Helping a $4.5M Rental Business Train Leaders

0:00Unternehmer/Gast How you doing? >> So, uh my name is Mike Timmermans. I sell bleacher rentals to festivals and fairs uh across North America. So, we do around 4.5 million in revenue and about a million in uh profit, EBITDA. >> Congrats. >> Uh thank you. And uh what's stopping me is having my leadership team delegate fully some of the responsibilities.

0:26And I think it has to do with um creating processes that are followed by all. And I guess how I get to it is like if if we need to hire key people and we don't have the processes then we can't delegate properly. So, I guess am I thinking through this properly or how do I how do you deal with training leaders, I guess, is almost a question, isn't it?

0:51>> So, how do you train leaders? No, I'm just I want to be clear. Yeah. >> Um So, this this is a this is a good question that I'm going to chunk up one level cuz I think it'll be valuable in in general. Um which is that fundamentally when we're hiring anyone, we look for the smallest skill deficiency possible. And so, if you think about skills like so, a lot of people are like hire Have you heard hire for attitude uh not aptitude or whatever the saying is, right? So, fundamentally you've got traits, as people call them, and then you've got skills.

1:25Now, based on Alex's worldview, uh this is not a thing. It's just that. A trait is just a series of skills, right? And so, when you hire a CFO, for example, you're going to try and hire for the smallest skill deficiency. And so, if the CFO is uh a dick, for example, but they're exceptional in all these other things, then you're like, maybe I can teach them to be kind in these ways. Now, that'd be a big That's a lot of skills to just have someone like go from not kind to kind, right? A lot of subskills underneath of that.

1:58But you can do it. The alternative if you're like a frontline person, it's like, okay, well, it teaches it takes me 2 days to teach someone how to do outbound. It'll take me a lot longer than that to teach them to be kind. And so basically the in some ways like you want both, ideally. But you want to solve for the small skill deficiency. And so if it's 2 days to train sales and 2 months to train kindness, take this person who's kind and then train them on sales. Later on, sometimes you have people who you're like, okay, this person's a little different than our vibe. They're not going to be, you know, oil and water, but they have this massive skillset that we can use and this tiny deficiency that is around this stuff that we can be transparent with them up front that they need to fix. So to your question, how do you train leaders?

2:42I think that attracting good leaders, so one of it's recruiting, right? So Chick-fil-A's head of people said this. She said a lot of people are trying to fix process when they really lost the championship in the draft. And so a lot of people are trying to to figure out what playbook they should be using with a team that's never going to win. And so I think it's hard to consistently level up team. Are you hiring mostly from within or promoting mostly from within?

3:09Alex >> I would say I would say yes, but our so our COO, she's like very qual like very skilled and it's like hard for her to delegate a key responsibility. So I think that uh Yeah, do we hire that within? I think we're probably going to have to hire that from outside the company. >> Mhm. >> It's like a key logistics position. >> Yeah. So the big framework that we use for training in general is document, demonstrate, doc demonstrate, there we go.

3:41Duplicate. And so first you figure out exactly what the checklist is. And I like checklists more than quote SOPs, that's a a personal preference. And this is like and you want to be able to break it down into behaviors. And I think this is where a lot of training goes wrong. I think most companies aren't very good at training. They're just they basically hire a bunch of people, see who's got the skill, and then fire the rest. Um but if you do get good at training, it's like, how do you train kindness?

4:06Well, you say, "Okay, well, people who are kind when they come on the phone, they they smile, right?" And they nod their head when people are listening. And they repeat back what someone says. And they, you know, raise their voice when when they walk into a room, right? And so, if you boil it down to some of the behaviors, the onus is on us as leaders to be more specific with what we tell our subordinates to do. And I think a lot of times if you're struggling to train some of these key traits with leaders, it's because you're not being specific enough about what you want them to change. And so, it's like, "You're just not getting it." It's like, "Well, no one can do anything with that." And so, it's like, you have to and this is where the work comes in from the top down. Where like, "Okay, when you do this."

4:45And so, the easiest way to bucket this That's a key. There we go. is Sarah, I need you to stop doing this. I need you to start doing this, and I need you to keep doing this. And so, just being more granular about what behavior you want them to stop or what behavior they're not doing that they need to begin or combination. And so, um giving someone the feedback of I need you to do this instead of this has been some of the most effective way that I've been able to change people's behavior, and it's about around the specificity. And so, we had a leader not that long ago um who was actually going through the same issue um who other teammates described him as a dick.

5:26And so, he ended up talking to a number of the leaders trying to get him to be less of a dick. And so, finally um I ended up having a one-on-one with him, and he was like, "Am I getting fired?" And I was like, "Well, no, HR will do that. So, this is not that conversation." Uh I said, "But if you can't figure this out, then that is probably the next conversation we'll have." And so, uh I need you to and so, I just reframed it, and I said, "I need everyone else to stop calling you a dick so that I don't hear it anymore." And since I don't really care if you're a dick on the inside, I just care if everyone describes you as a dick. And so, why don't I describe the behaviors that you do that causes people to describe you to describe you as a dick. I said, "So, you interrupt people when they're talking and they they don't like that. And then when people give judgments about their department, you snap back on what they should do but you have no context. And so, you look dumb and they don't like you."

6:13Right? And then you try to force your will uh onto them so you try to get them to agree when you have a point without asking them for their opinion. And so, I was like, "These are the three main sources of why people are calling you a dick." And he was like, "No one's ever given me this feedback before." Now mind you, if you talk to the managers, they'd be like, "All of us have been telling him to stop being a dick." But but you can't tell someone be charismatic, don't be a dick, or whatever the thing is. You have to tell them at a more granular level what the behaviors that you need them to change. And oftentimes, there's a lot more of those behaviors than you think there are.

6:44And that's where the training deficiency comes in. And so, if your leaders aren't doing what you want them to do, document, demonstrate, duplicate. This is the step process. Let me show you how I do it. Now you do it in front of me. And this is what we're going to have you stop doing. You're going to now do this instead and keep doing the other stuff that's good. >> Got you. >> Does that make sense? If you are a business owner and you are not growing as fast as you'd like, I'd like to give you a free gift. So, my team and I put together the 100 million dollar scaling road map, which is basically 200 hours of us looking over all the portfolio companies we've had and what stages of growth they went through and more importantly, where they got stuck and how they got past it. And so, we broke it into these 10 stages and we made this little kind of quiz thing where if you put in your business information, it'll tell you where you're at and the most important part for you, what to do for each of functions of the business across product, marketing, sales, customer success, recruiting, IT, human resources, and finance. And so, no matter what you're struggling with, someone else has already struggled with it and solved it. And so, I'd like to give you this thing absolutely free. You can go to acquisition.com/roadmap, plug in your business information, and if you want us to actually help you deconstruct the business and you're trying to scale, we'd love to help you out. On the thank you page, you can just book a call with my team and we will look at the business, see if we can help, and if we can, we'll invite you out to Vegas and we'll do this in person live.