly David:
You’re very welcome.
Adam Robinson:
Is … Yeah, anything else from your background that you remember, an article, a seminar, a book that you point to and say, “You know what? I experienced that, and it really impacted my thinking in a positive way”?
Carly David:
There’s an article that recently came out that is really focused on kind of one particular aspect of the coaching that we give our franchise partners. It was in Entrepreneur magazine. It was an online article that came out a couple months ago, and it had to do with whether or not you could be an owner of a franchise and also be the manager. Basically, this article said that there’s just no way that you will be able to be successful if you try to wear every single hat in your studio. I think sometimes people think that they can do it all, and they can, but it’s not 100% of each level, and so a lot of things tend to get ignored if you are trying to do too many things. We’ve tried to encourage our franchise partners that they can be as involved in the day-to-day operations of the studio as they want, so we do have some that are there every day.
We have some that have never stepped foot in their studio in the last six months because they don’t even live in the country, but what’s truly going to allow them to be successful is making sure they have the right manager in place, someone who really understands that sales process and understands, again, as I said earlier, this fitness sales process.
Male:
[inaudible 00:23:51].
Carly David:
Sometimes we will have owners that come in thinking that they can be the manager of the studio, and the owner, and the investor, and wear all these hats, so I share this article with them because I think it brings up a lot of valid points, and then we kind of have a dialog about whether or not that’s truly what they want for themselves and their studio.
Male:
[inaudible 00:24:09].
Carly David:
Usually, based on some follow-up conversations, they feel like going with a manager whose area of expertise is fitness sales is the best thing for their studio. That’s been a really helpful article for me.
Adam Robinson:
Yeah. Fantastic. As we wind the conversation down here, a couple of questions for you, what’s the biggest, greatest lesson learned about managing the people side of this business or the businesses you’ve been involved in, from staffing to franchisors to supporting franchisees? Is there one nugget you can share with our audience?
Carly David:
Yeah, so I think from like a corporate standpoint, in terms of recruiting and HR, one of the biggest lessons that I have learned is that everyone works differently, and HR and recruiting really can’t be a one-size-fits-all. Everyone has different needs, different priorities, communication styles, so it’s really important to strategically create HR policies and recruiting processes that will work for everyone but also align with our overall business strategy. I think the other thing is that you just need to make sure that you’re finding individuals that align with the culture, so at the end of the day, we want people who are excited about our product, our brand, and our growth, so passion and culture fit is a really important part of what we evaluate when we are hiring both at the studio level as well as corporate, and so that’s really one of the ways that we kind of approach the people side. Then I think the final lesson is that you have to have fun, and if you’re not having fun, then how can you reevaluate and shift some responsibilities or shift priorities so that you find the joy in what you’re doing?
Adam Robinson:
If you were to come back on this show a year from now and report to us on whether or not you successfully tackled the single biggest people-related opportunity that you have in front of you or the business today, what would you be telling us happened this year?
Carly David:
Oh, my goodness. I feel like you could ask me that question every single month, and it would change. We are just-
Adam Robinson:
I believe it.
Carly David:
Yeah, I mean, we are just growing so fast from a Club Pilates standpoint, from a corporate standpoint. As I mentioned, within a year we doubled our corporate team. I think I’ve got probably 10 offer letters I got to write up when we’re done with this, so we’re continuing to grow, so I would love to really work to create some sort of like automation for some of our HR procedures and kind of make them more accessible to our staff, and I think being able to automate that will be even more important to not just Club Pilates, but Xponential Fitness and our family of other brands as they continue to grow, and yes, just continue to open new studios and to allow these studios to be successful as possible. Ultimately, if a franchise partner can get off the phone and feel like, “I feel supported. I feel like I have a direction, I know what I’m doing, and I am confident that my studio will be successful,” that’s, if I can have that feeling, if a franchise can have that, then I feel like I’ve done my job.
Adam Robinson:
Ladies and gentlemen, that’s the final word. You’ve been learning from Carly David, Director of Recruiting and HR for Club Pilates. What exceptional growth and just a fantastic story. Carly, thank you for being with us on the program today.
Carly David:
Thank you so much.
Adam Robinson:
That is a wrap for this week’s episode of The Best Team Wins Podcast, where we’re featuring entrepreneurs and business leaders whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results. My name is Adam Robinson, author of the book The Best Team Wins, which you can find online at www.thebestteamwins.com. That’s it for this week. Look forward to seeing you again on the next episode. Have a great week, everybody.
Speaker 1:
Thanks for listening to The Best Team Wins Podcast with Adam Robinson. You can find out more information about Adam and his book The Best Team Wins: Building Your Business Through Predictive Hiring at thebestteamwins.com. Thanks again for listening, and we’ll see you next week.
The post Fitness Hiring and Recruiting appeared first on The Best Team Wins.
March 27, 2018
Hiring in the Home Care Industry
Itay Shalev, Owner of Comfort Keepers Chicago, joins The Best Team Wins Podcast to discuss people best practices and hiring in the Home Care industry.
Transcripts:
Adam Robinson:
Welcome to The Best Team Wins Podcast, where we feature entrepreneurs whose exceptional approach to the people side of the business has led to exceptional results. My name is Adam Robinson. And for the next 25 minutes I’ll be your host as we explore how to build your business through better hiring.
Today on the program, Itay Shalev is the owner of Comfort Keepers, Chicago. Boot-strapped and open since 2011, he has about 70 employees today. Itay, we are so excited to have you on the show to learn from you today.
Itay Shalev:
Well thanks for having me on, Adam. I really appreciate it.
Adam Robinson:
So we’re here to focus on the people side of your business. So before we do that, let’s get the 30-second overview of your business and what you’re doing.
Itay Shalev:
Sure, so Comfort Keepers, it’s our company. As the name implies, we like to keep the comforts at home. We help, primarily, seniors stay in their homes, but really, it can be any adult over 18. Our main goal at Comfort Keepers is to promote independence and the quality of life. It’s really the highest you can achieve for whatever the individual might need.
A lot of seniors, these days, it’s their overwhelming preference to stay in their home for as long as possible and not have to go elsewhere. And we can help with that additional support. We’ve been proud to have been doing it for seven-plus years here in the Chicago area. And we’re also really proud to be part of a international franchise. So Comfort Keepers, there’s over 500 locations all around the country, all around the world. And our office is right here in Chicago.
Adam Robinson:
Excellent, and if listeners want to learn more about the brand or about your location in Chicago, where would they go?
Itay Shalev:
Probably, the easiest place is just to go to the website, comfortkeepers.com, just two words together, comfortkeepers.com, and you can search right there. It’s an easy search tab there. You can just go enter your zip code, enter your city, state, and there’s all the numbers there at your fingertips to call.
Adam Robinson:
All right, excellent. Look, I know hiring caregivers can be particularly difficult. It’s a tough economy for everybody. Everyone’s working, pretty much, who wants to be working. But in an industry where the labor market is particularly tight, I have heard it said that in home healthcare the biggest impediment to growth is additional talent. So how are you finding quality candidates in a major metropolitan area like Chicago where things are pretty tight?
Itay Shalev:
Yeah, it’s a great question. I will say, just from a … how many people we have here in the city, I don’t think we’re as hard hit by this problem as elsewhere in the country, as I hear from other owners across the country, because I talk all the time to owners in markets that are big and small. Here in the city we’re fortunate, because a lot of it boils down to a numbers game.
We look for, probably the number-one thing that we look for is do you have the passion to do this work, because, as you were talking about, there’s many ways to work these days. There’s no shortage of jobs out there, and specifically for home care, you need to have the passion to really wanna help others. So for us, it’s almost like finding different needles in a big … but we have just a huge haystack that we can look at, so it just takes time. We have to look through applications that come our way.
Probably the one, single, biggest, most helpful way in the past here, that we found for recruitment, is word of mouth. So what’s true on the client acquisition side is also true for us, we found, on the caregiver acquisition side. And that is, if we have amazing caregivers, we have people on our team that are working out well, we tell them, “Hey, refer somebody you know.” We give bonuses for that. As opposed to going out and recruiting on job boards and doing it randomly, word of mouth is really, it’s been a key for us in this last year.
Adam Robinson:
So let’s dig into that a little bit. It sounds like you have a robust referral program. Walk us through the genesis of that and how you operate that, ’cause it sounds like it’s been pretty effective for you.
Itay Shalev:
Yeah, it all started organically. I think a lot of being an entrepreneur, having your own business, I think, a lot of us can relate to this, sometimes we hit upon things by happy accidents, and then we systemize it. We found that throughout our years, that there were caregivers who’d referred other people. And they just did it, because we like to think of ourselves as good employers, good people to work for, and they did too, so they referred other people to us.
And what we found, essentially, is that when you monetize it, when you give people a reward, saying, “Hey, if you recruit somebody, we’ll give you compensation for it,” it goes a long way. And it’s not just about the money, it’s just, I think, a lot of it’s just showing the appreciation. We used to do it in a way that was over time. If you’re a caregiver, and you recruited your friend to work for us, we would give you compensation over time for how many hours they worked.
What we realized from that was that it wasn’t giving them the reward and recognition up front, so we changed the compensation to immediately. So if we hire somebody that you referred to us, you will receive $50 after 30 days. And then after 60 days, you get another $50. So they’re eligible for every person they refer, they can get 100 bucks after two months. It’s not right away. They have to work for us for a short period of time, but then the caregivers are rewarded.
