Welcome to Close it now, the podcast that's revolutionizing the H Vac and home improvement trades industries. Get ready to dive deep into the world of heating, ventilation and air conditioning. We're turning up the heat on industry standards and cooling down misconceptions. And we're not just talking about fixing vents and adjusting thermostats. It's about the transformative movement that's reshaping the very foundation of H Vac and home improvement. We're the driving force, inspiring top performers who crave excellence not only in their professional endeavors, but also in fitness, nutrition, relationships and personal growth, proving that we can indeed have it all. This is Close it now, where excellence meets excitement. Let's get to work now. Your host, Sam Wakefield.

Well, all right. Welcome back to Close It Now. Sam Wakefield here. I am stoked to introduce our guest today, Jonathan Porter Wistman. He is author of a book that a lot of you may have read and if you haven't, you must pick it up and read it or of course, listen to it on in your drive time University, the Sales Boss, which we are going to talk about some of that today. He's also founder and CEO of who Hire, which is of course building the world's most powerful talent intelligence program for the trades, which is really exciting. And I hope to hope to hear a little bit about that today as well. But welcome to the show, Jonathan. Thanks for joining us.

Nice. Thanks for having me on, Sam. Looking forward to our conversation. I always come away with our conversations energized and ready to take on the day. So I'm sure your listeners feel that way as well.

Yeah, well, I sure hope so. I put a lot of heart and soul into it, so. But, but yeah, man, I love this. I love the opportunity that I get to, you know, talk to the best and the greatest in our industry and other industries and so we can support and help each other. But one thing we always do on our interviews episodes is give everybody a quick highlight reel. So why in the world should they be listening to you? Right? How'd you get here to this seat and just like, you know, catch us up from, you know, when you like had that aha moment business and then you like what your journey's been in a.

Well, I was born under a rock. I'm not going to go that far back. But I have, I have always been self employed other than about six months in my life. And then I realized I wasn't going to be a great employee and so always been building teams and organizing businesses and you realize really quickly that the number one single most important system in a business is the people.

Right?

And so really, really had a. How to focus on, on humans and, and how do you grow humans? Built and sold a couple of companies. My very first one was a cleaning company, of all things, because I grew up poor and if I was going to do anything, I was going to pay for it. So that was my first business. And then I got into technology. So two totally opposite ends of this scales. But eventually I got asked by Wiley to write the book the Sales Boss. And the book is really around leading people in a sales organization. So it's not a sales training book. But if you're sitting in that seat as the sales leader, whether that's the CEO, owner of the company, whether that's a sales manager, how do you get a team of people moving in the right direction and fulfilling, you know, the things that you hope for, for the company? So I called it the Sales Boss for a couple reasons, because you can say sales manager, but it sounds so boring. Like somebody that's doing it like a boss.

Right, exactly.

Style and flair, but also really kicking assets. And it also is an acronym B O S S Behavior, Outlook, Skills and Stature. There are four levers I go back to in the book time and time again to say how do you diagnose what's going on with yourself as a leader and then also, you know, with the people on your team, your audience. I imagine many of them are in the skilled trades and I've had the opportunity to work a number of people in the trades. Really my first sort, I've been doing like the enterprise space talking to those companies. I sold the first quantum computer to Amazon just to, you know, so totally different than like plumbers and electricians.

Right.

My first, my first real introduction to the trades was through Tommy Mello and he hired me based on my book and I got a chance to work with the great folks over at A1. But that really turned me on to saying, how could we use the enterprise prediction technology I was doing at the time to benefit the blue collar space and home services particularly? And so we went on a journey over the last couple of years of building what I believe is the best platform for the human component of home service business? If you can get, if you can get that right, a lot of things can go right. So the name of that company is who Hire? And I think that might, you know, those two things might be worthwhile for your, your audience.

Absolutely, yeah. We definitely want to dive into that here. Here in a little bit. And I love that you. That the sales boss is about the. The management, the leadership. Leadership, of course, is everything. You know, being a big John Maxwell to, you name it, you know, fan, you know, leadership is all the time. We're a leader. We just don't realize it. You know, that's one of the things so many people don't talk about is how to run the sales organization. Right? Yeah.

You talk to a. A business owner a lot of times, like, I need. I need to get salespeople. I need my people selling better. That's true. However, if you put great people in a system where you don't have a great sales leader, you're still going to be mediocre as a company. You're not going to have the same scale and impact that you want to have. So really getting the system that surrounds. How do you bring people into your organization? How do you. The. The subtext of my book is the real secret to hiring, managing, and training a sales team.

Right?

It's really all of that. If you have a great sales leader in place that gets all of that right, you could really hire less than stellar salespeople and develop them, right?

Sure, yeah. Have a team of average and just grow them. That's what. Years ago, what I said, what I told the owner of our company, because we had hired a few, you know, the. The hired guns, the hotshots, right? The guys that come in, they're the gunslingers. But then they were not anywhere close to the company culture. They were doing things we didn't agree with, so we had to let them go. And they really brought down the team for a while. And I told him, I was like, man, listen, let's just grow our superstars here. You know, we'll find people that. And hire again. Hire. Same thing. I love this because that's what I was doing before we'd even having a conversation. It's like, all right, well, tell you what, let's just plant them in our trucks and show them the right way to do it, and they become the superstars because we work on growing them as people.

That's right. There, there. You know, you can't. You can train average people to be better. I would put a little caveat to that, which is there are some traits that are just inherent to people that do well in selling.

Absolutely.

So, you know, if I use the expression in my book, if you needed a dog to do a job and there were no dogs available, you could probably hire a cat. But even if you teach that cat, how to bark like a dog. Nobody's going to be convinced.

Right.

So you want to start with the raw material for selling and for people that thrive in that sort of job. But yes, then given that that's true, growing somebody's capability certainly exists. Yeah.

Understanding where that threshold starts.

That's right.

For those, those key characteristics. So when you were looking for that, and this may or may not be the right direction to go here at this point. But I'm so curious because it opens up the other question of, you know, what do we need to look for when we're in this hiring kind of mindset and recruiting and all those kind of things. Because, and I agree with you, we talk way more about this than I can. One of the biggest things I hear from all over the country when I'm doing my trainings is, yeah, but how do we find people to. We've got a system now. How do we find people to put in that role? How do we find the right people to put on the team? It seems like there's nobody, nobody's applying for our job listings now. What?

