I had about 25 years worth of experience in the construction industry, but I've also had experience back on the other side of the business. One of the things that I can tell you is that I am probably, when I talk to people within my consortium, I tell them that I'm more of a soldier who's came up through the ranks. If there was something that was going wrong, I probably was one of the first ones to make one of those mistakes as we walk through what we do. I do have a parts and service focus. I have consulted with OEMs and with dealerships all across North America and Canada, the U.S. I actually did one in England as well. And I am going to be a facilitator coming up for the Level 2 Parts and Service Managers program that AED is going to have in Denver, Colorado in September. So our agenda today is going to be on recruiting tips. Recruiting tips that will give you an advantage in hiring the best people that we can possibly find out there, making the initial period after the hire smooth and easy, gaining productivity from your new hire sooner than later. It is a must that when we recruit successful candidates, we really need to think back on some of the hiring we did over the years. I look back on some of the ones I've had, and I can tell you who the successful ones were, and I can tell you the mistakes, and I can tell you some of the costs of some of the mistakes that were made by hiring those type of people. We have to be as meticulous as we can when we're getting new hires. We have to really look at it more like we're buying an asset. If we were to go out and spend a half a million dollars on a piece of equipment, if we were to go out and spend $80,000 to $150,000 or more on a service truck, we'd take a look at it in the way that we'd be a little disciplined in calculating our return on investment, trying to do some shopping, hopefully, and how we would install that piece of equipment into the organization to help it make money. I really believe that we need to hire with that same caution as we walk forward with things that we do. Effective recruiting and hiring an employee, it takes a lot of work, and it's well worth the work. If you don't put the work into it, what I found in the past is that you get some real big surprises down the road, so it is really, really a must to go out and put the work into the efforts. There's competition out there. We want the best. You need to find them in a way to rise above the competitive companies. We'll talk a little bit about that as we walk through. Take a look at the need to map out a specific plan to hire and retain those parts in the service professionals as we hire them. To start, what we need to do before we even try and hire anybody is to understand and make sure that we have really good job descriptions. We need to have job descriptions that are clear, that can talk about what we want to do when we hire somebody. We need to know as much for the company what we want to hire as we do for the candidate and what he needs to know. The best way I know to do that is to have your job description updated, to have it sitting in front of you when you're writing up your resume or you're writing up your job description online or wherever we're going to put it that we'll talk about. If we have those ahead of time, then we'll know where we're at. We need to make sure that we have a hiring budget set out, that we have a timeline set out. A timeline is going to be based on how aggressive we are, it's going to be based on by the need for a start date, whether we need somebody today, whether we need somebody last week, whether we need somebody a month from now. We really want to go out. We want to search for high-end talent. We want people that can make a difference. People that make a difference are people that management and the rest of the staff want to work with. So we really want to get those kinds of people and attract those kinds of people into the organization. You need to understand the value of your dealership. The willingness to pay is there. We don't really want to go out and hire people for money. People we hire for money will leave for money, and that's a constant as we go through. But we do need to understand that we have something in the dealership or at the store to offer those people. No matter what department you're hiring for in your dealerships, these guys will get more fulfillment if we can work together to recruit a high-end guy. One of the things that I like to do when I go up to recruit and when I start to look at new hires and I start to do interviews is I've always done them in what I call sort of a team approach. One of the things that I like to do is I like to set up a series of open-end questions. We rate them, and we weight the questions based on the job description from being very weak to being very strong. As a committee of hiring, what we do is we take those, and each one does his analysis, and he gives it a weighting on the question as to the answers that we get back. What we find in the end is we can take a look at those scores, and normally what we'll find is that in the end, we have a pretty good clue of the people that we want to look at again, the people that we can really consider to hire because they obviously are weighted, and those weighted questions have brought them to the top of the pile. So when we're doing that, it's a very simple process. If you need questions, we can get you some questions. I just did one actually for my church when we were hiring a secretary, and it worked out really well. We had four committee members. They all wanted to be engaged. They were all engaged with the questions, and in the end, I think we got the best candidate that we could ever possibly get from answering all those questions. What we find is when we get that ideal candidate, it's more fun, it's more productive for the entire team to work with, and it helps us as a company set a higher standard. So as we walk through the recruiting tips, the one thing