Adam Robinson:
And what have you found to be the result of this from a candidate-quality standpoint?
Itay Shalev:
Yeah, I think that it goes way up, because you’re no longer relying on just the random people who see your ad. You’re more relying on people. It’s, essentially, if you have a caregiver who’s a great person on your team, chances are they know other really high-quality people. High quality can attract other high quality.
The other piece of that is accountability. So we know that … What we’ve found from doing this is that if we attract caregivers, and we all have this team mentality that they were brought on, in a way, you feel more accountable to doing a good job with our clients. You don’t think, “Oh, you’re just this one random person. You’re really connected to our team from the get-go.”
Adam Robinson:
Have you, in your seven years in business, seen a change in the labor market, not just in terms of availability, but in terms of available quality talent for the particular kind of skills you hire for?
Itay Shalev:
Yeah, for sure. I think a lot of it is we’re just running up with … there’s all the retailers, Amazon, all these companies that have sprung up. They’re, essentially, offering a similar pay scale to what we offer, because this is more, in terms of the healthcare industry, this is one of the more entry-level jobs out there. So we’ve definitely noticed.
Now what we’ve had to do is just diversify our pool and also who we’re looking at. We can’t focus on any one segment of the population. You have to just go for a variety, because ultimately, the nature of our business is 24/7. We need folks out there who are willing to work at all times of the day or night. It can be young people. It can be older people. It can be mid-career, maybe they’re looking just to add something after their nine-to-five jobs. Or it can be students. Or it can be recent retirees. It’s wide open, in terms of the kind of people who can do this kind of work. The number-one thing they need is a passion to help others. A lot of it just goes back to that.
Adam Robinson:
Let’s go all the way back to when you first bought the location and opened up. How has your hiring process evolved from then to now?
Itay Shalev:
Some of it’s remained the same. I think, what’s been refined a lot is how much more quickly we’re ale to … You have to be a good judge of character from the outset. Our questions have, probably, been refined, in terms of what we’re trying to get to the essence of who you are. One of the top questions we ask … and we may have asked this at the beginning, but you’re not necessarily sure what answer you’re looking for when you first start this business or any business.
A question employers always ask is, “Why do you wanna work for us?” right? For us, that’s become one of the key questions. So we may have asked that at the beginning, but we’re not quite sure of what answer we were looking for in the beginning. Whereas now, we understand much more clearly when we ask that question, “Why do you wanna work for Comfort Keepers?” we’re looking for passion. We’re looking for why it is that you wanna help others. Does that answer your question?
Adam Robinson:
It does. What are some examples of answers you don’t wanna hear?
Itay Shalev:
Oh, I’m just looking for something to pay the bills, anything along the lines …
Adam Robinson:
Yeah, not a great answer.
Itay Shalev:
No, but people will say it in such a way that they think they’re not quite saying that, but that’s, essentially, what they’re telling us. This is not … Working for Comfort Keepers being a caregiver, it’s not just any other job. It’s a very private thing. You’re going into somebody’s home. You’re helping them in their most private, vulnerable moments, so you need to show us that you’re passionate about helping others, that you’re willing to listen to people’s stories, you’re willing to engage with them, make sure they get the most out of their lives.
Other hiring practices we had from the beginning, that we’re very proud we still have to this day, before hiring, we interview each caregiver. It’s usually two people from our office staff. And now it’s myself and also my wife, she’s a co-owner in this business. We each sit down with applicants, and she’ll sit down with them separately.
We just went through a hiring round today, where she sat down with one person for 15, 20 minutes and then I sat down with them for another 15, 20 minutes before we feel like we’re comfortable to bring them back. Even after we bring them back, they still have to onboard and train with us and sit back with us. So we like to spend time with our team before they ever go out.
Is that standard? I don’t know, actually. If you interview, or you get to know other home care agencies, how many people do it in such a personal way like that? My impression is … One thing we stopped doing was bringing caregivers in en masse and having a group of them come to do a group interview. And I know that it still can be a hiring a practice in other places. For us, it just didn’t allow the time to really get to know somebody adequately.
Adam Robinson:
Yeah, I suppose the question is what problem are you trying to solve? If you’re solving for the owner’s lack of time, and people, sometimes, skipping interviews, group interviews solve that problem. But they don’t solve the problem your customer cares about, which is, I like my caregiver.
Itay Shalev:
Right, we would rather, for us, our focus has been quality over quantity. So we would rather only meet with six people in one day. And if two or three of them don’t show up, that’s okay, because they probably wouldn’t have worked out anyway. So sometimes we understand when we schedule interviews for people to come in, there’s a certain amount that are gonna cancel. That’s just kinda part of why we’re in the business of what we’re doing.
I meet with families all the time about our services. I constantly get this. I get this feedback from families, like, “Hey, we were doing this on our own. We hired somebody privately. It was going really well for a month, and then they just came back to us and said they can’t work anymore.” It’s like, “Welcome to our world. This happens all the time.”
Adam Robinson:
With 70 employees, I can imagine leadership and management of the organization is increasingly complex. Talk to us about how you run the business. What qualities do you think make for a good leader in this space and for managers of people in general? And then what are the challenges that you’re facing?
Itay Shalev:
Sure. I think one of the challenges with a home care agency is we’re the administrative end. And really, our most important focus is our caregiving team and the clients in the home. Obviously, there’s a physical separation between the two. So a lot of what it takes to be an effective leader, to own and operate a home care agency, is to trust your staff. You have to delegate and trust people to take care of our clients in the best way possible, because we just can’t see and know everything that’s going on in the home.
One of the ways we do this is that we have a nurse field supervisor, just a fabulous woman, Terry, that she goes and checks in on many of our clients in their homes. It’s part of our requirements as a franchise. All Comfort Keepers offices do this. But she checks up on them probably more regularly than what’s required, so checking in at least monthly with our clients to get feedback on our services to see how we can help coordinate services any better, and trusting people to do their job. And then obviously, you have to build in checks along the way.
The other way that you can kind of trust and delegate is to make sure you have really good operational software. We have ClearCare as our system. I don’t know how familiar you are with all this. And some of this might be kind of inside baseball for us, the home care industry. But our software, essentially, it gives us a window into the home in almost real time. The caregivers, they have to clock in and out for all the shifts. They have to update all the tasks. They can also leave us general comments and updates on what’s going on in the home, and we can check this anytime, anywhere.
Adam Robinson:
That’s great. I think the point you’re making is it’s systemized. You have a systematic way to manage what’s going on, and that makes leadership scalable.
Itay Shalev:
Exactly. No, otherwise, you just can’t. You’d be like a chicken with your head cut off. I mean, you can’t check in on all clients at all times, so there has to be a system in place. And you just need to be able to trust your team to do it with weekly accountability checks along the way.
Adam Robinson:
Do you have core values in your specific organization?
Itay Shalev:
It’s interesting you said that. It’s something that we probably do. Maybe they’re not written up on our wall or anything, but it’s something that we have … Some of the themes that we talk about all the time is the passion to help others, and more specifically to our industry, to seniors, right? We have to have that passion for helping others.
Another core value we have is to be proactive. We have to think about, as we get to know our clients, what are their needs? What are things that we might anticipate that they could benefit from, because a lot of this goes to issues and problems that can come up. Ideally, we want to tackle any potential issues before they snowball and get unmanageable. So it’s like trying to address the problems before they even become problems.
Adam Robinson:
Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Directly, or indirectly, what are you doing to make sure those values you just mentioned are authentic and real on a daily operating basis out in the field?
Itay Shalev:
Yeah, part of that is we have to make sure that our team knows what’s going on with clients, ideally, before they walk in the door, that they’re appraised of situations as they’re going on. We also ask them for feedback all the time. So we try to practice what we preach. We can’t tell people, “Be passionate, be proactive,” if we’re not doing it ourselves. We’ll check in on our team. We’ll ask them how things are going.
We also tell them all the time, before they accept cases with a new client or even during, we ask them, “Hey, how’s it going? Is this still the schedule you want?” because we want to be proactive with our team to make sure that this is the job that they wanted to sign up for, because going back to what we were talking about in the beginning, in this industry where our caregivers, our team, they could probably find jobs elsewhere pretty easily. So if they’re happy and engaged, then our clients will be fine.
Adam Robinson:
Well said. Let’s shift a little more to the tactical in how you reward folks. What’s your philosophy around compensation and career-pathing for your business?
Itay Shalev:
You do have to look at pay, because it’s their livelihood for a lot of our team. So our philosophy has always been to pay above whatever the market rate is. That can just differ on what’s your market, and where do you live, and where do you work? Here in Chicago, we just try to pay … We’re always researching, staying up to date on what are the current, average, caregiver wages out there. We just try to pay a little bit above that to stay ahead of the market.
In addition to that, we want to offer more rewards. So there’s the caregiver referral bonus that we offer them. We’ve offered, it’s been for a few years now, paid time off. So we’ll offer them up to five days of paid time off. We just rolled in benefits for supplementary health insurance in vision and dental. We started a program where we’ll pay half of one of those, and we might even include a little more of that in the next year ahead. That’s a few of the things we’ll offer in addition.
Adam Robinson:
Taking it back up, big picture here, as we round out our conversation, what do you think’s the greatest lesson you’ve learned thus far, after seven years in business, about managing the people side of your business?
Itay Shalev:
Pay, and compensation, and financial rewards, it only goes so far. We have to always tell our team how much we appreciate their service. A lot of the compensation I think of is emotional, to give them a pat on the back when they deserve it.
