Ryan Englin on Play Big Faster Podcast: Navigate Hiring Challenges with Ease

I went on the Play Big Faster Podcast with Scherrie Prince to talk about why hiring is so hard for small business owners and what to do about it.

Scherrie opened with a question I get all the time. How did I end up doing this work? The answer starts with my dad. He was an owner operator in manufacturing. Worked insane hours. The business owned him. And the root cause was always the same. He never learned how to hire good people, trust them, and let them take over. That pattern shaped everything I do today.

When I started my entrepreneurial journey, I was running a marketing company for home service contractors. A couple of years in, something wild happened. Multiple clients told me they didn't need leads anymore. Not because business was bad. Because they had empty trucks and no one to put in them. One client gave me a shot. Three weeks later, four trucks were filled and two more were on order. That moment changed everything. I realized recruiting is a marketing activity. All I had to do was apply the same principles I used to generate customers to generating applicants.

But filling trucks was only part of the problem. These companies didn't know how to interview. They didn't know how to onboard. They didn't know how to keep the people they hired. Over the next several years, I built out what became the Core Fit Hiring System, a complete framework for attracting, hiring, and retaining frontline people.

Scherrie asked me what employers are doing wrong, and I gave her the blunt answer. Most employers spend too much time selling themselves in the interview. They vomit all over the candidate with reasons to take the job. Then they wonder why the person they hired isn't a fit. You are the buyer, not the seller. The candidate needs to sell you. But when you're desperate, you skip the process. You interview for 15 minutes and say "you're hired." Nobody gets married after 15 minutes on the first date. Stop treating hiring that way.

We dug into turnover, which is always the elephant in the room for trades and service companies. High turnover is almost exclusively caused by the employer. You're either making poor hiring decisions or you have a company culture that can't keep people. More than half of turnover comes from bad hires. And bad hires come from a broken interview process.

I walked Scherrie through the stages of what I call the dating process of hiring. The first contact is just to determine if you want to spend more time together. You don't pre-qualify someone's entire life in five minutes. That first interaction is about connection. Do we like talking to each other? Do we think there's an opportunity here? Then you move into the culture fit interview, where you look at behavior alignment. Does this person behave the way your best people behave? Do they have a vision for their life that's in alignment with where your company is headed? Do they share your sense of purpose? If not, you have misalignment. Frustrated employees. Frustrated leadership. And the revolving door spins faster.

I know some people hear this and think "I don't have time for that." And I get it. You probably don't today. But if you don't make time for it today, you will never have the time. Because you'll be chasing the same retention problems over and over.

We also talked about my book, Hire Better People Faster, which breaks down all seven components of the Core Fit Hiring System. Each chapter covers one component with two to four tools you can implement right away. Some require real self-reflection on your values, vision, and culture. Others you can hand to someone on your team and have running by this afternoon.

The big takeaway I left Scherrie's audience with is this. If you want to play big faster, you cannot do it alone. You need people you trust. People you can truly delegate to. Not "go work on this part and I'll finish the rest" delegation. Real delegation. And that starts with building a team you actually want to keep.

If you liked this conversation, I go deeper on every one of these topics on Titans of the Trades.