Hiring Secrets Start with being an Employee
Welcome to the show, this moving company, mentors and I’m with Lorne McInnes, who is the CEO of Ferguson moving and storage and Ferguson franchise systems.
Thank you so much, truly, honestly, for being here with me Lorne, and I appreciate you doing this. How are you doing? How are you
Doing good, Jae.
You know, I think it’s a challenging time, but quite honestly you know, it’s, it’s, it’s a time for leaders to stand up and I feel a little bit actually like more useful during these times then when everything’s running smooth.
Yeah. You’ve definitely been an inspiration and a leader in these times, leading the crew on various different aspects of how to handle it.
COVID situation like with
Commercials and, and templates, et cetera. So from, from me on behalf of all the movers, I want to thank you.
Yeah. You know I think everybody says we’re in this together and it really does mean that, right? Like anything that I can give, you know, copy paste, steal it.
I don’t care.
Like we need to share at times like this, so thank you.
All right. So I just, my first question, I’m just going to throw out some softball questions to you.
First question is like, how did you get into the movie business?
I’m hoping to meet somebody that actually did that, but that never really happens.
We all kind of fall into this business for one reason or another for myself, I, when I was 19, yeah. When I was 19, a buddy of mine was going to a small town with his mom because his grandmother was passing away and he asked me if I wanted to come and you know, went for eight weeks.
But when I got there, my money that I had saved up working in a gas station, didn’t last, as long as I thought it would, this was my first time, you know, paying rent and food and entertainment. And it seemed like my, one of my biggest expenses was entertainment. I ended up going pretty much broke within about three weeks of being there.
My parents never really thought it was a good idea for me to go on this trip in the first place.
So I didn’t have the courage to ask for fuel money to come home. So I put an ad in a I’m sorry, I made an application and put it out to as many companies as I could. I had two companies replied to me.
One was a moving company and the other one was a baggage company for an airplane company to load the load luggage onto airplanes, both of which I was actually totally interested in doing, just to get fuel money, to get home.
When I went to apply at the moving company, they said we had somebody else come in, but he was only able to stay for about six months. And this job takes at least like a year to train somebody.
We need to know if you’re willing to stay for at least one year.
I replied that I was, but in the back of my mind, I was thinking like, I’ll just get some fuel money and put in my notice. But after starting at the job, when I was 19 and doing it and feeling like for the first time I’m out of my parents’ house, providing for myself when I came time to actually go back, eight weeks later, I decided to stay.
I worked at that job for about a year and a half. And then when I was 20, I started my own company.
So you started your own moving company at 20 years old?
I did.
Yeah.
I had no money really to start it, but I was already delivering pizza on the weekend for one business. And then I realized in this smaller city of about 30,000 people, that there was a lot of restaurants that typically didn’t do delivery.
I started up a delivery business for these restaurants.
Cause each of them would get like maybe one or two orders a night, but combined, it created a good little business for me.
And it started off as a side hustle. So I would start that business in the evening after work. And it ended up being busy enough that I could quit my job and start doing that full time. So it was kind of like skip the dishes before the internet.
Yeah, we have, we have something like that here in the States. I mean, they have a like dying dash or something now, which is an app, which it does basically that very thing or something like that.
Uber eats and all that kind of stuff. It’s all, it’s all out there now, but I just made up a little menu and because the phone book back then nobody really put their menu in the phone book because you would have to let it sit there for an entire year before you could change it.
Right.
I made these menus for all the restaurants that I delivered for and I’ll drop that off with each order so that I would get this recurring business coming up and it would show people that other restaurants do deliveries. So it was kind of a good relationship that way.
I ran that for for another seven years. But after about six months, I’d saved up enough money to buy a moving truck.
I had my moving business, which I ended up getting contracts to deliver mail for the post office to start with. So my, my, my moving business was 7:00 AM until 4:00 PM. And then my restaurant delivery business was 4:00 PM till 1:00 AM.