We put on our calendar, for example, all of their birthdays. We always send them a birthday present on their birthday and acknowledge it, because we want to all feel connected together. Ultimately, it’s about helping others. I tell this all the time to my team, that we can only help others after we’ve taken care of ourselves. We always try to make sure that they realize how much we appreciate them.
Adam Robinson:
That’s great. Is there a particular book that was influential in your background, in terms of business education or leadership education, that you could share with our audience?
Itay Shalev:
A good leadership book, I’d highly recommend The Street-Smart Entrepreneur by Jay Goltz. I read that book. It’s a lot of practical tidbits. I read that in the first couple of years of owning-operating Comfort Keepers. And there’s lots of lessons in there. I remember reading at the time, like, “I’m glad he told me this now. That saved me some hard lessons down the road.”
And if there’s just another book I could throw out there to recommend, current book that, I think, helps to summarize our philosophy, not just on our business, but on life in general, it’s a book, the title of which is Happiness is a Choice You Make, something like that. It was written by a New York Times journalist.
He spent one year interviewing six older adults. All of these adults are 85 and older. The essence of the book was, what is it about these senior’s lives that’s led them to a happier existence, and what can we learn from that, all of us other adults out there? Ultimately, it’s about living a healthy, happy, productive life. We learn from our seniors every day. They’re one of our greatest resources for learning. We can all do this. This book is a great way to start that.
Adam Robinson:
If you were to come back on the show a year from now and report to us on whether or not you successfully tackled the single biggest opportunity that you have in front of you in the business today, what would you be telling us happened?
Itay Shalev:
I hope I will have told you that our referral bonus program, which we started about three months ago, and which it’s been pretty successful so far, that that’s really taken off. That has also led to more client acquisitions, because what we found out is that when you bring great caregivers onboard, who have the passion to do this, your client base and your business is going to grow as a result. It’s all about focusing on the quality of our caregiving team, and that will lead to all the growth elsewhere.
Adam Robinson:
Ladies and gentlemen, that’s the final word you’ve been learning from Itay Shalev, Owner of Comfort Keepers, Chicago. Itay, thank you so much for being with us on the program today.
Itay Shalev:
Yeah, thanks, Adam, I really appreciate it.
Adam Robinson:
And that’s a wrap for this week’s episode of The Best Team Wins Podcast, where we’re featuring entrepreneurs whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results. My name is Adam Robinson, Author of the book, The Best Team Wins, which you can find online at www.thebestteamwins.com. Thanks for tuning in, and we will see you here next week.
The post Hiring in the Home Care Industry appeared first on The Best Team Wins.
March 16, 2018
High-Volume Recruiting Tips
Hireology is hiring 20+ people in one month. Melissa Ryan, Director of Talent, shares tips for recruiting for high-volume with high-velocity.
Transcripts:
Adam Robinson:
Hello and welcome to the Best Team Wins podcast, where we feature entrepreneurs and business leaders whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has lead to incredible results. My name is Adam Robinson, and for the next 25 minutes, I will be your host as we talk about how to build your business through better hiring. Today on the program we have someone very special on the show, Melissa Ryan, Hireology’s very own director of talent is here with me today to discuss high volume recruiting.
So if you’ve been listening to this show for a while, you’re out there trying to grow or run your business, you will inevitably if you have not already be facing a giant wall of open roles that you’ve got to fill. Melissa is in charge of making sure that that gets done here at Hireology. So we’re gonna talk about from her perspective what it’s like to help a company grow exponentially on the people side of their business, and I look forward to digging in. Melissa, welcome to the show.
Melissa Ryan:
Thank you so much Adam, I’m happy to be here.
Adam Robinson:
At Hireology, right now we’re recruiting how many people?
Melissa Ryan:
We have over 40 open roles.
Adam Robinson:
40 roles for a 150 person company, so we’re growing the business by almost a third in the next couple of months, that’s nuts. How many of them are sales roles?
Melissa Ryan:
We have 28 open sales roles.
Adam Robinson:
So the bulk of those are revenue-focused roles?
Melissa Ryan:
Correct.
Adam Robinson:
And we’re trying to get this all done by when?
Melissa Ryan:
March 19th is our target hiring date.
Adam Robinson:
Okay, you’re just saying that, like wow. As of the recording of this podcast, that looks like two weeks to me.
Melissa Ryan:
Two weeks from today.
Adam Robinson:
So let’s jump right in. What are we doing to make sure that that happens? Because a month ago it was you working on the more manager and senior level roles that we had open, and our full-time recruiter on staff, Jordan Hester, running everything else. I see a lot of people around here now I didn’t see last week, so let’s talk about what you’ve done to help supplement what we need which is probably just raw horsepower.
Melissa Ryan:
Yeah, so when Peter and Julie, our CFO and CO came to me and said, “Melissa, we have identified this need, we are gonna open the 28 open sales roles.” I obviously understood the business impact that it would have if these roles went unfilled, and so one thing-
Adam Robinson:
Like what?
Melissa Ryan:
Lost revenue. Having an open seat, not only are you losing revenue by not having somebody in that role, but if somebody is previously in that territory, there’s lost quota coverage as well. It can have a really big business impact, and what we’ve identified here at Hireology is that for [inaudible 00:03:06] sales people it can take anywhere from; Depending on the level; two to six months. And so, I understand the urgency in wanting to get these people in the door as soon as possible.
Adam Robinson:
So what did we do?
Melissa Ryan:
I honestly took a minute to process it. Thankfully, having the support of Peter, I knew that I didn’t have to do it all alone, so quickly reached out to a staffing agency here in Chicago that I have a good relationship with and leveraged them for currently three different resources. So we have someone here for sales recruiting, adding another horsepower to the process.
We have one individual here helping us source passive candidates. With sales talent, the best sales people are not looking for jobs, and so having somebody solely focused on reaching out to these candidates within the Chicago market and basically explaining why they should talk to us, give us five, 10 minutes on the phone. And then we have one person here helping us coordinate, screening resumes, scheduling interviews, following up with candidates, kind of someone at each point in the pipeline. We also are working with one direct hire agency to help us just with additional final help as well.
Adam Robinson:
That’s great. Melissa, that sounds like a sales process.
Melissa Ryan:
Yes, it really truly is, and that’s how … I took a step back and looked at it. I worked with our business operations team to look back at over the past six months, historically how many applicants to candidates to phone screens to in-person interviews has it taken us to hire one person. And so that’s helped me look at setting goals and metrics for our team today of what they need to focus on each and every day.
Adam Robinson:
That’s great. All right, so we’ve got a team of support doing the heavy lifting here, which is awesome. There’s a couple of other things we’ve done. We had a sales open house last week that came out of nowhere by the way, that was organized in about a day. Tell me about that.
Melissa Ryan:
Yeah, so I’ve done this with previous companies, and what I found is that if you open your doors to candidates that may or may not be looking, they’re able to come in and get just some perspective on your culture, see your office. It’s held after hours, so it’s not taking any time out of their business day to just see what it’s like to work at Hireology. And I feel truly passionate that we have one of the best cultures in Chicago, we have a really strong employment brand, and so if we can just get an hour of these people’s time to come in and see for themselves what it’s like to work here, then we can hopefully draw their interest and appeal to them as a potential employer.
Adam Robinson:
So what did you do to set that up?
Melissa Ryan:
We set it up about a week in advance, so obviously it was a really quick turnaround time, we had an aggressive target. However, what I found is that if you set the date three weeks in advance, you end up with a lot more no-shows, so people are CPS and then they don’t show up. With a weeks time, we leverage not only our internal team to post the invitation onto their social media and their LinkedIn, we also were sending out … Each of the recruiters were sending out at least 25 messages each day to passive candidates just saying, “Hey, we have this open office, just come in and check us out.”
We also have great partnerships we’ve built in Chicago in ITA, and so we were able to leverage both of them to post out to their networks, post at an event. We saw a lot of response. In total we had about 40 RSVP’s and about 30, I want to say 30 attendees, so there was a really great turnout.
Adam Robinson:
Good, and what did they do when they got here?
Melissa Ryan:
So of course we had some cocktails, beer and wine, and then appetizers. People love to eat and drink, so we had that here. But we organized just a quick presentation, our VP of sales, Max Lowenbaum presented on the things that sales people want to hear about, career progression, how can they grow, and then our core values ’cause that’s so important to us as we continue to hire in scale. So just a brief presentation on those two items, and then we also had a panel.
We had four different members of our sales team at different levels, and those that had been … One person that’s just started and then ranging up to somebody that’s been here for two and a half years that’s been promoted four different times. We wanted to tell the story across all different levels and experiences of what their experience has been here at Hireology.
Adam Robinson:
That’s great, so all in, for listeners to get a sense for what it took to throw that together in a week, this was something that no matter how big you are, when you’re looking to hire, this is the tool they can use. How much time did you put into this? Excluding the actual couple hours of the event.
Melissa Ryan:
I would say at least an hour a day dedicated to sourcing, and that was myself and Jordan and the temps as well.
Adam Robinson:
Sourcing open house attendees?
Melissa Ryan:
Yes, reaching out to candidates on LinkedIn and other mediums just to say, “Hey, we’re having this event, you should come.” So about an hour a day I would say in total.
Adam Robinson:
Okay, so about five hours?
Melissa Ryan:
Yeah.
Adam Robinson:
Okay, and how much did we invest financially in this?
Melissa Ryan:
It was less than $1,000.
