If I asked you to think about a growth target for your company, what comes to mind? Is it the amount of sales dollars you’d achieve? Maybe the number of jobs you complete. Once you get past a few hundred thousand dollars, you as a business owner are at or beyond your capacity to do everything, so you’ll need to add employees to help.
For most roofing companies, this is where the problems start. Why? Because anyone you bring into the company does not know what you know or think how you think.
This is why many owners hire friends and family first, and we’re gonna talk about the pros and cons of that shortly. The result in many of these hires is having the wrong people, doing the wrong things, or allowing the wrong people to get into the company in the first place.
In the book titled Good To Great the authors use an analogy of the business being like a bus, and to have success, you need to have the right people in the right seats on the bus.
We call this being the right. And in this video I’ll share three elements to helping ensure whoever you hire is a fit for the job and your company.
Number one, having a values match.
If you want any team member to be a permanent part of your organization, their values will need to be closely aligned with yours and the values of the company.
This is why most company owners hire friends and family. They don’t know how to hire strangers, and they’re frightened to death about making a mistake in the hiring that ruins their business.
The friends and family most likely have similar values to the owner. If you hire people who do not have similar values, the end result will most likely be frustration and eventually termination. Just like any relationship where each party does not have similar values, at some point it will fail and along the way have one or both sides be totally miserable in the process.
An example of this would be an employee who had the skills to effectively do a job, but they were unde, dependable, selfish, not trustworthy. Even though an employee like this can do the job, they may miss days without advanced notice. Lie about hours worked or what they completed on the. , these acts are what we call a violation of values.
They most likely will not change, and it’s best to identify them upfront before you ever hire them, and then become dependent on them while they suck your life force dry every day.
Number two, having the right abilities.
Abilities are indicators of the knowledge or skills someone would need to possess in order to have success in the position immediately, or with as little training as possible.
For example, if you use QuickBooks for your accounting and you’re gonna hire a bookkeeper, you’ll want them to have experience with QuickBooks when you hire ’em. Otherwise, they’ll need a lot of training on that before they can productively contribute to the position. This will be setting them up to fail and cost you precious time and money, most likely resulting in them leaving or getting termin.
A successful hire would have the abilities and experience necessary to be productive immediately or within a reasonable amount of time after completing training.
This is a key area where hiring friends and family can bite you. They have the values, but not the experience to do the job. This can create a tricky situation where you, as the employer, are frustrated by the results they achieve, and they’re frustrated by being put in a situation where they’re overwhelmed, but neither of you wants to hurt the relationship, so it goes unsaid.
Unfortunately, this can go on for a long period of time and lead to a very toxic and unproductive situation that makes scaling your business impossible.
Number three, having the right behaviors.
Behaviors relate to how interested somebody is in the job and the way that they actually perform the job.
When you have a fit in someone’s behaviors for the position that they’re in, they happily do the job because it just feels right to them. They naturally conduct themselves in an acceptable manner. They produce the expected amount of work and do so at the level of quality your company desires.
This is another area where friends and family can be a challenge. They may seriously want to be able to do the job, but struggle to achieve the results you need. Just like with abilities, your desire to preserve the relationship can result in damage to it that may not be repairable.
Ideally, if you were hiring a friend, family member, or someone you don’t know, you want to try to determine if they have the right interests and aptitudes to perform the job that you’re hiring for before you hire them for it.
So those are the three elements to a successful hire. When you’re recruiting and you achieve all three, you dramatically increase the odds that you’ll have a strong fit for the position that results in a team member who gets satisfaction from their contributions.
You get a productive and dependable contributor for your organization.
We hope that this video provided you with tremendous value. If you need help with your recruiting process or wanna learn how roof coach can help your business, visit www.roofbizhelp.com and schedule initial consultation today.