Wow. Well, no, that’s, that’s definitely some hustle. I mean, and I think that really goes to show just how much work it takes to really be successful in business.
How much, how much you have to sacrifice so that you can not sacrifice later on.
Well, that was my, my thought was like right now or not now, but then was, I’ve got all this energy and I can, you know, I’ve got, I’ve got time on my hands, which I might not later. And I might not want to do much this much running around when, when I’m older.
So just get it out of the way when I was younger. So it was a lot of sacrifice for watching TV and hanging out and partying and stuff like that.
But it was just a choice that I decided to make.
You started your moving business, about 20 years old, you had the side business, you probably did some other things.
What was the transition, how long did it take you to get from your moving business that you had to Ferguson?
Because they’ve got a long rich history. I mean, it’s a hundred year history of being in business.
So how did you meld that? How did that come together?
So I sold my company in what was that? 1999. and then I moved back down to Vancouver. Then I started another company down here, the same, same business, but I just started fresh in Vancouver.
I ran that for two years and I had a leased space and one of my competitors kept coming in, asking me to work for him. And I’d never really enjoyed being an employee.
I’m just not a good employee.
I’ve always just been self employed and he had a big storage operation and a moving company.
He asked me if I would be interested to buy the moving division and he would just run the storage company. So I got out of my, when my lease expired, I went over to go and start with him. And then I ran his business for the summer, ended up tripling, like all the sales that he had.
And he was on vacation all summer with his family.
he came back and I managed his storage business as well.
When he came back, he only had one message and it was just a personal phone call. I’d handled everything else.
I really screwed that up because he started seeing dollar signs and decided not to sell the business anymore.
Oh my goodness.
Yeah.
And so now I had no job and my wife and I had just had a baby. So we had a little, a six month old baby at the time.
The very same day, I just started looking for jobs just because I felt like an immense amount of pressure to provide for my family.
I ended up getting hired on that same day at Ferguson’s as a lumper, not even as a driver, as a lumper. And that’s how I first started at Ferguson’s.
I’ve worked there for about two weeks. And then after two weeks I was then the sales manager and the operations manager.
That was really quick.
I mean I think based on the experience of you being a business owner, a couple of times in the NSA and then working for the sky has really translated in and they saw that, that experience and that, that ability was the, was the running a business in Nate to have that ability?
Or did you study go to college?
Where did you come up with this, this business knowledge to be able really expand that competitor’s business and then, you know, quickly move up the ranks in Ferguson?
No formal education, just starvation basically, you know if I, if I didn’t sell, I wouldn’t eat.
that was a really good learner for me. Like in my early days, especially where I live, they would get quite cold in the winter. It was far North up near Alaska.
Oh, wow. It got so bad.
One winter when I was first starting out that I would have to go and buy heating fuel on a daily basis for my, from my mobile home that I was staying in, which I would put about $5 of heating fuel in it per day. One time I missed getting to the gas station by just a few minutes.
I slept at my house at night, but 30 below zero, I could see the air crystallizing as I was breathing, but that’s how tight things were for me at the time. And so every time that I would go inside and I would do an estimate, if I didn’t get the job, I would just really grind myself.
Like, why didn’t I get that?
What did I do wrong?
And I would just slowly build on each failure, really?
You know, what, what went wrong? Why did, why did that screw up?
Why am I not eating today?
So really just the school of hard knocks, I would say,
Wow, that’s, that’s that kind of mirrors a little bit.
Well, how I got my business and stuff, but I didn’t have the mental capabilities, if you will, to tell like actually examine, okay, what did I do wrong?
And how do I fix it?
How do I make sure it happened?
I just, you know, wing it productions and kept doing what I was doing. So that’s amazing. And I think a lot of companies, especially the newer companies, they just think they can wing it and just push through.
Do you find that to be a successful strategy?
Not anymore. No.
