Episode 54

Ezra McCarthy

Hello and welcome back to the Lawn Care Blueprint. Today we’re going over a very important topic. Something I hear time and time again is, I can’t find everyone. And I have a great question for you. What if hiring wasn’t your biggest headache, but your biggest advantage? So today we’re joined by none other than Troy and I’m working on this last name here, Latif. Did I get that right? 

Troy Latuff

No, it’s Troy Latuff.

Ezra McCarthy

Latuff okay, from Blue Collar Recruiting. And, for building trades team to launching a virtual trade school, today we’re going to be going over how to hire right, train well and build crews that not only come, but they stay at your business. Troy, sure. Great to have you today.

Troy Latuff

Thank you, Ezra, nice to meet you.

Ezra McCarthy

Yeah, and we’re going over your story here a little bit. Do you mind telling us how you went from a, I believe you said an insurance salesman to working in the blue collar industry and now serving the businesses through helping them hire.

Troy Latuff

Yeah, no, I love telling this story. I grew up in a very blue collar home before I even knew what blue collar was. My dad was a carpenter. My mom and dad both came from farming backgrounds and there was no one in my family that went off to college before I did.

But when I was a kid, remember asking my dad, hey, can I go on the job site with you? Can I help you? Can I help you build the deck? I wanted to bring my hammer and nails and go with my dad and he would never let me. He said, you’re not going to do this. You’re going to use your brain and not your back. So I went to college and did that. I always had kind of a little bit of a sales and business entrepreneurship in me. So, when I got done with school, I wanted to start a business. I found a business that was pretty easy to start from a money standpoint, because I didn’t have a lot of money. And it was an insurance business with Farmer’s Insurance. There’s a long story to that too. But I grinded that business out for some time. And I ended up having a client we had for a little while that owned a small plumbing business that was his grandfather’s. We became friends. And it turns out he was looking for a salesperson. 

And at that same time, I was really sick of selling insurance. So it’s a good work but it’s a tough one because it’s hard to stand out of the crowd with it because it’s all about price. He said, why don’t you sell that, come work with me and let’s see if we can work on this together. And so I came in, in that plumbing business and we did a little air conditioning at the same time and I did sales and then we just started growing that team and growing that business. So my skill sets were different than his and we grew a business that had seven people in it. By the time we, over the course of the next 10 years or so, we grew it to about 70 people in it. So we grew it pretty quickly and pretty fast. I became part owner of it. And so on, we ended up selling that company. 

And I’ve been in love with the skilled trades businesses and all different kinds of shapes and forms for the last 20 some years. When I left the corporate side, we sold our business then I went and worked for a big franchise system. The thing I heard more than everything else was always, I can’t find good people. I can’t find good people. So I thought, well, there’s a niche in this space here somewhere where we can fit in and help people out. As part of our success, our primary reason for success is we did a good job of finding talent, building that talent, and that talent stuck around. We built a good farm team, built a good bench, and many of the people that we hired way back when as an entry-level technician or plumber or whatever are still there today. In fact, the one that owns the business today that does somewhere $30, $35 million in revenue, he came in as an installation helper. That’s the best part. So helping business owners find talent, groom that talent, keep that talent, and help them build a real career in the trades is what I’m passionate about, what my passion’s for right now.

Ezra McCarthy

So no doubt you hear it all the time, that’s probably why people come to you and I’ve heard it all the time, is there’s no one out there. So what do you think is the biggest myth that business owners tell themselves about hiring when they face these hurdles?

Troy Latuff

I’m not sure that they always say there’s no one out there. I think they’re hard to find. Part of what we do that’s a little different and it’s just like anything. And the biggest challenge with most businesses is they post and pray.

Let me spend a bunch of money on Indeed or ZipRecruiter and those sorts of things and hope to God the perfect person applies. What you end up doing is, especially as a small business owner, you’re busy running trucks, you’re busy doing, in your case, cutting grass or doing whatever, all the different kinds of landscaping things that your businesses do in mind to. You don’t have a lot of time to be weeding through hundreds of applications knowing that 95% of them are either unqualified and inexperienced. Some have bad backgrounds, felony records, or things like that, people who don’t want to put in someone’s home. So you have to comb through all that, and it takes a lot of time and energy. It can put a bad taste in your mouth. Where most people have successes, if you ask any good business, they’re going to say, my best people have come from referrals. Referrals of friends, referrals of family, referrals of other people on my team. Essentially, as a recruiting firm, that’s what we do, is we just go find people that might be a good fit and see if they’d be interested in a new and better opportunity.

