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(Note, alongside being a happy customer, I am also an investor in the business)
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It was 2013. I was sitting in Loco, a bar on Stewart Avenue in Ithaca, New York, with my business partner. It was peak season for us, and we had just finished a long day of moving boxes. Things were stressful, and operations weren’t going well. A lot of delays, missed appointments, and irritated customers.
We were exhausted, and I was playing victim.
Our employees weren’t listening. They were entitled. The economy was making it difficult to find people to work. The labor market was brutal. Nobody wanted to work hard. Our crew leaders were messing up the invoices. Our employees were boneheads and kept making mistakes that continued to affect our bottom line. On and on and on.
My partner finally looked at me. He had had enough. “This isn’t working, Nick. All we do is complain. We own this business. We hire everyone and tell everyone what to do. If things are bad, it’s because of us and our leadership. Next time we feel like complaining about how things are going, we need to take some ownership and look in the mirror. We are the leaders of this business.”
From that moment on he didn’t let me complain without telling me that it was MY FAULT. And he told me that pretty much every day. That year we did about a half million in revenue at colleges and made about $100,000 in all-in profit. It was the most stressful year of my life, but when it was all said and done, we took ownership. We decided that it wasn’t our employees’ fault. Or the economy. Or the labor market.
It was OUR fault because of our outlook on hiring.
All the stress was our fault. The missed appointments. The employees who didn’t show up for work. The broken down vehicles. The unhappy customers. All of the stress was because of us and our poor planning, training, systems and leadership. That was a hard pill for me to swallow.
But this mindset shift changed everything for me.
Ask the average business owner what their biggest problem is and they’ll undoubtedly point to their employees and their recruiting.
“I can’t find anybody who wants to work.”
“Americans are lazy and they’re getting paid to sit on the couch.”
“The labor market is brutal.”
These business owners are playing victim. They are blaming somebody else for their problems. And they will never be successful.
There are electrical contractors with hundreds of employees. How do they recruit and find workers?
Walmart has over 1,000,000 low skilled employees. How do they recruit and staff that many people? There are companies that WIN in every industry. How do they do it? They sure as hell don’t do it by blaming the labor market and playing victim. They do what they have to do and they make it happen.
At the beginning, I thought I was a great leader and manager. Unfortunately, most people do. But while that confidence in myself and my abilities was what kept me going when things got hard, it also made it harder at first for me to accept the cold, hard truth about hiring. If your employees quit—it is on you. Your employee makes a bad decision—you could have communicated better. Your business loses money because of an employee’s mistake—it is because of your poor leadership.
This world is full of business owners who are victims and complain about their people and their hiring. But victims never win. They never make it happen. They don’t adjust course and push to improve themselves. They sit back and helplessly wait for the world to come to them.
But successful people take extreme ownership over negative events. They have humility and admit mistakes. They adjust. They improve. They ignore the news cycle full of negativity and external factors they can’t control.
When business owners complain about hiring I sometimes can’t hold my tongue. “Yeah, it’s brutal out there. How much of your marketing budget goes towards recruiting and hiring?”
They look at me like I have two heads. “What the heck are you talking about? Of course I don’t spend marketing dollars on employees. I spend marketing dollars on getting customers. Is that even a thing?”
These business owners, and I would venture to say MOST small business owners, just sit back and HOPE that a unicorn walks in the door. They pray that the best, most loyal, hardest working employee who never makes mistakes is just browsing the free classified section of Facebook Marketplace, sees their job posting, and bends over backwards at the opportunity for average compensation at an average company with non-existent marketing.
You, as the leader of your company, have to hunt them down and convince them to come to your company. You have to build a company that attracts these A players and then go out and get them!
Nearly every single competent employee I’ve ever hired already had a job when I hired them. They didn’t apply to my posting. They weren’t actively searching for a job. I took matters into my own hands, took ownership over the shitty labor market, and did the work other companies weren’t willing to do to find and attract these people.
Hiring costs money. It takes a lot of time. If your company is growing, you will spend many hours and more of your revenue than you would like on finding and retaining the best people. In many of the industries that make for the best sweaty startups, there is too much work and not enough people willing to do it (which is what makes them such great businesses in the first place).
I play golf with the owner of the biggest HVAC contractor in my area—he is part owner of a business that does 10s of millions of top line revenue in three states with hundreds of employees. He told me they spend 4% of their top line revenue, or a few million per year, on their recruiting related advertising and outreach to find employees. While you may not need to start at 4%, if you do want to become successful over the long haul, hiring the best is what it takes.
And hiring the best means being the best at hiring and the best at running your company. It also means taking responsibility and leaning into extreme ownership. If you start with the mindset of “It’s my fault” AND “that’s okay because I can do something about it” you will win.
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A few tweets from this week:
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Note: Alongside being a happy customer, I am also an investor in the business.
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Onward and upward,
Nick Huber