I think when I was younger, like definitely the hustle and the energy and not having a family and commitments like that, you can definitely make progress that way. The only challenge with it for me was I became, as I grew, I became a micromanager because I knew everything I knew.
I knew like for example, which truck has a slow leak in the front right tire times that by 10,000 and when I would start bringing people into the business, I micromanaged everything.
It really limited my growth to the point where I could see that other people were making plans for the weekends that were working for me. And they had, because I was taking care of all the stress and I was really limiting people’s growth within my company because I was holding on too tight to so many things.
That’s really the downside of being like that startup wing it hustle guy is you are the wizard of Oz in your own business. And it’s really hard to let go.
Right?
Don’t pay attention to the guy behind the curtain. Right?
Well, that brings me to a great segue. Cause I mean the purpose of this podcast, this masterclass or whatever you wish to term it is talking about hiring is to learn about hiring.
With all that, I’m assuming you learn quite early, what kind of guys you needed to have on your team and what to look for and how to, you know, the questions to ask, et cetera.
Is that, is that a correct assumption?
Learning how to Hire by Hiring
Yeah. I think it’s something that always has been there as a question for any entrepreneur, regardless of what industry that you’re in is how do we, how do we find the people that are going to best support the company and its mission and its values?
It’s very important.
One thing that I have come to understand and I don’t know if this is true for you.
That’s is that I found that if I’m going to hire somebody, if I’m going to re get into the moving business again, what I’m going to start off is I’m going to really clarify my vision of where I want to take the movie business in three to five years.
Like really clarify how much money I make.
Well, how much, what, what it all looks like and everything like that, do you find, or have you use a vision to be able to go, okay, this is my vision of the company.
This is my projection for the company where I want to go, this is the mountain I want to attain, and I’m going to need these kind of people to get there.
Does, do you have that set up or is that not something that you have established?
Yeah. So it’s called a vivid vision and it’s something that basically what you’re talking about is you want to lean into the future about three years from now.
Right. And see, what does everything look like?
I’ve kind of, yeah that’s the way that I’ve always been. I’ve been able to verbally tell staff that worked for me, you know, what we’re looking for and what we’re trying to achieve.
I think that we have done a really good job of doing that because when I look around at the people that we have in our organization right now, like any one of them, I would love to have over to my house for barbecue.
Any one of them, I would send him to your house to give you a quote, any one of them, any one of the movers, I would feel comfortable sending over to your house to come move you.
Right.
So I think it’s really getting alignment within your organization, that we’re all rowing in the same direction. And it’s something that doesn’t happen overnight, for sure, but you’re right.
You need to have that vision because then you can keep bringing people back. And it really identifies who isn’t in alignment with the, with the business so that you can deal with those really quickly rather than, you know, hanging on to people.
I think we’ve all tried to motivate people in our organization. And it’s really frustrating because if you have somebody that’s not pulling the direction that you want to go, no matter what role within your organization chart, if they’re not doing the role, I think a lot of us as managers or owners think that we just need to put the right incentive program in place to get that person to take the appropriate action that we want them to.
I think it’s a huge mistake.
I think really what you want to do is find people that are already motivated and then give them the incentives to make that motivation go to the moon.
Motivating and Hiring
Right. Then actually that actually brings me up a little side question.
As I’m reading the book called “Awaken the Giant Within” by Tony Robbins right now. And he has a section in the book where he talks about motivated. He’s talk about how this woman would train dolphins and how it relates to you know, hiring people and motivating people inside the business.
He was saying that yeah, you can, you can have your incentive programs. You can have your reward system, but that only goes so far. You’ve got to actually, when you do it, you’ve got to make it so that it’s spontaneous.
You’ve got to have, you know, jackpot kind of rewards and things like that. So they’re always, they’re always like on edge, am I, if I do this, if I do this little extra, I could get an extra bonus, but if you keep having something that is like, okay, here’s your bonus system?
Here’s your pay?