that I've always tried to do is hire somebody that I know is smarter than I am. I've tried to surround myself with those type of people because I know that success of the company and the success that we need to have comes from those types of people. So a little bit about how we go about recruiting. We need to have a culture within our organization. There's a need to show that the employee that we want to hire that he's going to have opportunities, that we're going to develop his skills so that he can serve our company well in the future as well. So find a way to create that culture of business. There's a whole bunch of good companies out there that have a great culture. I mean, Google is famous for their flex schedules, Zappos for their empowered corporate culture. I mean, there's a whole bunch of them out there that are focusing on differentiation and promoting products and services, but the same principle works when we recruit. The more potential employees are going to know about your business before they walk through the door for an interview, the better they're going to fare in their interview and the better you're going to fare because they really, really want to work for you. Let's talk a little bit about service technicians. It's a must, a must to get closely involved with the vocational schools. If we're hiring techs, that's where most of them are going to come from. Try to hire top performers early so they can gain their commitment to completing the school curriculum. Try putting them to work during their break time to evaluate early work ethic and timeliness and knowledge when you get those new ones in. When I've, in the past, been involved with the schools, especially vocational schools, one of the things that we've always, always tried to do is make sure that we've had our equipment into those places. It's so much easier to hire these types of people when they've been working on your equipment. That's one of the things that we've always tried to do or I've always tried to focus on is making sure that we were involved with the vocational school and that we could have our equipment into those schools. When they work on competition stuff, they learn more about the competition than yours. What we really find really great is to have them come right out of there and already be familiar and it just cuts down that training process quite a little bit. The other thing we want to do is we want to make sure that we have job descriptions varied for different technicians. We'll talk more about that next week in the webinar. Job descriptions for a service tech can be very varied as we walk through. You need to know the level of tech you're looking for. Brief service techs out of recruiting school are going to be probably trainees to start out with and really need to have a career path put in front of them. You can do a career path five or six different ways. Again, we'll talk about that a little bit next week. You need to have that because too high an expectation is going to result in a disaster. As a service manager, what I found was I could get those people in, give them those expectations. About 50% of them would drop out before two years was up and they'd drop out because maybe they weren't getting the pay that they thought they should get. Many were relegated to doing the really basic stuff that they were doing. Not having a mentor or a teacher in a service manager or a shop foreman or a lead technician really caused people to walk away from those types of jobs really quick within the industry and within my job or in my shop when I had my shop. We want to make technician recruiting a priority. The reason we want to do that is this is the profit center of your company. I'm a firm, firm believer in parts and service being the profit generators for the company. I spent most of my career in parts and service in the aftermarket. I have a really good understanding of where I want to be. I have really good outstanding ideas on absorption rates as we walk through, on tech recovery rates. We need to know those. We need to make sure that the tech we're hiring knows those so that we can function as a profit center. Again, when we hire those people, we want to hire them in and make sure that we're going to be able to function when we walk through. We want to take a look at our service image. Take a look at it from the outside. Just talk to people and find out what your service image really is out there in the marketplace because it can be a little surprising as to what people think and how they think of your service. And really, we want to be known as best-in-class service if we can get to that point. We want to remake our service image. I mean, in a lot of our businesses, it's not the most attractive position in the building to be in, to be a service tech. Old-school ways where it was a dirty job. It was something that was necessary just to keep the machinery running. But we want to make it a technological advancement for people. We want to make it a career that's a profession, to make it a real professional job for these types of people. If we do that, we can attract really good talent. Caterpillar do a great job. Go online sometime and take a look at Caterpillar's ads for careers. They have ads on there of people, employees, that talk about the company. And they talk about where they can go and where career moves can go and where their career path can take them and how they can see the world. It's just a great opportunity to take a look at somebody. And one of the things that they say is they need the ability to attract talent for up-and-comer seeking a professional career. So we need to take that opportunity when we get out there to really take a look at how we're going to attract these new young people. We want to take all the opportunities we get to get in front of the younger generations of these schools, too. We want to help create a little bit of excitement and awareness for career opportunities. I mean, every