Ezra McCarthy

So it’s interesting, so are you contrasting the two different options? You said one is really kind of the post and pray as you described it and the other is more referral based. Is that kind of what you teach in your program or are there other methods? Cause say someone’s only maybe a two to 10 man crew like and you face that with the plumbing company at a certain point, they only have so many referrals. How does a smaller and a medium size of business depend on your frame deal with that? 

Troy Latuff

I think there’s a lot of things. I think you have to scream it from the rooftops everywhere you go. I think you should have a sticker on your truck that says I’m hiring. You should have on the back of your business card saying you’re hiring. I think it should be all over your website that you’re hiring good people, good talent. I think having your team giving them some sort of referral reward for that doesn’t mean everything, but it can go a long way. Posting jobs inside it. 

You know, if you have a vendor where you go buy materials or whatever, certainly could be a place. But I think you have to be in newsletters in communications to your customers. I think if everybody knows, people want to help and do business with people they like and trust. And this is really no different. If you have even a small contracting firm, to have 10 people in your business, how many customers would that business have? You tell me, what would you guess?

Ezra McCarthy

At that point probably, it depends if they’re landscape only or lawn care. Lawn care, it would be hundreds. Landscaping, it’d probably be less. And in fertilization, we control thousands. The numbers are pretty crazy.

Troy Latuff

And so what are you doing in that business to stay in touch with your homeowners? If you’re just sending them an invoice or coming out to visit once in a while, but I think good businesses, they’ll send out company newsletters, updates, refresh, and just letting people know that, hey, if you know anybody that’s interested in getting in our space, we’d love to talk to them. I think the biggest mistake that contractors do is they don’t, they wait until they need someone versus always being proactive with their talent, kind of thinking forward. What am I going to need three months from now versus what did I need yesterday?

Thinking about that and putting it out there, thinking about when school comes, when college kids are graduating from school in the spring, are we reaching out to them at career fairs and job fairs and different things like that. There’s our high schools and job fairs. There’s so many mechanisms that employers can do to get out there versus just posting jobs in Indeed, which is unfortunately what most do.

Ezra McCarthy

This is really interesting because what you’re almost describing to me is literally marketing for people, which I just don’t think people are doing. 

Troy Latuff

I never really thought about it that way either, but it really is. It’s marketing for them, but it’s no different than marketing. In my view, it’s getting that, it’s gaining a customer and keeping them. And it’s no different here. How do you get a new employee and keep them? How do you get an employee that starts as an entry level position and then owns the company someday? What do you do? That’s the beauty of building a business is that everything is easy when you have a good team that really likes working for you and all the things that come with that and the opportunities you might provide, not only for themselves professionally, but personally, different things like that. So people like to work, again, it’s no different from a customer standpoint. People work with who they like and trust, and it’s the same as customers.

Ezra McCarthy

Troy I’m curious about your opinion on this. This is something I’ve struggled with and I’ve kind of came down on the character side, but when you’re hiring for a skilled role, whatever that may be, do you go character or do you go skills and then look for a character secondary? And where have you kind of come down on this? Is it in either or how can you kind of structure looking for a team over there?

Troy Latuff

Well, it’s a two-fold question. Essentially, at the end of the day, it’s always, to me, it’s going to come down to character. Character is an inner quality. It’s a human quality that’s hard to teach. Technical is easy. I’m a big believer in hiring for character and teaching the technical. The hard part is when you’re looking at a resume, you’re not going to see character. You’re only going to see experience and qualifications. 

So the little things that most employers look at, in some cases they’re right, some cases you got to read between or ask them more questions. But sometimes the first thing you do, you see a resume and you see, as well as worked here for six months, and then he worked there for nine months and then here for two years. It doesn’t mean that you’re a bad guy. If everything else is okay and references check up, ask them what happened, just how they answer the question, how thorough they are. If it’s always someone else’s fault, that’s a quick character quality you might want to dig into. But I think first blush people are gonna look at experience first because that’s what’s on paper. But in my experience, if you’re gonna hire just on experience and not on character, you’re gonna get yourself in trouble.

Ezra McCarthy

What are some other ways, obviously duration of job experience and we’ve all seen the job hopping? You’ve heard much, but other than that, what are some other questions that you can use to screen for character? Because say you’re posting on some of these places, of course, we talked about referrals, that’s helpful as well. But of course, if you’re marketing, you’re trying to use all these materials to search for the right team member. What are some ways that you can screen, say you’ve got 20, 40, 50, 60.

You don’t want to interview all those people because that’s just going to be crazy. So how can you screen for character before they ever get to the interview process?