Adam Robinson:
That’s food and beverage pretty much.
Melissa Ryan:
Yeah, exactly. And so from a return on investment standpoint, my goal is to hire two different people from that event, but truly the impact I think that that event had is that on our employment brand, people were able to see why Hireology is different and ultimately have 30 people that are raving fans that want to work here.
Adam Robinson:
That’s great, I think we’re gonna get the hires.
Melissa Ryan:
Yeah, I think so.
Adam Robinson:
That’s great. For listeners, think about your cost per hire, how much does it take you to get someone in the door in your business if you add up all the money you spent on job boards last year and recruiters and all of the cost inputs to getting your hires, and then divide that by the number of hires you made, you get a cost per hire number that for most companies is between $3,000 and $5,000, somewhere in there. So if we hire three people for $1,000, that’s pretty outstanding ROI, very, very cool.
You’ve got people coming in on Saturdays doing interviews, tell me about that.
Melissa Ryan:
Yeah, the thought behind a Saturday interview day … We are a high growth business and the managers are really busy in meetings back to back all day, and so to hire 28 people, the total number of interviews is around 300 interviews, and so for us to be able to carve out time outside of the business hours, not only is it for the hiring managers less distraction, we actually have comfort in terms available. It’s just to be completely focused on interviews, I would say is just a more efficient way to use our time, and also for candidates it allows them to not have to take time off during the work day, they’re typically more flexible in what times they can come in. So to be able to crank out hopefully 15 interviews in a day versus scheduling that over the course of a week, it just is a lot more efficient.
Adam Robinson:
So I’m sure people are thinking, how are people on Saturday … What our managers say when we said, “Hey, we need you on Saturday.” And what our candidates say when we’re inviting them in on Saturday.
Melissa Ryan:
Candidates are really appreciative of the flexibility.
Adam Robinson:
That’s great, that’s surprising to me. Maybe it shouldn’t be.
Melissa Ryan:
Some candidates have things planned, they’re not able to come. If that’s the case then we’ll schedule them sooner or the next week. But I guess from my experience, they’ve appreciated being able to come in outside of the business hours, and they understand … We communicate to them that this is not the expectation for them, so we truly are a company that focuses on work-life balance, and it is rare that we have to come in on a Saturday. It’s probably only my second time ever where I’ve had to dedicate that time to coming into the office. But we just explained that this isn’t the expectation moving forward.
Adam Robinson:
Right, to what extent are you presenting that upfront when we’re doing interviews? How are we setting that expectation, what’s the message? So if I’m listening and I want to know how I communicate that when I’m talking with the [inaudible 00:12:46] applicant, what are we saying?
Melissa Ryan:
I just say, “We’re hosting interviews on this Saturday because we are going through such a high volume hiring push and we have X number of open roles. We are dedicating this time to provide a bit more flexibility across the board.”
Adam Robinson:
Okay, very cool.
Melissa Ryan:
Hiring managers, they appreciate it as well. They might not be excited to come in and do interviews on a Saturday, but they understand the importance of hiring and it’s important to them as well that they get these spots filled.
Adam Robinson:
That’s great, what else do you have going on in support of this mission?
Melissa Ryan:
We I would say are taking an approach of being very metrics-driven, so setting targets each day that are focused on very specific roles and being aware of where our pipelines are at for the different positions. If we know that our candidate traffic has been really light for our payroll account executive role, then we communicate each morning to have our sourcing help us with that specific role. So I think it just is all about open communication, having an intentional system of metrics and holding the team accountable to that.
Adam Robinson:
It’s interesting, it is truly a sales pipeline that you’re managing.
Melissa Ryan:
Yeah, absolutely. If you’re not getting enough leads or candidates on the top end of your funnel, you’re not gonna hit your hiring goals.
Adam Robinson:
What role in all of this does the direct hire firm play? Is there a particular strategy you’ve got in place for them for specific roles? Walk us through your thinking on how you’ve organized their support.
Melissa Ryan:
Their support I directed specifically at the roles that are historically hardest to fill. In Chicago, sales hiring is really competitive, and so to have an agency that’s focused on sales recruiting in Chicago, they have a network of candidates that … I trust her to send us the best people, and if we’re able to fill the hardest roles with their help, we can focus on the other high-volume number of roles that we have open.
Adam Robinson:
Yeah, very good. I mean, particularly for revenue generating roles, I know I’ve always; As someone in the hiring business; certainly had an aversion to paying fees for recruiting help, that seems like a complete paradox that we would need to do that. However, the math is pretty clear. There is a cost associated with unfilled roles, there is a payoff when sales start being generated that are months down the line, not years, and there’s a certain dollar amount that it’s worth to front load all of these hires. Anyone that comes in under the line with a fee structure is a pretty good investment to make.
Melissa Ryan:
Yeah, it will pay for itself in the first three to six months.
Adam Robinson:
So for folks listening to this, what was the amount of lead time you had? It sounds like we had to have this thing up and running for a long time, but what was the lead time you had to pull this together?
Melissa Ryan:
It was on a Thursday, I wish I could remember the exact day. It was the last week of February, so it was ultimately like three and a half weeks of a turnaround time, so it’s … Yeah.
Adam Robinson:
The last week of … I think really this may be the beginning of the third week. What I’m saying is I think it’s less time than you may remember it being. Pretty good.
Melissa Ryan:
Yeah, and obviously I am all for … The message that I communicated to my team was that this was our opportunity to make a really big impact on the business, and so while the pressure is on and the stakes are higher, this is our time to shine, so I think that if … Phrasing it to those that are gonna be working harder than they’ve worked in a really long time, I think it’s just an opportunity to really show what we’re made of.
Adam Robinson:
Yeah, it’s great. It is a huge value, very real tangible value to the business, all eyes are definitely on it. What are some other approaches you have used either here or in your prior lives like Groupon Goods and some of these other really high volume staffing programs that you’ve put together? What would you say are some rules of the road that can help our listeners ramp without blowing up their culture or process?
Melissa Ryan:
I think it’s important to … While we have a lot of roles open and we have a lot of positions to fill, we would never hire someone just to put a butt in the seat, that’s just not how we do things here. We are really intent on hiring to our core values, and I would never … There’s a huge risk involved if you hire even just one person that you feel doesn’t align with your core values, that can have a really negative impact on your culture and employment brand, so I would just caution against straying from your values.
Adam Robinson:
Cool, and in terms of do’s and dont’s for working with vendors for anyone who’s not done that before, when you pull the chain and get a bunch of help in the door, take us through what’s worked and not worked for you, what have you done well and what would you do differently?
Melissa Ryan:
With the direct hire agency that we’re working with, I think it’s just really critical that they understand obviously the opportunity and the role itself, but they also need to really understand our culture and our core values in order for us to hire the right person and for them to add value to us, we just want to make sure that they’re putting the right candidates in front of us, and so I spent over a few calls time with the agency talking through that.
With the temps that we’ve brought to help us internally, each of them went through orientation just as a new hire did, so they can hear how I talked to new hires about our core values and how we basically integrate them into the business and just our culture as well. So I think it’s just important that they are able to talk about the company and the culture just as any other employee would.
Adam Robinson:
So it sounds like we’re making the right investments of time to have these investments pay off.
Melissa Ryan:
Yeah, absolutely. Even though everyone is really busy, it’s just important to pivot your schedule to really ensure that they are spreading the right message about your employment brand.
Adam Robinson:
And so as we wrap up here, a couple of things. I like to ask guests on the show, is there one particular book or source of knowledge that really made an impact on what you do or how you approach business or the professional … Scratch that, let me ask this differently. We always like to ask guests on this show if there’s a particular book that’s been influential on the way that they approach business or life, for you is there anything in your professional library that you would recommend to listeners that is applicable to what we’ve been talking about today?
Melissa Ryan:
And I’m not just saying this ’cause I’m on your podcast, but reading your book I think really helped me …
Adam Robinson:
Shameless plug, thank you.
Melissa Ryan:
You’re the one that really created the core values and the intentional culture that we have here, and so that helps keep me focused and aligned to what my team is helping build.
Adam Robinson:
If you were to come back on this show in a year and tell us what 2018 looked like and what was accomplished for your organization, what do you want to be telling us a year from now?
Melissa Ryan:
I think specifically reflecting back on this episode, I would be able to say that we hit our hiring goal and because of that we helped produce X amount of revenue. And I think that’s the best story that a recruiting team can tell, and that’s what makes my eyes light up. But there’s also a lot of other really exciting things in store for the people team this year, we’re expanding our office space and there’s a lot of other really cool initiatives we get to work on.
Adam Robinson:
All right ladies and gentlemen, you’ve been learning from Melissa Ryan, director of talent here at Hireology. Melissa, thank you for being on the program.
Melissa Ryan:
Thanks for having me.
Adam Robinson:
And that’s a wrap for this weeks’ episode of the Best Team Wins podcast where we’re featuring entrepreneurs and business leaders whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has lead to incredible results. My name’s Adam Robinson, author of the book The Best Team Wins, which you can find online at www.thebestteamwins.com. Thanks for listening, and we will see you next week.
The post High-Volume Recruiting Tips appeared first on The Best Team Wins.
March 12, 2018
What You Need to Know about Workplace Sexual Harassment, Generational Challenges, and More
Brad Karsh, Founder and CEO of JB Training Solutions, has been featured on CNN, CNBC, and Dr. Phil and quoted in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today. He joins Adam to discuss what you need to know about workplace harassment, generational challenges at work, and much more on this episode of The Best Team Wins Podcast.