chance that you have to have one of your service managers, one of your parts managers, or somebody else within the organization go out and talk to one of these vocational schools, take that opportunity to do it. Because some of the best people that I've hired over the years have came through from just having somebody go and present at their school. What are we looking for? I guess if I was looking for a good candidate, Forbes magazine a few years ago did a poll. And three of the top priority traits for hiring anybody were professionalism, about 86% polled that professionalism was number one, high-energy people, about 78%, two, confidence, 61%. So we want to look for those qualities. And I think it was Warren Buffett that said, you know, somebody once said they were looking for people to hire and they were looking for qualities. And they wanted the top three qualities. They said they were integrity, intelligence, and energy. And they said if you didn't have the first, the other two would kill you. And I really, truly believe that, that we do need to have integrity at the top of our list, both ways, company, and we'll talk a little bit about that here in a few slides, but also in the people we hire. So again, when we put together part of our questions, we want to really make sure that we have questions that are directed towards integrity and the professionalism of the different people. Parts counter people. One of our favorite sources for this position is to take a look, maybe go out to parts auto stores, to different places such as Napa, look at the people up there and say, you know, are they going to, who's the go-to guy for answers? Who are they relying on for questions? How is that counter person interacting with the customers? Are they hustling around? Working at your dealership is a step up for most of their career if you have everything in place that we need to have in place. And most of those skills are transferable to your dealership. So we're looking for those people with those transferable skills. We want to develop a job description for this position as well. One of the typical ads that was placed years ago in a paper was for a parts counter person, excuse me, I'm twisting my tongue here, that one of the most important ads I've seen for an important job was in a local paper. It said, wanted, parts counter person, must be reliable, self-motivated with the ability to multitask. Additionally, sales skills, inventory management experience, customer service expertise and a positive attitude. Also requires professional appearance along with the ability to work with both internal and retail customers. Excellent communication skills, effective listening skills, along with the ability to work under pressure. That was an ad that I saw, an ad that I probably placed a few times, and what we found was that ad's looking for more than a counter person. It's looking for a professional. And if you really think about it, probably a trained professional for that job. But what we find is it's pretty common for parts people to come in with no formal education, to just give them a sink or swim, trial by fire, you know, move them in and say, here's the job, here's what we're going to do, and just leave them in that job. And that's a job that can make or break your business. So we really need to get understanding and to get into some more recruiting tips on how we can get into there. If we're hiring that type of person that has no formal training, that has the skill sets that we think we can work with and that we can train, what we need to know next is whether they're going to be a good fit. Southwest Airlines use the term, I think they say, hire for attitude and train for skills. So if we look for the right personality, we can get somebody that's going to come in and they're going to fit the team approach. And as parts counter person, we really need to have them come in and really be part of the team. And it's probably a job where, as I say, they're going to be focused on the counter, they're going to be dealing with service techs. It's a real job where they really have to interact with a lot of different people. And it's something that we need to look at. Let's just take a brief moment here and just look at the attitudes and skills of people in the parts personnel, the top 10 for all intensive purposes. What we think they need is a desire and an ability to help other people succeed. We think they need an ability to empathize with customers, even the upset ones that come in. We need them to stay cool under pressure while showing they care. Diffuse upset customers and can meet their needs. Follow through and demonstrate accountability. Work to find the right solution without the need to be right all the time. Strive for excellence and doesn't expect perfection from customers. Seeks his or her work as a profession, not as servitude. Strong cross teamwork and negotiation skills so that they can work with the parts department as well as the service department and the sales department. And can live within the rules and adapt to customer needs. What I found in business is that there's a real perception when people come up to our parts counter. And perception is about 90% of what's going to happen at that counter. And what we need to do is have our customers believe that there's a perception that we are there to do everything within our power to help them with their needs. So perception to me is a real big thing when we're talking about parts person at the counter. We can talk a little bit about them as we go a little further. And maybe we'll just mention a few other things if we have time here a little bit later as far as parts personnel are concerned and mentors and different things. But we'll move on now to referral programs. Many dealerships offer some type of referral program. Your dealership probably has one. Employees being compensated for bringing a prospective new hire. So is it a well-known program within your company? Is