Set the preface straight as we start here with a little bit of groundwork. When we talk about fast-tracking technicians, we're not talking about an easy way to have those technicians come up through the ranks. There's no magic bullet that we have. We have people that are going to deal with people in all our management roles. We have that triangle of a manager where we're trying to deal with the techs, we're trying to deal with people, and we're trying to deal with the customer. We have all those people, we have all that paper, we have all the politics in place that we have to walk through on a daily basis, and sometimes we just got to filter out how we're going to handle the people aspect of the business. In order to fast-track a technician, it has to start with the recruiting process. We have to recruit the right technician or the right candidate in order to fast-track anybody through. We're going to take a look at two or three things as we walk through it, and that's all I want you to take out of this is two or three little things. There'll be things that you're going to hear in the webinar that you're going to say, we do that, we do that consistently, but I want you to take a step back and I want you to think, do we do them well? Do we do all the things that we need to do? Are all the processes in place to improve and fix the things that we have if we already have things in place? So we really want you to focus on that area as we walk through it. As I say, some of the things you'll hear, you've heard many times before, but they're common sense and we just don't want to miss anything as we go through the webinar. So as the groundwork starts, the process starts with the hiring. We can't have a fear of hiring the wrong type of person. There was a gentleman who said, his name was Tim Ferris, and basically what he said was to do the impossible, we have to ignore the popular. And I think we have that issue as we walk through and we try to hire people. As we look at the things and we try to be the most popular business out there and we try to attract those young people into our business, and we're really not doing it with the right tools and the right resources. And we don't have the right information to hire those type of people. So we want to take a step aside from how we've been doing things, looking for something different, something that might be a little counterintuitive to what we talk about. Tim Ferris goes on and he says one of the things that he tells managers to do sometimes is maybe just give up. And when he says that, what he's saying is we all get in that quest. We all want to be more productive. We all want to get everybody motivated every day. We want them to do great work. But we have to realize that most of our biggest achievements get done without being motivated. He says, and this is a quote from Tim Ferris, he says it's accurate to assume that we must overcome fear to jump off the high dive at the pool or increase our confidence before we ask someone out on a date. He asked if it was easy for most of us, we wouldn't be waiting still to do these things. So instead of trying to get motivated, sometimes we need to take this tech, to take ourselves and embrace our fears and the negativity that we have and the task that we have ahead that we really don't want to do and we have to tell ourselves, you know, I don't feel good about doing this right now. I don't feel great about doing this right now. But we have to put our emotions in check. We have to start with a consistency that says we're going to do it anyway. So let's take that attitude into this presentation as we walk through it and just see if there's something in here that we can use. It's a topic that applies to everybody in the service industry. We want to retain the young technicians we walk through. Good technicians are tough to find. And you know what I've got here? We're talking about tips that we have here and I'm in the wrong presentation, Rebecca. So I need to change just to get out of this presentation. I put it on my desktop and I need to get to my desktop. So just bear with me for one second, please, as I try and find the presentation. You might have to help me, Rebecca. I'm lost in my... I'm trying to find my presentation. John, I'm going to put it on my screen, so just... You can keep talking. I'll just change the slides. Okay. Hang on. I have the wrong one, too, I think. I need to minimize. Okay. Hang on. I'm putting it back to you, because I actually... I have... It's back to you, because I have the wrong presentation up, too. Okay. I need to get out of here. How do I minimize the right-hand side? There's a little arrow, green arrow. Sorry, everybody, for the confusion. It's my fault. I put it on my desktop, and we opened it up from the wrong PowerPoint. So I'm taking full responsibility for that. So here's our agenda. And I'm sorry, as I say, sometimes things go wrong. John, you have to show your screen again. It's right now. Everyone's just seeing a basic screen. Okay. How do I get to the screen now? If you go to that little arrow, the window that you just minimized, it says, show my screen. There you go. Okay. Now we're good to go. Okay. We have it on there now? Yep. Okay. My fault. Sorry about that. We'll make it up to you here. As we walk through, as a service manager for 10 years, I always had that quest to go out, and I always had a quest to get the best, most productive people that we could find. My dream as a service manager was to have a team of A-techs to go out and to just do all the work. The problem I found after a few years in that is that we need to have that balance. We really need to get rid of having everybody, although it seems like the dream team, we find that we get a lot of attitudes, we get a lot of things in the way, and for the lifeblood and success of our business and the service department, we need to have a definite need in there to have these young technicians coming on board. So in the service technician training that we do, we talk about the correct mix and how we're going to get them in. So we're going to take a little bit of the knowledge and the skill of what we need to do in an interview. Again, we're going to hire on a firm foundation. Once the hire is made, we're going to build an internal technician training program for entry-level technicians, and then we'll look at some additional ideas to coach and train and look for technical advancement as we walk through the webinar. It's an issue that applies to everybody in the service industry. It's not just an issue in finding enough qualified techs out there in