Well, nobody applying for your job listing is a you problem. Well, it just means you haven't found the right source. You're crappy at writing. You know, you read most people's job advertisements and I wouldn't buy from them or they look just like everyone else. You should. If you're, if you're putting out job advertisements. One is recognize you need to augment your recruiting with not just paid ads.

Right.

However, think about when you, when you're, when you're going into the marketplace even to read a book, right? Let's say you go out to Amazon, you're like, I want to read a book on sales or leadership. And you do that and you get all these covers, you know, like a virtual bookshelf. You don't actually click and read the reviews of all of those books. It's the ones that catch your eye, right? And then you click it and you read the first couple sense, you're like, no, that's not it. No, that's not. Okay, this one and the first one, your, your job seeker is doing the same thing. You're out there on Indeed or social media or wherever you're at, and you're sitting on the shelf with all these other companies. So what is it that will catch their eye? You, you shouldn't be describing the job. I want you, if your listeners, I want them just to open up their Indeed account or wherever it is and just go and say, what's the first paragraph? And if the first paragraph is like, you know, we're a family owned company that's been in existence for 20 years and due to tremendous growth, we're looking for a self motivated, blah, blah, blah, blah, expanding now.

Join this, join this team.

You're, you're. It already is ugly, right? So what you need is to get really clear on the avatar of the person you're trying to hire and then describe that higher. Describe them really specifically not the job, the person. So you might say, hey, tired of working for average fed up with a job that you put pour your heart and soul into, only to realize there's not enough money left at the end of the month to do anything. Right.

Like you're describing my attention already.

Yeah, you're describing the pain of the person.

Right.

And so once that, that problem of having enough of the right kind applications is a writing problem, it is because you don't know how to identify, you haven't gotten crystal clear on who works in your organization. Then second, you have to use some sort of automation. And the reason is like we, we live in a world of doordash and Uber, right? If I get really hungry and I've got the munchies, I don't know why I would have the munchies. But I hear sometimes people get the munchies. And you know, you go and you order a burrito on doordash. How many times, Sam, do you look at that darn app to see where is your burrito?

Well, I can tell you it's a dozen maybe. And that's in a 12 minute time period.

Yeah, 12.

Literally like all the time. Or open it and you leave it sitting open and stare at it while you're doing whatever you're doing. Yeah.

And door Dash has that figured out. They're like, oh, the dasher has left to pick up your thing. The, the restaurant has picked it up, they started preparing it. They're on their way.

Right. And building anticipation.

And it doesn't change the time you get that burrito, however. That's the world we grew up in. You order an Uber, you're looking, you're like, oh, they're turning onto my street. This is program people to want to have a connection to the outcome. And yet I go on to some contractors hiring page or indeed, and they get a one sentence thing that says, thanks for applying, we'll be back to you shortly.

Right.

And it's like crickets. And then they fill out the form or they do whatever maybe they come in for an interview and it's like, we'll get back to you, crickets. So if you're going to compete in today's environment, you need to use technology so that you're one really rapidly responding in what feels like a very human way. So if, if Sam applies, he should be getting a text right away and it might look like, hey Sam, thanks for applying. Here's a short video about that role. If you're still interested, why don't you hit me back with a video?

Right, right.

And it's, it gets that instantaneous. I'm, I'm engaged. And then second, you should describe every part of your process and how long it'll take. So it might sound like, hey, we, we have a careful hiring process. We want to make sure we get the right fit, but we move fast for the right person. There's three stages. It's this, this and this. You could be working with us in as little as 7 days or 10 days or whatever that is. But you get contractors who can't define for themselves what the process is. So they get a great candidate and they leave that candidate hanging. And that candidate the whole time is judging. Do you know how to operate your business? If, if you're, if your hiring process is discombobulated, this is not the best look for you as a company. And matter of fact, you know what you see in most companies, you see this like resumes coming in and you actually have maybe a 22 year old, 25 year old HR person who's never done the job by the way, scanning through the resume, looking at resumes and throwing away great talent because they misspelled something on their resume and letting the person through because their resume was, you know, nice and neat and they responded on time and they were like things that have absolutely zero correlation to whether this person can do the job. That's a broken system. That's why in the trades you have 60% turnover for most roles.

Right.

That's insane.

It's absurd. Yeah, absolutely.

So, so well written job ad. Make sure that you're defining for, for your customer, your employee. Here's the four stages we're going to go for there or the three stages, I don't care how many stages is, but they should know at every step of the way exactly what they can expect. I think of it as the door dash experience. And then when you get finally get in front of them, you one, there's good prediction tools that can help you understand what you have in front of you. Who hires One of those. But even without using who hire, what am I looking for in that job interview?

That's a great question.

I have to know what that is. I get companies. I'm on a rant. You want to ask another question? You want me to keep ranting?

No, no, you're good. No, this is really good. So pause super quick though. Really? Yeah. Really appropriate timing because this episode is being recorded November 14th. Basically it's going to release tomorrow, the 15th of 2024, which is the fall as we know. We're coming right out the end of the shoulder months. And this is the time that, that companies in the trades are looking to start their process to hire for spring 2025 and through the winter. So this is the perfect timing for exactly this rant. So keep going. So when, when we're asking those interview questions. Right. And if you want to expound on the timing there too, that. Feel free.

Well, I was thinking. Yeah. That you know, from a timing standpoint, companies need to always be hiring.

Agreed.

The only reason they don't do that is they built this like Frankenstein model that's really hard and takes a lot of time and it's frankly, it's a pain in the ass. But if you've smooth that out where you can be constantly filtering talent and only talking to people that are highly qualified and you take the pain out of it, you know that, that, that's helpful.

Right. And I agree with that. I think that anytime, any, even a company that feels like they're maxed out, that's because they don't have all of the right people on the bus. I such a firm believer that when you find that that person that is the right fit for your company and your culture, make a place for them because they will only grow the business, not suck from it.

Yeah, they're maxed out temporarily.

Exactly right.

Because you, you're going to lose people. You're. You're going to be trying to grow. I find people in the interview spending a lot of time on what's the magic question I can ask. And that's going to uncover some, you know, thing that can help me be successful.

Smoking gun here.

