Brandon who I'm going to be speaking to today has had his fair share of
experience when it comes to hiring staff brandon
had a cleaning business and in just one month 30 days
he hired 25 new members of staff in his cleaning business he was
employing over 70 people and before he sold it it was generating
500 000 in sales in a month now brandon is not just gonna share how
to hire fantastic members of staff he's also going to share how to
have a wait list of people that want to work for you if you've ever
thought about hiring a member of staff you need to
watch this video hi so today i am joined here by brandon
hello hello and brandon and i have just been having
having a cup of tea talking about how to attract the best teammates
to your team brandon you shared something that i'd never heard before
but i'm really excited for you to be sharing it
with everyone because i can already see the value
and that was your flywheel model yeah can you talk us through that and
how you use that to attract the best teammates into your
team yeah of course so I think that the best thing to do is to kind of
describe what a flywheel is. Now a full disclosure
it's not my idea it's not my original idea
actually that the man who originated the business
model or the concept of a flywheel really the first person to put into
practice was jeff Bezos I hear you did quite well as well
Probably a good model to follow
I think you are going to make it
what jeff bezos did is he wrote down on the back of a napkin
this model this flywheel business model that he envisioned for
amazon.com now when you think of a flywheel
you think of a huge massive wheel that has weight
and it takes a lot of energy to kind of push it and kind of get it going
but once it kind of goes it gets its own momentum
it has its own source of energy and it's a lot harder to stop
and you barely have to turn it you just give a little kick every once in a while
to keep that you know moving really fast yes yes so what he did is he wrote down
this concept of a flywheel the diagram looks like. This
arrow diagram that kind of moves around these four different
areas with this hub in the center and in each one of these areas he started
off with if i could deliver a great customer experience to my customers yes
that would inevitably lead to more traffic
if we have more traffic to our site that's inevitably going to
drive more sellers to want to sell on our
website which will inevitably lead to more products and a better selection
which will inevitably lead to a better customer experience
which leads to more traffic more sellers and it just like
keeps moving they all push into each other and so he found that when he
focused on any one of these four areas it automatically drove the rest of
the business and the hub in the center was you know
that growth that he got and as he grew it would spin off another part of the
flywheel that would need lower price structures you know
because you have more volume and as you grow more you get lower
price structures which in turn leads to a better customer experience
which turn leads to more it just keeps going and going and going
so this whole concept of a flywheel i wanted to identify how i could do this
in my business and one of the things that we did just a
year and a half ago when we started up for the spring is we
hired 25 technicians in my service business
within 30 days and can you just tell everyone what your
service business is yeah so i had an exterior cleaning
business so we had about 70 employees here in portland here in
portland yeah here in portland and you know we
provided power washing, window cleaning, gutter
cleaning those types of services but when we
hired all those employees we didn't have to do very much effort to
get them to come aboard because we actually had a waiting list
of people that wanted to join our team a waiting list of people wanting
yes and it comes from building this amazing
flywheel you focus so much on the technician
experience your customer experience but not an external customer
like you and i would think of customers yeah but
your internal customers which are your employees like what's that amazing
employee experience that you can deliver that gets the employees to get excited
and you know talk to their mates talk to their friends talk to their family
yeah and encourage them you know talk about what an amazing place to work
and so it's a it's kind of a critical part that most
service business owners don't really think about or think that they can't
provide that if they're small so keeping using the
example of your service business the cleaning
business the first step you did is create a
culture that was so amazing that the people within your business
were telling their friends and family yes how did you create that culture
one of the things that i tell a lot of service business owners like you know
maybe you watching this is focus on who you are first
like find out what makes your company sexy
what makes it really appealing and what can make a
clean and exterior cleaning company sexy i know i probably lost half of the
viewers when i said make your business sexy but it's
possible you know some people say well it's just
me in a van or me you know me in a van with one
technician we're small it's like that's a small
startup company with room for improvement
room for advancement you get to start at the at the ground floor
of a business yes that small family-owned
and operated company feeling where everyone knows each other and has kind
of that that kinship with each other is
definitely something that can be very attractive to a lot of people
oh 100% but it's almost changing that mindset of
why would someone want to come on work for my one-man band why would someone
want to work for this business to what are all the huge
benefits right and i think a really good thing
about that is if you can't immediately think of them
because sometimes you're a little bit too close to the business