the workplace for us. It goes across the board. It's all across North America. It comes into play in Canada where I come from as well. We just need to go and we need to get into the schools. We need to do more, as we said in our last webinar, to find qualified techs. It's an issue that we've had in our industry for years because years ago, young people were leaving the industry to go into other industries that maybe were a little more attractive, that were maybe not quite as dirty, that they didn't have to have diesel fuel all over their hands. We need to take a look and say, how does our shop, how does our business compare to computer technicians and other careers that they went to where they didn't have to get their hands dirty? I think there's been a change and I think there's been a switch as we walk through our industry. I think our industry is becoming a little more attractive to a lot more people as we as managers start to realize that we need our service shops to be a lot more productive as we walk through. We need them to be a lot more innovative as we walk through our shops. If we can do that, we need to have these new techs on board to come in because they're the ones with the new eyes and the new views and have been to the latest and greatest tools that are out there. The good news is there are men and women out there that want to become service techs. I think it's a career that's highly, highly in demand and it's going to be more in demand as we walk through. First question, and we asked this question on our recruitment seminar last week. Do we have a recruitment plan in place? This slide is not in your deck. It's a slide that I picked up when I was at a vocational school in North Dakota from Titan Machinery. Titan Machinery, and again, this is just one example, have a scholarship program. It starts where the applicants get enrolled in diesel technology schools. They'll pay them a scholarship in the first semester and the second semester. They'll pay them a scholarship in the second year, first and second semesters. They'll provide tools and toolboxes that are required for the program, uniforms, internships, career upon graduation that they talk about. They put a very positive spin on their organization. They put a very positive spin on what can happen when a technician graduates. I know there's others out there that do something similar, that try and spin this in a positive way. Take a look at this. This is probably on their website as well as it is in all the schools if you just wanted to get a folder. It's a basic way to start with your company to look at something, to look and target top students that are out there so that we can fast track people. There's some logistics to what they do here. When they talk about giving out tools and toolboxes required for the program, basically they put them on a three-year program. They have them sign up and they really buy the tools themselves, but they take it out of their pay over three years as they walk through, so it's deducted from their pay as they walk through. It's an innovative way to try and get people in who don't have the tool, the money or the resources to graduating from school. So, again, just one way, and as I say, that slide was not in there, but think, do I have a good recruitment plan in place? So how and what do we pay? This is just a slide from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and it talks about bus and truck technicians or mechanics, diesel engine specialists. This was back in May of 2012. So it just talks about where they come from, but what you really need to look at is when we look at the bottom there, this is the mechanics with less than one year of experience were earning between $972 and $1336 per hour back in January of 2014. But, again, take a look at it. Bottom line with this slide is that we need to have a competitive salary to get those people into our shops. This just gives you sort of the average mean and lets you know where we're at when we look at it. So I wanted you to just have a brief note. You can get the stats online. Some of you can probably go and get them on a regular basis, but do your homework, do your research for your area to make sure that we do have the right pay scale for our employees out there. So, again, this was one other slide that I'm not sure is in your presentation. I'm not sure that I put it in. I was looking at it a little later, and I just wanted to look at it and say, you know, we have the slide for information. It's a potential as to where candidates may look to relocate. And if you're in an area, it gives you an indication of pay scales within the area, and you can see some of those darker areas where those pay scales are really high. And if you look at those areas, traditionally you'll find them in places where there's a big oil industry or a big oil boom, where they've been taking technicians out of, say, the dealership shops for years and out of different places and getting them out into the oil fields and paying them great sums of money to be there. So, again, all I wanted you to take a look with on this map is take a look at where your geographical area is so that you can see where you fit within it. I mean, we go anywhere from $28,000 to $70,000 on this scale as we walk through technicians. It also gives you a pretty good mean in your territory to start your plan and your recruitment and your career planning up to how you can pay, what you can pay, and where you need to go in that career path as far as a high and a low for the people within the business. You know, we just need to remember that when we look at those blue areas, some of them might be just a little misleading, but there are a lot of people still that are traversing up to those oil patches trying to work there because they don't want to work for $30 to $40 an hour in our industry. So, what's the message? What are we going to talk about today? We know that the schools are providing us with a labor pool of technicians that come out, that know everything, that they're not going to be productive after we hire them, that they're not going to be people that can come in and be 100% efficient or productive as we walk through it, depending on which term you use. But the reality is we have to have someone with the right attitude and desire to learn. Number one, that's what we're looking for, attitude and desire. And we should be willing to coach and train them in order to make more money for us, but we need to coach and train them so that they fit in with the culture of our businesses that we have out there today. So, we need to