Hi! My name is Dr. Sabrina Starling, owner of Tap the Potential and author of the How to Hire the Best Series. I’ve been a fan, friend and colleague of Mike for a number of years. Mike recently interviewed me about my newest book in the series, How to Hire the Best: The Contractor’s Ultimate Guide to Attracting Top Performing Employees.
In this interview, I share how Mike’s books, The Pumpkin Plan, Surge, and Profit First, have contributed to the development of this book series, as well as a solid foundation for my business, and those of my clients.
MIKE: Why did you write How to Hire the Best?
SABRINA: When I wrote the first edition of How to Hire the Best, I was living in Riverton, Wyoming, a rural part of the country. Most of my clients were small business owners. They were coming to me because they wanted more work-life balance. They were working 80 or 90 hours a week. I soon realized the work-life balance issue was caused by them not being able to hire the team members they needed.
I had just become a Pumpkin Plan Strategist, and was working on Pumpkin Planning my business. When I did the wish list interviews (from The Pumpkin Plan) with my top clients, I asked, “If I could wave a magic wand and do anything to make your life better, what would it be?” The responses were very similar: “Help me hire great people”, “Make my team better”, “Turn my warm bodies into A-Players”. That was the wish. At the time when I was hearing that, I felt so challenged by it. I knew that was the issue that needed to be solved and it was a tough one!
I started using everything I had in my toolbox as a psychologist to help them. I tried teaching the business owners how to coach, so they could get better productivity out of their warm body team members. That didn’t work.
Then, I started looking around for books about hiring in small business. There wasn’t much out there. Dr. Brad Smart’s book, Topgrading is excellent. However, it’s written for a corporate environment. It’s very hard for a small business owner, wearing multiple hats and juggling so many demands on his time, to execute the Topgrading strategies. I thought, ‘There has to be something out here.’ I was totally baffled that there wasn’t.
You might recall, I asked you, what are you doing? You said, “Well, you know, it’s tough. This is hard.” I interviewed other thought leaders, and business coaches who were working with small business owners, and I just wasn’t really getting anywhere. I got some good tips, but nothing that was a solid system that I felt confident would work over and over with consistency.
I started looking for business owners who were having success with their hiring, and interviewed them. That wasn’t easy either. I couldn’t find many who felt like they had insights into hiring. I said, “You just have to have an A-Player, and that’s all I need for you to be worthy of an interview.” Even then, they didn’t want to talk to me. They felt like they didn’t know how they got that A-Player on their team. Repeatedly, they told me it was just luck or happenstance. Every time I heard that, I dug a little deeper. What I came to unearth in all of those interviews is a system. There were certain things they were doing that worked consistently to attract A-Players to their businesses.
MIKE: What happened after the book was published?
SABRINA: My business grew as I got more clients wanting help with hiring. But, something surprising also happened. I started receiving phone calls from entrepreneurs all over the country. The ones that really took me aback were the ones that came in from major metropolitan areas, such as San Francisco, New Jersey, and Denver. The stories were all the same. They would say, “Sabrina, I’m not rural, but I really, really hope you can help me because the labor market here is crazy…what I have to pay to hire team members… I can’t afford it! I’m drowning over here. I’ve got more work than I can handle, I need some help. Can you help me?”
I thought, “Well, I don’t know if this is going to work, but let’s try it.” Sure enough, it worked. What I quickly discovered is, if this system works for entrepreneurs in rural, low population areas, it’s works exponentially better for entrepreneurs in major metropolitan areas just because there’s a larger population to draw from.
The thing for us entrepreneurs to wrap our heads around is that only about 10 percent of the population is A-Players. Even if you’re in a major metropolitan area, you really start to feel like you’re looking for a needle in the haystack, because you are! Furthermore, not all of those 10 percent are employable. Some people are retired, some are children, some have a disability that would keep them from being able to work for you. It’s a very small number.
Here’s the kicker: The traditional hiring practices that we follow are inconsistent with A-Player behavior. For example, we get busy, we decide we need to hire, we post a job ad. We put it out on some job boards and places like Craig’s List.
It’s the spray and pray approach. When it comes to marketing, most of us know that spray and pray doesn’t work. Yet for some reason, when it comes to recruiting, we expect that to work. The reason it doesn’t work is because most A-Players are not unemployed, reading ads on job boards, or Craig’s List. We need to have a system that follows the natural pattern of behavior of A-Players.
Mike, when you wrote Profit First, you asked what is the entrepreneur’s natural behavior around money in the business? We check our bank account, and we make decisions based on what’s in our bank account. You developed the Profit First system around the entrepreneur’s natural behavior and it works!
Similarly, I have developed the How to Hire the Best System™ to recruit in a way that aligns with A-Players’ natural behavior. That requires us to understand what A-Players want, what’s important to them, and what keeps them in our business, then use that knowledge to show up where A-Players hang out so they become aware of our businesses.
MIKE: What do A-Players want?
