Contractors journey to self-mastery requires discipline, integrity, and respect. Welcome to Hammer and Grind. Hey, welcome back to the show. On this episode, I'm going to be talking about something that contractors don't do very well, if at all, and that is onboarding new hires in their business. And I was just having a conversation, a private one-on-one call with one of my clients today, and he had just hired someone last week, and we were talking about some things that he was doing. And it became very apparent that there was no onboarding process. period it was like hey welcome to the team uh let's get you started out on the job right it's usually a phone call it's like hey meet me at this address at 7 a. m and then we'll get you started And like for you, you just want to plug them directly into the job because you're trying to free up your time to get off the tools and, you know, put them in place, especially if they're like a lead guy. And this was the case with my client is that this was a lead guy. And so this is common. I did this. I know a lot of contractors do this and there's no onboarding process, let alone a documented onboarding process. There's just no onboarding at all. It's meet me at the job site and let's get going. And then we'll kind of just figure out the rest of it as we go. I'll get you a shirt. You know, I'll bring you a shirt today and then we'll get you ones for the, you know, for the future. And they have to like wear that shirt for like three days in a row and take it home and wash it each night because you don't have the shirt. I mean, you'd be surprised. Like this stuff happens everywhere. Right. And then it's like, get going on the job. Like you got to start making me money right now. Like I'm paying you a lot of money. So you got to start producing right this second. And that can't, I mean, that's the worst thing you can do for a new hire in your business. You need to onboard them in many different ways. And that's what I'm going to talk about in this episode is like the different aspects of that. And really one of the most important things that almost nobody does. And we'll get to that here in a minute. So obviously when you onboard someone, there's going to be certain requirements. right like they have to fill out a w-4 that's a requirement and there's some other papers that go with that there's federal papers that you have to you know fill out um the insurance requirements bank draft or direct deposit requirements like all of these things to get them set up in your in your system if you will And this really, I mean, that applies to like employees. It doesn't necessarily apply to 1099 contractors. That's a separate process. And really, you should have an onboarding process for subcontractors. Like, it's a similar process that you go through. It's just going to have different information. It's going to be much more abbreviated than if you're bringing someone on as an employee. However, you should have processes for both. And then on top of that. You should have a different onboarding process for the different positions in your business. So if you're hiring an apprentice, that's going to be different than if you're hiring a lead guy. And if you're hiring an office manager or an assistant, that's going to be different than hiring a lead guy or field people. You could have four to five to six different onboarding processes for your business, depending on what role you're hiring for. The benefit of that is like. And 70% of that information is going to be universal across all positions. But then the other 30% is going to be specific to that job that they're doing. So the tech stuff is going to be like, do they get an email address? Is it a lead guy who's going to have a company email? Got to get that set up. Is he going to have a company phone, a cell phone? Is he going to get a company truck? You got to get their driver's license. You got to send it to insurance. All of these things have to be done. And if you don't have a written process, it gets to be overwhelming at times. I mean, there's times where you hire a guy, put him in the company truck, find out three months later when he gets into an accident that he was never added to your insurance. And therefore, they're not going to cover the accident because he wasn't added. Like that one little thing that you forgot to do can cost you thousands of dollars. So having this documented process is going to allow you to replicate this. easily with every new person you hire and even delegate this to someone else. So if you do hire an assistant or you hire an office manager, now you can delegate this. And this is what I did in my business. We'll get into a little bit later about, you know, different types of software and things you can do. And I even have a sample onboarding checklist. It's actually the checklist that I used in my business. I just removed all of the branding and stuff and some of the. things that were unique to me, like, you know, specific software, but you can see how it's just a very simple checklist, a one page checklist to make sure we're collecting the right information. That's like a low tech version. And then we can get into like using actual technology, CRMs and softwares to do this digitally. Both options are viable, but you got to have some kind of system to track this. So we know the tech stuff, right? Like we know the, If they're getting a company phone, you got to give them the phone. We know we got to get them a shirt. We know if we got to get them on the insurance. We know if we got to get them a company truck. We know these