teach skills that are going to be practical rather than just theory. And they learn a lot of theory, a lot more than hands-on, when they go to these vocational schools. So, we really need to get them involved and get them into a deep dive of the technical things that we do within our business. We need to have someone within our organization. It might be the managers. It might not just be the service manager. It could be the service manager, the parts manager, the sales manager that are ready and willing to train. And we also need to bring people into the outside to train the mentors and the trainers that we have out there. There's tons and tons of people out there. There's tons and tons of training available. There's tons and tons of training available from AED. So, think about the training that we need to have. Look what's a good fit for our people, and let's get our trainers trained so that we can actually train those people in the best way that we know how. We're going to start them with an entry-level salary that may not be that high, but also remember that last slide. It needs to be competitive with the geographic area and the marketplace that we're dealing in. So, questions to ask yourself again as we switch gears a little bit. Are we currently using a pre-hire, you know, some kind of pre-hire assessment tool that we can evaluate people with? Assessments that focus on learning, you know, abilities, behavioral traits out there? Assessments that focus on basic technical knowledge? You know, if all else fails, we suggest hiring for attitude and technical interest and train for skills. It's a little bit like the Southwest Airlines attitude that they're going to hire for attitude, and they'll train them to do their jobs. But they need a good attitude in order to get things done. We need that to come both ways, from top to bottom, bottom to top, as we walk through our industry. In addition to the face-to-face, you know, interview that we're going to have, make sure that the people are a good fit at your dealership. And we can do that in a couple of ways. Get them to take a couple of assessments. See where they're going to fit within your organization from a technical standpoint, from a behavioral standpoint, to make sure they're going to fit with the culture of your businesses out there. I suggest when we do this, we do it with more than one manager, that we set up a team approach to this. It could be another manager within your organization that gets involved, and a senior tech. It could be a possible mentor that's going to come in that's going to do a lot of the training that maybe should be involved with the technician that we're going to hire to see if he fits with his skill level, or not his skill level, but with his aptitude and his own learning abilities and how he learns, so that we have a good fit and a good match as we have them come through. That we don't take an A-type technician and try and match him up with a C-type trainee, so that we have the wrong mix of training. Let's really take an assessment look at how we get people to be mentors and trainers, and make sure that they have the right fit to be there to do that job, and that they have the right training to do that job. If you're large enough, you may even have a training manager to do some of these jobs, and that's great if you do. Once you have the baseline for the information for hiring, you need to determine how we're going to do that. These are just a couple of places you can go if we're looking for behavioral assessments or we're looking for technical assessments. AED Foundation has those technical assessments online. We have them here on the screen for you to see, to have a look at. What we want you to do is get a hold of the people at AED if you can for these technical assessments. Get online, look at them. If there's any questions or anything you need, get to Rebecca. She'll make sure that you get to the right people, you get to the right place that we need to do. Let's just take a look and see and make sure that we're going to the right place. I'm sure that Rebecca would love to help everybody with these technical assessments, because they're critical in the hiring process. Here's a silly story. It may not make sense to a lot of people as to why it's even in the slide deck, but it's a true story. One of the questions that gets asked in an interview when we're interviewing for a tech is, how advanced are your computer and Internet skills? The slide comes back and says, well, I'm pretty good. The follow-up question is, how are you maximizing Windows? Some of the people look at you kind of strange. Others say, well, I guess I'm not really that good at it. Sometimes if you have one of those questions that you can ask, then it's an easy way to find out if you've got somebody that's trying to bluff their way through an interview process. But kidding aside, this was a true story that was asked of somebody who said they had good computer skills, and really they didn't know too much about a computer. And we expect the younger generation, the people coming out of these technical schools, to be pretty computer savvy, and some of them aren't quite as savvy as we assume that they will be. So if we need to ask questions, this is just one question, as I say. Look for some of those simple questions that have to do with your business, that have to do with computers. This one just happened to be there because we were looking for somebody that could actually take our computer tool and monitor some of the electronics on the new equipment that's out there. And we just wanted to make sure that they had the basics before we took them out into the workplace. So, you know, as I say, some people look at it, I guess, a little bit weird. But, you know, it's good to identify this. So let's just move ahead a little bit here and discuss. We went through a little bit of the interview process, and we're not going to dwell on it. We've had the criteria that we wanted out there. We've got what we think is the right person in place. What we want to do is now is take a look at how and what and where, what we need to have in place to make things effective for this employee and we want to get them into the workplace and we want to move them forward. So ask yourself these eight questions that we walked through. Discuss total employee compensation. I mean, that's an obvious thing when we're hiring somebody. We want to be competitive. We want to be able to offer something that's going to draw those employees, those new people, into our business. We want a reward system in place to stimulate