Troy Latuff

It can be a little bit tricky. Narrowing it down, so sometimes it is, you’re stuck with a little bit of that quality experience. You have to whittle it down somehow to a manageable amount. I have instructed my team too before. I’m fortunate to have a business where I’m not the first line doing it anymore. When you’re looking at the resume and seeing where they worked and what they did and how long they were there, that’s going to tell you some things. If you recognize some of the things that you could do too, especially with field pets. When you look at service businesses, it’s a little bit interesting. Because you can go to that business where they work, if you see where they worked, one of the tricks that we do too is you can go to that business’s website and take a look at who’s got good reviews. 

In some cases, you’re going to see technicians and landscapers or whoever where their names are called out every other time. Well, that’s a guy I want to talk to. They got a bunch of five-star reviews. But if the employer has a glass door of one star and this candidate is saying this place is horrible and I only worked there nine months, well there might be something to that story too. So it does take a little time in fairness or fair or not fair. You got to weed it down a little bit. Usually we try to get to a 10 or a dozen of people, especially depending on the role that we want to talk to and then kind of take it from there. And then one of the things too, once you get on it, is just having that visual speaking to them or do they show up on time? 

So when you do reach out to them, how timely do they respond? That will tell me a lot. If I reach out to them and we’re interested in talking in this, if they take two days to respond to me, they’re not very serious about looking for a job. If they respond in all caps, that’s weird. I mean, there’s little things that you can kind of measure to see what kind of person they really are. I ⁓ mean, there’s sometimes just little things.

Ezra McCarthy

Yeah, I’ve hired before and I remember this is one example. This was the first time I was really hiring. I was hiring this guy. He showed up at a job site like a couple days before the job was supposed to start. This was at a municipality. We were doing some painting and the guy’s like, and then the business called me. What is this guy doing here? And I’m just like, wow, this guy is a complete ding dong. He didn’t even call me and ask me. Anyway, needless to say, he did not work out. Yeah. I’ve had a lot. Don’t hire off Craigslist. That’s a hint I learned. I should have clued in, but.

Troy Latuff

Careful with the tools you’re using, that’s for sure.

Ezra McCarthy

Needless to say, but I remember literally thinking this was my first business and I was thinking to myself, man, I have no idea on how to hire. I didn’t really know about podcasts then. You don’t know what you don’t know. So some of these simple things like don’t hire on Craigslist. Ask for referrals. Yeah, it’s helpful.

Troy Latuff

Do they show up on time to the nail? One of the first questions I ask is, if they know they’re gonna be talking to me and they’re working for my company, and let’s just say, I’ll send you an invite, we’re gonna have a conversation, interview tomorrow at 10 o’clock. And the first question I’m gonna ask is, what do you know about our company? And if they don’t know or barely looked at it, then that tells me, I’ve gotten to the point where now the interviews last about 30 seconds after that. If they haven’t spent five minutes doing some research on the company they’re trying to get a job for, that tells me they’re not going to work very hard keeping the job once they have it.

Ezra McCarthy

Maybe this is a little bit of an odd question, but how can we find people that are invested in you as a business? And what I mean by that is when you ask them, okay, what can you tell us about a business? How have you found a good way to get people so they come in and they say, Hey Troy, I’ve been researching blue collar recruiting. I know your backstory. I know your family or not in a weird way, but you know, I know all about you.

Troy Latuff

Locking you? Yeah.

Ezra McCarthy

Yeah, and I want to work for you and I’m going to keep pestering you until I work for you rather than you having to pass to them until they come to work.

Troy Latuff

Yeah, well, it’s interesting. Just in the last two weeks, I always ask people, what do you think of the business? What do you like about it? What do you have questions about? What would you do if it was your company? I like to ask that question because I’m a business owner that I don’t claim to know everything.

I think I’ve been around the block, but I’m a sponge. I like to pick people’s brains and see what they think, because other people have pretty good ideas. They’re not all good, but if you talk to enough people, you come up with some pretty good ideas. So I’ll ask people all the time, what would you do differently? What would you like about the website? mean, just things like that, just to get people to talk. And sometimes when you ask them something that’s not an interview question, you get more of a casual conversation started, which is interesting. 

But we had a guy a couple of weeks ago that applied to be a recruiter for us. Good guy. Nothing wrong with them at all. We just didn’t have a spot. We didn’t have a need at this moment. And he came back to my director of operations and said, hey, I’m looking at your business. I have a new angle I want to pitch to you that I think I can fit. It was more of a recruiter slash salesperson. Doesn’t matter how it ended up, but he started on Tuesday. Because I’m like, well, that’s an innovative approach. It’s something I hadn’t thought about before, so let’s give that a shot. I like people that come with ideas and make a job, make themselves stand out in the company and see what happens.