And when you talk to leaders that are hiring, they, they have what I call recency bias, which means they remember all the great hires they made and they forget all the ones that burned out and churned out and were an utter failure somehow. That was their problem, the person they hired. Right. They were lazy. They young kids don't want to work these days, whatever it is. And they Don't. They're not shouldering the responsibility for the bad decisions that they made. So leaders in your organization, the people you're response, you're giving the responsibility to hire for you. They're trusting their gut and intuition way more than they should. They believe that they're great judges of human character and the data tells us they're not. You could literally flip a coin and have equal hiring success as you get with most managers in a company. That's what your data would tell you if you looked at it. It's about a 60% turnover rate.

That's right. Well, that makes sense. Like in towns that are, you know, somewhat of a. We all know that every city has this community of workers that just hop, you know, give it five years, this group is going to be over at that company in another five years, are going to be at the next company and they just hop around. It's like these several groups that hop around all over town. And this makes perfect sense why.

So here's if you're running a company, first thing I would install this mindset that the system for getting people into your organization is the single most and keeping them is the single most important system. You are not an H Vac company. You're not a plumbing company, you're not a roofing company. You are a people company.

Right.

You just happen to install whatever.

Yeah.

So if you're, if you have somebody involved in the hiring process in your company, you should treat it like a half a million dollar decision every time they say yes to moving somebody through hiring process. Now how many people typically in a company have the authority to write a half a million dollar check?

One, right?

Yeah, usually the owner, probably the owner, maybe there's one or two other people they trust. And yet owners are allowing just anybody to make hiring decisions without clearly identifying what needs to. What's the standard? If, if, if you're a owner of a company and you're handing that responsibility for hiring to somebody else and you should, I'm not suggesting you should do all the hiring.

Correct.

But if I was going to give somebody the authority to write a half a million dollar check, a couple of things would be true. One, I will have clearly identified what are you allowed to spend half a million dollars on? What's the quality of that thing that you're going to spend half a million dollars on? And secondly, if you mess it up, I self audited my language. If you mess it up, I'm going to hold you responsible for having wasted a half a million dollars Right. And yet you get owners letting managers make a hiring decision that turns out sometimes even before they get out of training. And they never say a word. So I literally.

Better luck next time.

I literally trained the managers and companies that I work with. I'm like, you are physically going to write a half a million dollar check and endorse the back of it when you say Sam should move forward in the hiring process. Because when Sam wastes my money and he, he churns out of the organization. So it would be another Sam, not Sam. Wait, I'm gonna pull that check out and I'm gonna say, hey, Joe, remember when you wrote this half a million dollar check for this guy? What happened?

Right.

So you got to get the seriousness.

Right.

And then when you look at the, you know, we were talking about these magic questions people have. The truth is none of those questions matter.

Okay.

Zero. You make, make up whatever questions you want. It doesn't matter.

Sure.

What, what. The only thing I'm looking for is one relevant experience. But I'm going to get that from a lot of places. Right. And I. And yes, maybe some of that comes out. But what am I really looking for? Especially when it comes to somebody that's selling. I'm looking for mental flexibility and composure. Like when I ask a question, are they mentally flexible and can they maintain their composure?

Sure.

If those two things are true, it solves a lot of the problems I'm going to have bringing this person into my organization. And the other thing I'm looking for, because I will have used the best scientific assessments which will have done the work for me.

Sure.

Because I trust that more than my own bias.

Right. Facts over emotion. Right. A lot of times, yeah.

But one thing that I do look at, it's my rule of thumb is I want to. I'm always zeroing in on the answer to this question. Is this person that's in front of me what I would call a happy discontent? Are they a happy discontent? What do I mean by that? I mean, do they generally see the world with rose colored glasses? Like, are they happy?

Yeah.

Like, or are they miserable? Like life has given me the short end of the stick and like I've been persecuted and beaten down and like you, somebody comes in and you know, they're complaining about the weather, it's too hot or oh, it's too cold or whatever. There are people that are just genuinely happy in life. I want somebody that's happy. But what I want right next to that is discontent. And what I mean by discontent is I can tell by the way they speak that they know they were built for something more. They have more left to give in life.

Yes.

That they're seeking some sort of challenge. They're not lazy riding along. You know, they're not on autopilot.

Mm.

So those are the only things that I'm trying to get in. My question is, is, are they. Can they maintain their composure, their mental flexibility? Which means they'll be able to take coaching, by the way, which is why that's important. And then secondly, are they a happy discontent?

I love those things are true.

I'm in.

I love that. And that's. That's interesting. It's. I. I guess intuitively, you know, I've always done. Really sought after those two things differently, just through questions like the. My. My question about their discontent usually is always around. I just want to see where their. Where their mindset is and where their vision is. So I'd always ask them, hey, if money wasn't an object, where would you vacation? Where'd you pack up your family and go? Anywhere you could go? And so the degree of their answer would always tell me how big their vision is. Because if somebody's like, oh, we'd go to the Florida Keys is a way different answer than we'd spend a month in Fiji.

Right.

Or we'd take the world cruise for a hundred thousand dollars. Right. There's a whole different answer. So I would. You know, that's really fun that you're, like, putting some actual verbiage to this, because I just have always asked these questions just because I want to see where someone's mindset is, but never really thought about the specifics there. Yeah.

But whether somebody wants to be in the Florida Keys or, you know, on a $100,000 Cruz really has. Doesn't really tell me much about them as a person.

Sure. Absolutely. Right.

Like, because you're dealing with theoretical.

Right. Absolutely.

When I. When I get somebody talking about their life, like real things, the language they choose to describe that will tell me, are they happy and are. And discontent. My belief is that people will keep working for your company for as long as they believe they can do the best work of their life. Working for you.

Yeah.

And the minute that's no longer true, they're going to churn out. So I'm trying to look at where has this person been in their life? And will they're having worked for me because they're going to move on.

Yeah, but will.

There. Will they're having worked for me, improved their life. And them as a human in a real way. And if that's true, that's going to come out in our conversation together.

Yeah, absolutely.

It.

It's really interesting when we start thinking about the language people use. And also it's hard to recognize that language unless we've first gone before them in that language journey. Yeah. So can you. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because that's, I mean, clearly that's how to recognize it is. You have to know the language first.

I'm not. Do it. Ask me that one more time. I'm not sure I followed.