that young technician involvement because we'll talk about young technicians coming in and they're learning and they're not going to be on the most productive end of the scale and we're not going to be able to pay them on productivity right away. So take a look at what we can do. Maybe reward them for a milestone if they have some personal training or achievement that we wanted to accomplish within that first 90, 60, 120 days that we can reward them for. And it doesn't have to be money. It could be soft or it could be a hard compensation. It could be money. It could be something outside of money. But develop something to stimulate their involvement within the organization. Sometimes if they're married, it's just a simple write-home letter to their spouse saying that they're doing a great job and that they're way ahead of where they should be and that they're involved with everything within the business and they fit with the business culture. And maybe reward her with a gift certificate for dinner. Simple little things. Flexible employee benefits. I mean, as our workforce changes, we have to look more at flex work hours and flex employment for some of our employees. Maybe it fits with some people. Offer time off. Other forms of non-compensation that we talk about. Employee assistance programs. See what you have. If there's anything out there to help people into a higher learning, whether it be to go back to school, whether it be to do more learning for their job that they're on, look at ways that we'll apply assistance to help them out with that. Arrange for discounts on purchases within your organization if it's applicable. Arrange for professional services. And we'll talk a little bit about that briefly. Maybe just as much as a lunch seminar on finances or whatever, because these people are young and sometimes they need to have a little more life skills. Some kind of club reward or networking reward, you know, to look at the well-being or the health or to look at how we can get the customer or the customer and the dealer closer together through some networking that we may end up paying for as we walk out. Again, just examples of some things that we can look at out there. You may be doing them all great. If not, think about one that might fit that you're not doing today that would help a little bit with those new employees. So the internal technician program to fast track and the working knowledge of diagnosis and repairing machines. We want to make money. As I say, sometimes we look at that productivity and it becomes the end all to be all, but we have to have that understanding that we're going to have to pay some money to get these people trained up to do the job that they're supposed to do. It needs to be laid out in a step-by-step form. If you don't have a step-by-step internal training program in place, put one together, find one online. There's all kinds of them online that you can get and have a personal plan built for that new employee that fits with his individual training needs. You can build it, as I say, around a specialized position for this guy within your service or this girl within your service department, or you can do it to have them cross-trained within the department, but build a plan. If you don't have that plan written down on paper and followed through, then we're going to not win the battle at the end of what we're looking at here. One of the things I did in a prior life was walk into a dealership who was looking to put a plan in place. He put some things in place, and he only had three things on his whole career path that he was going to have the new technician do. He came to me one day and he said, two of them aren't working. I said, well, what did you do? He said, well, we just took them out. I said, if you're going to take something away and it doesn't work, you need to replace it with something new, innovative, or something that you know will work. So when we build the plan, let's make sure we have a plan together that we know is going to work. Some of it's going to be trial and error. Some of it's out there. Some of it people have been doing for years. Talk to people within your business. When I do training, some of the best ideas come from people like you guys that are on the phone. When I have you all sit in a room and we can put our heads together, we can come up with some fantastic new ways to help people within the business. That's why we like the training for parts and service managers that AED is doing where we get together and we can actually do that stuff with our own peers. Put this plan together. Put it together in such a way that it's going to work. If it's a plan and it's not working, fix it and make it work. Categories of technical training. A lot of these seem pretty obvious as we walk through. Engines. Does the technician, is he up to date with the Tier 4, the stuff that we have out there? Is he involved in engine repair? Has he been involved? Can he be involved? Is that the area of expertise we want him to go to? But if he's not, he needs to know the basics. Hydraulics and electrical. First thing I did when I went into the service shop was take basic electrical and basic hydraulics over again to make sure I was refreshed, to make sure I understood the different systems that were out there, to make sure that I could really get involved with the machinery because most of our machinery somewhere along the line involves hydraulics or it involves electrical, and we need that as part of our technical skills that we're doing here. Overall component ID. Where do they find it? How do they look for it in different machinery on different products that we sell? Operation. It's a great place to get the rest of the dealership involved, whether we have a good salesman, whether we have a machine demonstrator to take our new trainee out. Set it into the schedule to give them a few hours a week to do that kind of training because there's nothing better than that hands-on of learning how a machine works and how to make it work well that's going to benefit a new technician as he's out on jobs and customers see him work on machinery. Machine inspections as we look to it. One of the things that I teach in school is that we have a practice in everything that we do that we do an inspection first. It doesn't have to be a big one. It can be a 20-point inspection. It can be a 10-point inspection. About 5 or 10 minutes before anybody starts the job, you take them around. They do a walk around. They do a recording. Some of them do video recordings and put their voice to it. However you want to do it, make