Ready to Hire Your First Team Member?

Knowing When to Take the Leap

Ask John

By John Duever

Spyro Polymiadis asked, “How do you hire your first employee? How do you deal with an initial drop of quality until they get up to speed? What preparations should you have in place to try and maintain a “standard”? How can you relinquish control of the workshop output without wanting to jump in and do it yourself if you see mistakes and not micromanage? I do 99% private customer jobs and very little commercial - so the standard needs to be high. These are the things that have probably kept me from hiring even though I’ve needed someone for about 3 years.”

Great questions Spyros, I’ll do my best to break these down 1 by 1.

When thinking about hiring your team member, chances are you should have done it a long time ago. Very rarely do business owners hire their first team member before they need them or even shortly after they need them as many business owners work too much in their businesses and not enough on their businesses. So when one does need to bring on a team member, that new hire is not set up for success with job descriptions, training, culture, organization (including processes, work orders, SOP’s, training, Company Vision and direction,

Core Values, etc), among many other things. This can be an incredibly hard conversation for some to have with themselves and when one realizes the work it takes to build this internal foundation it can be overwhelming, so you never start to build any of this. One will continue to plug along by doing a job that pays their bills, sometimes, and not actually building a business. Build a rock-solid foundation for success for your team and company before you attempt to build the castle you dream about. No castle has ever lasted long on a weak foundation.

Secondly, what are you offering to these new team members? Ask yourself this question “Why would anyone come here to start a career?” If you cannot answer that question truthfully and in detail to the point that someone would hear what you have to say and be willing to leave their current position at their current job, then you are not ready to hire anyone. Just because you need someone doesn’t mean you are ready for someone. Build your internal foundation before you even consider bringing on a team member. Early and mid-way through my 22 years as a business owner I always saw holes in the company bucket and just grabbed a body to plug the hole and they always failed because we did not have a solid foundation. Now we do and life and business is A LOT better.

By the way, I prefer to refer to the people that work for Vinyl Images and WrapIQ as my Team Members, not employees. Employee is a term that means they work for you and you are not equals. At the end of the day you are a team even if there are only two of you, and they need to feel welcomed and part of the Team. This simple change of verbiage goes a very long way.

As far as the work quality and standard part, I have the $10,000 rule at Vinyl Images. New hires will cost us $10,000 during their training and the process of bringing them up to the level of being self-sustaining. The $10,000 rule gives the person a sense of understanding that they are expected to make mistakes. This takes a little pressure off them and minimizes the mistakes made because of the intense pressure of learning a new trade or working at a new company. Mistakes are going to happen. It’s just part of the game. Every single job we do in the adhesive-backed industries is custom in some way. Design, hand cutting, leaving a bubble, breaking a part of a car, burning something, knives, and cutting the vehicle or oneself, the possible mistakes are literally endless. This creates a lot of pressure. Reduce the pressure and the mistakes will be reduced as well. I do urge you to treat the $10,000 rule with caution. Maybe you have a $2500 or $5,000 rule. If the new hire knows that it is ok and expected for them to make a mistake or two it is incredibly helpful on their

Have a question for John?

Submit your question: learning journey. Don’t be taken advantage of and if someone does not have “it” and you can look at yourself in the mirror and be satisfied that you gave them every tool to be successful and they still don’t have “it”, you must cut and move on. The last thing you want is for someone to take advantage of this rule and ruin your reputation. My thought process nowadays is to take the time to hire the correct person and if they don’t cut it, they have to go. You will find the right person.

Relinquishing control is hard and only gets easier if you have a foundation set for your current or new team members to excel. As they excel, they gain your trust which allows relinquishing control and responsibility to become a lot easier. On the micromanagement side, you need to manage people the way they need to be managed. Some people need to be babysat and until they gain the confidence to critically think their way through problems that arise you will need to be there to catch them. I hear a lot of people tell me,“This person asks me dumb questions” or “It is so simple, why aren’t they getting it?”. The truth is some people just don’t have it. Hire slow and fire fast when needed. Train, train, train. When a new hire asks you a question that they should know the answer to, put it back on them by asking them a question that prompts critical thinking. Critical thinking allows people to gain confidence which could fix all the issues you mentioned. Build your foundation, hire the correct person for the job, know their love language and personality type, adapt to the person’s needs, give them every tool they could possibly need to be successful, provide them an avenue to critically think through problems and you will set yourself up for success!

John Duever John@wrapiq.com

Co-Owner/Operator, Vinyl Images Founder/CEO, WrapIQ