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Ryan Englin on Modern Contractor TV: How to Hire and Keep Rockstar Contractors

on Modern Contractor TV with Teddy Slack ·

Key takeaways

  1. Recruiting is a marketing activity. Stop thinking about finding people and start thinking about becoming attractive to the people worth hiring. When you become the employer of choice, people seek you out and fight to stay.
  2. Owners need to spend 30% of their time building and leading their team. Without the team, there is nothing to sell and nothing to deliver. That makes people the most important part of the business.
  3. The fastest way to create margin is not to delegate random tasks. It is to get rid of the tasks that drain your energy first. Draining work makes you less effective at everything else on your plate.
  4. There is no labor shortage in the trades. There is a retention crisis. Companies keep dumping people out the back door and then blame the market when they cannot fill positions.
  5. Employee referral programs need to reward the referral, not the retention. The referring employee takes all the risk. Paying out only after 90 days turns a referral program into a retention program and puts the employer's job on the employee.
  6. Nobody switches jobs for more money. People leave because of the people they work for. Stop competing on pay and benefits and start promoting what actually makes your company different.

I sat down with Teddy Slack on Modern Contractor TV to talk about how contractors find, hire, and keep the right people. And more importantly, why most of them are doing it wrong.

We started where I always start. The belief that "nobody wants to work" is a cop-out. Every contractor I meet says it. Every single time. And every time, the real issue is the same. You're not attractive to the people you want to hire. You're a small contractor. Nobody knows your name. You put serious money into customer acquisition and almost nothing into employee acquisition. Then you wonder why nobody is knocking on your door.

Stop looking for people. Start becoming the company people look for. That is the shift. When you become what we call the employer of choice, people come to you. They don't just apply. They fight to stay.

Teddy brought up his own experience with this. He started creating content for his oil tank business and suddenly excavator operators and truck drivers were reaching out to him on social media asking if he was hiring. He didn't plan it. But it worked because recruiting is a marketing activity. The same principles that attract customers attract employees. Post about your team. Post about your culture. Post about how you give back to the community and invest in your people. Get credit for the things you're already doing.

We talked about pay, which is where most contractors get stuck. Nobody switches jobs for money. I know that stings, but the data is clear across every generation. People leave people. They leave managers who don't value them. If your pay is competitive and your culture is strong, your people will turn down five-figure signing bonuses from competitors. I've seen it happen. But if your culture is broken, no amount of money will fix your turnover.

I shared the story of a single mom I inherited on my team back in my corporate days. Her previous manager berated her every morning for being 15 minutes late because daycare didn't open early enough. She was labeled the lowest performer out of 120 people. I moved her start time to 8:30. Within four weeks she was in the top 10%. One adjustment. That is what happens when you treat people like human beings instead of problems.

We got into the Core Fit Blueprint, the seven-phase program we run at Core Matters. The first thing we do with every company is stop the bleeding. Get the owner some margin. Get the fires under control. Then we build the foundation for becoming an employer of choice. Culture. Trust. Reputation. Growth. After that we reorganize the company to make sure the right people are in the right seats, write real job descriptions, build interview guides, and launch a 90-day onboarding program designed to get people to think like you, work like you, and win like you.

Then we build the bench. One of my favorite things to watch happen. Imagine having 30 qualified people who already want to work for you, just waiting for a position to open. I told Teddy about a remodeling contractor in Kansas who fought through two and a half years of building this system. They called me and said they have more qualified candidates on their bench than open positions. They don't post jobs anymore. That is what patience and process deliver.

We also talked about the Growth Accelerator Program, a three-year personal development journey we help companies build. One client partnered with local real estate agents, credit repair specialists, and financial advisors. When an employee graduated the program, the company gave them $3,000 toward a down payment on a house. Who does that? Almost nobody. And that is exactly why their people never leave.

I walked Teddy through the hats worksheet we use when owners are wearing 10 hats and drowning. List everything you do. Categorize it as designer, delegator, or doer. Then mark each item as energizing or draining. The draining stuff goes first. Not because it is the least important, but because it makes you less effective at everything else. And here is what blows people's minds. Most of those hats are not full-time jobs. Hire a part-time person. Hire a virtual assistant. Stop thinking everyone needs a desk in your office.

We wrapped up talking about AI in recruiting. It is useful for research and data analysis, but every job ad AI generates was trained on billions of terrible job ads that all look the same. It scraped Indeed and learned how to write the exact garbage that doesn't work. Be careful with it.

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

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