sure that you make it a priority for new people to do that walk around to look for other things that aren't on that work order that aren't in the communication that we put out there that need to be fixed so that they can get back to the service department and the service department can get back to the customer so he can say, Mr. Customer, we found these other things that need to be fixed and we need them fixed today or we need them fixed next week. But what we really need to do is make them aware I always, as a service manager, I've always sent something back to the customer saying this is what you need to do. These are things that can wait. If there was something that needed to be done and they didn't want to do it, I would make them sign off on it so that I wouldn't be held responsible down the road and I could put that in the file. We want new technicians to learn that. That's one of the most basic things when we get into our shops is to make sure we have a practice in place and that's the first thing that they do Communicate, communicate, communicate. Whether it be the technician communicating with the customer, communicating from the manager down to the technician, that communication has to be in place or we're going to lose new people before we get them started. There is nothing worse than having to come back on something or on a machine that went out and it was only out for two hours after you fixed it and something go wrong with it after we fixed it. There are horror stories I could tell you from my personal experience. Make sure that we have in writing the things that need to be done and that they have those technical skills in place. And we'll talk about ordering parts and completion of work orders. One of the things I've told my technicians to do, and drill this into your new technician very up front, if we have a $10,000 repair bill, we need a $10,000 explanation. We can't just go out and say, we did an engine repair, so we say, fix engine. We need to explain what we did, how we went into the job, how the components came into place. It needs to be a $10,000 explanation. We can write those explanations in advance in many cases if we're using a flat rate system or we have something within our business system. So the technician can just pull it and put it into place. But it makes his job so much easier if we have that in place when we're doing the completion of work orders. So let's start with the work order with an inspection. Let's finish it with the proper stuff. Just basics, but make sure that we're working within the right context to get things done. So how do we pay? How do we have a career path? What's it look like? Have one in writing. This is very basic. This is very simple when we're looking at here. As we start somebody out, it could be that we want to pay them $12 to $15 an hour and have them 70% to 75% efficient. Totally up to you what you put in there, but it has to be realistic. See technician, so he can see where he goes. And you can put times and dates and training in here. If the trainee is in place for 90 days and he's taken x number of this training and he's done this and he completes this, then he can move up to be a tech C. And the tech C, of course, you can see where he's moving. And he has to be a little more efficient, but he gets his raise. Tech B, same thing. Put things in place within milestones, within an annual plan that have to be done. Same when we get to that A technician, that master technician. We want it to be, and I have 90% productive, because normally what I find is a lot of these master technicians can be a lot more than 100% productivity. And what we want to do is we want these guys really to be our mentors. And we have to make some time for them to mentor these young people. And we build it in to their scale. And we may drop that to, say, 90% efficient, but you need to spend x number of hours and document them with the trainee. So again, look at how we get those A levels to mentor to the trainees, and how we get the trainees up to the next level, and how we do it through putting that timeline in place, putting that career path down on a piece of paper, and make sure it's in front of them at every interview we do on a quarterly basis, at least quarterly basis. So we have them on the job for three months, 60 working days. We've assigned a new tech to work alongside an experienced tech. We're going to expose them to all those areas we talked about. We pick an appropriate person. That's what I'm saying from that other page. We normally want the guys that are out there that are A technicians to be the team coach or the mentor. Most of them look at their productivity plan and say, I don't want to affect my productivity by training. So we really have to make a provision in their productivity for the training so that they can still get that productivity bonus at the highest level. Conduct, at the start, a weekly productivity evaluation to let that technician, that new one, know where he's at. So what we're doing basically is we're going to build a mentoring relationship with the people. And in doing that, we're going to create a bigger emotional tie to the organization. But we also want to encourage the mentors or the trainers to be firm and fair, and that they can't just go out and they can't just second guess an employee that they gave a job to. Or they can't just blame them for a comeback if one just happens to come back on a job that they were working on. They have to take responsibility for the training and the comeback, the repairs, and everything else that we do. And I'm a great guy. So you know that comebacks and repairs, everyone that I've ever did as a service manager, I've had the technician involved when I've been dealing with a customer directly into my office. And it works. Customers learn to respect and trust those technicians. And when they tell them something, normally they'll take it per vatum that that was right. Now, we want to encourage a little bit of humor. We talked about that in our last webinar. We have to build some self-esteem. Again, stick up for the people. If we have something that went wrong, let's, as mentors, take some of the responsibility for having it go wrong or go south. Give recognition, but give it strategically and deliberately. Don't forget those reports on the weekly progress. But not taking two hours every week to do this. Normally you can do it. If you have a little assessment that you can hand out, take a 5, 10 question little progress report you have. Give it to the mentor, the mentee. Have them fill it out. Give it to you. Talk to the