things that we have to get them. That's the tech side of stuff. And that's a little bit easier to remember. But, I mean, do we have them sign an employee handbook? Have we created an employee handbook? You should. That's an absolute must. You need to have an employee handbook. Are you giving that to them and having them sign off on it? In the back of your employee handbook should be a page that's a signature page where they sign off that they received it and read it, or at least received it. You're going to tear that page out and keep it, right? Or you can have a separate page they sign, whatever. But again, it's this process that's repeatable. Anything that's done more than once in your business should have a process. If it's a one-off thing that you're only going to do one time, don't need to process. Okay. I was talking to another client today on a one-to-one and he was documenting some, some marketing things on like buying a yard, like creating a yard sign and buying it. And he was creating an SOP. And I said, why are you doing that? Like, how often are you going to redesign the yard sign? Like once it's designed one time, you're just going to pick up a phone and call them and reorder it. It doesn't require an SOP, right? So like if it's something unique that you're going to do once a year, once every five years, you don't really need to have necessarily an onboarding process for it. But anything that's going to be repeated, time clocks, you know, checking in, apps that they use, software. Obviously, some of these things are going to be a much longer on-ramp time. Like, you know, especially if it's a software that you use, that could take months to get them fully integrated, right? You know, assigning them an email address, a company email that can take five minutes. So it just depends. It's all going to vary. But if you're not tracking these things, especially the things that are that take longer, like the insurance, right? Like you get their driver's license, you scan it, and then you email that to your agent. Well, once you email it, you just forget about it. It's like, I did my part. Well, what's the checks and balance there? What if the email didn't go through? What if they dropped the ball and they're in? What if they got the email, but then forgot to put it on your policy, right? So like there needs to be like a checks and balances on that. So I have a, you know, I could have a send an email driver's license to insurance agent and then have a reminder in a month or two weeks or whatever to follow up and make sure that they actually got it. If I haven't received anything, you know, normally you would get a response from your agent and be like, Hey, got it. Good to go. They're on your policy. Right. But what if you don't get a response? What's the follow-up policy on that? That's an important thing that you, once you do it, you'll forget about it. Like you said, I did my job. I did my job. You can't see me. If you're listening, I got my hands up. I did my job. I'm done. It's not my job anymore. It's on somebody else's responsibility. No. Like, how are you going to follow up and make sure it got done? Right. So you have that in your process and you're onboarding. So if you have a. If you're using like a digital format, you can see plain as day, like, hey, we haven't gotten confirmation on the insurance. We need to follow up. Right. So that's just one other option. So we know about the tech. We know about the uniforms and, you know, all that stuff. That's pretty easy to understand and know that you need to do. OK. But there's one very important part of the onboarding process. that I didn't do this initially. I think I read it in a book or I learned it somewhere, but I started implementing this. And there's really two things. One of them is kind of you do in the interviewing process, or at least I did, but then I do it again on the back end in the onboarding. And that is having an org chart, right? And that's where you have an organizational chart of your business that says, here's all the things that we want to accomplish. And here are all the available. you know, positions that you could possibly move into, especially if you're hiring a lower guy, an apprentice, right? A junior person, you can show them an org chart and see, or they can see that they can move up to, you know, journeyman, they can move up to lead guy, they can move up to project manager, or maybe do a lap move over to sales or whatever. Like they can see a future for themselves in your company. If you just say, hey, Brad, start on Monday at 7 a. m. at the Johnson's, bring your tool belt, and they show up and start working. That's not an onboarding. You're not giving them a future. It's just a job, right? It's just a job to them. And you're treating them like just an employee who's just doing a job. You should be the catalyst for these people. to create better lives for themselves. And so on the onboarding process or during the onboarding process, you should be figuring out like what's important to them. What's their hobbies? Why are they working? Are they saving up to buy a house? Do they like to go, you know, ride BMX or dirt bikes or snowmobile or shoot guns or whatever, right? Try to figure out what's important. And do they have kids? Are they trying to have kids? Is their wife pregnant, right? Are they taking care of an elderly parent? Like all of these things are going to factor into their motivation for being there as well as their, you know, their, their personality and their moods, their moods for the day each day. If you're hiring someone and then