Ryan Englin on Entrepreneurs United: Master the Art of Building Your Dream Team

I sat down with John St. Pierre and Rich Hoffmann on Entrepreneurs United to talk about why the trades have a people problem and what owners need to do about it.

We started with a question I get all the time: why did the trades stop being cool? The answer is simple. Too many employers still carry the old-school mentality that workers are a set of hands. "You work for me. Be honored you have a job." That attitude drives people away. Meanwhile, knowledge work got more desirable, and the trades never fought back. The competition for people isn't just the contractor down the street. It's Google. It's remote work. It's Uber and the gig economy. And the trades are losing that fight because they refuse to change how they treat people.

We dug into a truth that everyone knows but almost nobody acts on. People don't leave jobs. They leave people. Yet 99 out of 100 companies build their entire recruiting and hiring process around the job description, the bullet points, the tasks. Nobody talks about who you'll work for. Nobody shows the candidate that this is a different kind of leadership. So the candidate takes a dollar more an hour somewhere else. Not because the dollar matters. Because nothing at the current employer gave them a reason to stay. The dollar is the excuse. The root cause is disengagement.

I shared what I see inside companies that actually retain people. Employee-first companies focus more on personal growth than professional growth. They bring in financial literacy programs and invest in the human being, not just the skill set. They run real 360 communication where leaders listen, not just talk. And they do what they say they will do. That last one sounds basic. It's not. I've seen people leave because the boss never said thank you. I've seen people quit 18 months into waiting for the quarterly review their boss promised and never delivered. Integrity is not a poster on the wall. It's follow-through on the small commitments.

John asked a great question: what about the entrepreneur who says "this sounds nice, but I'm behind on revenue and can't make payroll"? Here's what I told him. Every entrepreneur wants their people to care about the business as much as they do. But your people will care about the business more when you show them you care about them as much as you care about the business. The best time to start was when you hired them. The next best time is now.

We talked about the Core Fit Hiring System and its seven components: Core, Find, Automate, Hire, Onboard, Engage, and Assess. I walked through the interview process and compared it to a sales process. You build rapport. You uncover their pain. You find out what they want in a new employer. You check culture fit before you check skill fit. Most of what we need people to do, we can teach. What we can't teach is whether they belong on this team.

Then I talked about the piece everybody screws up. The offer meeting. Think about why most new hires don't work out. Expectations weren't met on one side or the other. So we teach employers to sit down before the offer is signed and have a real conversation. What do you expect of me? Here's what I expect of you. I call it the pullback offer. I compare it to sitting in the driveway with your spouse before you move in together. Which way does the toilet paper go? Is the hamper a target or a destination? How do you fold a towel? None of these things are dealbreakers on their own. But pile enough of them up and you have death by a thousand paper cuts. The same thing happens when we hire people and skip this conversation.

John and Rich unpacked something after the interview that I want to highlight. They talked about how expectation-setting doesn't stop at onboarding. It continues as long as the relationship exists. That's exactly right. We re-onboard every 90 days because the company changes and the person changes. Expectations drift if you don't reset them.

I also shared my story. Growing up in a blue-collar family. Watching my dad work 12-hour days, six or seven days a week, because he never learned how to surround himself with people he could trust. That pivotal moment when an HVAC contractor in Phoenix called me in July and said stop sending leads because four trucks sat empty. That's when I learned that recruiting is a marketing activity. Three weeks later, all four trucks were full and two more were on order.

If you liked this conversation, I go deeper on every one of these topics on Titans of the Trades. Subscribe for more conversations like this.