the amount of referral worth the effort for your people within the company? Just a couple of questions to ask yourself. What we find is that current employees sharing job openings with family and with their friends is a key component to getting good people. Because they're probably only going to refer the ones most likely that'll fit into your company culture. And most of the selling for your business is already done. The current employee can convey the successes and the high potential that you have within organizations. So you have those built-in people, which I like to call employee evangelists. And we need to inspire them. And to inspire them, we need to make sure that we have a good program and that we do pay well. What we find is if we don't inspire employee evangelists, what we sometimes get is we'll get employees and ex-employees venting on the internet, which I'm sure that we've all had in our time, about something negative that happened within the company. And they can be probably the worst venters out there. The real problem, though, is that few companies provide inspiration or incentives for employees to share their personal stories. Caterpillar do a real good job online, as I said, on having people tell their personal stories. I think it's a real powerful tool if we're hiring people to have those personal stories. One of the ideas that one of the colleagues off the internet had said to me was that what you can do is you can do the same thing with summer interns. If you have an intern program or you're hiring an intern, you can get them to create a document with their experience. If it's a positive one, they can share it. They're very impactful, especially if you're hiring more interns next year for the job. You can give you a sense of what your company is being like for people to come in that are new that may not know as much and what they can learn. What we find is that that's a real good way to get them out there. Caterpillar do it with current employees and as I say, I think it works tremendous to get people. Social media, this is the ultimate for the young people in the workforce today. More than me, I'm a little older, and I'm not the best with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, but these are potential sites when we start to look for people where we can go and we can find good people. We need to make sure that we have a mobile app as well. We want to make sure that your company webpage, when you go to it, people can navigate on it and make sure that your job ads are prominent. We want to get them up close to the front page and as easy to find as we can because if we can incorporate your recruitment effort with social presence, then we can build up better relationships with those younger people. It also helps to show the kind of company you're going to be. They can read a little bit more about you and what it'd be like to work for your company when we have this kind of social presence out there. We know that more and more people are using their phones and mobile devices. A lot of people are getting rid of their landlines at home. If you want to meet today's workforce at its own level, you got to make sure that you can get these job ads and make sure they're optimized and available through mobile because that's where you're going to get the young people today. The other thing about having these types of things, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, is that we can have our own network and we have our own connectors. We can have people that we know are high potential candidates and we have people that we can maintain as a list of connectors. What connectors are, are people who aren't really suited for your workplace but you know that they're high performers and they tend to have a tendency to hang around with high performers. It's a lot faster if you have those connectors where you can pick up the phone, you can email, you can use your social media to let them know that you're looking for somebody and sometimes it's a lot cheaper than running ads or trying to get recruiters in to get people involved. Just think about how you could use social media and whether you're using it in the right step now to get those kind of people in. Again, we need to paint the picture for success. You need to have all your processes and procedures mapped out in writing. It is a disaster if you do not write them out. It shows organization, it's a great training tool for you as a company, for the people and the employees coming in, whether we're just trying to get them into the door, whether they get to know more about what we're doing, provide clear job descriptions, explain the compensation plan in detail, especially the bonus structure and share your training plan. You have to have a plan in place for anybody coming through the door on a step-by-step basis of where they can go within the company. Now, some of them won't want to be any more departs counter people, but we do need to have a career path in place for them to have a look at. Remember that we, as employers, need to stand out in an interview as much as prospective employees. Make sure that you as the interviewer make strong statements for your company. So pick out the strong points, the things that you do well, and make sure you emphasize those to the prospective employees that you want to hire. They can get a picture of what they're looking for if you describe the position and potential that they can have. And you'll know better if they fit the position as you go through it. A lot of companies have more than one job description for technicians. Again, if you're hiring that person from the vocational school, much, much more different than hiring somebody as a level four or a class A technician to come in and work that's got seven or eight or ten years' experience. So we need to really define what we're looking for and probably have more than one job description And if we were doing a service department management course, what