SABRINA: A-Players want a great place to work. To recruit them, we have to do more than have a good Careers page on our website and write a good job ad. We have to put effort into our culture. With this latest edition of How to Hire the Best, I’ve put much more emphasis on how to create a great place to work that is attractive to A-Players, which is what we coach our clients to do at Tap the Potential. I’ve developed the Tap the Potential Solution™ to creating a highly profitable, great place to work that allows an entrepreneur to scale a business, regardless of how tight the labor market is.
MIKE: What makes that important?
SABRINA: Ultimately, we have a much more sustainable and profitable business when we reduce our dependency upon people to scale. People are complex and payroll is the biggest expense. The more people we have in our business, the more complexity we introduce. The larger the payroll, the more challenging it is to be profitable.
As a Profit First Professional, I am an advocate for keeping payroll as small as possible, and instead, investing in the development of A-Player team members. A small team of A-Players working in a business with a clearly defined Sweet Spot is key. This has a significant impact on improving the profitability of a business. Many of our clients come to appreciate scaling back their teams to scale profit. We teach them to grow with lean and mighty teams.
MIKE: Why did you choose to focus on contractors for the next edition of How to Hire the Best?
SABRINA: Well, I like to joke that I like a good challenge. If there’s one thing that rural business owners have in common with those in construction, it’s that those two groups likely face the greatest challenges with respect to hiring.
All kidding aside, I was following your Surge process, and niching down even further with my work.
As the first edition of How to Hire the Best came out, I noticed the majority of the people calling me were in one industry—construction. That’s no surprise because of various forces that have come into play in the construction industry in the last 15 years or so. This industry is missing an entire generation of workers. There are very few young people coming into the industry.
To give you a sense of how severe this situation is, in 2016, the National Association of Home Builders asked 2001 young adults between the ages of 18 and 25 what they wanted to do for a living. Of the 74% who knew what they wanted to do, only 3% said they wanted to go into the construction trades. Meanwhile, 93% of participants in a HomeAdvisor survey said they believed their business would grow over the following year if not for hiring challenges. What’s more, the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts the number of construction jobs will grow by 11% between 2016 and 2026, faster than average for all occupations. Hiring is the #1 challenge in this industry.
Entrepreneurs in this industry really don’t have a big pool of labor from which to draw. There are definitely A-Players out there in the industry. As a contractor with the opportunity to grow, this means you have to be very savvy. You need the best, sharpest tools in your toolbox to attract A-Players to your business. That’s what I’m teaching in the How to Hire the Best, Contractor’s Edition.
I’ve paid attention to what works consistently to hire A-Players, across different industries. Using the Pumpkin Plan strategy, I’ve honed in on what works repeatedly most of the time, regardless of industry and geographic location. That’s what I included in the book. Then, I went a step further and studied what works with respect to hiring in the construction industry. This industry has some creative entrepreneurs who are having success with hiring.
In Surge, you teach about watching the trends and trying to be right out in front of where the need is.
Right now, we’re at a point in the country where our unemployment rate is at its lowest. Entrepreneurs, regardless of industry, often identify hiring as their #1 challenge. In the construction industry, the unemployment rate is at the lowest it’s ever been. It is very challenging for entrepreneurs in that industry to hire the team that they need to grow. How to Hire the Best, Contractor’s Edition provides the solution.
MIKE: Dr. Sabrina, you’re very quick to emphasize that How to Hire the Best is not a quick fix. Tell us why that’s so important?
SABRINA: When the first edition of How to Hire the Best came out, I felt a lot of pressure from entrepreneurs to give them a three-step formula. Go do these one, two, three things, and it will work, and you’ll hire A-Players. That three-step formula absolutely does work. They get A-Players, and they get them pretty quickly.
Here’s the deal, though: If you don’t have a great place to work, and you’re not working on yourself as a leader, paying attention to our own blind spots, you are setting up an environment where you’re not going to be able to keep A-Players. That quickly became a big concern of mine.
I don’t want to teach you the three things you need to do to get A-Players, if we don’t back that up with having a great place to work—a good work environment where you’re going to be able to retain A-Players long-term.
At Tap the Potential, that’s our sweet spot. We are supporting business owners in our Exclusive Small Group Coaching program to be the leaders they need to be to build a highly profitable, great place to work that attracts A-Players and gets team members working together from their strengths. As this is happening, these business owners get a lot more freedom and are able to do some amazing things, like taking four-week vacations.
MIKE: That sounds amazing. Where can readers get the book?
SABRINA: It is available on Amazon and from our website at www.TapThePotential.com
References:
http://www.nahbclassic.org/fileUpload_details.aspx?contentTypeID=3&contentID=255983&subContentID=694485&channelID=311
http://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/31/desperate-for-workers-a-colorado-homebuilder-starts-a-free-school.html
Cusato, Marianne. “The Skilled Labor Shortage: Where is the Next Generation of Craftsmen?” HomeAdvisor. February, 2016.
http://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/home.htm