Ezra McCarthy

I’m curious how did he find out about your business?

Troy Latuff

We work pretty closely with, have you heard of Skill Bridge? 

Ezra McCarthy

I have not.

Troy Latuff

So in the military for the transitioning military folks, whether they’ve been in 20 years or two years, there’s an opportunity for them to, as they exit, the military will help them find a job. and help them give them a little bit of time. In some cases, if they qualify for it, they can participate in something called Skill Bridge. And what that does is they’re still, in this case, this guy is still employed by the military, but he’s kind of like an intern for us. What he’s doing is we’re going to hire him when it comes out of the Skill Bridge program, but I don’t have to pay him until he’s out of the military here in about 60 days. Which is a really good deal for business owners all over the country. And we’re launching a new program called Boots to Blue Collar based off of this initiative. So yeah, pretty cool.

Ezra McCarthy

What really is a recruiter? So say there’s a business listening in that said, hey, maybe we’re at a point where we need skilled labor or landscape or et cetera. How can a blue collar recruiter help a business and what could they learn from a business like yours?

Troy Latuff

It’s funny when we started this, and again, coming from the blue collar space, owning blue collar businesses and managing them and being part of this world for a long time, I always try to look at it through the lens of the business owner and the candidate, of course, but making sure that everybody wins. It’s okay if there’s not a lot of businesses that I’ve been a part of where we really don’t have a bad day because when we have success, well, this person gets a cool new job. And most people, what, how many jobs that mean anything to someone?

Do you have in a lifetime, two or three? So to be a part of that is pretty cool, a big win. For the business owner, it’s nice to have that, hey, we get to be a part of you getting a brand new hire put in place and it helps move your business forward. That’s a good thing. And of course we win because my team wins and they get there, we get paid, I guess. So at the end of the day, that’s okay too. That part of it, so working with us, we try to build it to work off so that everybody wins in this scenario. And we have things where it’s as, we have a retainer model for bigger businesses that might want us to recruit for them full time as a department. 

All the way down to, I just need one general manager. I just need one landscaper that really knows what they’re doing. Can you help me with that? And we kind of have what we call a contingency model where you don’t pay us anything unless we successfully find someone that you like and you hire and they start working for you. It’s not an attempt to hire anything like that. It’s a fully vetted candidate or down to a posting service. So we offer a, what we’ve done is kind of taken an aggregated approach to ZipRecruiter and Indeed and simplified it. So if you say, I’m looking for a landscaper with these qualifications, experience, and so on, we’ll build a unique job description. We’ll push it out on our website. And then it hits all of the major job boards at once. Indeed, Zip and all of them. You don’t really have to do anything. We plug you into our portal. 

So everything kind of comes to you from one place and it’s about one third the price of you pushing it out on ZipRecruiter by itself. And that’s an entry way just to get people to get to work with us, to get used to us. And that’s a nice way to keep their jobs posted online all the time. And then lastly is just the trade school. We don’t have anything currently that fits perfectly into the landscaping business that you guys are in, but we do have some soft skills classes, we have some different management development classes that we’re building out and that sort of thing too. We want to be a business. I’m not looking to be 10,000 clients. I want to have a bunch and we do a really good job servicing them in all different kinds of ways.

Ezra McCarthy

Now with hiring, obviously this is your business, keeping people employed and finding them. What do you see as some of the main reasons that quality people here move from businesses and try to find another job? A lot of times, at least in our head, we may think, okay, it’s money. But what do you find is the main reason that these high quality, high caliber character people are transitioning? 

Troy Latuff

We’ve been talking about this, it comes back to the human factor. You’re right, some people leave because of money or at least they say it’s because of the money. In some cases, it is because of the money. There are people that leave a really good job that they love, but somebody’s willing to throw a bunch of money at them. So I don’t blame them for that. But that doesn’t happen very often. Most of the time, people leave because they feel undervalued, underappreciated, they don’t listen to, there’s no advancement opportunities, those sorts of things. 

If they still feel like they’re stuck, that’s tough, but that’s the same in any relationship. You get married to someone and you feel that way, it’s not gonna last very long either. I think it might be weird to say, you said stalking early on, so I’ll give you a different phrase that we say sometimes that might be just as weird, but it’s true, is when people work for me, it’s kind of like we’re getting married. I’m not getting married to them, but I want to build that relationship like we are, and I know being married to my bride for, since 1996, pretty good run, it’s built off of communication.

