Our BEST Employee Retention Strategy (That Costs Nothing) | 336

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Transcript

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In building my company to 35 auto repair shops, in building my business to 36 auto repair shops that do over $50 million a year in revenue, I can tell you that we are not, in fact, in the auto repair business, but we are in the people business. This just happens to fix a whole lot of cars. And that our success entirely depends on our ability to hire and retain high-quality people. That is what is allows us to build repeatable systems, to scale to multiple locations, to have freedom as the owner because everything doesn't rely on me because we have a solid system in place. And so in this video, I'm going to talk about the retention strategies that we use that cost very, very little money to be executed on, but have extremely high success rate of keeping people. And the first thing we have to understand is that people do not quit their job, they quit their boss. So the job is the things that they do. They fix the cars, they chuck people in and out, they sell jobs, they have to work on Saturdays, they, you know, do the things that are like required for the business to make money. And that as business owners, sometimes we focus heavily on the job requirements and the job traits. But what happens is people, we may think that they're upset about having to work Saturdays, but really what they're upset about is their boss. And that people quit their boss and not the jobs. They're upset about how they're being treated, how they're being spoken to, that the lack of appreciation, that maybe they needed one Saturday off for the whole entire year to do something that was important to them and their family. And maybe we told them no, didn't even consider it or find a solution, or maybe we told them they could and then pulled it back. And then that's the real reason someone quit, right? And so we have to understand that everything we're focused on is how do we create better and stronger relationships in the stores in order to strengthen this side of it, that people don't quit jobs, they quit their boss. And we want to understand and make that as best as we can. So, how do we show appreciation? How do we build these relationships so that when times get tough or when there are road bombs, or maybe they do get a better offer from a competitor, that they in fact respect us enough to come back and we can come to find a solution because maybe they really don't want to leave, but they they believe there's a better situation, right? That's how we lose the best people, which our goal is to not. And so the first one is we do every single week um a weekly call on the computer, on Teams. And so this is gonna be a very ugly uh Team screen. And and all these dots are kind of the faces of the people. Okay, and on that call, every single week, Monday at 9.20, or whenever we do it, we are gonna walk through and highlight. Here were the top stores last week, here are the top technicians last week, here are the top people who improved. So we don't only look by volume, but we also look at improvement because often that is sometimes the people who are kind of normally at the lowest uh volume, but showing progress. We want to highlight them. We have core values in our company that we hire, fire, promote, acknowledge on. And so every week we pick a number of people to uh highlight how they display that core value in our business, whether they're being a team player or an extremely high-level integrity or accountability or drive performance. We get we walk through uh promotions that are coming up. We keep everybody in the loop, right? Because sometimes people feel like I don't know what's going on. They just like want me to do things. So we have this call, it's super sweet, I think it's 20 minutes that we get the whole company on, and boom, boom, boom, we we we we run through it. And that recognition, that way of communicating, of flattening the the lines has worked really well. In addition to that, the next thing that we do that works really well is at the end of every month, we mail letters to every single team member of uh a store that's had a record. So we are pretty generous in our uh what we define as a record, but we want to celebrate a lot of people. So if a store has record um sales, we will send a letter. So you like it's the best June that that stores ever had. Everyone gets a everyone gets a personalized letter signed by the CEO and either me or my brother that is acknowledges them for their individual contribution. We mail this letter to their home. And and often our employees will say that, you know, the new ones will say this is the first time that they've ever gotten anything like that, like in the physical mail to their home from their work, and it's like it's up on some freezers for a little bit of not a time. It is stored away. Many of these aren't just thrown out because they they actually feel like, man, these guys really appreciate me. And so, because this has worked so well, we want to highlight more than just sales, we want to highlight uh customer served because that's really important to us. We want to uh talk about financing because we we really want to make it affordable for people to do it. We want to sell a lot more tires because you know, people who would people if they buy tires, they like come back for more work. And so we have a couple of our key categories, and then you know, anytime a store has set a monthly record in that category, boom, they get they get the letter. And so that strategy, we've been doing this for well over a year now, costs us almost nothing, whatever the cost of the stamp is, and some high quality paper, but has had a direct effect on our business. And so, super easy for you to do, super easy to execute, takes no time. You could easily do that one. And finally, the last one is uh I'm gonna draw some balloons, and you're gonna make fun of me in the in the comments probably. Um, but these these are little party balloons, and every year we throw a company party. Now, this isn't some extravagant thing that costs us tens of thousands of dollars. We actually keep it really simple. So, you know, we're in the auto repair business and uh a lot of the guys like to bowl. And so we rent out uh a bunch of lanes in a in a bowling alley on a Friday or Saturday night, and we get everybody, everybody there. And in that session, we A, we have some fun, we bowl, like the guys are competitive, which which is cool. They they work together, they compete. Uh, then we go through and recognize uh top performers for the year in terms of who had the most sales, uh, what was the assistant manager with the most sales, who was our rookie of the year, like newcomer who's who's really shown promise, both in sales and technicians. We have different awards related to those core values I was talking about, uh, in terms of customer service and financing and tires. We have some special uh awards if we really want to acknowledge somebody uh maybe who didn't fit any one of those categories. And not only do we have a couple, we have plaques, we get them, we we say a little thing, we get the trophy, we get the speech. Uh, we have like a Stanley Cup. So if you ever, you know, hockey, they have the big cup, we have a store team of the year. So, like, what the best store of the year gets this name and printed. That cup will then goes lives at that store for you know the year until they have to bring it back to the party and it gets it gets uh sent to somebody else if they don't win it again. But there's this idea that like none of those things cost a lot of money. Even that party, that party costs the most. We get our vendors to help sponsor it out of pocket. It costs us like a couple grand, but it is well, well worth it. Oh, yeah. We also like auction off like uh or or raffle off like a like a PlayStation 5. We've done other like cool things there, so like everybody has a little fun with it. But none of these things cost a lot of money. But they show that we appreciate, they show that we care, they show that like we are doing things that no one else has done. And that's that's one of the biggest benefits of working in a small company. Like we're you know, we still consider ourselves small, even though we do we do a lot of revenue. Uh the you know, it's me and my brother, like are the owners, we have our CEO, our CEO, or CFO. Like they the organization is very flat. And versus like you get into a like a one of our competitors that has 2,000 stores, like you're just a number to them, right? Or dealerships like that have a lot of politics. And so we try to stand out in that we are family-owned, we care about our people, and we don't just say that, we show that by the things that we do, and all of that makes this like really easy for you for you to copy. Like, this isn't hard. It just takes some work, it takes some organization. The the biggest challenge, honestly, is like you just forget about it because you got a million different things on your head. And so, ideally, there's somebody on your team who you guys can map this whole thing out. You watch this video, you say, All right, this is great, let's start doing these things. And just every Monday, and then you're like, all right, let me send the text to the people I need to. Let's get the letters written on the on the second of every month once we figure out the records. Uh, let's put a date on the calendar now to have that like party in mid-January or February to go through it. And it's like you once you build the rhythm, all this stuff becomes a lot easier. The challenge is if you if you don't, uh time will fast you by, you think, hey, this is all great stuff, and then you don't put it in action and you're not going to get the results you seek. So these are some of my best strategies. I would love to hear yours in the comments if there's anything I missed or you think you're doing that's special for keeping your people. And I'll see you in the next one. Cheers.