They’re only gonna do what it’s going to take to get that bonus or get that pay. You know, at first they’re going to probably be really excited, but after a time it’s just going to become a monotonous thing.
But if you have something that’s a variable, a reward system. And then maybe every once in a while have like a jackpot rewards system where it’s just spot spontaneous, that seems to really motivate people in the longterm.
Do you find, is that something that you do or is that, is that not something that you find is just keeping them to the vision and the qualities and that’s good enough?
Yeah. But part of the vision is that you have personal growth within the organization for each person that’s there. And again, you have, we have a lot of different bonus programs, incentive programs, and that kind of thing.
They only really are effective for people that are already kind of, that are already like motivated people that want that enjoy.
They’re enjoying working hard and doing a good job. And then, Hey, if there’s, if there’s something this month that if I can achieve this certain goal, that’s cool.
Right.
But it’s not going to be something. If somebody doesn’t want to wake up in the morning and come to your organization, it’s not going to change that.
Right. But I think for movers, we have different bonus points programs for them.
For our sales staff, we have a bonus programs for them, for our managers, we have bonuses and incentives for them, for our dispatchers, for everybody that answers the phones and books appointments.
So everyone’s got appropriate incentives within their department. And then we also have spiffs that are more random that can come up.
First person to book a pack job today gets 50 bucks, you know, different, different things like that. That are more random. We have spin the wheel. We have carnival games that we do.
We have random times where we do employee appreciation days. And then we’ll bring in a whole bunch of carnival games, catered food, stuff like that. So there’s a lot of things that you need to do.
I think really for me, I look at my staff almost like they are my customers, like I want right. I want to support them and take care of them. I don’t remember the last time I dealt with a customer face to face that’s for them to do so I need to support them. Then I don’t have to worry about my customers and how.
Communication is Key
I mean, one of the things that I’ve come to realize, of course, I sold my moving business last year, but one of the things I’ve since that time, and now one thing I’ve realized that I should have implant implemented was an internal marketing campaign that really helped, you know, really market the vision, the mission statement, the whole path of where there’s going.
Everybody stays on board plus, you know, that incorporates these different incentives for, to be a good loyal person, somebody who takes initiative, et cetera. I really find that to be true.
That sounds like that’s kind of what you’re doing with your company.
Yeah.
Right from the beginning, it’s part of our onboarding process as well. And it’s also included even in the later stages of our interview process while we’re interviewing people, because if we can share with them, what are our vision and our mission is in the business and what we’re trying to achieve, we can see right.
In person interview with those types of questions or letting them know, like what’s their reaction to that, right?
if somebody maybe coming in and they’re an experienced mover, and then they hear something like that, and then they just roll their eyes because maybe they’re, they have bad experiences working at different moving companies.
Then they go into a different category of of our chart with, you know, if we’re going to hire them or just keep them on as a maybe in case we need them Monday for a bigger, bigger job.
Right.
But it’s like how we classify them.
It’s partly based on, are they going to be in alignment with our mission and our vision?
Qualities to Look for when Hiring
That kind of leads me to the next question, which I kind of did the circuit of route towards the questions I wanted to ask you.
The biggest question I want to ask you is what are the qualities that are you looking for?
You’re hiring a perspective candidate for whatever position it is in your business, whether it be sales or labor or operations or storage, do you have like a process?
And if you do, what is that process? You know, one, two, three.
Sure. So the process starts with the advertising itself for the position.
I think that’s critical because we have to treat our advertising almost like our leads for moves. And if we put out our ads, like we’re hiring almost, it’s almost just like saying we’ll move anybody. Right.
Our ad copy is really, really clear on what we’re, what we’re looking for and what we’re. So it depends on the role of course, that we’re talking about Jae so if it’s like sales, it’s going to be a different ad copy. Then somebody mover versus a dispatcher, but running the ad copy is number one the resumes or the applications that we get in is number two.
