In the conversation
Ryan Englin on The Cash Flow Contractor: The #1 Mistake Contractors Make When Hiring (and How to Build a Team That Stays)
Key takeaways
- There is no labor shortage in the trades. There is a retention problem and a training problem. Contractors keep firing people over the 10% of skills they lack instead of investing the time to train that 10%.
- Recruiting is a marketing activity, not an HR activity. Every action taken to attract customers applies to attracting employees. Job seekers who trust your brand call you first instead of going to Indeed.
- Building a bench of pre-qualified candidates through long-term nurture changes everything. One plumbing company owner called the same prospect every six weeks for a year. That one hire brought three more people with him.
- Measure behaviors, not just hours. Every contractor describes a great employee in terms of behavior: greeting the customer, cleaning up the job site, showing up early. Those behaviors have trackable outcomes and matter more than technical skill alone.
- The no-news-is-good-news culture in the trades destroys retention. Employees hear from the boss only when the boss is mad. A weekly three-minute check-in with three simple questions changes that dynamic entirely.
- Every employee needs to generate two and a half to three times their compensation in revenue. Communicating that expectation clearly and positively gives people a target worth hitting and makes the business sustainable.
I sat down with Khalil Benalioulhaj on The Cash Flow Contractor to talk about why most contractors treat hiring like a fire drill instead of a business function, and what happens when you flip that.
We started where I always start. Recruiting is a marketing activity, not an HR activity. The same work you do to attract customers, defining your target, crafting a compelling message, choosing channels, building a pipeline, applies to attracting employees. Your website, your social media, your email list. All of it. If a job seeker landed on your site today, what would they think? Would they want to work for you? Most contractors have never asked that question.
Khalil and I dug into the concept of building a bench. Seventy percent of people are passively looking for work. They're not on Indeed today, but they will be in six months or a year. If you're not nurturing a list of prospective candidates, you're invisible when they're ready to move. I shared the story of a plumbing company owner who called the same guy every six weeks for a year. Happy hours. Game invites. Simple texts asking how things were going. That tech finally joined the team and brought three guys from his old company with him. Marketing companies don't think like that. They think about conversions. This is a nurture cycle. It takes longer. And it works.
We talked about the promise and deliver equation. You can make all the promises you want about great leadership, training, benefits, and culture. But if you can't deliver on those promises, you just built a revolving door. That's why the internal work matters as much as the external marketing. I told Khalil about our remodeling contractor in Kansas who kicked and screamed through the process, stuck with it, and two and a half years later stopped posting jobs entirely. They have more vetted, qualified candidates on their bench than they have open positions. Recruiting is no longer a conversation in that company. Growth is.
Khalil raised a great point about balance. You can't build a great team if the business itself is unhealthy. If you're underpricing jobs and robbing Peter to pay Paul, your people feel that pressure. They know when the boss is stressed. They know when things are going sideways. It's like children when mom and dad are fighting behind closed doors. The kids know. Your employees know too.
That led us into measuring behaviors, not just hours. I stand in front of rooms full of contractors and ask what makes a great employee. Nobody says "someone who can run my CRM." They say someone who greets the customer with a smile, cleans up the job site, shows up a little early, goes the extra mile. Those are behaviors, not skills. And behaviors need to be tracked. Make your core values verbs. An action is a behavior. Then track the outcomes. Punctuality? Punch a clock. Learning? Ask what they're reading or listening to. It doesn't have to be fancy. A legal pad and a pen work fine. Google Sheets work fine. Consistency matters more than software.
We spent real time on the cost of a bad hire. Lower productivity from the supervisor and crew during training. Customer satisfaction issues when the wrong person touches a job. Morale damage that spreads like a virus. One small contractor estimated disengagement alone cost them $3.7 million a year. That's real money ripped off the bottom line. And when your A-players watch you keep hiring B and C players, they leave. A-players want to play on A teams. Nobody wants to carry dead weight.
I also pushed on a mindset most owners overlook. You need to profit from every employee. Think of it like marketing. If you spend a dollar, you need at least three back. If you pay someone $80,000, you need to show $240,000 in revenue because that person exists. That math has to work. And your people need to understand how their work connects to that number. Not in a threatening way. In a way that gives them something meaningful to aim at.
The one thing I left listeners with is simple. Start a daily or weekly huddle. Three questions. What's working? What's not? How are you feeling? The first dozen times you ask, the answers will be "fine" and "nothing." That's okay. Over time, trust builds and people open up. One client asks a single question every morning: "Scale of 1 to 10, how'd you sleep last night?" When a guy keeps showing twos, the leader knows to pull him aside. One question. Three seconds. It changes everything.
We didn't get to talk about my book on the show, but if this resonated, grab a copy of Hire Better People Faster. I'll autograph it and mail it to you.
If you liked this conversation, I go deeper on all of these topics on Titans of the Trades.
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