Welcome to The Contractor's Daughter, your go-to podcast for eliminating random acts of strategy and marketing in your highway construction business. Hello, friends. I'm your host, Jeani Ringkob. I'm a third-generation asphalt contractor and an absolute brand strategy and marketing geek.

Welcome to The Contractor's Daughter, where we tend to dive into the world of growing your business in the highway paving, construction industry, and I'm, as always, super excited that you're here with me. You can see I have Holly in the background today if you're watching the video of this.

But we are actually talking about something that's on everybody's lips, everybody's playing with, and I think it's one of the reasons we're seeing an incredible acceleration in our industry of adoption of technology, et al, period, but AI, so what about AI? We have not talked about it.

I actually do have an episode coming up where we talked to one of the key stakeholders in the company that created Hey NAPA for NAPA, which is an incredible tool if you're not familiar with it. Make sure you're subscribed so you catch that episode.

I actually talked to Devine and we go into the creation of that tool, how it's used, why it works so well, and what they expect coming in the future with it. Make sure that you are subscribed for that episode.

But today I'm going to be talking a little bit about why I caution about AI. I don't know, you're either like it's the end of the world, it's Terminator happening right now, if you grew up in my generation, or you're like, "No, this is great. This is the best thing that's ever happened."

No matter what, it's making our world move so much faster, and it's here. How do we use it in an effective way? I think there's one thing that if you understand this, you're going to get the most out of AI, you're going to feel better about using AI, you're going to be able to help guide your team to use AI, and it's going to be like a guiding lighthouse, a guiding pillar for AI as you incorporate it into your life, into your family, into your business, all of the things.

That's what I want to talk to you about today. Here is this guiding principle. Then we're going to get into some really great stuff because I like to give you some meaty stuff that you can sink your teeth in. We're going to actually talk about some tools that I've been using, how I use them, how I think business owners in our industry can use them. We're going to get into some of that.

But first AI is not a strategy. Let me repeat that because it's so important, AI is not a strategy. AI is a tool tool in need of a strategy. It's like the tail wagging the dog or the dog wagging the tail.

You can waste a tremendous amount of time with AI. If you don't know what is the objective that you're trying to reach, what is the thing you're trying to make more efficient, what is the thing you're trying to automate, if you don't know what your goals and objectives are in terms of looking for and implementing AI resources, you're probably sucking a tremendous amount of time into it.

I dedicate a certain amount of time each week into learning about some kind of AI. Granted, I spend a lot of time reading and learning because that's part of how I continue to add the most value to my clients, but these days, AI has to be part of that.

But part of the reason I do that is I do it at a super high level because I know part of my strategy is to be able to quickly stay on top of, and when I hear a problem, when I'm sitting in the office with my clients, that I can quickly say, "Hmm, I've heard about something," then I go dive into that deeper and I figure out if that's a solution for them from an AI side.

Some of the things that already know better because I have other clients using those solutions or I'm implementing them. It's really important to know that it can suck a tremendous amount of time if you don't have a strategy in place.

Also, it can be misused. One of your responsibilities as a business owner or a key leader in a business these days is to spend time and make it certain people's in your company's job to spend time determining: How is our company going to be using AI? What is our policy around that use of AI and how do we communicate that policy and enforce that policy?

Unfortunately, this is something that very few of us in the industry really sat down and thought about. I'm getting ready to post on my website just our AI policy within my company so that prospects of mine, clients of mine can all just see “What is this company's policy around AI?”

It's really important because I'm dealing with strategy, messaging, branding, marketing, collaborating between sales and marketing. There's a lot of AI that gets used and we're going to be transparent about our policy so we're drafting that and we're actually going to be posting it.

I have a small, mighty team, but my team is going to be involved in reviewing and finalizing that with me and understanding it as it relates to them. That is really important as well.

Then the next thing, and I mentioned this, is AI is here. Ready or not, it is here. So you need to think about what is your overall strategy for your company? Then on a lower level, whoever you assign to or the time or the energy you put into determining how AI is going to be used, make sure that that's integrated towards moving you towards that strategy, reaching those objectives, getting you to that next level of growth, creating more revenue because it's creating efficiencies in your operations, helping you make smarter decisions.

Remember, this is the key point. If you get nothing else from this podcast today, I want you to get that AI is not a strategy. It is a tool in need of a strategy. Let's make sure that that tail is not wagging the dog, and let's make sure you have a strategy in place.

That's the part where I'm going to make sure today that I give you a link to just schedule a call. If you want to get in my calendar and you want to start having somebody to have this conversation with, I'm happy to make that time, and that's storybuilt.marketing/schedule. I'm always available to you in my audience to have some of these initial conversations.

If you don't know what that strategy is and you want to start thinking about how do you start building that, let's get on the call and start talking about it. I've mentioned a few ways that I'm using it, but I'm helping leaders think about it in their business. I mentioned you need to be thinking about this. Sometimes they want somebody to be helping them facilitate having these conversations, or it's part of that strategic growth initiative.

Every single strategic growth initiative that we're doing moving forward, we are thinking about “Are there AI elements that we want to recommend or suggest or specifically even tell them to steer clear of because you don't think it's efficient or the right time for their business?”

I use this every day in my business. I'm constantly thinking about it, using it, getting better at it. Then I'm also saying no to certain ones that I'm coming across too. Let's talk about a few ways that we see based on my research, based on my experience, based on conversations that I've been having with folks in our industry that I'm seeing things really make an impact on business.

We're going to talk about four key areas. The first one that we're going to talk about is solving labor shortage problems. All of you guys know we are adding more and more content around workforce on this podcast, on LinkedIn, because that's where I hang out and I also created a lot of resources. But a lot of the work that we're doing is workforce-related because that's the biggest bottleneck in our business.

How is workforce going to be addressing this? Two high-level areas. I know that there's already been testing on autonomous equipment and vehicles inside of our industry actually on paving projects. We even see this going on more on the paving side than at the plant operation, but we're seeing this happening and we're seeing it accelerate.

I know that there are going to be at least one approved fully autonomous paving project tested this summer moving forward. Something that I think is probably worthwhile just in terms of being a consumer or an ingester of is what is happening with autonomous equipment? Could that be a fit for your business?

If tests are successful in the next year on those types of things, do you want to be an early adopter or do you want to be a mid-range adopter? What is your threshold for when you see those things working? Do you know what the ROI would need to be for you to justify looking at things like that in your business?

One of the things we can do if we do hop on a call is we have a workforce ROI calculator. It really breaks down what are the costs of your turnover, of your recruiting expenses, opportunity costs, all of those kinds of things to help you really understand what is the financial impact that your current workforce strategy is having on your business.

This might be something that you want to have a really good grasp on. If you're looking at making big investments in any kind of technology or any major equipment investments and how that's going to impact your business, can you recruit the workforce or what changes would you need or can you eliminate? Are you going to be an early adopter of some of these tools that come out?

Also, AI is an incredible way to look at what areas in your company might you be able to increase efficiency. Either certain roles, jobs, processes, or projects that happen on a recurring basis that you might be able to increase efficiency and thereby make your team more effective or get by with less or allow them to do things that you need them to be spending other time on.

The next category that we're going to talk about is data entry and some of these start weaving into each other. This is one of those areas where I guess we're going on almost like a level deeper on the creating efficiency, supporting estimators, supervisors, accounting, almost everybody in our company these days is doing some kind of data entry. This is something that can be a huge impact.

Then all important and one that I think sometimes we say only the giant companies have to think about this, but really, I don't think that's true, I think once you get into that upper small to medium-sized business, if you want to create a real competitive advantage, you should be thinking about the third thing, and that is supply chain analytics.

Historically, we've relied on people with a really good historical knowledge of these types of things, or people that are really gifted and skilled with spreadsheets to track these things, or we've just winged it and licked our finger and stuck it up in the air to try to figure out these things as well.

I feel like AI is going to make really getting into the analytics of supply chain and helping that really impact our bottom line much more accessible to smaller-sized businesses that are still really, really dependent on looking at the cost of their inputs.

This is going to be really exciting. Like I said, these are all layered. Part of it is data entry, but here are some of the benefits. We can get better forecasting moving forward. Imagine if maybe there are opportunities for you to hedge.

I know my husband is a trader if you've talked to me much in the ag industry and so hedging is something he talks about a lot. Arbitrage is something he talks about a lot to me. Not something I hear people talking about as much in our business, but definitely something where I think there is tons of potential for even medium-sized businesses to reap giant rewards. If we can really understand these analytics, how can we reduce the cost in our business?