Like how quickly does people do they reply?
Plus like, what’s the content that they’re supplying with us their background. Do they have transportation?
Like all the basic stuff, do they live nearby?
Do they have experience?
Do they, are they able to, you know, say that they’ve, they’ve been, they’ve got references and stuff like that.
The next one will be the phone interview, where we have phone interview questions, and those, those phone interview questions just really helped to see, like, is this person worth bringing in for an in person interview?
We’re looking for things like attitude, we’re looking for plans and goals of what they, what they want for themselves. We’re looking for a fit for the role. Like, are they able to physically do the job?
At that point, we’ll bring them in for an in person interview and these questions, I’ll be glad to post on your website as well. If you guys want to see them, that’d be great.
We have our in person interview questions. And then after that, then we get into more of like the documentation, because we have our entire policy manual, because everybody that does get hired on is going to be subject to your probationary period within the, within the role.
And then we assign for movers.
For example, they get assigned to a move mentor and the move mentor will give us feedback to, through dispatch and operations on the different people that we’ve brought on to let us know how they’re working out on how they are good fit. So we used to set up big in the warehouse, like training centers for pad rapping.
I just found that on the job is just much better. If we can assign a mentor and have new people join into like a larger crew, it’s much better for us so
Training the New Guys
That a lot of people seem to find that to be true. I personally found that to be true. I did try the training route, where I put them through a day of training and so on.
So, and I still am an advocate of like a day of training, where they learn the company policies and they learn the procedures and basic theory of it.
But the actually, if, especially if they’re going to be a mover, there’s really no compromise. There’s really no nothing that they can train, unless you get them out there in the field, actually picking stuff up and putting it back down.
If you’ve ever seen somebody get like their pilot’s license, they’ve got like a tremendous amount of classroom time.
They’ve got the the airtime where they’re actually like in the plane. And so that classroom time, it’s more on theory. And that’s, that’s more of where we spend our time is going through we’ll show them like our advertising that we’re doing, not radio ads, website, ads, that kind of thing.
Different TV commercials that we’ve done in the past, just so they get an idea of from a customer’s perspective, what are they expecting?
We’ll show them like our marketing material, like our postcards and our brochures, because we really want them to have a customer experience perspective as top of mind.
Right. So they know exactly what you’re promising and not promising and so on and so forth.
Even part of it, we have like a video kind of a bad move or something I found on YouTube was like stuff dropping and breaking and stuff like that.
Then another video of a good move, just so that people mentally can see there is a difference because a lot of people, when they come into apply for a job, if we’re focusing on moving, they think because they’ve helped their friend move a couple of times that they can be a mover and it’s not that big of a deal.
It really is eye opening. When you show them like a bad move and a good move, that there is a difference.
Hiring Experienced Movers?
Exactly. I agree with you.
I can’t tell you how many times somebody you’d go on you go, so have you ever moved somebody before?
“I helped my dad moved a couple of times” but this is a little off subject, but do you prefer to hire somebody with experience or without experience, do you find that the guys with experience are a little harder to train towards your procedures and that you’re, you’re more having the blank slate is better or vice versa or is it really make no difference?
Hey, it could be either or our boxes that we put them into.
Two of them are experience with good attributes and no experience with good attributes. Right. I’ll hire either one of those two. Okay.
But I remember one time before we had like a lot of our processes set up, I was shorthanded like for the very next day. So I put an ad in Craigslist and two people applied and I asked them both to come down.
The first guy showed up for the interview half an hour late. He had like it was all scruffy long hair, like halfway down his back. Not that that’s a problem, but it wasn’t like, it was all mangled looking. He had mustard stains on his shirt.
He gave me like this application that was kind of had coffee stains on it and stuff.
But he had like a lot of experience. He’d worked at like some companies that I knew in the area for years.
And then the next guy came in.
He was like 20 minutes early.