Well, so you're talking about, you know, you can recognize in their language, you know, where they are as far as the discontent and, and their happiness and all of that. But how do we recognize that language if we haven't learned the language to be able to recognize it? Right. So it's this. To me, it just seems like this. We have to learn this language and know what to listen for to be able to recognize what we're listening for. I guess maybe would be a better way to say it.

Yeah. So depending on who's doing your interviewing in your company, most people have a technical mindset when they're interviewing somebody. So if you're interviewing somebody to be, you know, a technician or some other role like the. I'm looking at that through the lens of can they do this job? And I'm suggesting I'm going to have that conversation with somebody. But I want to teach my leader, the sales boss, to have the lens on of. Ignore the technical answer and be looking for who are they as a human? Are they happy, discontent? Are they mentally flexible?

Right.

They maintain their composure. It's. It's not a, it's not really a different skill. It's just swapping out a lens. It's almost like, you know, if you have a camera and you put the polarity lens on it, it looks different than if I, you know, and the same thing with sunglasses.

The.

Everything looks different. So I just want to say I'm going to put on my lens of who is this human standing in front of me?

Oh, I love this. And, and I really asked that, like, that way on purpose because, you know, a lot of people listening, they, you know, kind of have an idea about this. But I love these awareness moments of, oh, that's all it is. It's just remembering, let's also look through this lens also. And so, I mean, until I learned it, I didn't even know to know to ask for that. But, you know, These awareness moments are cool because now it's like immediately actionable that people can use. And it's not like just like you're saying, not learning a new skill. It's like, oh, just being aware of it. And to think about this also.

Yeah. And people use heuristics, which is a big word that just means shortcuts.

Sure.

But people use heuristics to get there. So they'll say. And you'll hear people go, well, if they played sports, then they're going to be a good employee. Or if they did, why they're. And the. The reality is none of that's true.

Sure.

It is a heuristic you've used to convince yourself that you have something to go on with this human. My grandfather used to say, business would be easy if it wasn't for the people. Like, people are messy.

Right.

So design but designing a process that just gets to. To the foundation of functionally. Who. Who are they are. Do you know Josh and Laura Kelly over.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I spoke on a sales panel with him at Profit Rocket last year.

Yeah. You know, Josh has this great. When he. When somebody comes work works for their companies as they focus on three things, they tell them, look, you're gonna, I'm gonna promise you that you're gonna come away from this being a better human. You're going to be better at your job and you're going to be better in a better financial place than you were when you came to work for us.

Wow.

And that's so powerful. That's human to human conversation.

Right.

So baking that into your hiring process, where you're saying, this is who we are as an organization and who. Here's the avatar of who does well in our organization and here's who you will become as a result of having spent time with us.

Wow. I love that. That's. I'm learning today. I'm writing this into the way I will be hiring people from now on too.

Yeah. And that was so powerful because a lot of times we. You hear this in home service contractors especially, like, people should be lucky they have a job.

Right.

They're lucky that they can work for me. That you have to change your mindset of because that's no longer true.

Right.

People have a lot of options where to work. The truth is you are lucky as a business owner that there are humans that are willing to come alongside you and give a portion of their life to helping you fulfill your dream. And 90% of the people that work for you aren't going to have a big exit. When you blow out and sell your home service business or you retire or do that for them, this is a job. It's a period of time that they're coming alongside you because they have some need they need met that might just be to pay the bills. It's your job as the owner to help that human have a bigger dream about themselves.

Right, right.

Or understand what is it that they are dreaming of and how do I come alongside them to help them achieve that thing then knowing that they'll likely move on.

Right? Yeah, absolutely. And some of the best leaders that I know across the country are, you know, are doing this. They're, you know, meeting with their people individually. And so best practices. Everybody listening. There's a handful of people I know, you know, they'll meet with their people individually. We go. Go through this whole process of helping them fill out, you know, find their why in life. And what's something financially that you're building towards. Is it buying your first home for your family? Is it that new truck? Is it the rv? Whatever it is. And then constantly keeping that in front of them. It's like, okay, here's the metrics that we'll put together to get there. Are you on pace for those? And I love those conversations because now we have a reason to be there and a reason to build something great together.

Yeah. I have in my book, I write about the five truths about humans. And I think if a leader can master those, they can master growing a team of any sort. But especially a sales team, one of those truths is only their reasons matter.

Right.

And that. And that's true for every human. So as a leader, you've got to figure out what, what, what, what matters to this human that I'm gonna hire into my organization. I'm surprised when I listen to the. To my calls my team has with people that are coming in and getting set up on our platform. And, you know, looking at their hiring, how. How many struggle with the answer to the question, why would somebody want to work for you?

Sure.

Like, you get silence from some people.

Crickets. Right.

And sometimes it's the owner, and sometimes it's your HR leader. If, if you're. Here's a good test. If you're an owner of a business, just go knock on the door of your. Whoever's the front tip of the spear for your hiring. When people come to come to your company, just go, just say, sam, I'm just curious. Why would somebody want to work for us?

See what they say.

This is A person who talks and sells your company all day, every day, if they're doing their job right, and if they hesitate and there's no passion and they can't get deep about why this is such a great place to work, you got a problem.

Right, Right.

And it can't be, well, because we offer $2 more an hour or we have more paid vacation, or we. Because if that's the only reason people are coming to your organization, well, guess What? When another 50 cents an hour comes up or another day's vacation, that person is susceptible to churn. Why? In the trades, 60%. That's the churn rate in a lot of these organizations.

Yeah.

Just think about the massive human cost of 60% churn. Like just in terms of setting them up in payroll and showing them where the bathroom is and how to clean their truck and you know, like basic like that. That's a lot of work. Give them passwords for all your systems, you know, whatever you got to do just to have them. That means In a two year period, you have replaced 100% of your company.

Oh, that's awful.

Now you might have a handful and, you know, three or four people, 10 people, 20 people that have stayed around for, you know, their lifers. Yeah, but that, that means you have this whole other section of your company that is in constant state of churn. You tell me whether or not a company that has employees that are under two years, under three years, under four years, are doing a better job servicing the customer than companies that have employees that are there six to ten years, right?

No, not at all. Never.

They can't. Plus all of that energy of just starting over, like, imagine you were. I, I recently started doing Spartan races.