The fourth area I want to talk about, which is super accessible, and this might be somewhere where you want to get started today if you haven't already dived in and you just want to start test driving some of these things, or you're looking for some new ideas, is daily productivity.

Maybe for you as the business owner, or if you're thinking about key people inside of your company and things, tools, resources, and AI products that might be able to help them, I'm going to share right now a few that I am using and a few that I have heard about that may be of interest to you.

First off, one of the things that I love is I spend a ton of time on Zoom. That's how you meet with all of my prospects and clients, almost 90% of the time. The rest we tend to do in person or we meet at events. But so many of my weekly meetings happen on Zoom.

But I have a note-taker anyway. I like that tactile feel, but I use Fathom on a regular basis. It is a Zoom app. It's built-in, you can just add that app on there. It is incredible because I can actually make specific highlights during my conversation.

I can create all my customized labels, but then afterwards I can go in, it's generating a transcript, but based on about 10 different types, meeting types, standup meetings, sales meetings, general meetings, it will actually scan the whole transcript in all of the meetings and pull up notes that are based on those and it's really incredible.

It gives me the high-level things we talked about and a few bullet points under each one. So quick and efficient. We use this when I take a conversation with the client for onboarding and then my project manager can actually take that and build out their project management in another tool we're going to talk about later.

She doesn't have to be part of the call. It's quickly summarizing it. She can see the deliverables in there. She can see the problems and challenges they're having. All those things are succinct and summarized. She doesn't have to read the transcript and she doesn't have to watch the whole thing.

Another way that I use Fathom is in our weekly team meetings, it actually will extract the tasks, or the to-dos for you so it has a feature where it will go down and everything that is something that somebody is supposed to be taking action on, it creates a list of those things so a huge time saver, a huge efficiency. I find as a sales tool, this is absolutely something I can't live without anymore.

Another tool is Zapier. This is an automation tool. Largely, we use this on the marketing side, internally inside of my own company, and also in our clients' companies. If it's not something you're familiar with, it is a tool that can connect almost any software to another software.

If you think about the concept of if this happens, then this happens, Zapier is a magical wand in between that makes that happen in our companies. I use something called ScoreApp to build assessments, which are great tools. If you've been listening to the podcast, you may have actually taken one of our assessments. We build that tool, ScoreApp is a great product that I like to do that with. It's got some AI features built into it as well to help you quickly create those and generate some ideas.

But once we do that, we want to connect it to our HubSpot, those two, we can make forms directly on HubSpot, but because I want to use this ScoreApp product on the other side, I need a way to connect them. Zapier is how I connect them.

You set it up once. I've hardly ever had any problems with the Zaps. They call them Zaps, breaking down or not working, so really an incredible product. It can allow you to do so much stuff. Great when you think about automation and efficiency for your teams.

Alexa is another one that seems like something we have in our homes all over the place. I'm going to give you an example of how I use this. There might be another podcast on this at a different time. Michael Hyatt, one of my favorite authors, he talks about the ideal week and building your ideal week.

I actually have a laminated sheet right here in front of me with my ideal week. I never hit 100% on my ideal week, but it is a great model for me to always be shooting for.

Today is Wednesday and Wednesday is my content creation day. I work on content for my own business. I also think about content for my clients’ businesses during this time if we are in a scenario where I'm actually building and developing that content for them on a quarterly basis.

This is the day that I have blocked for that. That's part of my ideal week. But in my ideal week every single morning, part of that is what I call my workday startup ritual, it's all the things that if my day falls apart and I get nothing else done, everything else falls apart, if I can get that done, I know that I'm moving the needle in my business and I'm doing the most important things.

It is just under two hours, but what I do is I have actually built a routine into my Alexa app that when I tell my Echo in my room a certain cue, it actually starts that and triggers it and then it has waiting periods in between each activity.

I may be taking that a step further, I just recently got, and if you're on the video, you can see this, I haven't hooked it up, I haven't really got it set up yet, but I had a Stream Deck. I'm really excited about this. I got it to be able to create better presentations, to be able to maybe sketch ideas out while I'm doing these types of things, videos for social media, explanatory videos for my clients, all of those kinds of things so I could bounce between video, my sketch pad, all of those kinds of stuff.

I need to get it set up. I'm so excited. But also, as I've researched how I'm going to start doing that, I've realized you can actually create some of these routines and processes for productivity in it too.

I could create a process where I push one button, it opens just the screens I need for producing the podcast, nothing else, so everything's clear and starts running me through a routine to make sure I get that done efficiently. There are all kinds of ways to use that tool as well.

But I wanted to share the Alexa tool with you because it takes me through, it prompts me, and it keeps me on track for that task every single day in the morning when I'm doing my really essential startup routine.8

Another tool that we use inside of our company, and there are different ones, is we use Monday as a project manager. I said that sometimes my project manager, well, all the time now. We'll go into Fathom and look for stuff to build out that core after an onboarding call of what does our client's project management board look like?

What is going into their specific project? How long is this project going to last? What do we think the deliverables are going to be? When are the meetings that we need to have? It allows us to figure out what subcontractors we're going to need to apply to the project? All of that stuff.

Well, Monday has incredible AI features built into it as well. If you're into these types of things, Asana might be another project management tool that is heavy on the AI side that you might want to explore as well.

Everhour is another AI tool that I have not used, but when I was researching for this episode, it was something that came up. I think it might be relevant in the industry so probably, because it's relevant to me, because it might be relevant to my clients, I’m probably going to be looking at it some more.

It can integrate with things like Monday, Asana, or possibly even Slack, which we use on a regular basis as just a different tool to help you track hours. It's not necessarily an AI tool, but it integrates with a lot of really great AI tools that allows you to track.

Imagine you have somebody that does maybe administrative and accounting activities, but you're really trying to figure out how much time are they spending on each thing? Are they spending enough time on the right things? You need this kind of information to help you decide if you're going to need to make another hire in the next couple of years.

Sometimes you just want to be able to allocate. If you're doing job costing, there might be a way to allocate how much time is being spent on certain activities with some of those in-hop office support staff. That may be something that some of my clients that are really getting into optimizing are going to be interested in.

Then there are all kinds of stuff within the Google suite. I'm not even going to get too much into that, but if you use Gmail, you've seen all kinds of AI writing prompt tools in there. In terms of helping with email, in addition, there are a couple called Ellie, HyperType, and several other email tools as well.

A few that I have not used but I'm going to mention here because while I was doing my research, I thought that they warranted, and I may be looking into some of these, are Snipd. It's a podcast-listening app, which I'm super excited about.

I'm constantly getting ideas for content or inspiration from podcasts I listen to or things that I want to test out and I'm constantly moving over to my notes app and I'm cutting and pasting and marking the timeline and making notes to make sure I remember.

Well, from what I saw, Snipd sounds pretty exciting because it does a lot of these things with you or for you. It'll actually give you a summary beforehand. It's actually pulling key points out as you go and you can quickly save those so all of those key points that you want to go back and commit to memory or be able to reference later with a quick tap of your headphones is what they promise, that it will actually take care of basically creating a note in that section or clipping that for you so you can go back and visit it. That's something I'm pretty excited to try out.

Another thing is if you are using ChatGPT for search, I know so many of us these days are saying, "Hey, I can just search with this," this is probably the biggest hit to Google since Google came out, is Perplexity.

The reason why I'm excited to maybe start using Perplexity a little bit more is because it cites its sources, which reminds me of, quite frankly, Hey NAPA. Why I think that's incredible for our industry is because it references its sources when it gives you feedback.

Same thing with Perplexity, it tells you where the information came from so it's not just making anything up. If you use AI or you've been using ChatGPT for looking and just basically googling researching, searching things, you may want to check out Perplexity and also you're going to want to check out Hey NAPA if it's anything related to the asphalt industry as well because they have great source data in there as well.

Then one more mention just because I'm a mom and I found this intriguing and I'm excited to look at it to see if it would help my kids is Wisdolia. It actually will take [inaudible]. It'll take a presentation, it'll take slides, it'll take information from a URL, all kinds of different places, and it'll create flashcards and studying support tools to help you study and learn a topic and prepare for a test, and then you can customize it once it does that.

I think this might be something if you are continuing your education or if you have kids at home, this might be another one that you want to check out. If you're thinking about increasing efficiency in your company, I hope that some of this was helpful for you. But just don't forget AI is not a strategy. It is a tool in need of a strategy.