He had a tie on and a shirt clean cut, nice smile, really eager to work, but he had no experience.
I ended up having to hire the first guy cause I needed someone for the very next day that knew what they were doing. And I couldn’t sleep that night. Cause I was, I really felt like why can’t we hire that guy?
That, that second guy that came in. And so that’s where that years ago now, but that, that really that experience for me was a bit of a mind shift on what we need to do as an organization and to follow up on the story, the guy that I hired, I ended up having to let him go like 10 days later, just like everybody else.
Company Culture
So we were speaking before about being a good fit.
You’re sending them out there that you’re signed on of move thank movement or rather sorry. And you know, you’re seeing if they’re going to be a good fit, what is it that you’re looking for to make sure that they’re a good fit? Is it attitude? Is it initiative is a hustle or is it all of them?
What is it? Is there like a secret sauce that your thing or is it just, you’ve got like this checklist and it’s, and it’s very, very, you know, statistical driven, you know like in a major league baseball, you know, you got these statistics, okay.
You drop these bars, you have your batting averages. You’re going back down to the minors.
Yeah. We do have a checklist that we go through. It’s probably been about two years since I’ve looked at that myself, but I happy to share that with you and post it on your, on your page down below here. And but it’s really not that complicated.
It’s really more to do with, are they well-groomed, do they have a good attitude? Did they show up on time? Are they reliable? Do they have good references? And do they have good customer experience skills we’re not here just to move boxes in furniture, we’re here to move people. So you have to really find that comfort level. Yes.
They might not be as good as some other experience mover with getting like a height, a bed sofa down a spiral staircase might not be as good as them, but they’re not going to sit there and talk politics with your customer either
Cause they’re, they’re smart enough to know not to do that. Right. So there’s, there’s I’m happier with that trade off that I’d rather find somebody with a good customer experience skills.
Earlier we were talking about some of the questions you might ask one of these movers regarding hiring, is there like a couple of questions that are pretty standard that you really use, not as like gotcha questions, but that you use to draw out the person’s intentions or abilities and stuff.
Do you got a couple of questions that you can share with us now?
Yeah, like again, I don’t really do the interviews anymore. I haven’t done them for years, but we have a list that I helped to make like three years ago, but I would say, but we’re really looking. It depends on what you’re looking for in that regard.
So what are your plans for the future?
Okay. Can you tell me a little bit more about yourself?
Can you tell me about a time where you’ve had bad customer experience yourself as, as, as a customer, right. And how did that make you feel?
Because I want to see how you’re going to react. If you yourself are treated mistreated and how that made you feel to see if you can have empathy for our customers, if they’re not happy about something.
The reason that I would ask that question is to see if a customer says like, Oh, you scratched my wall. Are you immediately going to get defensive and say, no, that was already there. We didn’t do that before you even see the scratch, or are you going to say, Oh, I’m sorry.
Can you please show it to me and empathy for the client?
Right? Because we are in this business where we’re trying to take an entire house load of stuff that doesn’t belong together in a truck and do exactly that fit it all together in a, in a truck. So stuff can go wrong, no matter how good of a movie mover you are.
I really want to be approachable, our staff to be approachable. If the customer is not happy about something or if they’re going to concern about something. So I want to kind of bring it a back around earlier. We were speaking, you were saying, you put out the ads, the first thing you got to do is put up the ads, which I think that’s pretty much common sense.
Step one, you got to put out the EDS, where do you post your ads? And why did you choose them? They’re like, why do you know that that’s a good place to get whoever you’re looking for?
And so do you have like a set of like, okay, we’re going to post ads, hypothetically on monster indeed Facebook, but we’re not going to do it on Craigslist. That kinda, you know, and what was your reasoning behind that?
It depends on the amount of people that I need to hire as well. Like if I’m wrapping up for the summer, I’ll post ads on all of those places.