you find out that their wife has cancer, right? And really they just took the job there because you offer insurance or whatever reason like that, that's going to, that you're going to have a little bit of a different, you know, experience with that person. Especially if they're already dealing with a drama when they start working there. I want to know this stuff. And that can come out through an onboarding process where you ask a series of questions. You know, once they've been hired, it's a little more informal now. And sometimes people can feel, you know, more open to sharing some things with you. Maybe, maybe not. It just depends on the person. But in an interview, they're not going to share all that information. Or more than likely, they're not going to. In the onboarding process, you can collect some of this information and document whatever is important. Whenever a new contractor joins the profit club, I have an onboarding process. And one of the things I have them do is fill out a survey. And that survey asks them personal questions. Are you married? Do you have kids? What's their names and ages? What's your hobbies? Right. Other things that are more business related. I want to track these things because I want to know what, you know, what my clients are doing, what's going on in their lives. How can I best help them? If I find out they have a different hobby, I might have connections to, you know, to help them with their hobby. We may have a connection with with our hobbies. Right. So a lot of my guys are doing lots of different hobbies between shooting and riding motorcycles or horseback or flying. or, you know, snowmobile, whatever, camping, right? Like these are all things that I want to know about my employees. It's also an entry point into making a better connection with them within your company to help build that culture. Now that's the thing I want, that's the secret part. That's the one thing that no one talks about. And that is onboarding them. with the culture of your business. Okay. What's important to you as a company? Are you going over your core values? Are you establishing what your mission is? What your vision statement is? Are you sharing this information both visually and verbally with them? One of the things I did that was really powerful is I had, at one point I had these rack cards. If you're not familiar with the rack card, it's like a, I think it's like maybe four by six size or might be like three by seven or something like that. I can't remember the dimensions, but it's just like a single piece of card stock that like fits into a little plastic container. A lot of times there'll be like sitting, you know, like maps. You go to the rest stop and there's like maps that are in these little containers. It's like that kind of size, but it's just a single card. And on the back, and I would hand these out to clients, and it just gives you more real estate to put pictures and different things on there. But on the back of my rack cards, I had like, I don't know, six or seven different reviews that I just copied word for word off of Google. And I picked the ones that were the most important. And this is a little tactic you guys can steal. In the review, like say the review said, You know, I hired Brad and his team to remodel a bathroom. They did a fantastic job. They were very professional and they kept our house clean, you know, during the entire process. Highly recommend. Well, what I would do is highlight the key words, you know, professional and clean. I may bold those. I may attiocize those. Don't make fun of me if I say that wrong. attiasize those words and bold them so they stick out on the paper. And I would do those and I would bold the, you know, one or two or three keywords in every single review. So when you look on the card on the back, it just stuck out like a sore thumb, those words, right? And so when you're reading it, I would say, here's what I would do. A new employee come in. I'd say, hey, take a few minutes and read this card. Just read the back of these, read these reviews. And then they would, you know, they would read them. And then I would say, What would you say that our clients appreciate the most about what we do? And they would usually say, well, they appreciate that you're professional, do quality work, and that you are very clean, right? Or tidy or organized, whatever those words are. Something around like being clean, keeping their house clean. And I would say, that's right. But the one, and then I would say, which one sticks out the most? Which one was repeated the most? And they say, well, it was clean. I'm like, exactly. Our clients expect to have a quality product, a project, a quality product, sorry. But what they care about the most is that we're clean in their house, that we take care of their house. We clean up every single day, right? We vacuum, we put down runners. We do all this to protect their stuff because that's important to them. And so now I'm setting the tone right from day one of the kind of culture and what's important to us, you know, in the business, in our business. And so it's not a matter of, you know, meet me at the Johnsons at seven and then I show up and like, why is this place dirty? Why didn't you sweep up or clean? Well, they didn't know that. And then you get frustrated. Well, it's common sense. It's common sense you're supposed to sweep up. And I've said this before. No, it's not. That's not common sense. Hey, just a quick timeout from the show. In the next 30 seconds, I'm going to tell you exactly how you can transform your contracting business.