Make sure that you get on my calendar. If you want to talk about if you're ready to start increasing productivity inside of your business, we also have that Growth Assessment Tool. We’re going to link to both of those. A quick link to schedule with me at storybuilt.marketing/schedule and also to take that Growth Strategy Assessment, which is storybuilt.marketing/assessment. You'll actually get to see and get to actually go through one of those tools that I've used ScoreApp that I mentioned and it integrates AI if you're building those types of assessments into your company.

Make sure that this week, you pick no more than maybe two or three of these. If I've dropped some that you're curious about, you're piqued about, maybe you're even wanting to just get on my calendar and learn about this ideal week or how to create a morning ritual’s kickoff day for your business day, definitely do that.

But try to pick no more than two or three of these that you're going to experiment with this week to try to increase your productivity or maybe you're going to sit down with your team and really think about how could we impact our supply chain or how could we impact or have a strategy to impact this labor shortage challenge we're having in the next coming three to five years.

There are some great challenges and thoughts as it relates to AI and really taming that beast of AI and helping you start to think about what is the strategy that you're going to use to help wag AI in your business to get results.

This wraps up this week's episode of The Contractor's Daughter, a huge thank you as always for joining me. I hope that you got something from these four points that we talked about. We are going to solve labor shortages, help you with data entry, address supply chain analytics, or super quickly if you want a quick lift, increase your daily productivity for yourself or a teammate in your office.

Until next time, keep growing your business and thriving in life. If you enjoyed this episode, do not hesitate to subscribe and leave us a review.

Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of The Contractor's Daughter. If you liked what you heard, be sure to subscribe and review. But most of all, share this with all of your friends, partners, and customers in the highway construction business. Thank you for building the infrastructure that we all rely on.

Welcome to The Contractor's Daughter, your go-to podcast for eliminating random acts of strategy and marketing in your highway construction business. Hello, friends. I'm your host, Jeani Ringkob. I'm a third-generation asphalt contractor and an absolute brand strategy and marketing geek.

Welcome to The Contractor's Daughter Podcast, where we're going to dive into the world of growing your business in the highway paving construction industry. I'm thrilled to have you join me today. I am your host, Jeani Ringkob, and we're going to be talking about the difference between a toxic superstar that you might be bringing into your company versus a true type-A team player.

What's the difference? So much of the conversations we've been having, even just coming out of World of Asphalt, my first presentation was on eliminating random acts of sales and marketing, my second one was on leveraging marketing to support your HR, recruitment, and retention, even a lot of the questions in the first presentation circled into some of these challenges that we're having around workforce.

When I came home and I continue to work on several of these workforce-focused projects because that's the bottleneck in the growth to my clients growth, we are working on things like implementing really incredible interview processes into the business, identifying the best-fit candidates which a certain element of that, if you put the cart before the horse, has to be what are good-fit candidates based on who is your company?

What is your culture? What is the work ethic? What are the growth strategies that you're trying to put in place? How quickly are you trying to grow? All of those kinds of things. Are you wanting a lot of autonomy inside of the company? Are you very process-oriented? All of those things go into consideration.

But I've had several conversations about we want to hire the best. We know that workforce is tight, but we know that it's also there. They just have more choices and they're more of a discerning chooser at every level. Whether you're getting that entry-level laborer, whether you're getting supervisors, operation managers, all of those things, we want the best, but sometimes in going out and trying to find the best, it backfires and we end up with somebody toxic inside of our company.

That's what we're going to be talking about today. As we dive into this problem, I want you to know, we're building these processes, we're talking about all of these things, and we have to identify what is right for you and what is right for you might not be right for everybody else.

But there are some things when it comes to avoiding making toxic hires, hires that based on research we know can have a terrible impact inside of our businesses, and how do we still get high-performing, grade-A, type-A really strong players at every single role inside of our company?

First, let's talk about what a toxic superstar is. Sometimes they are what we might deem as lazy, avoiding responsibility, or lying. These are all things that can come up. Unfortunately, toxicity inside of our company can come in so many forms. Really having a strong workforce strategy and messaging to attract the right type of people to our company early on, that is the first filter.

It's one that I want you to be thinking about. But we're going to move into a very actionable thing, even past that as you get into that hiring process today. Watch for that as we move through this episode. I talked to you about it, and I'll let you know when I get there, because you're going to want to take notes. I'm even going to talk to you about how you might do it inside of your company.

But these superstars that are toxic can be showing up in so many forms. I've had scenarios where people have salespeople or folks that are out really critical interacting, bringing in the work, managing the work, building those relationships that are so good but they're so isolated, they're so egocentric, they're totally in it for themselves that they're actually creating more tension inside of the company.

They're creating problems for operations. They're absolutely unreceptive to integrating into the processes and the policies for the company at large. It can be incredibly toxic.

Actually, research shows that if we have these types of toxic superstars inside of the company, in a lot of ways, we can look at them and justify and say, “But they're working at such a high level. They're so good at their job. I give them a task and they're really, really hitting it,” but yet they're leaving a weight.

A lot of times, research shows that these types of performers inside of our company actually sometimes diminish the performance of those around them, those around them that are still high quality, still great to good performers, and people we want and we even want more of inside of our company, if they're performing well but they're diminishing multiple people's performance around them, even in multiple departments of your company.

Somebody in sales, as I mentioned, can be diminishing the impact or the performance of not only other salespeople but of customer service, of operations, of management, and leadership above them, even because they're taking so much time to manage.

All of those things have to be taken into consideration. Even though we may have toxic players inside of our company, what we're really focusing on are the toxic superstars.

The reason I want to focus on those ones is also because they're the ones that were the most reluctant to get rid of or to address the problems with them and oftentimes there's just no addressing it. It's really hard to get them. There's something at their core that makes them very difficult to make them not just strong performers, but actual team players.

You need to look, if you think you have this type of scenario going on in your business, or you know this is something you want to avoid in your business, look around and look at, “Are there multiple people in your company not performing?” This could be something that's impacting them. Not necessarily, but it definitely could be, especially if you know you have somebody that really shines great, but also tends to suck the air out of a room or make extra work even though they're reaching their goals or objectives and shining bright, they're making extra work for those around them or you're seeing people actually lean out of being part of the team because they just don't want to work with that person.

Now on the flip side of that, let's talk about what we call when I work with my clients and we're talking about the interviewing process who we're trying to really identify when we're really trying to weed people out, we always say we're trying to look for that type-A team player.

This doesn't necessarily mean type-A personality. I know my husband and I joke that we are both type-A's. Not every role requires a type-A. Absolutely not. We need a good variety. But who are those top players that are really going to contribute?

There are lots of characteristics. The most important thing that you need to know is, first, are they the most qualified? But to know this, you have to also have done the front work on what is the role that you're hiring, what does that role require inside of your company, and what are the skill sets that they're going to need to have to perform at that.

That's one of the things is, are they the most qualified of all the candidates in front of you? But you have to do the homework to know what that qualification is. I can't tell you how many times we don't do that work and we're hiring really based on a misconception of what that role requires. Put in that work so that that's very clear. That's a whole other podcast episode.

Another thing that I think we're all typically looking for and there's some common characteristics is they're putting in their best effort on a consistent basis. We can't perform at 100% all the time. This is not healthy, it is not actually normal despite what maybe historically we wanted to think about ourselves and our abilities to do in the past, but are they consistently showing up with a high level of effort and performance?

Are they a team player? Do they care also about how those around them and those that they impact, how they are performing, and how they might impact that? Are they adding to or even enhancing the culture? In all of the research that we've been doing, because we are very research-focused on the front side of our workforce projects, one of the things we absolutely know to be true is people stay because of the other people that they work with.

Somebody that is taking away, not enhancing that culture probably isn't going to be somebody that you want to be putting in key roles in your team or exposing to the other great team members that you've already spent a lot of time bringing into your company.

This means they're cooperative. They're supportive. But then another characteristic means are they growth-minded? Do they fit also the values of the company? If you haven't identified your values and you can't translate that into the employer brand and the messaging, that's something that you should be thinking about. It can be a great way to eliminate bad candidates before your HR team and your supervisors are wasting time on them.

But there's one key difference. I told you I was going to give you a gold nugget today, here it is. If your brain is starting to drift, come back to me right now. One key difference that you absolutely should look for in any role inside of your company is the individual's willingness to be coachable.