we'd talk about is how we'd set up that career path, how we'd look at absorption rates for them, how we'd look at recovery rates depending on where they are. And again, we'll talk about that in future classes as we do on-hand seminars. We just don't have time to do that today on this phone call. So offer competitive salaries and benefits, but remember that people who come on board for strictly money will leave for money. We find that time and time again, but we need to have important pay plans along with competitive benefits. If we don't have competitive benefits, we're going to get ourselves in trouble right from the start. We need to be where people want to be and they want to get into those benefits. So are you selling your dealerships? If we have all that stuff prepared, we show prospective quality candidates, we have our act together, and they can visualize that we can succeed, then we need to move on to take a look at the next step, which is, you know, how we use the information as a recruiting tool. So it's important for you to market your company, hype up your industry, no matter what it is. Make sure your efforts and your company brand are out there because they can mean a lot to potential employees. If you can market your company as cutting edge, market it as cutting edge. If you want to market it as being top in service, market it as top in service. If you want to market it as being latest in technology, that we have all the latest and greatest tools to move out and fix things, that's what we do. And what we find when we have those kind of things out there is we can draw more motivated potential candidates because a lot of them want to work for somebody that has that advantage, that has that one thing that nobody else has. But also make sure that your dealership offers integrity. You have to offer integrity. Do what we say we'll do when we say we'll do it attitude is necessary, absolutely necessary in our business today. It's not a time for beating around the bush either, telling potential employees what they want to hear. We just don't need to have people come in just to fill a position. We want to tell them the bar is going to be set high and that our entire business works hard and they're going to expect a lot. What we find by just getting that up in front of people, we find it's a great filter for people who may be a little questionable if they're a job seeker. What we find is it's really great to get that question out on your expectations of what you expect from somebody. If we can do that, as I say, then we're starting to weed out some of the bottom feeders and we're getting into that top potential bunch of people that we want to get involved with. We want to be ready for the employee, day one. Latest research shows that if we have things set up, workstation readiness, computer access, etc., and we're not prepared and the new employee doesn't feel welcome, then there's a 90% chance that that new employee will leave your dealership within 18 months. We know that employee turnover is expensive and creates more work. Part of my 40 years on the job, I had a job I started one time. First day on the job, went in, worked all day, 5 o'clock came, actually 4.30 came, and my boss and a couple of other salesmen decided that they were going out on a sales call and left. And I'd been working all day, not much employee interaction, and 5 o'clock came and nobody came. 6 o'clock came, nobody came back. I'm the only person left in the whole dealership. And I'm wondering, this is my first day on the job, what am I supposed to do? And 7 o'clock came, and I was getting kind of tired of working for the day, so I wanted to go home, and nobody came back. So I had no key, they had an alarm system, I set the alarm system, locked the front door, went out the back and jumped over the fence and went home. And it wasn't a real good experience for first day on the job. So what we need to do is make sure that we keep day one really special for employees. Let them know that they're really wanted, that they're really needed. Take them out for lunch. Do those kind of things that get them out there. Get an action plan together and keep it in front of them as we walk through the first day and the second day, and get them engaged and get them interested in the different things that we're going to do as a business. Make sure they have all their accesses done in advance. Review the onboard training program on what the expectations are, where you're going to take them, what their career path is. Introduce a new employee to everybody in the dealership and the location. We really want you to make the first day a really big deal. What I suggest, if you don't have it, is a new employee handbook. The question I guess that you can ask yourself, do you have one at the dealership? Is it worthwhile to have one at the dealership? What we find sometimes is people incorporate their benefits and they'll incorporate career plans, they'll incorporate all those types of things, access IDs and different things of the need into a personalized book with the employee's name on it so that everything is there and it's all available for them to have. So again, let's make sure that we have everything ready so that we can move ahead. Training. How do we make it effective? One of the biggest ways that we can do that is to assign them a mentor. And what we mean by a mentor is a co-worker, not a direct supervisor that will watch over the people, answer their questions, help them with their progress in the position. And I know from past experience, everybody needs to have a coach of some kind. If you're going to work as a team, the best teams have good coaches. We need to make sure we have the right people that are in these jobs. We really need to make sure that those mentors are the types of people who are the ones with that positive attitude that can really help that employee and are a role model for the employee. I had a field tech one time that I would