is when you're down the pub or in the coffee shop and your friends say
oh man i'd love to work for myself double click on that and say
why what what actually attracts you to my business and the things you just said
the family-owned local be there from the beginning
maybe you offer flexibility these are fantastic things that sometimes you just
a little bit too close to your business to realize
and the beauties of your business yeah and
and maybe your business doesn't have that many
sexy components right now but you can create them you can create an
environment where you focus on your employees hopes and
dreams and what they want to accomplish and you help them connect the dots
of if i work really hard in this business i can actually
get my dreams fulfilled and especially if you work with your
teammates to kind of help them with their dreams and their goals and really
sit down and ask them what they want to do and
and what skill sets they may want to learn and actually provide a path for
them to experience that everything changes
in your company with that part of it and i think for a lot of people company
culture they don't really exactly know what it means you know it's like oh
i have to have bean bag chairs and ping pong tables and you know
in my shop like what is that what's a good
company culture yeah it feels like a buzzword rather than what
are you doing today to make people feel right welcome and
they've they've done surveys of hundreds of thousands of
employees and most employees they it actually
almost no employees say that the thing that they value
most about a job or about a career is how much money they make
wow okay appreciation recognition they want a positive working
environment yeah and those types of things are typically
something that a lot of business owners forget to really strategically put in
place into their business so that that happens
on a regular basis with their employees okay so now we've
established how our company can be sexy we've got our
employees telling their friends about it what happens next
the the big takeaway for you know if you're watching this and
you're trying to get people coming into your business
as home service business owners we know how to attract a customer
to our business yes you know we understand the concept of marketing
okay if you're going to have a postcard if you're going to have a flyer a
leaflet some you know some kind of brochure you
know that it has to have a good call to action
it has to have a good hook, a good headline
a good attention grabbing photo you have to have
you know we understand the marketing side of it we understand that we have to
send out enough of them to actually have an
impact we have to broadcast it out to as many people
we have to have a marketing budget set aside to be able to market for that
customer and then when the customer decides to
buy our $500 or £500 thing
like they make that purchase then we have to deliver
what we actually said and if we don't do a really good quality
job of delivering that service they won't refer us
to any of their friends or family yeah that all of those same principles have
to be applied when we're trying to get employees to
our company absolutely because it is a much bigger commitment
to ask someone to make as opposed to a customer spending 500
quid you know with us in our service business yeah
we're asking an employee to devote 40 hours
a week for years for our business and if we don't have a marketing budget
and we don't we don't really think about what makes our company unique and why
would an employee want to work for us and you know what are the values that we
care about in our business and do we actually
deliver a fantastic job deliver a career opportunity deliver
positive working benefits to our employees
and then we wonder why they quit and they don't tell any of their friends
or family or anyone else that they have a great
job that they work at yes so it really comes down to
that same marketing principle you know getting good employees is a marketing
game and it all comes down to marketing i really
love that that's a completely different spin on it a lot
of people think why should small work for me it's
probably just price i'll create a job ad that says so and so
wanted x amount an hour right but that's not
inspiring but everything you've just said of
create the inspiring culture be the business you want to work for
and then rather than doing that job ad it will start to sell itself yeah
and if you think about it marketing you know if you if you were to
you know do some google adwords yes you would split test different
headlines right you'd have well what if we used
this sentence would we get more customers what if we had this
kind of an offer would we get more people to click on it
would it be cheaper when you have your job
postings like have multiple versions with different headlines
and different you know copy in your job ads
uh see what you can attract have something be different you know
just everyone else that is clean or wanted
14 pound an hour you know this and this they must be
you know drug free whatever i mean it's it's so
boring so copy and pasteable aswell yeah and they're wondering why
someone's going through and just going like submit resume enter submit resume
enter so that resume and then it takes so much work to try to
figure out who's actually interested but if you work on that process a little
bit more even just a tiny bit more with some intention that
really opens up a lot more possibilities and i love what you've said about you
might be watching this thinking that's a lot more effort a lot more work
involved split testing the job i've never thought
to do that but i love what you've said about that
person is committing 40 hours a week for hopefully a really
long time and the value that person can add to
your team in terms of happiness in terms of profit
is infinite so why aren't you putting that