What does coachable mean? I'm going to tell you a little bit about what coachable means, but guess what? I'm also going to tell you a quick way that you could actually integrate this into your hiring process as well.

If you've been to my presentations, you know I like to over deliver, so I want to give you some actions today that you can take away with you. The key difference for somebody who is coachable is they have a willingness and an ability to seek, be receptive to, and to act on constructive feedback to drive not only their individual development, but also to improve their performance and their ability to impact that growth of the company and those around them.

I'm going to say that one more time. It's an individual's willingness and ability to seek, be receptive to, and act on constructive feedback to drive individual development, improve their performance, and also even improve the performance of everybody around them. That's what coachability is.

But the question I always get when coachability comes up is “How do I know if somebody is coachable? That seems a little bit intangible, Jeani, how am I going to know this in an interview or a screening process or what types of assessments does it take?”

There are assessment tools that can tell you these things so we're going to dive into what technique to do that. Before we do that, though, remember we have created a Workforce Health Assessment tool, which is going to help you identify some of these answers around maybe the employer brand.

We've mentioned several things up to this point, your employer brand, knowing your values, having messaging all around your recruiting and retention that helps people self-select out if they're a poor fit and attracts those folks that are just right for your unique team or the specific role.

If you want to understand more about what is the current health of your internal workforce process, system, and strategy, we actually made an assessment for that. We're going to have a link in the show notes for you to get a hold of that and later on, I'm going to give you the website, the landing page that you can go to to actually take that assessment. It takes like five minutes and it's going to really help you understand “What do I need to be working on?”

But as part of that process, if you're working on really attracting any talent and you're really wanting somebody who's coachable, here's a quick actionable tip for you. You can assign a task during the interview process.

This is hard for a lot of companies because it's really out of the box. They're like, “Wait, before I even hire them, you want me to have them do almost like a test project or a test example of one of their main responsibilities?” Absolutely.

Taking more time on the front side can pay dividends on the backside. The higher up this role is in your company if you're talking about a sales manager and operations manager, things like that, building in something like this into your interview process can be incredibly powerful and so, so important.

What you can do, we actually build a whole interview process for some of our clients and there are different types of interviews that happen during that time. Some of them are much easier and quicker and take less time commitment upfront, but they help us quickly and efficiently eliminate folks that aren't a good fit, and then they get a little bit more deeper and in depth and they ask very specific types of questions as they go.

If you want to build coachability testing into that process, in the middle of that process, you can actually assign them a task. Maybe it's to role play with somebody else inside of the company to provide a project estimate if that's the position that you're looking for and that's what the example we’ll use right here, and then whoever might be a manager, a supervisor, or was previously in that role might go through that with them acting as the client, the customer.

They would go through the entire process, they would prepare the estimate, then they would deliver it to them and then you could give constructive feedback. Remember if we go back to that definition of coachability, do they ask questions? Are they willing first to take the feedback? Do they ask good questions during this process to make sure that they really understand the feedback that they're getting and ask maybe inquisitive questions to understand it better?

Then are they receptive? After you give them that feedback, you ask them to go back, make some modifications, make some adjustments, maybe role play part of that out again, and then you see, how do they actually improve?

Remember, part of that definition was individual development and improvement of their performance. Can you actually see improvement? Are they taking what they learn from you and are they actually applying it? How do they handle this? Is there friction? Do they get tense? Do they get up in arms? Do they ignore recommendations? Do they come up with some additional ideas or ask great questions during the process?

This is a great way for those critical roles that you want to make sure that you get top performers for. This is something that you can implement into your interviewing and hiring process. It can even be part of an onboarding process. I've done it both ways. Integrated both ways into that.

There's nothing wrong with letting people know that you're going to be doing this. I know in marketing, a lot of times, people are given assignments for given projects and it is like a test run. Part of that always is giving that kind of constructive feedback.

I did promise you access to that resource. I gave you this quick tip. I want you to go think about, are you really hiring for coachability? Are you hiring players that are going to bring your company up and elevate everybody around them? Or are you hiring players that might be sucking stuff out of the room and actually diminishing the efforts of those around them?

How could you add some kind of coachability test into your systems and processes to make sure that you're getting those best players? What is it that you're going to want inside of your business?

We have the link for that Workforce Health Assessment in the show notes so that you can grab it, click on it really quickly. Like I said, it is designed to in five minutes help you really understand what parts of your overall recruitment, retention process, and strategy are actually working well, what parts may have gaps that you need to be paying attention to.

You can also find that at storybuilt.marketing/workforce-strategy-assessment, and it'll be right there for you to take that. Also, not the best link I know, so make sure that you just jump into the show notes and grab it there as well, so you don't have to type all that in.

This wraps up another insightful episode of The Contractor's Daughter, a huge thank you to everyone for showing up, being with me, following along, and I hope that you really remember what is it that might be some of the characteristics of those toxic players?

Then what is it that you're looking for when you get a real high-performing type-A, somebody who benefits the entire team and elevates everything around them, what does that type-A player look like inside of your business? In particular, are they coachable? That's what I want you to think about and try to implement some kind of coachability test into a system or a process. Think about where you might be able to do that.

If you have questions about that, if you want to think about that, if you want to maybe play that out with somebody, what could that look like inside of your business, or you have a different unique role that you're wondering, “How do I do that for this type of role?” I'm always there for you. You guys can always hop on my calendar. I always include a link to capture some of my time in the show notes as well. Remember that I'm here for you.

Also, go take that Workforce Health Assessment. It also will give you some great ideas about how you can overcome some of these workforce challenges. Now, again, if you enjoyed today's episode, do not forget to subscribe and to leave us a review. That helps us get more great content out to everybody else in our industry. Until next time, keep growing your business and keep thriving at life.

Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of The Contractor's Daughter. If you liked what you heard, be sure to subscribe and review. But most of all, share this with all of your friends, partners, and customers in the highway construction business. Thank you for building the infrastructure that we all rely on.

Jeani Ringkob: Welcome to The Contractor's Daughter, your go-to podcast for eliminating random acts of strategy and marketing in your highway construction business. Hello, friends. I'm your host, Jeani Ringkob. I'm a third-generation asphalt contractor and an absolute brand strategy and marketing geek.

Welcome to The Contractor's Daughter where we delve into the world of pavement, asphalt construction, business ownership, and everything that goes with making your business and your life a success.

I'm thrilled to have you join us today because today we are going to be diving into the keys of success with none other than Tom Reber himself. He's a renowned author of Winning the Contractor Fight, a dear friend of mine, and somebody who has served our country.

In our conversation, we're going to explore powerful sales strategies, the importance of company culture, and the art of hiring the right people in our company. If you know me, you know I love all of these topics. Let's jump right in.

Today we have Tom Reber. I don't even know when I first saw you out in the world but I know we've been connected on the social platform as I've followed you for a while. First and foremost, thank you for your service.

Tom Reber: Oh, absolutely. Well, it was probably a year and a half ago or so. You were on my podcast The Contractor Fight. That's I think the first time we actually talked and then, what's the word, stalk at each other on social media and stuff. Yeah, it's been a good thing.

Jeani Ringkob: Yeah, absolutely. I have tons of questions. I have a whole list of questions. We will be weaving some stuff in from conversation we actually already had pre-getting actually kicked off and started. That was super good. But you have also been busy since we talked because you have a book coming out, right?

Tom Reber: I do. It comes out in spring here of 2024 and it's called Sell Unafraid. It's in the final stages of editing right now. I think they're pretty much done and they're just waiting on me to answer a few questions and then we rock and roll with it. Yeah, Sell Unafraid: Unleashing Sales Success Through Personal Discipline. I think it's one of the biggest factors of success or failure or underachieving, if you want to call it that, in sales that nobody talks about is discipline.

Jeani Ringkob: Right. Nobody wants to say that word because it's the one thing that’s--

Tom Reber: Oh, no. Then you're accountable to something, right?

Jeani Ringkob: Right. I know you talk about integrity and discipline a lot in all of your coaching that you work on. I think that it just is expected that that would be a thread and a theme in the book that you discussed on sales.

Tell us a little bit more about when you are talking about sales with the people that you were coaching and mentoring, what do you see as some of the biggest hurdles that folks are having as they’re trying to, because I think a lot of us, in all of these industries, we have these different growth stages.