technician. Give it 5, 10 minutes at the end of the week or at the first of a new week. And just ingrain those positive things. And of course, if there's something we have to correct, let's correct it so we start a new week fresh and ready to go with a new technician. Helps so much in making things go the right way. Encouraging to join professional trade associations. You know, we want them to be part of the loop. We want them to be up there with the people that are in the profession that they're working with and see how to do things on a timely basis. Look at different things that they can join, that they can be involved in. Invest in their career planning. Sometimes that costs us money to invest. Sometimes it's just our own time. Operate a corporate mentoring program, as we discussed on the previous slide. Look at incentives for learning. I know we're not paying them much on productivity, but let's take a look at how we provide incentives for learning and take advantage of the learning that's out there, not just on the internet. Sometimes what I find is we can send these young people to school and we can bring them back, and sometimes it's just great to have them put on a program for the rest of the technicians. I find it works really well with people. It gets them involved within their little department, and they get so, so pumped up about sharing that knowledge that they've learned with somebody else. But make an overall goal to get them in there, to want to share their ideas, to let them have a voice within the organization and share those good ideas. But you want to make your expectations clear. You want that coach to know what he's supposed to be doing in this period. So a word of advice, give your managers and your supervisors, yourselves, plenty of relationship training. You need plenty and plenty and plenty and more. Keep asking new and old technicians why they work for you. We want both to know why they're there. The mentor and the mentee, is there anything we can do to make this position better for you? We have to communicate. We have to explore the different needs that each of these new people are going to have coming in, and their needs are going to change. We know we can help them. We know that we can help them with early growth within the organization, but we also want them to know that we can make a difference somewhere in their lives. So we look at those other things that we can do, but we really want to bond them really close with our organization. Remember, new eyes within the company, especially in the service department, are needed to improve our overall department health as we walk through our own service department. We need to learn new ways and do new things. So give your technician a voice. Let your technicians grow. Equip the technicians with the right tools. Again, some of these are pretty much no-brainer questions that we need to ask, but they are the new eyes in the department. You know, a lot of these people know that they were the best and the brightest in the class that they came out of. You know, they know that they're pretty good at what they're gonna do, and they know sometimes that we need to take them out there and we need to have them looking for the next challenge. So let's not forget to look at this growth as we walk through this. We may have them sitting somewhere where they don't need to be, and we may need to fast-track them even a little faster than what they're going, looking for that next challenge. Make sure they have the right tools. That tool program we looked at was one way to make sure that a technician had the correct tools to do his job. We need to make sure we have the correct tools in our work base or available to our work base for the specialized stuff that we work on today. Talk to these people about the specialized tools they've been using at the vocational schools they go to. They may have something that's the newest and the latest and the greatest that we may be able to bring into the business. But we do need to make sure they have the specialized tools. I mean, if you're a carpenter, you're not gonna go out and try and work in a woodworking shop with dull saws. It just doesn't work. Not a good message to send to anybody new. So let's make sure our tools are in the appropriate place they're easy to get to, that we can actually say that we have people within our shop that have the correct things to do the correct job. It'll just help mold them into the future of the department to know that we are excited enough and interested enough to make sure they have the tools to make their department profitable in the future. Again, we have all these resources on hand within the organization. There's operators manuals, technical manuals, parts managers, technical bulletins. We have them set up in a room. They're all going on computer now to have these manuals computerized. Find a way to give them easy access to this. A lot of this stuff can be done at night as they can walk through. Sometimes we can just have manufacturers on board online training at night so where they can pick up a few extra courses that are online. I'm sure AED probably has some of those courses. If not, there's other people out there that do. Make sure that we have available to them a list of things that they can do on their own time. It just shows a little ambition and it shows that we care and that we'll pay for them if there's any cost involved. Enlist other departments. We talk in training about silo effects that we have where the sales department is its own entity, where the service department is its own entity, and the parts department is its own entity. What we need to do is have this new tech at least spend a week to two weeks working on the front or the back parts counter. Assign them to simple tasks in the rental department if you have a rental department. Have them involved with the salesman and the demonstrator to help with machine walk around. Anything we can do to break down that silo that we have between service and sales and to have these new technicians coming in, getting on board, and understanding that we have to work together in all our departments in order to be a profitable business today. So, we're developing that in-house curriculum for skills training if we haven't got it. We need to offer, offer, offer, offer more training. Remember that money alone won't retain most of these guys down the road. In the old days, we paid people for their time. Today, we pay more for performance. But in every position, it's a different story. But in every position, if we want to retain those people, we