We’ll post on Facebook, indeed Craigslist, because we need that number of applications to be able to funnel down so that at the bottom of the funnel, and we can maybe out of a hundred, maybe we’ll drop out like six good, good movers.
Right, right. So it’s not so much for me about where we put the ad. And I think a lot of people would disagree with me because they say like, Oh, maybe Craigslist.
You’re not going to get that same quality of people. But you know, my experience, you never know. You never know where, where people are, but it’s, it’s, it’s your filtration process. That’s what should stop the problem from being there.
Just because somebody that you don’t want to work at your company applies, that should not be a problem unless you’re not getting very many applications and just hiring whoever comes through the door because you need to fill shirts.
So it’s, it started like a sales funnel. So you’re creating this funnel for hiring. So it’s basically, you’re doing sales, but for, for crew. So you’re just, you create this funnel, you bring them into the funnel.
And I was like, go through the funnel and they get filtered out. And at the end you hopefully have some good guys based on your criteria.
Yeah, exactly. So it’s exactly like a sales funnel. And I think it needs to be treated that way because these are the people that you’re putting into people’s houses that you sold them on a certain experience, right?
If you’re the cheapest mover in town, you can still make a lot of money and still have bad movers. If that’s what you promised, if you promised me, Hey, it’s 20 bucks an hour, these guys are going to be kind of sketchy, but, and there’s no insurance, but that’s, that’s the way that it works.
And if you marketed that you would actually do okay, right. If you’re going to get the cheapest guys, but I think most of us aren’t in that camp.
I think unfortunately, a lot of us want to have like good quality customers, but we don’t necessarily do as much as the backend work as we really owed to those customers that we should a lot, a lot of companies do, but we need to really treat it like a process in our business.
It’s just as serious as advertising for leads, right? Like we always have good ads for trying to find customers.
Why not do the same thing for trying to find movers?
Now, one thing that I’ve come to learn when I was with my business and I don’t know if it’s true for you, but I found that like sales, you got to constantly be looking for people to hire, or do you find for your company that you only hire when you really need them or, you know, or versus, you know, hiring consistently so that you never have to be in a situation where you have to have guys now?
Well, for me personally, I own a number of different businesses. Now. One of them actually is a recruitment staffing agency.
When I personally need like a lot of extra guys for a big project we have five full time people working downtown at that business. So we can cheat a little bit that way and just call my staffing agency. And Hey, I need 35 guys for next week. And then they’ll, they’ll supply it.
However, we do still have advertising because you’re always wanting to restock the restock the bench, right?
And there’s always going to be even some of your top performers who are not going to be, you know, they, they’ve given you their notice that they’re leaving in six months or whatever, and they’re going, they’re going to Europe or wherever.
So, you know, I think you do need to always be like a hockey coach where you’re looking at who’s on the bench and restocking the bench. You might not play everybody that’s on the bench, but you still want to be able to call on different people. At different times.
Hiring in Excess
There was one thing that I learned when I was in thing in my business was that hiring excess. So if I know I need two guys, I know that I need to hire like six to nine guys because out of those six to nine guys, two or three are going to stick.
And that’s what I really need.
Do you find that to be true for you or because of your system?
You’ve, you’ve already eliminated that variable.
Yeah, we can. We, we don’t need to do that so much now, but one thing that we do it on bigger days, like if we need to have 35 movers come in for eight o’clock in the morning, we’ll bring in 20% more than what we need, which is only like an extra six guys, because stuff happens.
Somebody calls in sick when you’re dispatching, you don’t want to have the exact amount of people come in that you’re expecting on those larger days, because life happens. And it’s good to have some extra people come in, depending on where you live as well.
You can limit your exposure to how many hours you need to pay these extra people.
If everybody showed up, you just need to have plans available for if everybody does come in, what do you do?
Cause you don’t want to just send people home and then pay them for not doing anything, but maybe you want to have things like let’s reorganize the warehouse different projects that you can have, and you can also pick the people that you’re going to do, those warehouse jobs and those other like washing trucks and stuff like that based on who showed up the latest in the morning.