send out to a job and I went out with him one time and the first thing that he said to the customer over the excavator that was broke down was, not a problem, we have that kind of issue all the time. And I sort of cringed and I'm going, that's not really a good thing, a positive statement to be telling our customers that we have those kind of problems all the time. So again, we have to watch. I wouldn't want him to be a mentor for any of my service tech or for my parts people. So again, think about who the mentors are within your organization. And if you don't have anybody, there are some tips that I could give you or that Rebecca can send to you on what a mentor should be and what it shouldn't be. And we probably won't have time to get into them today, but if you want that, just send an email to Rebecca and we can send those out on the top ten attributes of a mentor. So again, we know that this part counter person is going to be filling one of the most important jobs in the organization, but we throw them out there and we normally give them a sink or swim mentality when we know that they can make or break our business. So again, how do we train them? What do we train them in? And I'm just going to run through it quickly because, as I say, we don't have time in this conference call to go through everything. But what we'd like, if you have a mentor, maybe thinking in your head, I'm not sure who that is, let's just think about these soft and basic selling skills that we need to practice and they need to practice every day. These are the people that you want to mentor and these are the mentoring questions that you really need to look and have answers. One of the things is, do customers get addressed within 30 seconds of walking into your business? You want to greet them with eye contact and welcome. Eye contact invokes trust, verbally lets them know that they're going to be taken care of because sometimes they're on the phone, sometimes they're busy. But just a short pause and a, hello, how are you? I'll be with you in a minute, goes a long way with a customer when they come in. Take I don't know out of your vocabulary. We just don't want our customers to have our parts counter people say, I don't know. If it's true, it can cost us a lot of empty service days in the shop, cost us a lot of money, cost us a lot of inconvenience customers, so let's not have that in the vocabulary of any of our mentors or any of our employees. Have all new counter personnel learn as much as possible of your customers. There's a quote that I use, I think it's on my LinkedIn page, it says, people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. It's that perception that I talked about when we were dealing with people at the parts counter, that perception that we're doing everything within our power to get them the parts they need. Make sure that your mentor and your employee have effective listening skills, that they can ask for an order, that they upsell successfully. These are things that we want to be taught in a day-to-day, hour-to-hour basis. Have a mentor teach them how to handle potential situations, and I've been through a few of those in my life, where we've had potential situations and unkept customer expectations. Proper communication of warranties, refunds, and return policies. Discussion of delivery options and schedules. Some companies give discounts if you can wait for your parts. Some people give discounts for stock orders, for multiple orders, for quantity orders, so take a look at how we can order things and give the customer the best deal out there that we can give them. Pay attention to the details. A must in a parts counter job. If we have misplaced orders, or spelling mistakes, or things that just cause the order to go bad, we're not going to have that chance to keep those customers coming back for the long term. So again, the coach or mentor should be somebody with a coaching attitude, should be patient, willing to help, not authoritative. Those are the kind of people that understand our customers, that understand that business of the parts counter better than anybody else. Those are the people we want to be those mentors. We also want to provide progress reviews. Daily for the first little bit, weekly for the first quarter, and examine how they perform frequently conducted tasks and jobs. Remember that people who understand what the business is, and whether they're doing a good job, are going to be more satisfied, they're going to be more motivated within the organization. Leads to better manager-employee relations. So have some kind of specific cycle or steps, with the primary purpose being on measurement and continuous improvement. I'm a great guy to say that if you can't measure it, it's not going to improve. We can measure where we're at, we can measure where we want to be on the bar, we can measure where we want to be in the future, and if we can measure it, we can gauge it, and we can keep that employee much, much more engaged within the business and keep them moving ahead. So it should be nonstop. It should be an activity and a progressive step review that sort of helps them determine what they need to improve. We also want to get their feedback to us, because new employees are probably really good eyes to have within the company, because they are some of the people who can tell you what is good and what's bad about it. One of the things that I like about new employees is that not only do we want to have a mentor or a coach, and have that down mentoring, but I'd like to have them up mentor, which means sometimes new people with new ideas can help those mentors with their ideas, and we can actually get better improvement and get better design implementation and really have a good organizational step to helping that employee feel like he really is engaged within your organization when you implement some of the things that they want to do. So we really want that upward mentor. We want to engage those