need to have a mix of everything out there in order to do it. So, we need that skills training in place. Soft skills and hard skills, we need them in place. We need to have soft skills training in place as well as we need to have that little bit of sales training and we're not trying to make them salesmen, but they need to know how to talk to a customer. They need to know, as technicians, how to answer that negative question that comes out there. And, you know, watch how we word what we say when we're talking to the customers. And, you know, a personal experience story, I had a technician, great field technician, went out to a job, had a problem with an excavator that he was working on at the time for me, and first thing he said when he arrived at the job site was, yeah, we've had that problem a lot, I know how to fix it. Not a good positive statement to be giving that customer. So, watch what we say. What's what our older people say that those young people don't pick up those bad habits that we can get them trained on those positive aspects of how to be positive with a customer. So, soft sales training skills for technicians is a real good place to start with that. Look for some courses. If you can't find any, I'm sure that we could help you find them. Look at Paying for Extra College, Continuing Education. We can do those podcasts. If we have the ability, cross-train them. The more they know, the more valuable they become. You know, again, I talked a little bit about having that new employee present workshops once they went to a school. Have them come back out and share that knowledge that they've learned with the other employees. Even if it's knowledge that somebody may have picked up already, share it again. You can never share too much knowledge. Bring in outside experts to educate the employees on the subjects of their personal lives. It's just a kind of opportunity. I mean, if you can do this, it sets you apart a little bit from some of the other employees out there. It shows you care, you know, that you're willing to provide something that maybe nobody else will provide, that you care about them as people, and that you're caring about their lives. I mean, it goes a long way to helping that employee, to getting that employee to want to work for you, to want to learn quicker, to want to be more productive quicker for your company. So look at those areas that we can work in. So, does your company have something in place to look at employee growth for both professional and personal? You know, do your young technicians want to develop knowledge and skills in order to improve their value? I mean, that's what we're talking about, and that's what we talked about in this last slide. Let's make sure we have the things in place. I mean, if nothing else, the ethics and the values on which we rest as an organization, you, me, and everybody else, is that we have policies that show values that we can translate into day-to-day actions that are good values, a physical environment they can work in, which is a good physical environment, and an overall goal where we want them to come in and we want them to stay, and we have to make it and we have to mean it when we have those things in place. So, can we bill all their hours? This is a question that comes up. We can't hire all these techs. Have a good mix, and we're not suggesting that you're gonna have this new guy up there looking at having all his hours billable. Set up a scale. Make sure he has billable hours, but don't give him all the menial tasks to do either. If you do, as we say here, just have him perform simple tasks like checking a machine for rent, performing a simple service interval and basic service skills. Remember that if we only give him the menial tasks and he's one of those high achievers, he might just walk away before we get him trained to where we want him to be. So, look at that career path model, look at it and see where his progress is, and make sure that we're moving those people ahead to where they need to be so their goals are attainable as well as the goals we set forth for them. Offer incentives. Again, go back, have an incentive program in place that starts, and it may not be money, as I say, out of the first 60 days or in the training period, but look at ways that you can entice and enhance that guy to stay. Now, once they treat the training, have we properly incented them? Give them that raise, move them to that next place. Completing the training also means they're not eligible for any of the bonus programs maybe that you've had today. Get them onto those bonus programs, but give them something, whether it be that letter home, whether it be a letter of appreciation or a certificate of appreciation, give them something to show where they've been. These people want to exceed, but make sure that we reward them with either hard money, soft skills of some kind. Don't just hire and let them breathe. I mean, I've had technicians, I've had people walk into my shop and say, that guy hasn't moved, should we just check to see if he's breathing with a mirror? We don't want them to be a fog in the mirror. We want them to be part of a culture of productivity. Look at those pre-hiring assessments that we have out there. Build a solid boarding, onboard training program. Use all the technical resources at our disposal. That's why we're on this call. That's why AED have all the programs that they have in place. Use all the technical resources we have at our disposal and assign that mentor and train that mentor. As service managers, we get so busy with people, paper, and politics that we don't have a lot of time to do the job of mentoring these guys. Make sure that that is assigned and that assigned responsibility is in place and that that mentor is responsible. Just a quick tip, because if we don't, there'll be no responsibility for that new hire. Look at those other people in those other departments. Help build that rapport. Reduce departmental silos that we talk about when we do training. You know, we have subject matter experts in everything for training technicians, for doing everything, whether it be within your organization, whether it be from outside. Have a plan in place. Train everybody, but especially train these young people to come up to be in that organization with an attitude of training that is ingrained in them as they start on their journey to become those A-level technicians that we need so desperately out there. Track their progress weekly. Make sure the carrots are out there and they're in place. Again, we've already mentioned these. Make sure they have