I don't know why I saw that. And I want to commit to one with you.

I hate running, but I'm gonna do it for 20, 25 just because I need a health challenge. But could you imagine you're gonna start like a 21k and you're gonna race against somebody else running a 21k. And let's imagine those are two business owners. They're both running race to 21 million. And they know to get to 21 million, they got to have, I don't know, let's pick a number. 30 employees, 50 employees, doesn't matter the number. And this guy is running, but every time he gets to 10 employees got to go back and lose two and go up, and then lose two and go up. The other can just run straight out. That literally would be like running a Spartan race and saying, hey, I get to run 2k and then I got to go back 1k and then I can run 2k and go back a k and run 3k and just gonna exhaust yourself.

Yeah. Your 21k race turned into 50k.

Yeah. So here's a question. And you, most business owners be really hard pressed. Like if you ask them what their EBIT is, they got that. You ask them how many trucks they have, they got that. You ask them how many, you're like they got the big top number. But if you said what's your churn rate?

Right.

In humans, most gonna have a really hard time answering that question.

Yeah. They wouldn't even know.

Your leadership team should know that metric just as well as they know it every other metric. Like what is Sam, if Sam's the manager, what is his batting average? And I would be posting that.

Yeah.

Like we shouldn't have Sam in the hiring process because he's at 50. 50.

Right.

Like we're just going to skip Sam, flip a coin. I'm bake that into my software. It's called the coin flip.

Right. Yeah. Random employment generators.

When Sam hires them, it's random because he's at the Magic 8 Ball.

Yes, no, maybe.

So we have to have the standard that we could do better. Now what's a quick way to get there? Just go back and say how many technicians do I have today? November 15th, 14th. Right. Whatever day you do this exercise. How many W2s did I issue last year for that same role?

Oh, hey, that's an easy way to get the number.

You're going to be pretty close now. You can say, well, we grew. Great. Well, let's take into consideration. But if you shrank, it's at least a, it's a sort of a, it's, it's, it's a messy way of getting to a very important number, but at least put a stake in the ground. If you have 50 technicians and you hired 150 technicians, you got a problem.

Right.

Fifty technicians. And you, and, and, and you had 50 last year, but you've hired 75. You got a problem.

Right.

You got to get. This is a number that has to come out of the closet and into the light of day.

Right. Where we don't measure, we can't manage it. Right.

And, and aside from that, these are humans. Like nobody starts on day one and goes, Yay, I'm gonna burn out in 120 days. Yay. I'm gonna, I'm gonna put on the identity of this company. And then six months later, I'm gonna be a loser.

Right.

That's a. That there's a human emotional toll placed on humans when you bring them into your company and you fail to be able to turn them into kind of employee that can add value to your company.

Right, right.

It's like this idea that, that you should be able to treat it like a consumable resource. I mean, people talk about resources, but this is not a consumable resource that you want to burn through.

There's.

There's a human cost. And second to that, what also happens when you churn out and turn people through your organization, the people that stay in your company, develop this mindset of I'm not going to really wait and help Joe because Joe probably not going to be here 90 days right now. If he makes it the 90 days, maybe I'll kick in and help him. Like they're waiting to just see if they make the cut.

I just had another sort of thing you want? No. And I had just another interesting thought on the flip side of that is we're feeding all of these people who've gone through our organization and learned the ins and outs of our organization. We're feeding our competition insider trading knowledge every single time that happens. Because where are they going? To our competition. And now because I'll tell you, if that was me and I was at a place for a while and I went somewhere else, I now know how to completely shred that company in a sales call. Not directly, but if that's my competition, I know all of the right things to say. Now about listen, we do it this way. Make sure to ask them if they do this thing.

And yeah, the there's destroyed. There's no good that comes from super high churn and bad hiring in a company. I would say the only thing worse than really high churn is no churn. I mean you've got to have some or you probably don't have a standard. Like if you're keeping everyone, you probably don't have a standard because the truth or zero growth. Yeah. Humans are messy. You're gonna. Even if you do everything right, you're gonna. There's gonna be some people that just don't make the cut.

Absolutely. Well, let's turn the corner a little bit because I'm. I'm so intrigued and especially since the first time we've been talking about who hire is. It's such a cool tool, but I don't know as much about it. And I know all the listeners would like to know more about it because with the AI taking over the world, it seems like right now, basically we've got Terminator waiting to happen. Some people are saying, I don't believe that now, but I am being nice every time I talk to my devices. The lady that's in the room, that I can't say her name or she'll beep right in the middle of this episode. But I'd be nice to them just in case. But tell us about who hire. What problem does this solve? What shortcut does it give us? You know, all these things. Right. And obviously we now know why you came up with it for everything we just talked about.

Yeah. At the very basic, you know, you think about, you can think about who hire as an applicant tracking system that people would be familiar with. So everything from writing your job ad, putting it out on job boards, managing candidates coming in, whether that's texting one way, video interviews, automating the process of scheduling and rating and all of that sort of thing. But the real magic and the key thing that's different is what we call a performance blueprint. It sits in the middle and it gives you a prediction about the applicants coming in on two things. How will they fit in that role and how long are they likely to stay. To give you an example, for Mercedes Benz, when an applicant comes in for say a car sales job, they're taking a 10 minute questionnaire and then we say this person's going to sell 50 cars a month or 20 cars a month or 30 cars a month and they're going to stay around this period of time, we get to within 15%, it's mind blowing. What are we doing for home services? Well, when we got started, we to build these blueprints and when I say blueprints for your comfort advisor, your dispatcher, your CSR agent, your install technician, plumbing, electrical, roofing, solar, you name it. We went out to the network of businesses. So for example, for H Vac Plumbing, we partnered with the Nexstar members. There's 1100 members in that group. We got to assess thousands and thousands of their actual employees doing those jobs. So these employees logged in, took a really long questionnaire and then we got their actual performance data. So how did these people perform? What did their managers think of them? When did they churn out? We're feeding that into a machine learning algorithm. Think about it's, it's very similar to what's known as actuarial science. So when, when an insurance company is trying to decide, hey, am I going to insure Jonathan or Sam, they have a, a prediction that says, well, Sam's likely to have cancer and diet, age, whatever he's like. So they're trying to weigh are you insurable and at what risk level.

Right.