For a while, you're bootstrapping it, you're doing lots of things, but for a long time, even as your business grows and gets bigger, as an owner, you still pretty much stay integrated in sales, almost every owner in the industry. You may even be the one coaching your sales team or mentoring your sales team. What is it that you see with a lot of the service companies that is the biggest challenge for sales?

Tom Reber: Well, I think the number one thing that jumps out to me is that success is what we call an inside-out game. All the success you want starts with you. When I talk about personal discipline in sales, if you drop a rock in the water, where that rock hits, we call that a strong you are getting oxygen.

Get oxygen, workout, sleep, eat right. Don't be a knucklehead. Try to quit your meth habit if you have that going on, whatever. The stronger you are, the better everything else is in your life. Then the next ring of that rock comes out, we call a strong home and then our strong business.

The top performers that we've worked with and coached throughout the years, when they get that order of operation correct, their sales results are always way better because how you do one thing is how you do everything.

If you can't honor getting up on time, hitting the gym, controlling what you put in your mouth, taking your wife on a date on a regular basis, those types of things, the most basic level, how are you going to excel as an elite salesperson?

Even if you're a top salesperson in the company, there's always room to get better because what I found and what I've coached and seen myself is, man, when I give me priority in that inside-out game, I always reach a new level in my career.

When we get on the phone or do a workshop, sales workshop with people, one of the first questions we'll ask the room of all the sales reps, I'll go, “Okay, honestly, write it down, how many times a week do you work out? When's the last time you took your spouse on a date?” We do this little quiz to shine some light on like, “Guys, this is important. This is also why you're working your tail off because [inaudible] your family, and you want to be healthy.”

But so many people underachieve in anything, but especially sales, because I think sales is a contact sport. It requires stamina, endurance, mental toughness. You got to be able to reframe all the crappy deals with on a daily basis that comes your way and all the nos, and I don't think you could do that if you're not taking care of yourself.

To me, sales is again, one of those professions that I think your skills are perishable. In the Marine Corps, we go to the rifle range, we go to the pistol range, and we shoot, and I still shoot now. My wife and I go to the range a few times a month.

The more I shoot, the better prepared I am. When I'm not shooting, I'm not as good. That's why golfers go to the driving range every day because they're a professional golfers and you hit balls and so as a salesperson, you work so hard to have that sales call presentation, whatever it is in your industry that you call it, that's game day.

Yet so many salespeople don't take care of them. The typical stereotypes that you think of when you think sales guy, you think a guy eating a doughnut, and who's the pathetic guy on a rainy night sitting in the bar on the road and traveling and all that stuff from the movies.

I think you got to treat yourself like an athlete to some degree and understand the discipline of things like role-playing. Inside our community, we do probably 2,500 role-plays a month within our group.

Jeani Ringkob: Really? Wow.

Tom Reber: Every week, today, we have a live role-playing call, sales training call that one of our coaches runs and we have this whole belt system like martial arts, this many points gets you [inaudible].

We gamified a little bit. Because the best salespeople are competitive too. They want to [inaudible]. They want to get the next belt. To me, it's hands down just the discipline.

I'd say with that, one of the issues is that a lot of people, especially if they're a business owner and they're doing all the sales in their business, a lot of them don't see themselves as a salesperson. They see themselves as “I'm a concrete guy and I have to sell jobs.” They still see themselves as the trade or the profession.

I think you really got to take that sales hat, embrace it, put it on, and go, “Hey, we don't build anything or fix anything without a sale.” That's the number one role that I have in the company is either to sell or to be the champion of the sales and make sure our people are trained and stuff.

Jeani Ringkob: Do you find within your community, how much do you encourage, or what are your thoughts around that owner that is growing and adding sales team? What are your thoughts on that? Or what do you see in terms of how much does an owner need to stay involved in that as they're growing, as they're hiring salespeople?

Tom Reber: All right, let me address one thing here quickly, 90% of the time that people tell me they're hiring a salesperson, they don't need a salesperson.

Jeani Ringkob: Okay.

Tom Reber: Okay. A lot of people think, “Oh, this time of year, it's March right now when we're doing this.” If you're in a cold climate, you know that in March and April, your phone starts ringing off the hook and you start feeling overwhelmed. That's when a lot of people go, "Oh, I need to hire a couple of salespeople." When the rest of the year, there are not enough leads coming in and whatever it is.

When I say they're not ready for a salesperson, when you reverse engineer the math, when you reverse engineer and you look at their current sales process, there's a lot of waste in it, a lot of wasted time.

Especially in the service industry, the way somebody gets a price now is they call a contractor, contractor says, “Do you have a pulse and live in my area?” “Yes. Okay. We'll come out and I'll stand in your yard or in your home and tell you how great I am and write up this thing called an estimate. Then I'm going to leave it with you and then I'm going to pray to the heavens that you pick me.”

That's the average. There's a lot of wasted time in that. What we teach is it's going to cut about half your time out of the sales process. You're never going to go meet with somebody that's not already a good fit for you and you're not in the proposal-writing business.

I talked to a guy not too long ago. He's like, “Yeah, I got 83 bids out on the street.” I'm like, “All right, how many are sold? How much money you got in the bank?” He's like, “Well, I'm still waiting to hear.”

Jeani Ringkob: It’s easy to get sucked into that phase of it for a lot of people. I see. I will say I've found myself going, “Wait, I've spent way too much time with this proposal.” If they never see it, it doesn't matter.

Or I don't walk them through it and add value to that conversation. I do think there's value in a good solid proposal. There's certain elements to it, but yet you can template that and you can turn it in. I think this is one of the areas in a process where you probably just set a timer and say, “Look, it's better done than perfect.”

Tom Reber: Yeah. But a lot of it is on that initial pre-qualification call. The macro answer to your question is, as the owner, man, you have to be the champion of sales. You gotta be involved. You can't just hire salespeople, set it, and forget it. There has to be a high degree of accountability.

Otherwise, we have a sales team in The Contractor Fight and we are in contact every day, they're accountable to things they do, we're very on the ball with that, but I've done it wrong in the past too, where I've hired somebody with industry experience and you cut them loose and you realize, “Man, if I've created a culture where there's no accountability, that's going to be a problem.”

But most companies don't need more salespeople right away. I'm not saying you shouldn't hire more salespeople, but when you reverse engineer, like, “All right, how much more do you have to spend on marketing and you get the phone to ring the X amount of time to pay the sales guy? And then by the time you reverse engineer the cost of that and commissions and all those things out, what are you left with?”

We've found that it's a better place to start with your existing team, you, whatever it is, and refine this process to where there's no wasted movement. What that looks like is you reach out to the company, we're going to set up a 10 to 20-minute phone call with you.

In our process, step one, we call the motive. Why do you want to do this project? People buy for their reasons, not for my reasons. The room I'm sitting into my house is in our basement. It's about a thousand-square-foot area that we were converting into my podcast studio here.

I have a studio off site and then we have this here when I need it. My wife, amazing designer and things like that, she was going to do things here. So we called this company to do concrete staining in the basement. I wanted to rip the carpet out, put the concrete down, whatever finish.

Called this company, a guy walks in, stands in our foyer, tells us about his daughter's travel team softball or whatever it was, tells us about the classic car he's restoring, and all this other crap where he's trying to act like he's bonding and we're creating rapport.

We start walking down the steps of the basement. We get to the bottom of the basement and I turn and the only question question he asked me the whole day was, “What do you want to do down here?” I said, “Yeah, I want to rip the carpet up and do an epoxy.” Before it got out of my mouth, he cut me off and he's like, “No, you don't, you want the X 5000 flooring system and this and this and this.”

For the next 20, 30 minutes, all he did was barf all over us with all the reasons why you should hire his company.

Jeani Ringkob: You [inaudible] what you want, you want something else, but we have it.

Tom Reber: And then finally, my wife goes, “Well, how much is this going to be?” Now, there are so many things I can pick apart with this, which I do in the book, by the way. No, because I told the story, but when a salesperson hears how much is this going to be, most that aren't trained properly, don't control their self-talk, their negative self-talk, those different things, they make assumptions and they make stories up like, "Oh, she's asking because she only cares how cheap it is."

That's just one of those stories that you can tell. Well, my wife had $50,000, $60,000 to work with cosmetically down here. In her mind, she's just going, “Okay, whatever finish it is, I don't care.”

Jeani Ringkob: But I got a budget.