employees. So parts and service, hands on. We want them to become familiar with your product. That's a basis for everything. Component location, maintenance, serviceability, operational features. Make sure you allow new tax and parts people the opportunity to run the equipment. If you have equipment within your yard, if it's something that they can do within the back shop, have them do it in the back shop. If it can be done in the parts department, do it in the parts department. This progresses training for those visual learners more than anything else will out there. So, again, some of us think they don't need technical information, but we need it, and we need that ability to understand and combine with what's out there. And sometimes it just helps when they're talking to people, when they know what the machine and what that component is or what it looks like when they're talking to those guys on the phone or in person at the counter. Engaged and productive employees are more committed. If the employee is familiar with the product sold, they have a better opportunity to talk to you. to the customers, again, about how their machines are working, what their machines will do, how they can make their machines work better, and they're going to build better customer relationships. Coach others in the serving attitude. Create a culture in your dealership that attracts and keeps the best performers in parts and service. We feel an attitude of servitude is important, is critical to the coach. But remember, it's not one of the important attitudes when we're actually dealing with those young people and we want to hire them to bring them in to coach or to train other young people. We want the other young people to really get that confidence built before they get into that attitude of servitude, but we really need it in a coach. I've been on many teams, and the coach needs to have that attitude to really get across to the players on the team. So he needs to be courteous, friendly. Respect, keep things positive. Have an attitude of helping others. That's what we want. We want the customers coming back in. Once we have them trained up right, those new employees are going to be much easier to retain than they are if we don't give them any training whatsoever. Questions. Questions are a good thing. Makes an employee feel comfortable. Helps with the job. Existing employees need to remember they were once new, and we have to make sure that everybody within the team has a willingness to help out. Employees who become capable of answering customer questions, they're the people that the customers go to. There's always go-to guys at the counter, so we need to make them capable of answering those customers' questions, building those relationships. Employees who understand the business complain less, they're more satisfied, more motivated to succeed, and it leads to better relationships, again, within the organization. Strong competition to attract good people. It's hard work to recruit and train. We have to put the effort and the time into it for your recruiting and your training processes to succeed in a solid investment. Rebecca has a polling question, I believe. Question number one, Rebecca, that you could put out there for a poll, and just to make sure that as a company, do you have what it takes to attract that strong competition? Do you have the stuff that you have to have in place to recruit and train those top performers, those job descriptions, those different things that we have? And I'm going to continue as that poll goes on. Throughout the years, what we've found is that trust and confidence need... John, I just put the results of the poll up there. Okay. So, again, if we don't have it, we need to have it. So, trust, confidence. What we find is that we can have everybody at the parts counter get into that trust mode in that little group, but outside of that group, we erode really quick on our trust and our confidence. So, what we really need to do is make sure that we can leverage our manager-employee relationships as well, if we want to keep and attract those good employees. We want to energize the jobs, find ways to energize that job within your own company. I mean, I'm not sure what it's going to be for your company, but there has to be a way to energize people within a job. I mean, if you don't, what happens is people stay, but they retire. They retire in the job, and when they do that, they can cost as much money for your organization as people who have left or people who just leave for other reasons. Clearly, disengagement is a cost. I mean, in America, it costs somewhere around $3 billion a year. Let's challenge the people. Let's see if we can rotate assignments, job share. Some things that we can do, conduct an expectations exchange with the employee, within the rest of the employees as well. Try and do something that helps with that kind of engagement that we need to have with our employees. Employee turnover is expensive. I know that, for a fact, it costs about two times their salary, and that it's difficult to keep them if we don't train them. Bad signals are given when employee turnover is high at the dealership. Customers wonder about the problem, if it's a problem with management. Other employees wonder about stability. It slows down the learning curve and the productivity. I mean, they're all no-brainers, so just some things you can do maybe to help with that. Make sure your top performers are given the raises that they need. Make sure your incentive plans are best in class, and take a look at some of the other ones that are out there and make sure that they are. And let the employees know that you appreciate the work they do. That's one of the bases of having good employees, is to really know that you appreciate what they do. Sometimes that goes a lot further than anything else. Make sure that your parts counter people and your technicians people are all happy people. And if you don't know what the answer is