Follow JB Training Solutions on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram, Youtube, and Google Plus.
Connect with Brad on Linkedin and Twitter.
Transcripts:
Adam Robinson:
Welcome to The Best Team Wins Podcast, where we feature entrepreneurs and business leaders whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has lead to incredible results. My name is Adam Robinson, and for the next 25 minutes, I’ll be your host as we explore how to built your business through better hiring. Today on the program, we have Brad Karsh, founder and CEO of JB Training Solutions based in Chicago, Illinois. Brad has been running JB since he founded it in 2002, has 15 employees today. And I have to say, is a pretty amazing resource for talking about workforce generational issues, workplace effectiveness, management skills. You name it, Brad’s an expert. And so I’m so excited to have him here. Brad has been on the Dr. Phil show, CNN, CNBC, Fox News Chicago, quoted in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, New York Times, lots of other places. The guy knows what he’s talking about. Ladies and gentlemen, Brad Karsh. Welcome to the program.
Brad Karsh:
Thank you, Adam. It is amazing to be here.
Adam Robinson:
All right, so let’s dive in here. Before we get started though, for our listener’s benefit, give us 30 seconds on JB and what you guys are doing.
Brad Karsh:
Sure. So we basically do workplace training. So we train on some of the things you mentioned. We talk about communication skills in presenting, we talk about management and leadership. We do a lot of work on different generations working effectively. And we’ve recently started doing a fair bit of work in the area of sexual harassment prevention training. We also do some keynote speeches, consulting, and coaching. That’s in a nutshell what we do.
Adam Robinson:
And if listeners want to learn more, what’s the best way for them to do that?
Brad Karsh:
They can check out www.JBTrainingSolutions.com.
Adam Robinson:
You mentioned something that is absolutely the topic of the moment here, and certainly I hope here to stay is the issue of sexual harassment in the workplace. I mean, it is the top topic in HR, and it’s in the national conversation. Companies bring you in to educate leaders on this issue. What are you seeing out there right now? I mean is this … Are you brought in before or after the crisis, and what are you seeing out there that owners of businesses should be thinking about right now as it pertains to this topic?
Brad Karsh:
Yeah, it’s almost impossible to find a situation where there hasn’t been some kind of incident, reported or not, and as we all know, in the five months since Harvey Weinstein came out last October, there have been 70 major figures who have been accused of sexual harassment, from our political leaders to Hollywood, to sports figures and more, it is unfortunately a prevalent, prevalent issue. So we’ve got companies reaching out to us at all stages. Some, if you will, just want to educate their employees. Some, as you said, have had a very specific or high-profile incident, and they need help in understanding this very important topic, and there is an extraordinary amount of miscommunication about it, which makes, I think, this class remarkably interesting and incredibly informative.
Adam Robinson:
Yeah, I can imagine. I mean, so what … If you were to, other than don’t be an asshole, what’s the biggest, most important thing that CEOs of fast growth companies need to understand about this issue?
Brad Karsh:
Here’s what they need to understand, and I think this is the most important point, really for anyone at any level. Sexual harassment is not about intent, it’s about impact. So all the time, we hear this as an excuse, “Oh my god, but he does that for everybody. He just doesn’t have a filter. That’s who he is.” Or, “You know what? He gives everybody a little tap on the behind every now and again. Not a big deal.” Even if the person doesn’t intend it, if the impact is offensive to somebody, it is sexual harassment, and there’s an extraordinary number of unreported cases of this stuff. It’s not about the intent, it’s about the impact.
Adam Robinson:
Yeah, great. That’s well-said, very well-said. Well, let’s go with that for a little bit longer here, because I get asked often, as I’m sure you’re out there on the front lines of this every day, what happens to the manager in the middle of the organization who aspires to be a leader on this issue, but they work for someone who just is not? They’re the opposite, right? How do I, this is the question people ask me when I’m out there, how do I impact this issue when my boss or the CEO of the business is not a great role model here?
Brad Karsh:
Yeah, you know it’s interesting, Adam, because I hear that question a lot. Not just even about this topic, but it’s like, “Hey, I want to be a better manager, but my manager’s a terrible manager.” Or, “I want to present more effectively, but my manager doesn’t let me do this.” One of the things when I’m talking to leaders, at any level of an organization, is it is very easy and very convenient to say, “I would love to do it but my company doesn’t support it, or the organization, or my boss doesn’t support it.” But I say, “You know what? Make a stand.” And it doesn’t have to be a public, Don Quixote type stand where you’re going to go up against the big evil windmill.
What I’m talking about is just make it great on your team. Make it great for your people on your team with your ability, and you will see how that stuff does start to spread, or at the very least, the people working for you feel a lot better, because they know that you care about them, you care about the issues, you care about getting better and you care about them getting better.
Adam Robinson:
Very good. With that in mind, let’s take a pivot here in the conversation to multi-generational workplaces, and that’s every workplace, of course. And when I’m out talking about this particular topic, the most common feedback I get is, “Well, we want to hire that next generation, but we’re all part of the previous generation. We learned it a certain way. We do it a certain way. We just don’t know that we’re the kind of place that is going to be accepting of a new way of thinking or doing this.” Industries that we spent a lot of time on, and automotive retail, specialty retailers, older, more established consulting companies, they face this issue. Tell us about your work on multi-generational workplaces and how you advise your clients to manage that more effectively.
Brad Karsh:
Yeah, and it is something that we talk about a lot, and my whole thing is it doesn’t matter which generation you’re from, no generation’s better, no generation’s worse, they’re all just a little bit different. And once we kind of understand what some of those differences are, once people realize that people are just people, we can remove some of these, “I think,” platitudes that we claim about all the generations that often times really aren’t all that true. So 20 somethings, I hear this all the time. “Where do they come from, they don’t have a work ethic, they’re not honest, they’re not trying all that hard, they’re very entitled.” Those are the things that every generation pretty much said about every other generation since the dawn of time, right? Yeah.
Adam Robinson:
[inaudible 00:07:42] That’s correct.
Brad Karsh:
I mean, I start my presentation off with a bit where I read this thing from Time Magazine, everyone thinks it’s from three years ago about millennials, but it’s actually from 25 years ago about Gen X. And they’re like, “But no Brad, you described millennials.” I said, “No, I described any 20 something generation that’s in the workplace right now.” But that being said, there are different things that shape the generations, and there have been profound changes in the last 30 years in technology, in culture, in society, and perhaps most importantly in parenting.
And once we understand where the generations came from, we can find a common language that unites us, realize what some of those differences are, and just coach our way through them. Doesn’t have to be that big of deal. Setting expectations is probably the single most important thing that we could do.
Adam Robinson:
Okay, so as a father of four, I have to ask, tell me about how I’m screwing up my kids, Brad. What am I doing wrong?
Brad Karsh:
I’ll tell you right now. So one of the biggest mistakes that we make, and I have three kids I think who are similarly in age to yours, is our kids are too busy. They have too much going on. And I kind of call it the myth of opportunity. If you think back to, nobody knows how old I am, maybe some people do. But I’m 52 years old, so I’m an old Gen X’er. When I grew up, our lives weren’t as busy. The statistic is that free time between my generation, and the newest generation, is down by about 50%. That’s substantial, meaning this generation has 50% less free time than we did growing up.
Well, what does that mean? Their entire lives growing up, the newest generation, has been so involved in clubs, activities, sports, that they have always looked up and there’s always been someone there, and someone has told them exactly what to do. There’s been a coach, a teacher, a chaperone, a volunteer, an instructor, a parent, a grand master, a private swing coach. And someone’s told them exactly what to do. So they come to the workplace and they look up and the see people like you, Adam, and they see people like their managers, and what do you think they want their manager to do? Tell them exactly what to do.
They are not used to leaving the house at 8:00 in the morning and saying, “Mom, I’ll be back by lunch time.” Or, “Mom, I’ll be back by dinner,” and figuring things out on their own. This is not a good thing, this is not a bad thing, it’s just a different thing. So one of the things that I’m trying to do with my kids is give them some free time so that they can figure things out on their own, so they can learn to be self-sufficient, so that they can become more creative and they don’t have to play within the rules and within the lines all the time. But it’s hard, because we’re like, “Oh, God. We really want them to play soccer and they’re getting pretty good so they should play travel soccer. Gosh, wouldn’t it be a terrible opportunity if they didn’t learn Mandarin and music is so important, they got to learn music. And God, martial arts teach you discipline.” So we just pack them full and we don’t do enough free time.
Adam Robinson:
Well great, you just described the source of my intense parenting guilt, so we’ve put our thumb on that. That’s awesome. But, so let this be the parenting episode here on the Best Team Wins podcast, but I have to keep this going because my wife and I talk about this. We’ve actually … I think where somewhere in the middle, but we often lament like, “Are we not signing our kids up for enough stuff? And what are we doing? Will this under-prepare them for tomorrow’s world if we’re doing this a little bit differently?” Because they do plenty of activities, but we have parents that talk to us and parents get together, school events and things like that, and they go, “Wow, we really look at you guys like wow, you’re not always slammed doing stuff. We really like you you give your kids a little bit of free time.” And I’m thinking, “This is insanity. This is insanity. Like I can’t remember having anything structured when I was a kid and I’m only marginally screwed up.”