Tom Reber: Because we're putting in copper, we're wrapping the bar in copper, we're doing the tequila thing over here, blah, blah, blah furniture. She was just doing some math. She goes, “How much is this going to be?” He goes, “It's going to be really expensive.” We're like, “Okay.” He's like, “It's going to be, I don't know, $9,000, $10,000, $11,000.” I'm like, “So right there, you made another assumption that we would think this is expensive.”

Jeani Ringkob: So many mistakes.

Tom Reber: Anyway, I was bragging about my team here, if this guy had been trained by our team, first of all, he wouldn't have come over without having this conversation on the phone first. We would have sent him pictures or a video. I would have been happy to send pictures.

Now I know what we're talking. If he would have simply asked the question, “Tom, sounds like you're doing a lot of work down in the basement. What's the story?” if he would have just asked a question with some curiosity, genuine curiosity, and then shut his mouth, what he would have heard was that I fly my elite clients in here for coaching days and it needs to be sharp.

This is the big screen where we're going to look at numbers and some things like that. In the area, we're going to sit my drum sets over there, the pool table, we want the cool I-Beam metal base is what was going to go here. This is before this base was done. This was going to be a tequila bar with a black granite top and a copper on the front of the bar.

I would have talked about how important this corner and this part of the basement is visually because my floor and everything else needs to be on brand with The Contractor Fight, because I, on a daily basis, am in front of tens of thousands of people on lives, webinars, content, and this and that. So being on brand and making this part of the Fight was the most important thing and was my true motive.

Had he done that, I would have talked for 20 minutes nonstop. He could have spit out any price he wanted for the floor because I would have connected emotionally with him because he would have been curious, he wouldn't have been the know-it-all, and he would let me explain my reasons.

Then once he got motive, then step two is money. “Hey, Tom, I think I really understand what you want here. I've got one or two ways that I can handle your project.” “What's that sound like, Bob?” “Well, the first is, you mentioned the floor, the pool table, the painting, the copper, the tequila bar, some trim, and some of these things, so the first thing I could do is I can handle all of that for you with our team and our connections, take it off your to-do list, and do the floor. For all of that, you might be $90,000, $100,000.” Pause.

“Or we could just come in and bang out the floor for you for $13,000, $14,000, $15,000 and give you a great base to work with. Which of those conversations do you want to have?”

Now this would be on the phone, by the way, we teach people how to do this on the phone so I'm not driving to Tom's house in traffic, standing in the basement, tap dancing, typing shit up, sending it, waiting to get back up. We're going to know on that initial call at 10, 15-minute phone call, what's important to you, about what it's going to cost, and I'm going to get your true budget 100% of the time because of the way I bracket.

I give the high anchor, I give the regular, and I let you opt-in. Sometimes if somebody says, “Oh, $15,000 on the low end? That's ridiculous.” We got 17 other bids for $3,000. for this floor because people do that.

Then that's simply you affirm it. You go, “Yeah, I'm not surprised. Why do you think everyone else is so cheap? What do you think we should do next?” I'm taking control by putting it back in your court.

This process, and I'm throwing a lot at it here, there's more to it, there are other steps that we encourage people to follow, what's going to happen is you're estimating proposal, typing up time, follow-up calls, and all that, all that stuff in the sales process is going to be cut in half, the time that you spend.

You're only going to go meet with people that you know what they want, the motive. Not, “I just want my house painted,” but “My daughter's 16th birthday party is in three weeks, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Oh, and if it's not done, my wife's going to hang me,” that's a motive.

So when you get that emotional connection, then you could talk money. A lot of times, so before you go out there, they already know what it's going to cost within range. There are ways that we protect. If you get out there and you see a game-changing site condition, we teach you how to address that.

But what we see with this process is, guys coming in, doing $300,000 a year in topline sales and making no money to within 12 months later doing 2.7 at a 50% gross profit and they sell from their phone, meaning the main sale happens on the phone, you go out, you confirm it, and you write it up.

We've been teaching this for about a decade. You can get a mortgage on this thing. I can transfer money.

Jeani Ringkob: You can buy a Tesla in three clicks.

Tom Reber: Right. Yet in the sales world, I think it's so behind the times a little bit here where you got to go out, you got to touch the walls to give a price or whatever.

Jeani Ringkob: I think especially in these industries, when we're going out, we're looking at whether it's a paving project or it's a concrete floor, whatever it is, everything's a little bit old school, little behind the time, there's a ton of value to that. There's a lot of stuff I love about that in this industry, but I'm always challenging it too.

The question of when do you hire more sales or the salesperson, that's right. Are you optimized yet? Maybe you might even optimize what you're doing and you don't have a good process in place yet.

Tom Reber: Yeah. I mean, growing your sales team is no different than saying, “I want to scale my business.” It's the same thing. Well, don't scale a turd. You're just going to have a bigger turd. You use the word optimize. I love that word optimize, which you already have.

Am I as efficient as I can be in our current sales process? What needs tweaking? Let's get that dialed in, get the frameworks in place before we try to grow something bigger. Because again, I mean, I had a painting company a million years ago and we ended up doing the math and decided to train all of our crew leaders to upsell instead of hiring another sales guy.

That was way more profitable. Then our crew leaders, they're great people, they would take other appointments on the weekends and nights that we couldn't get to because they wanted to make some more money, but we coached them how to do that and started hiring a full-time sales guy. We were doing three to 400 projects a year.

Jeani Ringkob: Right. When you think about the base cost of the salary and the benefit, all the things, optimize, optimize, optimize what you're doing, test it, measure it, track it, question it. Why are we doing it this way? Is there a better way to do it?

Tom Reber: Yeah. We teach this, one of the metrics that we encourage people to track is, we call it the ESR, the Effective Sales Rate. If I sell $75,000 this week of whatever projects, a couple of different projects, and I spend 32 hours in the sales process, my ESR is $2,300. My effective sales rate.

This is all the time, it's a follow-up, it's type and crap up, it's drive time, it's standing on site and meeting, all these things combined, and what we see when people start implementing the process that we coach and we teach, we see that number double, because the 32 hours becomes 10 hours, 12 hours, for the same dollar amount or more, because when you also bracket properly, your average job size goes up.

One of the metrics that we follow is, are you and your team getting better? How do you know you're spending less time to sell more at higher profits? That's one of our indicators because how much time does the average salesperson spend with the wrong prospects and all that stupid follow-up calls when if you just had a conversation with somebody, an open and honest conversation? Which, again, there are so many things that feed into this.

Did you grow up with a crappy money mindset? I grew up with a terrible money mindset where I thought $500 was a lot of money. I just think if you're bringing that baggage, you're not role-playing, you don't know the frameworks to use, all these things combined end up in a bunch of wasted time for a salesperson.

That's why I said back in the beginning, you got to work on you. You got to deal with your self-talk and the consistency and following the process and putting in the reps so that when you get an objection, when somebody says, "Well, why can't you just come out here? Why do I have to send you pictures?" We get that from time to time.

“Hey, that's a great question. Are you cool if I share with you what our process looks like?” Then we map it out. A lot of this is the spirit of the conversation, tonality, empathy, curiosity, and what we found is that the consumer, the prospect is refreshed by this when it's done right because they don't want more people coming to their house and having to burn their time meeting with people.

Jeani Ringkob: And they want to take our time to meet you and whatever it is.

Tom Reber: Yeah, if you’re not a good fit.

Jeani Ringkob: I guess since I worked so much on the marketing side but I always talk about actually I'll be at World of Asphalt in a couple of weeks and we'll be talking about one of my presentations really has to do with how do we make sales and marketing work together.

I've been leveraging both of them because I grew up doing the sales piece. I mostly help with marketing now but I always have that in mind towards sales. I always say, and I think Donald Miller was where I came up with the original analogy, but my take on it is he talks about a plane and how your business is part of a plane. I like to think about the engines though, and I don't think I've ever heard him mention this, but it's like, if you have sales and marketing, it's like, do you have a sales team that's built for a 777 and then you have a marketing that's for a Cessna 210 or vice versa? Probably doesn't work very well.

But when you said something about the customer, the research shows that pre-COVID, people were 70% of the way to a decision about something because they were consuming content online before they wanted to have an actual touch point with a salesperson or directly with a company.

I think post-COVID that's probably accelerated. We've read that study. I think we're probably for around 80% and I think with the way technology is, the way content is being created, that's only going to accelerate. But our sales systems and mindset haven't really accommodated for that.

I think people would appreciate if sales caught up with the fact that that's the experience they want to have. Even if they're coming in and having a sales conversation earlier than that, or if it's a different type of product that needs that, I think that people appreciate you not wasting their time too.