to that question, you really need to find a way to have them say yes, and inject some fun. Make it fun for these guys. If we tell people that the workplace is a fun-free zone, they're just not going to be happy through a day-to-day basis. And what we find is that you can go to different studies that say that fun enhances creativity and it doesn't diminish productivity. So really take a look at what you can do to have fun. And those little things really, really help build that employee morale within the organization. I'm not sure what I did there, Rebecca. There we go. So let's summarize. John, we lost your screen. We're back. You've got to show your screen again. There you go. Okay. It's back. Can't turn my pages. Okay, so let's summarize. For TACS, go to the most productive sources that you can get. Get involved with those schools, get to know the instructors, donate components, whatever you can do to help yourself. Get in there, recruit right from that start. I have people going out now recruiting in high schools as much as they are in colleges. For parts people, shop other retail places, look for people with similar skills. Be prepared. Paint a picture for success. Make sure you have that in writing, that you have that visualized for your own self as well as for the customers. Differentiate yourself as a dealership, somehow, some way. Make that first day special. Don't make it one where somebody shows up and nobody comes back to work and just leaves them there alone. Take them to lunch. Do those kind of things for them. Take a look at the mentor program. Make sure you have a good mentor. Outline the challenges of career paths and the annual regular reviews and encourage employees to come to you with their career questions and the wishes that they have throughout the year. One of the things that I say when we look at this is if you can't measure it, you can't fix it. So again, ask yourself these questions. How would I rate the dealerships on the following aspects of recruiting, hiring, and training top performers? Where do we need to improve to make our dealerships a more attractive place to work? Is our employee turnover under control? If you can't measure it, you can't fix it. We need to know where we're at. We need to know what we're going to have. We need to know that that mentor is going to come into place. He's going to help us with this job. Again, people are not solely motivated by money. They want a clean, safe, productive place to work. They want to feel welcome. They want to feel important. Take a look at how you rate among the different things that we have there. If you hire the right people from the start, that's the best way to reduce employee turnover. Interview those candidates. Vet them carefully. Not just to ensure you have the right skills, but they're going to have the right fit within your company. High turnover is going to hurt. It can cost almost twice as much. Let's do everything in our power not to get there. I truly believe that managers are concerned about their well-being and they're not just an employee. They're going to be more productive, more satisfied, and more fulfilled. Immerse a new hire in the new culture. Get them involved. Make them feel valuable. Have a welcome strategy from the management down to the last employee. And existing employees, make sure that everyone in your business is an advocate and a recruiter for your business. Again, we have walked through this stuff very, very quickly as we went through it, but I do want to thank you for your attention, the opportunity to address some issues today. Hopefully there's something in there. More next week on tech retention and fast-tracking those technicians up through the ranks. And then in a month or two, if you want, we're going to have that parts and service level two, if you've had level one, and we're going to get into a whole bunch more on key indicators and employee engagement. With that, I thank you. Rebecca can go to the last polling question, and then we can open up the floor for questions for the next couple of minutes, if you'd like. While they're taking the next polling question, John, just one question for you. You gave a bunch of great suggestions. Do you have a recommendation of the first place for people to start? The first place for them to start as? Well, you talked about schools. You talked about, obviously, the referral program. What's your recommendation? Social media. Well, when we're going to the schools, what I'm finding is, today, is that more and more people, as a shortage of techs come up, are actually going out to the high schools, and they're starting to recruit from high school. And there's some really good recruiting programs out there that I've seen where, if you can get those people into your dealerships, you can get them onto scholarship programs, and you can get them to sign work agreements for two and three years. Sometimes, as early as possible, when we're talking about the service techs, I mean, if we can get them as graduates from high school and help them into technical school or help them with a tool program, I find that we can get those young people more involved and more engaged into our shops and our businesses a lot quicker. I'm not sure if that answers the question. Yep. I don't see any other questions on the list. The poll results, just for those that are curious, are on the screen now for the second question. With that, if anyone has any questions that John didn't answer, feel free to send them to me, to Rebecca, at AED. Additionally, as John mentioned, there is another webinar next week on how to fast-track entry-level technicians, and that'll be on August 13th. Feel free to register with AED for that webinar. With that, I just want to thank John for his time and for the webinar, and hope everyone has a great day. Thank you.

construction industry

recruiting

hiring process

asset

top talent

job descriptions

competitive salaries

company culture

career opportunities