Brad Karsh:
No, it is. I think our kids are over-programmed and over-structured. Now, there are a lot of reasons that people have talked about that being a, “maybe a good or a bad thing.” But I think nobody … Again, you’re not doing this looking ahead to 25 years from now and saying, “Gee, when my kid is a junior manager, they’re going to have the skills necessary to think independently, be creative, and handle gray.” And I think that’s where there’s a big, big issue. We were, and I keep using we collectively as let’s say Gen Xers or Baby Boomers. We grew up with more gray. Things weren’t so obvious. We figured stuff out on our own more so I think than today’s generation did, which is much more highly structured.
We look to each other for solutions. They look up for solutions, to a parent. And again, some of these are technology abetted as well. And these aren’t anyone’s fault. When I went to college, my mom showed me how I can use a washing machine at home. So I get to college, I go to do my first load of wash, and guess what? The washing machine in college was not the same one that I had at home. And I was like, “Oh my god, the buttons are different. What’s permanent press? I’ve never heard of permanent press.”
I didn’t know what to do. So I experimented, I figured out, and I got it right. Now, if that exact same situation were to happen today, what would happen? The kid would FaceTime their mom and say, “Mom, take a look at this washing machine. What do I do?” And again, I’m not saying that’s inherently bad, but when we’ve had thousands of those types of interactions over the course of a youth, what tends to happen is their reliant upon others to figure that stuff out as opposed to doing it on your own.
Adam Robinson:
That’s the title of your next book, Brad, is every kid needs pink to-shirts.
Brad Karsh:
There you go, exactly. Way more pink.
Adam Robinson:
So let’s talk about your business. You’re growing. You’ve got 15 employees now. Think back to 2002 when you were getting started, into now and your experience in picking the right people for your organization now that we have a handle on help you give your customers. How has your approach to hiring for yourself changed over the last 15 years?
Brad Karsh:
Well, it’s interesting that we’re doing this topic, because hiring great people is not just the most important thing, it’s the only important thing you need to do as a business owner. And again, I like talking, I’m not a big writer, but I wanted to write about how the most important skill any entrepreneur can have more than anything is hiring great people, because you’re never going to take your company anywhere unless you build people within your organization. You can’t be a company of one, and you have to hire amazing, amazing people. So that has been our mission, our motto, since the get go, since our first hire in 2005. So I did fly solo and struggle and barely made ends meet until I did hire someone great, and that changed the whole trajectory of the company.
Adam Robinson:
Do you have a particular approach or a process you now follow?
Brad Karsh:
My background is I worked at Leo Burnett for 15 years. And my last five, I was the director of recruiting. So I read 10 thousand resumes, I interviewed a thousand people, and at the time, I didn’t realize how important that would be as an entrepreneur. So a lot of my approach to interviewing is stuff that I honed over many years working as a recruiting director. And to me, it’s obviously a great resume, and I read a ton of those, and it’s also getting to know the person in the context of the interview. And I like asking some non-traditional questions, some things that I find to be important. Although, I will admit too, I’ve hired some unbelievable people. I’ve also made some terrible mistakes. But thankfully, more good stuff than bad.
Adam Robinson:
Yeah, well is there a particular interview question that you like or recommend to others.
Brad Karsh:
I have two kind of interesting questions. One of the things that I ask now is, “What did you do during your high school summers?” And that may sound like the most bizarre question, but let me tell you why. And believe it or not, Adam, it gets back to some of this generational stuff. The percentage of teenagers in our country who have held a summer job has declined precipitously over the last 20 years. It used to be around 50 to 60% and now it’s hovering around 25 to 30%. And what’s happening is high schoolers aren’t working those same menial jobs that I had, and many people my age had, and instead, because there are more opportunities, they’re going to lacrosse camp, or they’re traveling with their family, or they’re doing a social services project, or they’re taking a teen vacation, whatever it is.
But fewer and fewer have menial summer jobs. And I’d like to hire people who have had menial summer jobs, because to me, you learn a lot in those jobs. You learn the value of work ethic. You learn the value of simple things, like sometimes dealing with a boss who isn’t perfect sometimes, you making sure you have to show up on time, and maybe more than anything else, realizing that having a menial summer job, unless you did a good job at that, you were going to be stuck doing that the rest of your life. So the value of what a good job means and what it’s all about. So I like people who actually had menial summer jobs as a high school student.
Adam Robinson:
What was your worst job you ever had?
Brad Karsh:
I worked in circulation fulfillment advanced publishing, and what I did for an entire summer while I was in college is I opened up envelopes and sorted checks from trade publications like Modern Jeweler and the Drover’s Journal. You don’t know what a drover is, Adam.
Adam Robinson:
I was just going to ask you. They’re a great band, but I don’t know what a drover is.
Brad Karsh:
A drover is a person who drives cattle. So these were pretty glamorous trade publications, let me tell you. And I opened and sorted checks, eight hours a day, five days a week, for 12 weeks.
Adam Robinson:
Modern Jeweler. It sounds riveting, it really does.
Brad Karsh:
There was Modern Hairstylist. And so I get the checks from the hair salons. One of my favorite hair salons was called The Best Little Hair House in Texas.
Adam Robinson:
You’re kidding me.
Brad Karsh:
United Hairlines. I mean, it was fantastic just to see the names of these salons.
Adam Robinson:
That’s great. Yeah. All the world is a pun. Yeah, my worst was I was … It wasn’t really so much the job as the person I worked for, but I was the kid in the paint and glass and key cutting department at our local True Value hardware store. And I can make keys, mix paint, and cut glass better than any 16 year old in my home town, I tell you what. But that’s when I learned a lifetime in retail was not for me.
Brad Karsh:
Exactly, right? And I learned a lifetime of sorting mail was not for me. Although, I think I did a pretty decent job at it. And then I come home, four nights a week, and I cut grass in my neighborhood to make some extra money.
Adam Robinson:
Yeah, nothing motivates like doing simple math and realizing that getting more than that out of this job is just not going to work. Well so let’s talk a little bit about your philosophy around structuring programs for team members at companies. I mean, you’ve worked with hundred of organizations. What is your philosophy around rewards and recognition? Just based on your observation and experience, what do you find works best?
Brad Karsh:
Yeah, so I have I guess you’d call it somewhat non-traditional, and part of the reason is I have a smaller company, it’s my company, and I can kind of do some of the things. But one of the things that I push for people doing in organizations I fair does not mean equal. I can treat all my employees fairly, I can reward them all fairly, but that does not mean I have to reward them all equally. And I’m a big fan of playing favorites, and if there are people who are doing a really, really good job, I want them to be rewarded.
And there are certain things that everybody shares the benefit from, but one thing is making sure that the best people are getting the best rewards. The second thing is you don’t really know what people want until you ask them. And one of the things that we have done from time to time in our company is at the end of the year, I’ll ask our team to put together what I call a wish list. And I’ll say, “Jot down 10 things that you hope to get out of your job next year.” Could be anything. Could be from job responsibilities to rewards to recognition to technology. And I say this. I caveat this, and this is important. I say, “I don’t promise you that I will grant a single one of your wishes, but I want to know what’s on your mind.”
Like I know what I want out of my job, and I’m not you. And what’s great is to see some of the thing that people write. Because it really does come from things that they want. And some of them we’ve direct to [inaudible 00:20:57], like, “Yeah, sure. We can do that. You want this. That’s a great idea. Let’s do that.” Other things, I’ve been like, “Well, no, we’re not going to have a company plane. Like that would be great, but we just can’t swing that at this point.” But asking them is really cool. If they trust you, I do, and they do, and you trust them, they’ll put some things that they really man. And it’s kind of neat. It helps guide you as to what’s important for them in terms of rewards or recognition.
Adam Robinson:
To the other side of that equation then, when someone is not getting it done, or something’s a little off center, what’s your approach to giving feedback? What are you doing right or less than right in your opinion to help people get where they want to be?
Brad Karsh:
Yeah. Feedback is super important. We do a whole bunch of classes on giving feedback, and I think it’s super, super hard. People just struggle to have an honest, open culture. So I’ll even admit, I’ve messed up. We hired somebody probably eight years ago, they hung around for about a year and a half. They should have been gone after three months, but we gave them feedback, it wasn’t sticking. We gave them too many chances, so I think you have to be super honest, super open, super direct about feedback. And you want to do it early. And you want to say, “Hey, listen. Here’s something that you need to work on.” And I’m assuming you’re talking about constructive feedback.
What I like to do though is set up that constructive feedback is normal, it’s natural, and everybody gets it. So when you think about, especially we talked about generations. When you have someone new starting at your company, let’s say right out of school. When you think about college, the only time you get constructive feedback is when you’ve done something wrong. Whereas at work you could be getting constructive feedback just because you could be doing something better. So a lot of newer employees don’t take well to feedback because they think it’s about them making mistake. I like to set up it’s not about a mistake, it’s about how you could be able to do something better. So you get it often, you get it honestly, and if somebody’s not correcting the issue, you got to have some consequences. I think we fail in that regard too. “I’ve talked to them seven times about it and nothing’s changed.” I’m like, “Well, there have to be consequences.” Consequences doesn’t mean you have to be fired. But there has to be some level of consequence.
Adam Robinson:
So looking back on all of this then, what do you think is the greatest lesson you’ve learned about the people side of your business, or with your perspective, in business in general?
Brad Karsh:
I think communication is so vitally important, and if you have good, open, honest communication with people, it makes a world of difference. And I also think caring is so important. And one of the things that amazes me about the team that we have here is how much everybody cares about the company, how they care about our clients, and how they care about each other. And if you give me a company of smart people who care, you can do anything in the world.