We're using that same science because we know the humans doing the job today and we know how you actually perform. So when you, if you're an H VAC company, you have a candidate that comes in, we're comparing them to thousands of other people whose diseases we know.

Right.

And whose performance we know and we're making a guess to say, hey, this, they're likely going to do this. Now you're going from having somebody who, you know, a human that's doing a face to face interview or there's, you know, maybe it's that young person screening candidates on LinkedIn to go from that to being able to compare that candidate to 7,000 plus other applicants who we know.

Sure.

Who do you think is going to make a better judgment?

Of course, yeah.

It's the data.

It's just as clear as a bell as soon as we define it that.

Way, when you think of it that way and yet. So it's not perfect, but think of it like poker. When you think about the World Series of Poker, every hand has odds for the hand. And our goal is just for you to push your chips all in on the best hands possible with a highing. Now, it doesn't mean when you're playing sitting down, playing poker, sometimes you push your chips in on a poorly ranked hand and you win big. And sometimes you push your chips in on a great hand and you get beat.

Right.

But when you look at games over time, the same people win the World Series of Poker year in and year out.

Why?

Because they're disciplined in playing the odds.

Right.

That's what we want to help our contractors do. We want to instill a discipline of. You're going to, people are messy, you're not always going to win, but we want you to place your bets consistently on your highest ranked hands. Not from Joe's intuition because he believed somebody was great at playing football in high school. So he's going to make a great technician.

He's disciplined. Yeah.

That sort of thinking has gotten you where you're at today.

Right. Well, when we of course have to make changes to get changes and our same thinking is not going to get us to a new place.

This is the application of science today in home service businesses and contractors that don't upgrade the way they're hiring and they think they're going to hire the same way they did at the beginning of last year. They're already getting behind.

Sure. Yeah. No, 100%. I'm seeing it all over the country too. It's just, it's, it's incredible the difference just in the last, I'd say 24 months from you know, we were coming right out of the boom of COVID and all, all of that happened there and now we've landed in this place of. It's almost as if the business owners for the most part there's plenty that are doing incredible. So don't this is everyone. But it's almost as we've slipped into this desperation, scarcity mindset all over the place that's like literally just. If somebody will just fog a mirror we can train them. Let's hope we can train them. And begging for anybody to walk through the door.

Yeah. So my. I'm particularly passionate about this and I have a ton of areas where we're growing the offering for our contractors. I'm going out all of next week and living at one of my contractors businesses because I want to be up close and personal. See sort of the things that they're dealing with. My commitment to the industry is we will be the number one platform for fixing their people problem. I want to, I want my, my customers to be in a room with a bunch of other contractors bellyaching and bitching about how hard it is to find and h great people. And my customers go, you know what? It's been so long that since I had a hiring problem I don't even remember what that was like.

Right.

Because there is an answer to this problem. It's not all a technology fix but technology can help us in many ways fix that. And then when we surround that by real business discipline and I'm passionate about this because when you look across the landscape of the United States, the core businesses that really make commun are your home service types of businesses. They're the ones sponsoring little league, they're the ones showing up at the community events, they're walking into our neighbors homes. It's not the walmarting of America where there's a Walmart and a CVS on every corner. Now you could argue we're getting more and more private equity in the space and we're starting to head that way. But I still believe at the end of the day those individuals com locations they become the face of our community. And so if I can help them make better hiring decisions and put more profit into their pockets, that's going to go directly into the local community.

Oh, 100 make for better schools, better.

Roads and all the things that make us uniquely American.

Oh, I love this so much. So take us through real quick. Unless you already have the details of exactly what, what you do offer. When somebody says, you know what, I've got a, for example a 10 million dollar a year company and I need to bring on a handful of people. Yeah. What's that look like? Yeah.

Well, they would just go on to whohire.com we're a technology platform. So there's a monthly subscription they're gonna, they're gonna use to get on that and then we offer a bunch of other services around that. So sure, you know, if they're having a hard time, some people are behind the eight ball, right. They need 10 immediately, they need five immediately. So we have done for you recruiting services that can help you get caught up, but you're not going to sustainably grow paying somebody else to recruit team members.

Right.

So what we want to install is a technology and the expertise within your leadership team that you can self grow both your leaders, your technicians and people within that organization. So, so the, the actual engagement sometimes differs but you know, at the heart of it are who hire technology platform and that prediction, that's what we're, that's what we're banking on.

Love it, love it, love it, love it. So that, so it's whohire. Just whohire.com. that's the whoire.com.

It'S such a tough one to remember.

I know that. So for everybody listening, you know it will be in the show notes. You don't have to crash the car trying to write it down. It's wh-o h I r e.com and, and how, where can people find your book?

And Sam, when are you putting this episode out?

We are going live Friday, November 15, 2024.

Yeah. So anytime between now and the end of the year, if somebody's watch listening to this podcast episode and they book a demo and they say Sam sent me, then we're going to give them a hundred percent off their implementation fee.

Ooh, thank you. That's awesome.

That's the friends of Sam discount.

I did not even know that was happening. Everybody got it.

You got to put Sam in the comments and it's got to be before the end of the year before.

So before the end, before December 31, 2024, make sure to get your demo booked with who hire and you think thanks for that gift. That's awesome.

And just Put Sam in the comments. Like, what do we talk?

Can they also put close it now. Either way, Sam or close it now.

Sam, or close it now. Either one. I'll know who you are.

Perfect. Yeah. So make sure to give that in the comments to get your setup fee wave. That's pretty.

And my team's gonna say, what the did you just do?

Well, that's my.

That's my. We love. We're. We're Sam and the. And we're in the holiday spirit early.

I love it. That is. You know, to kind of wrap this up a little bit, I want to circle back to the main theme that I heard in this discussion is, yes, there sounds like some really incredible technology that I'm super excited to get to know more about as well as use and, you know, even help my. You know, all the companies that. That I'm coaching and coaching with, you know, we can help them hire better. But the theme that I heard the most throughout this episode is humans. We're. We're working with people. We're working with people. Not just people, but people who have lives and families and emotions and feelings and their own communities, and they're the providers. And to not respect them as people enough to truly give them a great experience where they want to stick around and treating them almost like cattle is. Boy, that says a lot about who we are as the leader and the business owner. And this is not a spanking for anybody listening. I'm just hearing it, and I'm basically spanking myself in this matter of, you know, I've thought that over the years, people are coming, go. But now that I think about it this way, wow.

