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Business with Beers
Employees Are NOT LAZY! What's REALLY Driving the Great Resignation? | 279
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Nobody wants to work anymore. I hear this everywhere. But what if we've got it completely backwards? What if the problem isn't them? Think about it. If your job paid peanuts, your boss was a mess. The only perk was like a pizza on a Friday night. How long would you stay? Last year I lost one of our best store managers. His location consistently made $25,000 per month in profit. And after he left, it dropped by more than 50%. But he didn't quit because of the workload or pay. He left because of tension with his direct boss. It was a bunch of small stuff, things that we could have fixed if we had known. And that moment hit me hard. Not just because of the numbers, because I realized that we were being blind to what was really going on. It's easy to fall into this trap. Oh, I'm going to blame Gen Z or whatever the name is now. They're lazy, they're unmotivated, they're addicted to dopamine and doom scrolling and all these things. But sometimes it's not about the work ethic, it's about finding a place that people want to work and they want to grow. It's whether, like, the work is worth doing. Do people appreciate it? That is what a lot of times I think through and I think a lot of our employees and our teams think about. Because in my experiences, people don't quit their jobs, they quit their bosses, right? They quit the person who they're directly working with. And most importantly, people quit when they stop growing because growth equals happiness, okay? Growth equals happiness. What I mean is like, it's not just they have to be continually promoted and they have to get paid more and more. That's what people think by default. It's really about growing as a person. Like, are you developing new skills? Are you hitting personal milestones? Are you saving money? Are you building confidence, right? When people feel that they're stuck, when they're unheard, they're unseen, they're going to check out long before they quit. And the by the time they quit, you're like, oh well, like too bad. But they used to be great, right? But what changed? Well, the change was like they wanted to continue to grow and they just couldn't see that possible by working in your company and they went to find someone else. Like, I have this concept, the idea is that my world, my company, is this balloon. And that everyone who is inside of my world has their own balloon, right? Of their goals and dreams and ambitions. And you lose people when their bubble their vision of what's possible becomes bigger than what they can see within your balloon, right? And so my goal is to continue to grow my organization, to continue to create opportunities for everyone that's in my world. So as somebody wants to grow and evolve and their balloon gets bigger, like they don't have to, to. To leave me because I want. Will provide them opportunities to allow them to, to grow a new division, to grow a new store, potentially become partners on a new business, right? And so that's what you have to think about is what do I need to do to build this business, to build this organization so that people can see the vision and they can see, you know, their life growing within my world. If we don't want to lose them, right? If we want someone to be in a world, we have to think that way. Because I've learned this the hard way is that if you want to fix a problem, you have to start by looking in the mirror. Because what happened, like, why we lost this good manager was like, as our company has, has grown, right? We have over 200 employees now. We've created hierarchies, right? Like, like every traditional company does. But that hierarchy then creates this disconnection between who's at the top, you know, who's in the middle, who's at the bottom. Like, things don't get communicated the right way, things that become problems. The person right above in the next tier should be fixing them, but they're not. And so now we lost someone great because we're, we have too much structure. And so the goal for me is like, how do I keep it flat as possible while not like burning people out? Because the problem is if you're too flat, if you're, if your company has like 200 people reporting to one person, obviously they don't have the bandwidth to do that. Like, you need to break into smaller teams, but you also want to be able to go down to the level. So we call this a skip level meeting where someone like my CEO will meet directly with store managers. He's skipping the district level, right? Or our district managers will skip a level. They'll skip meeting with the store managers to talk directly to the technicians, right? We call it a skip level meeting. That is one way you can, you can do to flatten out the organization in case there's somebody in the middle who is doing it. In my case, like, I could go directly to the DMs if I wanted to skip the, the leadership team, right? And it's not because you don't trust them or because you think anything else, it's just a matter of, like, you want a different perspective. And if your only lens is through other people, like, they're gonna make you see the world the way they see the world, right through their frame of reference. And when you can skip it and you can go direct to a source now you have a fresh set of eyes and you may be able to help someone see the perspective in a different way. And that's what it's all about, right? It's trying to figure out, like, what's working here, like, what is working in this organization that we need to double down on, right? What is it that people love? And this is why we. We attract them, and this is why we retain them. And on the flip side, like, what sucks, right? Like, I'm not perfect. Our company is not perfect. We make a lot of mistakes, admittedly, but if we can acknowledge what it is and we can have a good feedback loop to fixing it, then that encourages our teams to then speak when there's a problem, right? Because a lot of times people see an issue and they don't bring it up because they're afraid that their boss or their, the owner or whoever it is is going to ridicule them. They'd be like, that's a dumb idea. I don't know why you said that. They're going to get really defensive and they're going to say all these things like, I don't care. Like, someone, if someone came to me and said, like, this, this, this that you are doing, maybe it was my idea too, is complete bullshit. It sucks. Like, we should stop doing this. And I have this better idea and that makes the company better. Like, I don't care. That's my idea. If it makes the company better, it makes people happy. It makes everybody more money. Like, that is what I want to do. I value progress over perfection. Don't worry about, like, you have this perfect thing and it's this, like, glass box and it's fragile. Think about, like, I want to continue to improve the company. And people change, too. Like, things that I did 10 years ago in building my company do not work