Ryan Englin on The Profit Minds Podcast: Your Revenue Problem Might Actually Be a People Problem

I joined Dr. Steven Kirch on The Profit Minds Podcast to talk about why so many revenue problems are actually people problems wearing a disguise.

I opened with my dad. He was an owner operator in a blue collar family, chasing the same dream every entrepreneur chases. More money. More time. More freedom. Twenty years later he woke up and asked what happened. I spent a lot of my childhood at his shop, and I believed his problem was customers. Not enough new ones, not enough repeat ones. So I skipped the family business, went to college, did the corporate route, hated it, and started a company to help people like my dad bring in and keep customers.

I was wrong. It was never a revenue problem. It was a people problem. That realization is why Core Matters exists today.

Become the employer of choice or keep paying for the alternative

Steven asked what employers do to get the right people. My answer is the same one I give every owner. Become the employer of choice in your local market. People hear that and call it a consulting cliche. It isn't. It means people want to work for you, and once they do, they want to stay. They choose you.

Most owners sit in the opposite seat. I have to find another employee. I have to find the good ones. Nobody wants to work anymore. That's victim mentality handed to us by the media and reinforced by our friends. When you market the things people actually care about, good people choose you. Recruiting stops being a struggle.

Steven shared a great example. He worked with a CPA firm that doesn't make its accountants fill out billable hour timesheets because every client is on retainer. To CPAs, that's enormous. The owner called his own firm boring. That's the pattern I see constantly. Companies sit on genuinely unique things and dismiss them because it's just how they've always operated. It takes an outside set of eyes to point and say that's different, tell me more. Then they light up. Then we put it into the world. I have clients whose websites now do more employee acquisition than customer acquisition, because they figured out the right team attracts the right customers.

Your employees won't recruit if you never taught them how

Steven and I got into net promoter score, and I pushed on the version almost nobody runs well. Employee net promoter score. The number is worthless without the why. Companies send out the zero to ten question, collect the data, and never ask the follow up. The gold is entirely in the why. With frontline teams, that takes effort. Field employees aren't in the habit of explaining themselves. You ask why and you get "cuz." So buy lunch, bring them in, and ask face to face.

Here's the trap I see. A company posts a solid eNPS of 30 and gets zero referrals. Their people would refer. They just don't know how. So John goes home and tells his buddy, "Go talk to Wendy and see if she'll let you quit your job and come work here." Then we sweeten it with 250 bucks and wonder why nothing happens.

We coach customers on referrals constantly. Emails, social posts, scripts. We never do it for employees. Equip them. Role play it. Remember what you're asking: for someone gainfully employed somewhere else to make a major life event decision on your behalf. Nobody flips jobs on a whim the way they switch restaurants. That's exactly why employer brand matters. Don't take my word for it, look at our employee testimonials, our videos, our content. And I'd rather own that content on my own site and channel than build equity on Glassdoor, where the loudest voices are usually the unhappy ones.

Every step before day one decides engagement

A job posting is marketing. The interview is a sales conversation where both sides confirm they're getting what they want. Recruiting is a marketing activity, start to finish. Then comes onboarding, which in most small businesses sounds like "glad you made it, there's your desk, we'll email you the I9." Every one of those moments decides whether you end up with an engaged employee. Engaged employees do great work, excite customers, and drive profitability.

I also told Steven what turnover really costs. Owners think it's the Indeed spend. It isn't. People quit twice. Once in their heart, once when they tell you. In the US it takes about ten weeks to find a job, so you lost their head two and a half months before you lost their body.

On screening, resumes are finished. Three types exist: written by people never taught how, written by paid professionals and embellished, written by AI. All garbage. Use an applicant tracking system, which is just a CRM for recruiting, and build a bench so you hire before you need to. Let automation handle the screen. A human does the interview. Sending AI on the interview is like sending AI on a first date and asking if she was fun.

If you liked this, I go deeper on employer branding and building a bench on Titans of the Trades.