Adam Robinson:
Is there a particular book that has been influential in your career that you would want our listeners to know about?
Brad Karsh:
One of the management books that I read that I really, really loved was a book called It’s Your Ship by Captain Mike Abrashoff, who was a captain in the Navy. I heard him speak a few years ago, and he’s got a fun, easy to read, and provocative book about management and leadership. And a lot of it is about empowerment, and a lot of it is about trust, and a lot of it is about motivation. And it was really inspiring to me, and one of my favorite books bat management and leadership.
Adam Robinson:
Fantastic. All right, Brad, if you were to come back on this show a year from now, and report on whether or not you successfully tackled what you think is the single biggest opportunity that you have in front of you in your business today, could be people related or not, what would you be telling us?
Brad Karsh:
We had our company meeting about a month ago, and one of the things that I talked a lot about, and this would be the people side, is even though I teach feedback, and even though we teach that, I think we’re still not as good at giving each other honest feedback as we can, and I think that can hold us back from time to time. So I would hope that I say to you that we are an organization where feedback flows freely across all levels, and people take it really well, and try and get better because of it. That’s what I would hope.
Adam Robinson:
Ladies and gentlemen, that’s the final word. You have been learning from Brad Karsh, founder and CEO of JB Training Solutions. Brad, thank you for being with us on the show today.
Brad Karsh:
My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Adam Robinson:
And that is a wrap. Thank you for listening to the Best Team Wins podcast, where we’re featuring entrepreneurs and business leaders whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results. My name’s Adam Robinson, author of the book, The Best Team Wins, which you can find online at www.TheBestTeamWins.com. Thanks for tuning in, and we will see you next week.
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March 7, 2018
Talent Development Factory
Frank Milner, President of the Tutor Doctor franchise brand, joins the show to discuss the award-winning people practices at Tutor Doctor, or as Frank calls it, a “Talent Development Factory.” Tutor Doctor is constantly developing their talent and is often named a top employer, find out how they do it on this episode of The Best Team Wins Podcast.
Follow Tutor Doctor on Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Youtube, and Google Plus.
Connect with Frank on Linkedin and Twitter.
Transcripts:
Adam Robinson:
Welcome to The Best Team Wins Podcast, where we feature entrepreneurs and business leaders whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results.
My name is Adam Robinson and, for the next 25 minutes, I’ll be your host as we explore how to build your business through better hiring.
Today, on the program, we’re so happy to have Frank Milner, the president of Tutor Doctors. Based out of Toronto, Canada, Tutor Doctor was founded in 2000, has around 60 corporate employees, and, Frank, currently, how many franchise locations does the brand have?
Frank Milner:
We have 300 franchisees that operate about 550 or so franchise territories, operating in 16 different countries around the world.
Adam Robinson:
Pretty amazing, so, Frank, welcome to the show.
Frank Milner:
Thank you.
Adam Robinson:
We are so happy to have you.
Frank Milner:
Great to be here.
Adam Robinson:
We’re going to focus on the people side of Tutor Doctors today, so to set the stage for everyone, give us 30 seconds on the company and what you’re doing in the market.
Frank Milner:
Again, the name of the company is Tutor Doctor. Tutor Doctor’s mission is to change the trajectory of students’ lives. We do that through our network of 300 or so franchisees and we do that by delivering one-to-one tutoring in the home to students, and we found that that one-to-one experience between the tutor and the student really is the difference-maker, so we don’t necessarily follow any set curriculum or anything like that. The key ingredient in our methodology is really around the one-to-one nature of our program and really being there for the student. Meeting the student where they’re at is what Tutor Doctor is all about.
Adam Robinson:
If listeners want to learn more about the brand, where, what’s the best way for them to do that?
Frank Milner:
Tutordoctor.com or tutordoctoropportunity.com is the best way.
Adam Robinson:
Okay, let’s talk about the people side of Tutor Doctor. Before we dive in, I want to go all the way back to when you started the business. Talk about the founding team. What did it look like when you launched the brand?
Frank Milner:
We actually relaunched the brand. The original founder was an old friend of mine who I hadn’t seen in many, many years and happened to bump into him at a restaurant here in Toronto. At the time, I was an executive with another franchise brand, and he was struggling to get Tutor Doctor off the ground, meaning, he had built a really successful tutoring business, he knew he wanted to scale it and expand it, he had began franchising, but he was really struggling with it and struggling to get traction.
Because I was in the industry, I offered to help him, and I did so. I started helping him and, as I began to help him, I really began to recognize what an amazing opportunity Tutor Doctor was, so my modus operandi shifted a little bit from helping him to actually wanting to acquire the business. This is late in 2007. I put an investment group together and landed up acquiring the business from him, and we relaunched Tutor Doctor early in 2008. We started from scratch. After making some investments in technology and operations and the training side of the business, and we sold our very first franchise midway through 2008, and here we are 10 years later, and so far so good.
Adam Robinson:
Yeah, I would say, so let’s focus on that transition from your friend-founder prior owner to you leading the business. What tools or techniques did you use to navigate the leadership change for the team members that were working there at the time?
Frank Milner:
We treated it very much like a startup. At the beginning, we had the founder involved. I wanted him to remain involved and to really grow the business with him. I really liked him, his passion, the story, et cetera, but there were just some challenges with that and, ultimately, that didn’t land up, but it was just me and one other person when we started out, but we knew right from the get-go that people and having the right people in the right roles was going to be the key to our success and, from the get-go, we really wanted to pay attention to the people side of the business being, realizing or recognizing that that was some of the most valuable assets that we had.
Our approach was certainly to hire people for a specific job that we needed done today, but, as we were doing that, what we were really doing was looking to bring people on board that had the potential to grow in the future and that we could grow with and that had the ability and the desire to take on more responsibility, and that strategy has remained intact and core to our business all these years later, and we’ve now grown, as you mentioned, to over 60 employees.
Adam Robinson:
Let’s talk about how that process for finding the right person has evolved. You’re in a people based business, and you said as much. Talk about how you approach that. What systems or process do you have in place that increases your hit rate?
Frank Milner:
There’s a number of systems. Obviously, there’s a … we … and it’s kind of like something that we laugh about internally because we’ve got a very kind of defined hiring process in terms of a series of interviews.
I have to be honest, we kind of put people through the wringer as they’re coming into Tutor Doctor, again, because these decisions to us are some of the most important decisions that we make, so we really want to get it right and we really want to get it right the first time, so we’ll have the initial screen interview, which typically takes place over the telephone, then the hiring manager will meet with a candidate in person for the first in-person interview and, depending on the position, then there’ll be or there’ll always be a second interview.
Between the second and third interview, we also do a psychometric profile, and that psychometric profile isn’t … It’s not really a decision-making tool, but it’s a decision-influencing tool. We want to get a good sense around fit, culture fit, et cetera, and then there’ll be a second interview and then a final interview, which often I’ll be included in in terms of any key decision or key positions that we’re hiring for, and that’s often kind of … not kind of, excuse me, that’s often a group interview that takes place.
Adam Robinson:
You mentioned culture fit. Are there particular core values that you’re screening for or the right fit [crosstalk 00:09:04]?
Frank Milner:
Yes, there absolutely are. We are very mission and values focused, and certainly that is a part of the process to make sure that there is that value, that values fit, so we want to make sure that the folks coming in share the values that we do, and not only just share them, but believe in them really strongly as their own core values.
Adam Robinson:
Can you take us through what a couple of those maybe?
Frank Milner:
Sure. We have a value around understanding, which is about presuming the goodwill of others; listening, not necessarily telling; empathizing, not necessarily criticizing, but really seeking to understand, so understanding is one of those values.
We have a very strong value around curiosity. We’re an education company, so we want to demonstrate the power of learning by learning. We want to be interested. We want to be inquisitive, and we want to see the possibilities, so that value of curiosity is a core value of the company.
Ownership is another value. That’s really all about being accountable, being willing to make commitments and living up to those commitments, so that’s another value, and our final value is around grit, and grit to us means we just don’t quit.
Adam Robinson:
Thank you for taking us through the company values. What happens in your organization when you believe someone meets the value system, but you find out 30, 90 days in or longer in that they’re not quite a fit? Talk about how you address those situations.
Frank Milner:
We address it. We have follow-up conversations at various [inaudible 00:11:34] as you laid out to give feedback and to also get feedback. If it turns out that it’s not a fit, then we make a decision, and if the decision is to part ways and, of course, we want to be friends and we are happy to continue the relationships, but we just make a decision that we’re just no longer going to work together.
We really take our time at the front end of the process before making the hiring so that we can limit those situations where we have to take an action after hiring, but we do take action and we do take action quickly because that’s just key to our organization’s growth and our culture.
Adam Robinson:
Yeah, what you said there, Frank, is just so critical. When you do make a mistake, even though you try to minimize, the likelihood of that happens in terms of culture fit, when you realize you’re making a mistake, it sounds like you take action. So many leaders do a version of sticking their head in the sand and hoping it gets better as it just gradually gets worse and makes things bad for everybody, and so kudos for taking the action. That’s the hard part.
Frank Milner:
Yeah, and that is hard, Adam. I have to be honest that it’s hard for us, too, and I have in the past been guilty of being slow to act when in my gut I know I have to act and I need to take that action. I have been guilty of being slow to act because sometimes I really like the person and sometimes they’re really popular and they fit from that perspective, but we really work on that, and that’s where the team comes in and we really help each other with that so that we can have an awareness of it and do what we know we have to do and do it quickly so, but my point is it’s not easy for anybody, and I think awareness is key and just being committed to doing the right thing for the organization, and that’s what … It ultimately always comes back to what’s the right thing to do for the company, and that makes it easier.
