Ryan Englin on People-First Builders Podcast: The Best Strategies for Reducing Turnover in Blue-Collar Hiring

I sat down with Fletcher Wimbush on the People-First Builders Podcast to break down the full arc of what it takes to reduce turnover in blue-collar hiring. Not just tactics. The entire system from triage to scale.

Fletcher and I started where I always start: the origin story. I was running a marketing company for home service contractors, and one by one my clients stopped needing leads. They needed people. An HVAC contractor in Phoenix called me in July. 120-degree heat. Four trucks sitting empty in the yard. I told him I'd figure it out, applied marketing principles to recruiting, and filled all four trucks in three weeks. That moment changed everything for me. Recruiting is a marketing activity. Always has been.

We got into why staffing agencies and recruiters so often miss the mark. The incentive structure is broken. They fill a job req. They don't find the ideal person for your company. And the reason is simple. Most companies haven't done the internal work to define who they are, how they behave, and what they expect from their people. If you can't explain your employer brand quickly and clearly, a recruiter has nothing to work with. You end up with a resume that matches a job description. That's it.

I told Fletcher what I tell every contractor: we teach people to fish. You can pay someone to Door Dash the fish to your door, but that gets expensive and you have zero control over what shows up. Or you can learn the process and build it yourself. That's what we do at Core Matters. Done with you, not done for you.

Then we walked through the phases. Phase one is always stop the bleeding. I look at three areas. First, are enough people coming into the pipeline? If not, fix the top of the funnel. Second, is the culture toxic? We run a short pulse survey with employees to find out what leadership looks like from the receiving end. Third, are performance expectations clear? Sometimes people aren't failing. They just have no idea what success looks like because nobody told them. Those three areas cover where most companies are hemorrhaging people.

Fletcher asked me about firing toxic employees. My first question is always the same: will they be surprised when you fire them? If the answer is yes, you have work to do as a leader. No one should ever be surprised they got terminated. I've never had a client tell me they fired someone too soon. It's always "why didn't we do this two years ago." Every single time.

Once we stop the bleeding, the next step is becoming an employer of choice. People want to work there. People want to stay there. People line up even when you're not hiring. That doesn't happen overnight. It takes two to three years to fully build, but the needle starts moving in three to six months. Human nature is skepticism. Your team needs to see consistent behavior from leadership before they believe the change is real.

From there we focus on getting the right people in the right seats. Not just leadership seats. Frontline seats. The shoulders on which your organization is built. Sometimes the fix isn't firing someone. It's moving them. I told Fletcher about the pattern I see all the time: a guy is a mediocre plumber but you put him in a project coordinator role and he crushes it. Assess people for where they belong, not just where you stuck them.

After that we optimize operations. When you have the right people in the right seats, something incredible happens. They tell you which processes work and which ones don't. They help you build better systems. They're excited about it.

Then comes vision casting and personal development. This is where retention becomes permanent. I invest in you as a human. I invest in your personal goals. You want to buy a house? Let's build a plan. You want to drive a Corvette? Let's figure that out. When I pour into your life outside of work, you help me achieve my business goals. Every time. If I expect you to care about my business with zero reciprocity in your personal life, you will find someone who gives you that. The Growth Accelerator Program is how we make this real and repeatable.

The pinnacle is the bench. A pipeline of qualified people who want to work for you before you even have an opening. That's when you scale with confidence. That's when your business becomes worth exponentially more because it doesn't depend on you standing in the middle holding everything together.

Fletcher made a great point about exit strategy. Private equity buyers pay a premium for businesses where the owner can walk away and nothing breaks. That's what this system builds. And the irony is, by the time you get there, you might not want to leave.

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