I think they almost appreciate you qualifying them honestly and authentically and saying, “Hey, if you're not a good fit for us, I'm not going to waste your time coming out there. But if I have some other directions to point you, that's what I'm going to do.” That kind of conversation, I feel like it's the same mindset as saying, “I'm going to consume enough content that I'm pretty sure I already know what I want to do.” They want to feel like by the time you're in my home on something like this, I want to be pretty dang sure I don't have to have anybody else in my home.

Tom Reber: Yeah, I love that you brought up the content piece because that is a part of the sales process that I think a lot of salespeople go, "Oh, I don't have to do that." Again, I know there are different types of salespeople. There are people that are just fed 20 leads a day and they're just commission only. I know there are people that do some business development and sell, that whole thing.

But to me, you're either a true salesperson or you're just an order taker. A true salesperson to me finds their own leads. They're on the hunt. They're building their own pipeline. They're creating content. They're taking a camera out on a job site or whatever.

Jeani Ringkob: They're contributors to the company.

Tom Reber: Right, and they're going, “Hey, one of the biggest questions we get is when we do a driveway like this, why do we do this, act that, the other thing? Let me explain this to you here.”

Now, this is probably good to do in the long run, even though it could be another $5,000 to $10,000 more, but this is going to save the education piece. I bring this up because in our painting company back in the early 2000s, we started creating content, blogs, and all those different things and content has been my number one strategy.

I do it in The Contractor Fight. Let's be the number one educator in this space for the problems that our people have. The more you do that, you position yourself as the expert, you have less price competition because you're answering customers' questions, you're talking about money, you're talking about issues, all these things.

They're not going to call you if they're not cool with the pricing that's on your website or that you've done on social media or whatever it is. Again, you're saving yourself time by not meeting with the wrong people.

We talk about being forward-thinking with some of this stuff where sales is kind of lag behind. But I think the one area that we're trying to encourage salespeople to do is actually go back to more of a personal touch and have these real conversations where it's true, I can't overemphasize enough, it's true curiosity, you call my company, whatever I sell, I'm going to go, “Hey, Jeani, listen, I know this is important to you. Are you cool if I just ask you a few questions and make sure if I can even help you?”

You start with that spirit. We teach you how to have gratitude. Like, “Hey, last I checked, there were 600 other painters in the city you could have chosen. Thanks for picking up the phone and calling us.” You're just starting with a different tonality, a different spirit. That creates a connection between you and your prospect that your competitors aren't going to have.

They're going to make it about money, you’re going to make it about the motive. When you connect with the motive, the money's no big deal because what we hear in our clients here all the time when they give feedback is, “I really felt like Dave heard me. Dave really understood.”

A lot of our customers are dealing, I'm just throwing it out there, in the trades, they're dealing many times with the woman of the house. Last I checked, my woman wants to be heard, doesn't want to be dismissed, doesn't want some contractor guy coming in making assumptions.

I mean, you've grown up in the trades. For some guy to come over to your house, not know who you are and your history, and talk down to you, that's probably an issue. So, when you make somebody feel heard, everyone has that sign around their neck that says make me feel important, when you do that in the sales process, you're going to crush your competition, you're going to sell at higher rates, and you're going to do it in half the time because sales are pretty snagging easy when you take care of the basics.

Jeani Ringkob: Right. I keep thinking about the convert, the example you were using in your basement. I think you said your wife knew the budget was $50,000, $60,000, whatever it was, $60,000-$80,000.

Then you talked about the example when he was anchoring the price points, which is a tool, like, yes, you're offering [inaudible] things, but you're really also gauging. That might not be the only options, but you're really trying to get a taste. I love that idea.

I think it ties in so directly to asking about motive and understanding, letting them tell you all the things they need to tell you because if all you wanted was a floor, that's one story. If you're telling a story about the space, what it means, it impacts your business, and you're creating a space for people to come and thrive, to be able to focus and work on their businesses, it's like a shelter and a getaway for them, that changes everything.

That might in a good salesperson's mind, I hate these things but I just think then when he puts together the example of, “You know what, you've got all these things, we actually could just take that off your hands and we have some people we can manage and some resources, contacts,” whatever it is, all of a sudden, maybe you're willing to spend a lot more for that because nobody else has asked and understood that you're running a business, your wife has a business, that you have kids going on but you're creating this really great space and it's really essential for your business but so is your time.

All of a sudden, you and your wife might look at each other and say, “Wow, we hadn't even thought about that as an option, but given everything else we have going on, our budget just went up. We're really actually happy and grateful for that.” There are diamonds and gold nuggets in asking somebody to share their story.

Tom Reber: Yeah, and that scenario you shared with us finding more money for something is the result of trust going up. Trust is when somebody feels like they're understood, you're not interrupting them every five seconds in the sales. I've done that. I've gone into houses when I didn't know how to sell way back in the day and I would talk about stupid things like the size spray tip we were going to use to do the trim with.

I'll just speak to contractors, most contractors go to their comfort zone, which is technical stuff about the trade. You think you have to convince people to buy and win them over with, “We've won all these awards and we don't subcontract our work and we use this sort of paint,” and like, okay, all those things may or may not be important, but if none of those are the reason somebody wants to buy, then you got a problem.

So when I speak, I put this big screen up and I have been in business 20 years, member of this certification, this award. We do background checks, all the typical things that we all do. I asked the room to keep adding.

The question is, “Why should somebody hire you?” That's what I do, I forget about it. I don't put the slide up until I ask the question. I ask the room the question and they all start throwing out all these things and I hit the slide and everything they said is up on the slide, basically.

I'm like, “The problem with this is these are all reasons you think people should buy from you.” I had a woman buy a project from me that was four times the amount of every other contractor.

This was a long time ago because I understood that her motive was “Don't wake up my twin babies while you're here.” That was literally the only time that she got the sleep or the kids never slept except for like--

Jeani Ringkob: Twin babies.

Tom Reber: Twin babies. They slept, I want to say, from 12:30 to 2:00 in the afternoon or some crazy time like that. I'm like, “Hey, what's a good motive question?” It's like, “If you could wave a magic wand over this project, what would it look like?” Super open-ended, shut your mouth, and let them talk, and she's like, “Well, if I could wave a magic wand, you guys wouldn't make my twins up.”

Jeani Ringkob: When my kids were little, I'm sitting on the door. I have children, do not touch this doorbell unless there’s a fire or you're the police, don't touch it because I'm going to come out swinging.

Tom Reber: Yeah, I just said to her, "If you could wave a magic wand, you wouldn't wake your kids up. Tell me more about that. What's the deal there?" Again, it's being curious. Just be curious. She starts opening up going, "I've hardly slept since they were born. The only time they sleep is this crazy time in the afternoon. They're out like rock, and that's the only time that I can take a nap, I can wash my hair, I could do whatever I need to do, make a phone call," and they were driving her nuts.

I just said, "Hey, I got a crazy idea. What would happen if we made our start time later?” I think the kids slept around one, and then that way, we could start our lunch right around that one o'clock time when they go down. “I know there's ABC park or whatever it is down the street here. I'll have the crew go off-site for lunch. They'll take an extended lunch and we can do some training or whatever it is down there during the lunch break. When the kids wake up, you text the crew leader. They'll come back and finish the day out.”

I said, “What would happen then?” She goes, “You would do that?” I said, “Yeah.” She goes, “The job's yours.” I said, “You don't even know how much I'm going to charge you.” She goes, “I don't care.” That's what I mean. Motive is not always the money. It's the convenience. It's “Don't wake my kids up.”

Another story was, I had a woman whose number one criteria for hiring a contractor was her dad had emphysema and there couldn't be any dust. There was drywall repair that had to be done, sanding, and all these different things.

I was the only painter that got that information out of her because I asked the right questions about, “Tell me what's going on in the house when we're doing this project. Is there anything that we're going to do that's going to jazz up or mess up the flow of your life here?” She's like, “That's a great question. My dad, my father-in-law,” whoever it was, “has an emphysema.” It opened up the whole thing.

Jeani Ringkob: They're really nervous about it.

Tom Reber: Yeah. So we took extra measures and this and that, where all my other competitors were just about the X 5000 spray tip. “Here's the price and I hope they hire me.”

Jeani Ringkob: And I won that award.

Tom Reber: Yeah.

