Ryan Englin on Gathering the Kings: The Labor Shortage, Authenticity, and Bottlenecks in Business

I sat down with Chaz Wolfe on Gathering the Kings to talk about the beliefs that hold business owners back from building teams, why authenticity beats polish every single time, and the one thing I'd whisper to my younger self if I had the chance.

We started with a question I hear constantly: what bad decision shaped you? For me, it was the belief that no one would ever deliver for my clients as well as I could. That belief kept me as the bottleneck for years. I waited way too long to make my first hire. Then I got sick, one of my team members stepped up, and the clients loved her. She had a completely different approach than mine. She was better at nurturing. And I realized I cost myself five years of growth because I held on to a belief that wasn't even true.

That's the pattern I see in every trade contractor I work with. The single biggest bottleneck in any business is the owner. Not the labor market. Not the economy. The owner.

Chaz asked what drives me, and the honest answer is freedom. Not the loose, do-whatever-you-want kind. The kind that comes from control and order. I watched my dad in manufacturing work 12-hour days, six and seven days a week, chained to a business that owned him. He's still not fully retired. And it all came back to one thing: no one ever taught him how to hire and keep the right people. He's been saying "nobody wants to work" for decades. So has everyone else. There's a clipped magazine article from the 1960s about the labor shortage. This is not new.

Every generation of twenty-somethings looks the same. Boomers were the hippie generation. The complaint about the next generation is thousands of years old. We think we're unique. We think we're the victim. We're not.

The first step I tell every business owner is this: if you're not attracting good people, it's probably because you're not attractive to good people. Look in the mirror first. Figure out who you are, what's not changing, and what you're willing to change. Then communicate that honestly to the market.

I told Chaz about one of my favorite client stories. Five guys who started a company together. All went to high school together. Passive aggressive to the core. Like a fraternity. They did not want to own it. They were putting out job ads that said they were open, honest, and forthright. New hires would walk in, see the real culture, and leave within weeks. So we rewrote everything. We owned the passive-aggressive nature. We said "we're like a fraternity here." Their director of procurement read the new ad without knowing it was his own company and said, "I want to work here." Sales went up. Turnover disappeared. Customer satisfaction improved. All because they stopped faking who they were and started attracting people who actually fit.

That's what I mean when I say recruiting is a marketing activity. You're not filling a position. You're making a compelling case to the right human being that your team is where they belong. And if the case you're making is a lie, you will pay for it in turnover.

We also talked about the trap of doing everything yourself. Owners tell me they don't have time to document processes. I call that out every time. If a seven-minute task actually takes a full day of mental prep and recovery, and two hours of documentation saves you that day every month, you hit ROI by month three. The question is whether you want a job or a business. That's where our Core Fit Hiring System lives. It's built so owners stop being the bottleneck and start building teams that run without them.

Chaz asked me what I'd whisper to my younger self. One phrase: niche deep and niche quickly. I spent years running a digital marketing company and a recruiting company at the same time. I was everything to everyone and no good to anyone. The riches are in the niches. The moment I committed to one thing and did it better than anyone else, everything got simpler. Hiring got easier. Systems got cleaner. The market knew exactly what I stood for.

My book, Hire Better People Faster, covers the full process. Everything we teach. Every framework we coach. It's practical, it's how-to, and it's built for busy contractors who don't have time to read theory.

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