What I try to do, and this is for me as a business owner, because I've all, you know, always ran my own companies. I. I'm in the habit of. In the morning when I'm going into my place of work is I try to imagine one of my employees and them on their path into work for the day, and what are they thinking and feeling and what problems might they be dealing with their. In their life? And what dreams might they have and. And. And what emotion, you know, mental baggage are they showing up to my office or my workplace if they're working remote dealing with. And I try to imagine what can I do and what will they be thinking and feeling at the end of their interaction with me that day? Well, I have elevated them so they can be better for their family, so they can improve their health. Like, if you. If you look at somebody over a, you know, a Five year time span, you think, let's just go four years. Like somebody that becomes president. And at the end of four years, if you look at them, they are worn out. Oh, they might have come in with like jet black hair and now they're gray.

I, I've noticed this news. Several different presidents, I watch it go completely white in four years.

Yeah. And the reason is, is there's such a tremendous weight of responsibility regardless of what political party you're at. What do you see happening inside your company? Do people come in and they get fitter and healthier and brighter, smiled and more energetic, or are they starting to age and they're getting fat and unhealthy and like, that's you.

Yeah. Right.

So what do you want? Like, if you. I. I'm a part of this group that Joe Polish puts on. It's called the Genius Network. It's a great networking event. But one of the things he talks about is you as the entrepreneur being the million dollar racehorse. And if you had a literal million dollar racehorse, you wouldn't put it up wet. You wouldn't stuff cheeseburgers in its mouth. You wouldn't, like, you would take care of it. You would give it proper rest. Well, in your business, you have racehorses. Look at the quality of those racehorses over time. Like just physically look at them.

Yeah.

Is this. If this person is physically unhealthy and mentally deteriorating and exhausted, that's the future of your business?

Yeah. Wow. This is reality right in the face. I love this so much. It's such a great reminder. And speaking, it's kind of landing this plane with where it started, with leadership. Right. There's an exercise that I've done several times. A good friend of mine actually has been a guest on the show. He takes everybody through. It's very similar when we're talking about recruiting. And he'll have everybody just write down a list of all of the attributes and traits that you want in a good hire. You know, can they're punctual and they have a great attitude and all the different things, and it goes down the list. And then he says, now rate yourself on a scale of 1 to 10 in every single one of these categories. It's like you're attracting who you are. If you want to hire people with these attributes at a level 8 or a 9, then you better have these attributes in yourself at a level 10, because you attract who you are. And it's like, wow, what a, like, reality of if the fish stinks, it sinks from the head down. So in order to build a better company, more thriving with better people that want to work for you, be someone worth working, working for.

That's it. The and if your audience wants to check out the Sales Boss published by Wiley on Audible, it is free right now. So I have marked it as zero cost because I've been out and about chatting with people and there's a chapter. It wasn't written for the trades, but tradespeople are smart. They'll get it. You'll be able to decipher how this applies to your your universe because at the end of the day, it's about business. There's a chapter on how to run your hiring process, but there's also a chapter on being a leader and the leadership code and what are the five truths about humans that if you master them, you will be able to build any kind of company that you want to build, whether that's an H vac, plumbing, electrical, solar. Maybe you want to go into something completely different.

Love it. Well, that is incredible. In fact, I just downloaded mine right now on my Audible. So everyone go download the Sales Boss. It's free on Audible right now. Go to whohire.com, W-O-H-I-R-E.com and set up a demo for to check out the software. It will it sounds to me like it is a. It might not completely solve your hiring problems, but it'll sure make a hell of a dent in solving your hiring problems. And make sure to mention Sam or close it now or both in those comments. So you get get it sounds like a pretty sizable discount, which is awesome.

There's, there's no double discount for mentioning Sam and close it now.

It's just confirming that this is where.

It'S confirming that you, you too are friends of Sam.

Exactly. Are you friend of Sam? It's honestly this life philosophy. Everybody that's listening probably knows this. I don't think I've ever said it, but strangers are just friends I haven't met yet.

Yeah, that's right.

This is what the classic, classic, classic sayings. Well, thanks for joining us today, man. It has been a pleasure. It always is getting to hang out with you for a bit and I know that you've been on a lot of adventures to different trade shows, that kind of stuff coming up. Where if people want to get out and about and see you, where's the next event or location you're going to be that?

The next one I'm going to is the roofing process conference. That's happening December. I think fifth, sixth and seventh might be sixth. Seventh and eighth. Don't show up a day early, but look it up. It's on Marco Island. And we're gonna. I'm gonna be doing a panel there with some of the greats and we're gonna be talking about things related to home services.

Love it. Yep. There's a lot of roofers that listen to this too. So that's all the roofers. That's gonna be an incredible conference. And for everybody else that's near Marco island, even if you're not a roofer, get your butt there because it'll be some valuable content and some things you can go back and action in your business.

Plus, it's a beautiful location.

Yeah, exactly. Who wouldn't want to go to.

I'm going to skip the conference and I'm just going to go hit the beach.

Word. Sounds good. I'll bring my suit. We'll drink the first non alcoholic drinks on me.

Yeah. The first non alcoholic.

We're prepping for Spartan now, right?

That's right. I am now nine days short of one year of no alcohol.

Congratulations.

I'm gonna toast in nine days. I think I haven't yet decided is it. Is that a new me or you know.

Right. I love it. I love it. Congrats.

Thank you.

That's huge. Mine will be January 1, will be a year. So awesome.

Congrats.

Yeah, for sure.

You're gonna make it. You're on the home. You're on the home stretch now.

Good stuff. Well, thanks for hanging out with us, man. Last time, everybody. The sales boss. Go get the book. It's free on audible right now. Whohire.com and go schedule a demo. Make sure to mention Sam or close it now. And Jonathan Porter Wisman. It has been incredible and we will see you again. Absolutely. I'm sure. I'd love to do a whole episode and really deep dive into more of the. The sales leadership content that you have. Really talk about the book and get. And. And we'll book it out enough we can get an update on how the. The data from who hire and what that looks like and just continue to build on that.

Love it. Nice to see you again, Sam.