productive work. Make sure they're challenged. Look at the obstacles and the barriers to getting a job done. You know, we may have to adjust the jobs to fit strength and abilities and talent, but if we do, we do. But be able to flex within your plan. Keep the promises we make. Make integrity be part of your company culture. Look at the communication systems we have in place from tech to customer, from customer to tech, from service manager to tech, from parts manager to tech, parts person to tech. Make sure that we have communication in place where they can talk on those kind of systems. Clearly define job responsibilities and accountability. Everyone has to be held accountable, mentors and mentees. Encourage these young people to take their initiative. The more we encourage them, the more initiatives they'll show. Recognize reward for creativity and innovation, and where possible, offer job flexibility. Don't try and give them one job to repeat, repeat, repeat. In these types of jobs, that's one of the reasons these technicians took these jobs was to have job flexibility to do different things. So again, make sure that we can sort of look through those summary thoughts as we walk through. The technician shortage is not gonna go away. We suggest hiring for attitude, training for skill. We know that we're not gonna get the people out of these schools highly qualified. They're gonna come in and be 100% productive right out of the chute. So let's make sure that we don't have our expectations set too high. Let's train for that attitude. Make sure you have your own tech training program. And when I say your own, customize for each technician that you hire. Everybody has different skill sets. Everybody's at different levels. Make sure that we customize that to fit them. More than ever, these people want a culture of openness and shared information. That's just coming with the new generations. They wanna know where the company is, where it's going, what it's doing, what it's gonna look like in the future, how the company is doing financially. If we can show them, sometimes you can get that from being a business where you publicly have that stuff online. But let them know where you stand. Let them know where you stand in the marketplace against the competition. Always keep them up to date on how your competition is doing. Always do those surveys. Make sure that you are paying them as well as you can pay them within the parameters of your geographical area. Today's market, service technicians really have control if we look at it. And sometimes we'll say they don't. But some of them will say, you're lucky to have me working for you. And if you don't believe it, treat them like you don't need them there and see how quick these young people today will walk out and not stay with you if you don't have that culture in place. So I'm gonna finish up and then we'll open for questions. And as I said, I apologize for that three or four minute delay we had there while I pulled up the right slide deck. But how are we gonna go on a personal note and how are we gonna move ahead from where we're at today? I kind of look at it as do we want to build companies as do we want to build contenders or are we gonna have a shop of contentious people? We live in a competitive society today and our service departments are no different. We're looking to get the productivity up. We're always pushing to get it there. We're always incenting them on it. And we're well adapted to the elements we need to contend in the race to be that best, to have the highest productivity out there and to achieve those personal goals we have. In the service business, we recognize we need to have teamwork. We need to have internal harmony. If we don't have that, young people won't come into the organization and young people won't stay. They won't want to learn and they won't want to fast track. If we have that attitude of contentiousness, it says it seizes upon our desire to be right. What I mean by that is then we get into a position where our managers are saying it's my way or the highway and we get that attitude built into our trainers and we get that attitude built into all the management that we have. As we have those contentious people and if we are contentious people with the people that we have, we have a tendency to find our own kind. So we're gonna hire a bunch of contentious people. Let's get rid of the notions that we have or we may have that say that we can prove how wrong what we're talking about today and what we've talked about in the past and how we're gonna put people into place and how we fast track them up for our organization. Even though we may affirm that sometimes it may be the wrong thing to do, we have to affirm how right it is and not be contentious. I mean, we need our service departments today to be full of contenders. We breed them. We can make them contenders in the right culture and the right attitude. It's an atmosphere that we need to breed within our organization. With that, I wanna thank you for the opportunity to share these ideas. We can take this time to open the floor up to Rebecca who can ask any questions or ask for any questions that we have. But don't just stop with this webinar. Look for those resources, put some in place. As I say, a lot of things are things we've talked about that you've done in the past. Find one thing, two things, three things out of this webinar that you can take and that you can put into practice that you were doing that you can do better or things that you haven't done that we can put in place. And with that, I wanna thank you for the opportunity to do this. It's been fun again and I hope to have the opportunity to do it in the future. Thank you very much. Turn it back to you, Rebecca. John, thanks for a great webinar. I haven't seen any questions come through, but I do wanna encourage people if you have any questions about some of the stuff that John mentioned, feel free to certainly contact me at AED or certainly, and I can direct you to John if it's a question directly for him. But no, overall, a great webinar and I thought you gave some great options and some great ideas that people can take back to the dealership. So I just wanna thank everybody along with John for participating in our webinar and hope to have you participating in another one soon. So I hope everyone has a great day. Are you still there, Rebecca?

service technicians

recruitment process

structured training program

mentoring and coaching

incentive and reward system

ongoing learning and growth

communication

teamwork

positive company culture