There isn’t anything we can’t resolve as long as we’re talking. And I think if you treat your employees that way, you’re going to be in pretty good shape.

Ezra McCarthy

I’m sure you’ve worked for some businesses or at least been around them for a while if they come back to user services. People that are just doing really well. People that have worked someplace for five, 10, 15, 20 years. And people enjoy it. Not some of these, I don’t have any skills so I’m staying here to get a paycheck. What is keeping them around? Those listeners can say, okay, I want to model after this these companies Troy’s talking about.

Troy Latuff

I think it’s those things. What’s hard to do sometimes is when you’re the CEO, the chief everything officer of a small company, it’s hard to take that hat off sometimes and really just put yourself in your team’s shoes of what they’re experiencing every day. But sometimes I think it’s called your blind side. And I think one of the best things that an employer can do to really uncover what’s going on inside their business is to take the guard down and have a sit down one-on-one conversation with someone and make it very unthreatening and there’s no, all it is a listening session of what would you do differently? What can we do differently? What does this business need? What do you need? What does Charlie need? What does, you know what I mean? Getting their opinion. 

Sometimes you don’t get it on the first run, but if you make a practice of it where you meet with them every couple of weeks or a month until things start to, they feel comfortable opening up and they feel like their opinions matter and they see that you actually implement some of the things they suggest those little things that don’t cost you anything go a long way. Does that answer your question? Sorta? I mean, to me, that’s a big thing. 

Ezra McCarthy

Yeah. That’s helpful. And I’m curious for retention, what role do you see benefits playing into it? And especially you as yourself, I believe you mentioned when you started working with that company, they were doing, what did you say? It was around 10 employees or something. That business. So seven, when he started, I have a feeling they weren’t offering just an insane benefit package. And then as you grew, you saw that transition. Cause I presume by the time they got later, you had something. So where do you see the benefits playing into that? And then seeing the growth that you did in your previous business.

How did that factor into retention for team members?

Troy Latuff

Yeah. Seven. 

Sometimes it is a tricky one for smaller businesses because you’re trying to lure someone away that has three weeks vacation and full benefits and 401k and all this kind of stuff and sometimes that’s hard. Usually if you think about it and really peel it back a little bit and uncover it, the question is what are you getting? So if someone is genuinely interested, show me what you have. Because there are resources that you can go and help them basically to set up your own health insurance benefits and a small company can be really restrictive and expensive and I get it, I’m not a big company today. So it’s expensive. 

I suppose if you are a big company, it’s still expensive. Regardless, it’s expensive. I’m gonna pay X amount of dollars and for your hourly wage, we’re gonna agree upon your PTO, which is fine and whatever. That’s the easy stuff. When it comes to health benefits, let’s see what you have. But for small business owners, one of the best things is that there are programs depending on the person, if they’re married or unmarried. A lot of times it’s a bigger deal. They’re older than 25 and they can’t get under their parents’ plan. And especially if they have kids or if they’re married, what do you have? What we’ll do is try to find something equivalent to what they had on the healthcare.gov. Because if you’re a candidate does qualify for healthcare.gov benefits, if your employer doesn’t offer it. 

And if they can buy something, we sit down and look at it together. And if they buy something, then we’ll agree upon how much of that I’ll contribute to. And it gets them to the same place essentially and you’re not locked into a big fat policy with UnitedHealthcare or something. But I think those kinds of things are helpful. I think certainly 401k is setting up something. There’s little bonus plans and that sort of thing. Younger people are less worried about 401k and more worried about how much can I get a bonus if I do something. I’m a big believer. I’m a capitalist at heart and I’m a big believer in performance. I’m okay with salaries and hourly and, I like adding commissions, gifts and bonuses to people that perform. And you can tie that to lots of things. You can tie it to sales, you can tie it to reviews, you can tie it to whatever, all kinds of different metrics depending on the business and what they are, what kind of revenue things they can talk about, add on services and so on.

Ezra McCarthy

This has been really good, Troy. If someone’s interested, especially that one service sounds really interesting about pushing the jobs out, where can people find you if they want to learn more about you or perhaps there’s some resources you can point them to help them?

Troy Latuff

The best place is just go straight to our website. You’ll see everything I just talked about there at www.thebluecollarrecruiter.com and you can poke around and see the premium postings. That’s what that’s called. We have employer services where you want to start or just go straight to the contact form and all of those contact forms come to me and my sales team and we’re happy to talk to anybody you send her away.

Ezra McCarthy

Well thanks Troy, that’s a wrap and what a lot of value there. So if you’re curious about leveling up your hiring, hopefully you took some notes. Feel free to check out Troy and we’ll catch you on the next one.