All right, take care, man. We'll see you soon. All right. So that was Jonathan Porter Wisman with who hire. I hope that you got some value from that episode. I know I did. And thanks everyone for joining us today. A couple quick announcements that I want to cover. One is the Hook Agency sales Summit in Minneapolis, Minnesota. That is there are 10 tickets left to that guy and it is going to be incredible. Make sure you go to hookagency.com or just find Tim Hook on Facebook page, his Facebook page and that will be the place to get a ticket. Also the link for those tickets will be in the show notes. So that is step one. The other speakers there, as you know, hopefully as you know are going to be of course myself I'm actually going to be pretty getting pretty close to closing out the day. Joe Chrisra is going to be there. Jason Walker is going to be there. We've got Elizabeth Howard who's arguably one of the best operators in the industry right now growing a company from 30 to 100 million and Phil Falanski who is going to do 16 somewhere between 17 and 20 million and we're just going to round out the year which is wild thinking about he's going to be somewhere in between and his toggle number is as much as what how most people do in a year. So that's pretty wild. Also Brent Buckley is going to be there. Mr. 14 million a year. And yeah, and of course Tim, Tim Brown, he owns Hook Agency and in my opinion he is definitely one of the best market digital marketing agencies out there that I have seen. There is a short list of the people that I trust. If you want to know who that is, message me. Right now there's about four which I love to have a short list in a, in a world that is cluttered with the trash. So just like any other industry, if you need to know about some marketing agency, let me know. Happy to get you connected. And the big announcement though is the end of April, 1st of May, the week of April. Let's see, what is it? I'm going to look at my calendar here because I want to get it exactly right for all of you the week of April 28th through May 2nd. Now it's going to be three days in that week. We don't have the exact days like locked down just yet but it will be that week. We are working on some of the final decisions on location and days and that type of thing for the close it now sell the votes are in. Basically the word boot camp evidently has to be in there because when I polled the audience everyone said boot camp. But it's going to be the close. It now sells training the sales system boot camp, right. Come learn how to be that 1%, how to be that top performer. Come learn how to multiply your numbers. It's going to be so incredible. What me And Steven and the rest of the team are putting together Lauren, everybody, that's in the close it now team. You are going to want to be there. It's going to be off the charts. Some of the things we're doing are wildly different than anything you've ever experienced in the, in the trades, in training, for the trades especially. This is not just come learn a few things and let's hope it works and you know, spaghetti stuck against the wall. These are actual proven principles. We're not retraining stuff that we learned 15, 20 years ago. This is the new stuff. This is how people are buying right now. It's perfect timing because it's springboarding out of that, out of the January event at Hook Agency. And that is the, the topic of the day is how are people buying in 2025? Well, we're going to deep dive into that with way instead of just, you know, a 45 minute session or whatever I get and one day's worth of a handful of speakers, we're going to spend three days intensively getting you to the next level to be a master at exactly how people are buying right now in 2025. So you do not want to miss the event. The tick the link to the tickets are going to be in the show notes here. I'm going to make sure, make sure, make sure, make sure that you have a seat. Now I'm capping this at 60 people. It's going to be, it's going to sell out. It's going to sell out fast. Now what I want to do is make sure that everyone who wants to be there gets there. So you can go ahead and message me directly. Samoseitnow.net you can email my assistant Lauren. She's my scheduling coordinator. Lauren L A U R E N at close it now.net or go to the Facebook page, search Close it Now, find the Facebook group, join the Facebook group and of course check out closeitnow.net that's the website, all of those places. If you fill out the form on there and put in the notes that you want to know more about the Close it Now sales bootcamp event coming in the spring of 2025. We will make sure to get you on the, on the short list and it's kind of like penciling in your spot. Now you have to want a ticket. Of course we're not going to hold it for everybody. As soon as the tickets go and sell that short list, you're going to get a day, get a few days to buy before the Tickets go and sell to everyone. But if you want to be on the pre order list for this event, get your ticket now. Get on the list now. Email me samoseitnow.net that's Lauren L A U R E N@closeitnow.net or you can go straight to closeitnow.net and fill out the form there or go join the Facebook group or just pop me a Facebook message. Any of those ways will get me. Make sure you mention that you want to know more. Want to get on the pre order list for the ticket for the spring event. And the very last thing, everybody, if you've gotten value from the Close it now podcast, I am working on my reviews so make sure to scan the QR code that is that came up on your screen. That will take you right to the link tree. Foreclose it now you can get all the different links to all the different social media, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and that is where you can, you will be able to leave a review. I would love a five star review. If you mention my. If, if I read your review online and you hear your review then I will give you a one hour coaching session. Those are now a thousand dollars. It's not because I have to charge that much. It's because I just don't have that much time. So my coach said you got to start charging for these things. So that way your time is worth it. Doing so many trainings. But so listen everybody, if I read your review online, then you get the ability to get one of those at no charge, which is really, really powerful because there's so many people that have done a free coaching session with me that have absolutely gone and blown up their numbers from one session. It's like the, my. If you listen to the old episodes, you've heard me talk about this gentleman, I haven't talked about him in a while. There's a guy named Mark, he's up in Chicago. We did one coaching session. He'd never sold above a 16 seer single stage system in three years of owning his business. No, no bad judgment on him for that. Nobody's saying anything negative there just because he didn't know. Right? And so what we did, we did one coaching session that day. He went out and he sold a $19,000 variable speed system like immediately same day. He'd never done it before. And he's like man. And of course he does that all the time now. So that is exactly what is happens when you get a coaching session with me. So, so good. I'D love a five star review. And that's it. So that was the last announcement. Everybody, thanks for listening today. I know you are on the path to success. I see greatness in you. I've got your back. I am here to help you every step of the way to do things you've never done, to get results you've never gotten so you can make a massive impact in your life, in your family's life. Be that provider that you know you're called to be to make an impact in your community. Go be someone worth buying from you.

Listening to the Close It Now Podcast. Our passion. Our mission is to dive headfirst into the transformative movement that's reshaping the very foundation of H VAC and home improvement and at the same time covering fitness, nutrition, relationships and personal growth, proving that we can indeed have it all. We hope you've enjoyed the show. If you did, make sure to, like, rate and review. We'll be back soon, but in the meantime, find the website@closeitnow.net find us on Instagram at thereal Close It Now. And on Facebook at Close It Now. See you next time.