today. And in another 10 years, what I do today probably won't work again. And so it's this constant evolution. And the best business owners, the best people are able to build a company through this constant iterative process, not sitting and waiting or just being stuck in their old ways. And so the truth is that there are so many great people out there, so many people that want to work hard. They Value effort. They. They want to win, but many of them just haven't found the right environment. They haven't found a company that they can excel in, that their balloon can get bigger and bigger. And so when I'm looking for people, I don't care about a resume. I don't care about a degree. I don't care about, like, really what they did in the past. Like, yes, I look at that, Yes, I ask questions. But what I'm looking for is their personality. I'm looking that they're coachable, that they're willing to learn. Like, the best employees I have, the best teammates are sponges, right? They soak everything up and then they act on it, and they have this, like, inner fire and this drive. And, like, I could call them on that idea and boom, like, we're literally doing it two hours later. That is what I'm looking for in anybody that is on my team, especially at a high level. I'll give you a great example. My business partner in Waterloo turf in Houston, his name's Rick. I've been working with him to get better at financing, like presenting payment plans to customers. You know, the jobs we sell are 10, $15,000. A lot of times people have the money. They just don't necessarily want to give it all to us, right? And so we have a bunch of payment plans that we haven't been using. And so I coached him yesterday on the process to present those in a better manner and to talk about it early, to talk about it up front, to. To do it in a way that was like, hey, save your money and just use our payment plan. And it makes it so much easier. And Anyway, I spent 10 minutes coaching him on this thing, and two hours later, he texts me, and he just closed $15,000 of work by calling up the customers that he had earlier today and say, hey, by the way, I forgot to tell you, we've got these great payment plans. And now he's all fired up about using these payment plans in this language going forward because he saw the success, so he. He listened. You know, we overcame some of his initial objections of why he wasn't doing it. He did it, he had success. And then now, like, we're going to exponential growth from that. That is what you're looking for in leadership. People, right? People who are at the top of the organization who are making decisions because that's contagious. And now everyone that he hires and as he builds out his sales team there, like, he's going to teach them that thing. And he is going to hold them accountable for doing that process because he now believes in it, right? That is how you get this compound effort of people and skills and the mindset to build a massive organization. I think the fear that a lot of people have, and I've had this, you know, I had this many years ago before too, was that it's scary to invest a lot of time and energy into someone only to have them leave, right? And you're like, why would I spend a bunch of time. They're only going to leave me in 3, 6, 10, 12, 2 years, whatever. Like, I've heard people say crazy stuff, but this fear, it causes people, them to then cling on to experience. Like, oh, I'm only going to hire somebody who has experience in, like, turf. If. If I said that for my Houston location in Waterloo, like, I never would have hired Rick. He had no experience in turf. He had no experience owning a business. He had a ton of experience in leadership and people and drive, right? But he had no experience in the actual thing we were doing. And if that was my filter, I would have never talked to him because I was like, he doesn't have what it takes, right? He doesn't have the experience that I need. But instead I said, I don't care about any of that stuff. What I want is somebody who's hungry, who's coachable, who's driven, who's ready to learn, who's doing whatever it will take to win. And if you have those traits and you invest the time, especially in a franchise system, because then the franchise can teach the turf, I can help teach the business ownership stuff. But if you have the right person and the right team in the right process, like, it all will work. It does take a little time. And you have to get over that fear of, like, I'm going to invest in this person and they're going to leave. So if there's one question every leader should be asking, it is this. What do I need to do to make my company a better place to work? Right? What do I need to do? Take ownership, look in the mirror, figure it out, talk to your people, iterate small wins, all this stuff. And it's not something that you do once. It's not just during a crisis. It's not when someone's looking to quit. You need to do it constantly, right? Because culture and environment, all this stuff, it's not just like a box that you check. It's something that you build every day through the people you hire, through the conversations you have, through the actions you take and the moment that you stop asking that question is the moment that your company is going to start falling behind. And your competitors who are watching this video and who are taking these actions are going to build a better organization. And guess what? When your people's balloon gets bigger than your world, guess where they're going to go? They're going to go to the organization that they believe will give them the best opportunity to continue to grow. And so I'm on a mission to build a hundred million a year franchise business over the next three years. I'm at 50 million today in revenue between all our companies. And the only way that's going to happen is I need to build a rockstar team around me at every level. Not just my executives, not just the leadership, but like every level of the organization. I want to play at an extremely high level. And to win, I need people who are right there aside of me. Because it's not just about the job. It's about this mission. It's about growing. It's about all the things that need to happen. Because when I win, the company wins, everybody wins. And so ask yourself today, right now, like, you could stop this, send somebody attacks and like, what is great about working here with this organization, with me? What sucks? Totally be honest with me, like, don't hold anything back. What do we need to do more of? What do we need to do less of? And they just actually listen, take action. It can be small stuff. It could be literally things that cost you $5 or don't even cost you anything, right? It could be someone just says, hey, you never show appreciation for the work that we do. Right? It could cost you nothing to set a reminder in your phone to tell somebody that you appreciate it when you truly do. And it's not a lie. You're just so busy. So anyway, take that action. Let me know how it goes. Drop it in the comments below and I'll see you on the next video. Cheers.