effort in yeah yeah i mean you're you're asking
someone to work at your business and spend more time
with you than they probably do with their own
family yes yeah you know with the that amount of our
commitment that they have during the week they're spending more time with you
than they're then they're likely spending their waking hours with
their family so i mean what are you doing to make that a good
experience for them do they really feel appreciated do they feel cared for
when you show that first you get a completely different
type of response from your team members it really makes it unique it makes them really proud of the place
they work for that's incredible and practically do you then so in
the way you're talking about your marketing you're trying to get that message out
there to as many people as possible if you're marketing your company as a
place to work how do you get that message out there to
more than just people's friends and family
are you posting experiences of what it's like to work for the company is there
any practical things people can do today to
show the culture yeah one of the biggest most powerful
tools that i think that's underutilized is to have a
careers page have a page a website page that says
what it's like to work for your company hire a videographer or hire someone
you know even a member on your team to hold a cell phone and to just
video your technicians working outside
working inside talking to the customers how every job is a little bit different
show what it's like what a day in the life of your
career is like to prospective employees and then when they see that the people
who connect with it and say that's what i want to do they'll
be the ones that apply and people look at that and say i
couldn't last one day working there that doesn't look like
it's for me they don't apply they don't send a resume and you're not
wasting your time talking to people who are going to show up to the
interview and then not show up to the first day of work or
show up to two days of work and then just
ghost or worse that's a six month training period and someone leaves you
that's yeah if you can establish what it's like
from the beginning you're attracting the right sort of talent the people that
believe in your values right yeah there's there's so many
so many negative consequences that happen to a business
when they turn over an employee when they you know lose an employee and then
they have to hire someone else asides from costing thousands of pounds
to replace an employee you have you know damage to morale of
other employees damages to property and during the
training process lost productivity so many different
things that get impacted so hiring correctly right from the very
beginning is a really important step Brandon thank you
that is so useful and really flips how we should
look at the hiring process and how we should
look at our company before we want to put it out there in
the world to create a company that you're proud of and have other people
talk about is just the highest compliment and
i really hope people have watched this and feel inspired that their company is
something that they can build that they can be proud of but so can
their team yeah so thank you ofcourse and brandon this is just the
tip of the iceberg about what you know about employees you have
done your fair share of it yourself is there anywhere our audience can go to
find out more about your amazing journey and how you can
help people yeah i'd love to you know one of the
biggest things when daisy asked me to talk about employees it's like
how long do we have because i can talk about this for hours and hours and hours
it's comfy guys i just i love this topic i loved having a team
of 70 plus employees in my service business and unbelievable amazing
experience i just loved working with it so one of the
things that i did is i put together a digital course that's completely
online you can watch it from the comfort of your own home
or office in your pjs whatever you'd like to do
it's called the ultimate hiring flywheel and
i recorded at least three long modules just on the topic that we're talking
about core values and how to attract the
right kind of team members where to advertise
list dozens of different places you can advertise
and then i actually have a total of eight modules on what
what questions you should ask your technicians to make sure you're getting
the right ones how you should do your phone references
different interview scripts and how to onboard them how to
train them how to motivate them how to develop them
even more and how to have dashboards that you
could you know put up inside of your office or
even on some of your ipads or even phones
to be able to get that spirit of competition with some of your
technicians and see their performance really go up so it's
42 total videos there's workbooks there's thousands of dollars
worth of HR documents that you can use in your service business and systems
that are in there and you're more than welcome to go and
check it out at automategrowcell.com
and it's called the ultimate hiring flywheel
and it's it's about six hours worth of content just like this where it's really
in-depth along with homework assignments and
different kinds of you know follow-along scripts thank you
i think anyone that's hiring their first or the 1000th
member of team can really benefit from this because
this isn't the normal hiring process but it's one that you you've seen work
would you say that in 30 days 25 people asked you
to work for their company yeah with 25 people in 30 days not all 25
asked to come work we did have to have some advertising and some marketing
which is all included in this course yes absolutely
fantastic well head there if this is something that has really resonated with
you and you want to know more and thank you so much for watching and
thank you Brandon I really appreciate it my pleasure thank you