So that gives an extra incentive for people to come in a little bit earlier than they normally would, because they want to actually be off on one of the jobs rather than staying behind working in the warehouse and watching trucks
So that you kind of use a kind of a carrot and stick process. So the earlier you are the better you’re going to get on a good job. So you’re not having stuck, you know, cleaning the mud off the mud flaps or the trucker DIC numb or whatever it is that you need to do.
I think, you know, for the most part, like it ends up working out because on those bigger days, you normally do have like two or three people that for whatever reason they’re not feeling well, it couldn’t even be that they worked late like the night before.
They tweaked their back or something like that. Like there’s always, there’s always something.
So I’ve had it really where all of the people that we brought in as extra needed to do other things, but we were also a flat rate system. So we have the ability to put extra movers onto different jobs as well.
There’s a lot of different ways that you can manage that situation, but I’d much rather have a busy morning with a few extra guys to figure out what to do with versus the other way around where I’m short handed now, what do I do?
Which, which two poisons would you rather take?
Where do to Put “Help Wanted” Ads?
Great. Now the last question I got for you on this subject here on hiring is, you know, what is your training, your onboarding process look like?
What did, what did you got like a checklist? What is it that you go through?
I mean, we did touch upon it earlier, but I was kind of hoping you could give me a, like a, kind of a, an ABC one, two, three on that.
There’s actually a lot to it.
We’ll have them come in and then do all the paperwork and things like that. But where we really get into the onboarding is using a system called Trainual and we have all of our, all of our training documented there.
So each mover will get a login to train you on. And that, that takes them through the step by step of all of our like mission and vision and all the, all the stuff that I was talking to you about earlier. And there’s a little quiz at the end of each important thing, just multiple choice, just so that we can see that they read it.
And that they did it, that that training was really cool because they can now do it on their phone. They don’t have to kind of come into like a big formal thing and we don’t have to have like a trainer constantly rewinding the tape and pressing play again.
The training will is, is really a key for us to get people through a lot of the basic communication that we want. And then we’ll bring them in for the in person training, which is also like more of a summary of, of what we showed them.
And we give them clear expectations for like their role have them go over like their letter of offer. We’ll introduce them to everybody in the office.
We’ll give them a tour of, of everything. We’ll show them the different equipment that we have in the yard really try and introduce them into the, into the culture.
We also, during the interview stage, we ask them what their favorite chocolate bar is. And then when we hire them, we give them their chocolate bar.
Oh, that’s nice. Yeah. So it’s, you’re, you’re, you’re doing a little bit of a reverse, so you hire them, Hey, here’s a little reward. Thank you for being part of the group. And it’s sort of, you’ve already establishing that culture right from the get go.
So I liked that. That’s kind of a cool, and it, I, I think it also, there’s a a marketing tactic. That’s very similar where a marketers like, especially internet marketers, they’ll go and give a bunch
Value and give you free things so that you are kind of like obligated. And I put that in quotes to the Dell purchase from them and be somebody that’s going to purchase their stuff.
For us, I think it’s, it’s really to do more with, we want to show that we’re actively listening to people. That’s important that we’re hearing them and, and, and making people feel we want our customers to feel special.
We want them to feel like they made the right choice with hiring us. We were definitely, you know, on the higher price end of, of moving.
I think you need to deliver on that high price with the value you, you can’t just charge a high price and then just be the same as everybody else.
You need to provide value to your customers through, through the experience. And that really starts with our, with our movers.
Right? if I can send over some fantastic guys to your house that do a great job moving furniture really, that’s all you really want as a customer. And anything else that we can do on top of that is just icing on the cake.
Thank you so much. Hey, I really appreciate your going over your hiring process with us. Thank you so much for that. I really enjoyed the talk on hiring and thank you very much for your time. We will see you in the next segment very shortly.