Adam Robinson:
Your company has developed a great reputation as a place to build a career. I want to talk about how you manage the team from two sides of the coin, one, pay, promotion and rewards and, on the other side, performance management when things aren’t going to plan, so let’s start on the front end. If somebody comes to work for Tutor Doctor, what is the promise or message or deal you’re making with them? If you come to work for us, this is what the future could look like for you. Walk us through how you brand or sell the opportunity to come be a part of your organization.
Frank Milner:
Yeah. Sure. We’ve got a very big vision at Tutor Doctor. We’re every clear about what that vision is and what we’re trying to accomplish and what we’re working hard every day to accomplish, and we’re also very clear that we want to be kind of a talent development factory, if you will, because we are growing so rapidly, we have grown really rapidly over the last number of years and yet, when we step back and look at it, we’re still very much in our infancy as compared to what our longer term objectives are, so, really, it’s about attracting people who want to participate in that, who are willing to obviously come in and prove themselves and strut their stuff, so to speak, and develop and grow along with the organization and what that looks like.
For example, we really believe in pay for performance, so a lot of our comp structures as much as possible have a performance component attached to them. Again, that’s very much a part of our culture. We’re a company that’s striving for excellence, and, in fact, we’ve won some business excellence awards from third-party organizations, which tells me that we’re on the right track certainly, but we don’t give automatic pay raises every year.
We don’t do that. What we do is people get pay raises as they take steps in the organization and as they take on more and more responsibility within the organization so that their compensation is impacted, so, rather than a 2 or 3% annual raise, we say, “No, we’re not going to do that. What we are going to do though is, as you take on more responsibility and as you, um, achieve more in the organization, you can have the opportunity to earn much bigger, um, pay raises, so to speak,” and that tends to happen in big chunks as opposed to little incremental steps, and that’s our philosophy. It’s been our philosophy since day one, and it works very well for us.
Adam Robinson:
It sounds like it, and, intuitively, it makes sense for the … and based on your cultural description, grit and things like that, I mean, for people that want to get ahead, that pitch is … the kind of situation I’m sure those folks want to opt into, it sounds like it pulls the right people towards your brand.
Frank Milner:
Exactly. We want people who are excited about the opportunity, the potential. They believe in themselves. They’ll go above and beyond and stand out and grow and learn, and it, ultimately, lands up being a win-win.
As I look around our organization, I mean, some of the growth that’s taking place is … It’s amazing, and it’s really exciting for me because some of these people are hired as junior employees, coming in at a very junior level, have grown into really senior executive positions, and that’s … I look at that and, for me, that’s … It’s just incredibly rewarding to see that, to see them grow.
Just a couple of weeks ago, I’ve got a young lady who’s been with us for just over five years, and she just got promoted, and she’s had a series of promotions, but she’s just got promoted and become a director in our organization, and I just get a huge kick out of it because I’ve watched that growth happen, and to see her achieving those goals is really exciting. It puts a little pressure on me because she’s already gotten the next [inaudible 00:19:58]. It’s like I want that, and she’s going for [inaudible 00:20:03] heads up, and she’s going for it, and that’s what it’s all about.
Adam Robinson:
That’s great. Those kind of stories, when you tell them to prospective team members really helps seal the deal and get people excited.
Frank Milner:
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Adam Robinson:
Let’s spend a few minutes on the other side of the coin though, so, all best intensions moving forward, new individual joins and a couple of months in, for whatever reason, it’s just not happening either through a lack of result or lack of fit or whatever reason. How has your philosophy pertaining to coaching and performance management evolved over the last 10 years?
Frank Milner:
It’s evolved quite a bit. We believe in crucial conversations, and we have those conversations. We have coaching conversations. We have regular weekly debriefs just to make sure that employees are on track in terms of their objectives.
Internally, we call them rocks, and then we have a formal quarterly conversation, which is, again, the employee just completes a short documents that just highlights what their objectives are for the quarter, or were for the quarter, how they did in achieving those objectives, where they did well, where they had challenges, what could their manager have done to support them more in achieving that, and we have a very open dialogue, and that happens every quarter with every employee. It doesn’t get too deep into it. It’s not like a performance evaluation. It’s a 20-to-30-minute conversation that happens every quarter.
We used to, talking about the evolution, we used to have this really big process around the annual performance reviews, et cetera, and it was just a really big deal that we’d go through every year and, quite frankly, I got frustrated with it because we’d have these big in-depth performance reviews and there was a lot of prep work and a big meeting and, at the end of the end, we did nothing with it, and that was just really frustrating to me, and to do it on an annual basis, it just … When we stepped back and looked at it, it didn’t make sense.
We don’t want to wait a whole year to course correct. We need to be course correcting all the time. If we’re going to course correct all the time, we’ve got to be interacting a lot more regularly, hence, the weekly debriefs and the quarterly conversation, and the quarterly conversation works really, really well for us.
Adam Robinson:
Yeah. I love that, Frank. That’s incredible, and you’ve used some words that our listeners will recognize as being part of the EOS methodology. Let me just take a wild guess. You guys run EOS at Tutor Doctor.
Frank Milner:
We run EOS, absolutely.
Adam Robinson:
Okay, very cool. We at Hireology are hardcore EOS fanatics. We run it to the books, so I’m always excited when I find out someone else in the industry is doing it as well.
Frank Milner:
Yeah.
Adam Robinson:
Pretty incredible processes.
Frank Milner:
Yeah, it works very well for us. We’re pretty hardcore around it as well. In fact, we’ve got a [VTO 00:24:17] meeting coming up early next month, so …
Adam Robinson:
I love it.
Frank Milner:
… I’m very excited about it.
Adam Robinson:
Yeah, and one of the things on this program we haven’t spent a lot of digging into with guests is how an accelerated, more frequent performance review process, you call it faster course corrections, which I just love, can really impact the velocity of the business, and it sounds like it’s had a real impact for you.
Frank Milner:
Huge impact for us. Absolutely, huge impact for us, and, for me, it also … I like simplicity. We went through a stage where we were growing and we started becoming a big organization and acting like a big organization, and we lost a little bit of that simplicity as we were in that kind of growth mode, and that’s why I love the whole EOS system because it really brought us back to that state where … It’s just very easy to provide clarity, a very manageable system, easy system to run, and it’s just about being disciplined around it, and we’ve become very disciplined around it.
Adam Robinson:
A couple of questions as we wrap up here, is there a particular book that has influenced your journey as a leader and an entrepreneur?
Frank Milner:
I’m an avid reader, so I think … so Traction, obviously, you can hear, has had a big influence on our organization, but, personally speaking, the book that’s probably had the biggest impact on me as a leader is Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I read it many years ago. I followed and … not an easy read. I’m not sure if you read it. It’s not an easy read, but-
Adam Robinson:
It was an assigned reading for me in a graduate program …
Frank Milner:
Oh, really?
Adam Robinson:
… back in the day, yeah, and it had a similar impact. I haven’t been in the workforce long enough to really understand how powerful those concepts were. I probably need to go back and reread it. It’s timeless.
Frank Milner:
Yeah, it’s just, really, I believe and … It just helped me to develop some emotional intelligence. I mean that’s what it did for me. I followed that book up with Principle-Centered Leadership, which was another one of his books that kind of followed the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and it’s just had a huge impact on me just throughout my career, and I still know those values and draw from those values and talk to those habits even as … I’d do a couple of the sections of new franchisee training, and I’ll often find myself referring to those seven habits as I’m training new franchisees coming into our system.
Adam Robinson:
All right, so final question here, Frank, as we wrap up, if you were to come back on the show a year from now and report to us on whether or not you and Tutor Doctor were successfully able to tackle the biggest people or team-related issue or opportunity that you have in front of you, what would you be telling us happened this year?
Frank Milner:
That’s an interesting question. One of the challenges that we have is we have 60 people here at our home office, but we also have a whole lot of remote team members because we’re a global company. We have a country manager in the UK. We have a country manager in Australia, et cetera, so a lot of remote people and a lot of remote leaders, and finding a way to really stay connected and on the same page continues to be a challenge, and, actually, I think we do a decent job of it considering, but I do think that there is lots of room for improvement, and what I’d hope to be telling you a year from now was that we have really been successful in leveraging technology to help us build those bridges amongst the team.
As an example, within the last I would say maybe six months or so, we’ve really started using Slack as a technology tool to help with that communication and working with remote staff, and we’ve actually really begun to get a lot of traction with it, so that’s replaced … I’ve seen a lot of my emails go down, et cetera, and whatnot, so I think we’re on the path, so that’s an area that I really hope to make a lot of progress in over the coming years, and I’m feeling very confident about that right now.
Adam Robinson:
Ladies and gentlemen, that’s the final word. You’ve been learning from Frank Milner, president of Tutor Doctor.
Frank, thank you so much for being with us on the program today.
Frank Milner:
Thanks, Adam. I enjoyed that.
Adam Robinson:
That’s a wrap for this week’s episode of The Best Team Wins Podcast where we’re featuring entrepreneurs whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results.
My name is Adam Robinson, author of the book The Best Team Wins, which you can find online at www.thebestteamwins.com. Thanks you so much for tuning in, and we will see you next week.
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