Jeani Ringkob: Right. I always tell people when we're looking at websites and stuff like that, or creating a piece of content and the job description, I'm actually doing a lot of work right now on workforce strategy, recruitment, and development, because that's a big bottleneck. You can leverage a lot of marketing strategy there.

When we look at job descriptions and stuff like that, I always tell people, “You haven't earned the right to talk about your business yet. You haven't earned the right to talk about your accomplishments, your awards, or how you're better than them. They woke up this morning with a problem. Until you prove that you understand it, and empathize with it, you build up to that.”

I always say job descriptions, they all start with like, “We've been in business for X numbers of years.”

Tom Reber: I don't care.

Jeani Ringkob: You guys do that at the very, very bottom. If they've kept reading that long, then you're on the right to say that. That's great.

Tom Reber: Well, it's what's in it for me, right? If I'm looking at job ads or whatever, and career pages on websites and stuff, I want something that's going to draw me in just like a good marketing message.

We had good friends, they have a big water feature business out on the East Coast and then create these gorgeous swim ponds and backyard ponds and this and that. They ran an ad and they needed a heavy equipment guy who run in the machine all day.

They spent an afternoon trying to figure out, “Okay, who could be ideal candidates to come work for us?” One of the things that came up was guys that work for utility companies. They run heavy machinery.

I'm going to butcher the headline of the ad but it basically said “Tired of no one ever seeing your work?” Because they were digging these things and putting the pipes in and they were covering and whatever it was and they picked up a phenomenal form and type guy from that ad because it spoke to the fact that he literally would drive home every day and he would be like, “I have nothing to show for what I did all day.”

He wanted to be able to drive through town and point to something and go, “I built that, I did that.” That's what was in it for him and he jumped ship in a heartbeat and he's as happy as ever.

I come from the painting industry. I think the best recruiting messages in painting are not showing a guy with a roller and a brush. Put a spray gun in his hand. What young 18, 19, 25-year-old dude, for the most part, doesn't want to pull a trigger and get paid?

You got to make it cool, what's in it for them? I think that's where the trades do a terrible job of this hiring thing because number one, most people only hire when they need people, they're not always recruiting, they're not always trying to build their bench, and the other thing they do, this is back to this whole sales thing I'm talking about here, our pre-qualification process, we call it the ‎Shin-Fu, and there's a long story behind it, it's called ‎Shin-Fu.

You can Fu, what we call Fu, you can Fu potential employees. What's their motive? “Hey, Dave, you reached out and you applied here and we're having a meeting. Wave a magic wand over your ideal day at work, what does it look like? Talk to me about this. You mentioned earlier that your boss didn't take care of you. What do you mean by that?”

I asked that question to a guy years ago and he said, “When he hired me six years ago, he said in six months, I was going to get a company truck,” and this guy had been carrying around this bitterness for almost six years that he didn't have a company truck and that's why he was leaving the company.

I'm like, “So all your boss would have had to do is honor the commitment that he made you to get you a truck.” I almost lost guys because I forgot to give them an iPad. I promised an iPad and I forgot.

Jeani Ringkob: The little things matter.

Tom Reber: My point is by asking motive questions, you could really draw what's important to somebody. I had an employee years ago who we were setting goals for the year and we called in all of our individual employees and, “Hey, what do you want to accomplish this year and how can we help you get there, and this and that?”

Jeani Ringkob: Right. We don't do this in this industry as nearly enough.

Tom Reber: Right. This one guy goes, my partner at the time, he goes, “What would make this a great year for you personally on the personal level?” Great question. The guy goes, "Well, my wife and I got married and I couldn't afford to take her. She wanted to go to this one place.”

If anyone that knows Geneva, Illinois, outside of Chicago, there was a place or maybe still is called The Herrington. It was this really nice, bed and breakfast place. I'm from that area.

But anyway, he's like, “My wife has always wanted to stay at The Herrington. I've never been able to afford it.” My partner goes, “Well, what's it cost?” He goes, “That's going to be $3,000 for the weekend that I want to take her on and I just don't have the money.”

My partner goes, “Well, what if we just created a plan based on how you're bringing your jobs in on time and stuff that we make this happen this year for you?” They sat down, reverse-engineered this whole thing. He hit it within a quarter. It didn't even take him the whole year.

I want to say it was like 70 days, he hit the milestones of bringing jobs in on time and certain gross profit. He knew that every time he hit the job budget, we were putting $500 into the pot for him or whatever it was.

In 70 days, he was able to take his wife. You think that guy's not loyal, sticking around because you're helping him get what they want. That's all sales is, whether you're selling your stuff.

Jeani Ringkob: It's a personal touch. It was unique to him. Yeah, that takes some time, but if I think about the best companies and the managers and the supervisors that are leading teams in those organizations, they actually would enjoy that stuff too.

They would actually enjoy, or the business owner, whoever it is, the ones that really attract and keep the best talent, they actually would enjoy doing stuff like that and being like, "Oh, I can do this?" It takes just a little bit of time for them to manage that, to flush it out, say manage it, say, "Hey, whoever an HR payroll, we're going to stick this money over here on the side for this as a bonus or whatever, doing this over here." Not that much work really for the amount of reward you're going to get then.

In our industry, I think stuff like that pays dividends because what you don't stop and think about is we're a referral industry when it comes to best people and I know because we're doing these projects and we always do research. We survey, we interview, and we know friends and family are one of the biggest pipeline feeders for workforce and yes, you want to have multiple pipeline feeders for that, but that's also some of the best quality if we teach our people how to bring them in, who is a great fit.

We talk about that they're going to be on your team with you, this is part of just putting it in perspective for them. But imagine how many times that guy is going to go tell that story at a picnic or at the bar with his buddies.

Tom Reber: It is. I'm smiling when you're telling that story because I'm reminded of there's a period in our painting business outside of Chicago and mind you, we were doing 300-plus projects a year, we're humming along. We gave our crew leaders autonomy on start times, finish times, work it out with the client, whatever it was, we gave them that autonomy because they pulled us aside one day. This was interesting.

Our top crew leaders pulled my business partner aside and he said, "Hey, I don't know if you're going to go for this, but I think this is important." He goes, "What's up?" he says, "Well, everyone on my crew, we all have young kids, pre-school, whatever." He said, “Would it be okay if one day a week we started later so that we could walk our kids to the bus?”

I'm almost tearing up when I'm thinking about it because as the owner, I walked my kids to the bus every day. I picked them up from school every day. I was able to do all these things as the boss. My partner's like, “I'm going to do you better than that. You guys can start and wrap up anytime you want. You just work it out with the client and you bring the jobs in on time and everyone's safe and everything's cool. You do what you need to do to be there for your families.”

That one thing where then they're telling their other family members and friends about working at our company, because most guys in the trades are on the job site at 7:00 AM or whatever it is. They're sometimes earlier.

Our guys were rolling in at nine o'clock and they had breakfast with their kids, they walked their kid to the bus, they hopped in the truck, and they drove to the job site, and they were as happy as a lark. That word got around in our team group from those relationships because they were telling people about that.

Jeani Ringkob: They probably worked a lot harder.

Tom Reber: Oh, totally.

Jeani Ringkob: They knew they still had to get the job done. I feel like this is a topic that comes up a lot because when we do research on workforce, one of the things that usually always stays in the top three is they wish they had time for taking care of personal matters, watching kids' sports, stuff like that.

I know mostly, I deal with the paving industry, especially if you're on DOT jobs or paid county jobs, it gets hard, it gets really, really hard to figure out “How do I do this?” But I will say it's great that people are starting to have a conversation like, “Are there ways we can do this? Does it mean shifts? Does it mean this and that? Does it mean certain crews that have needs to come in later, both work later or earlier or whatever, and group them together?”

At least those conversations are starting in our industries and I admire the people that are willing to have those conversations because it is hard. It's hard in these industries sometimes, we have restrictions, you're going on, the weather is good, different things like that. But to just have the willingness to have those conversations and like you said, it's the motive again, understanding that motive.

What are the motives of your employees? Why are they grumpy? Well, maybe it's because they have a sick mother in the hospital they're trying to go see. I don't know. But if you don't ask, you don't know either.

Tom Reber: Well, I want to pull back and shine a light on what you're saying here. It's going to sound like it's self-serving because we were talking about my sales book. But what I want people to see is that every interaction you have with another human being is sales.

I encourage you to have the discipline to do what you're talking about is having a conversation with your people. What's important to you? Don't make assumptions. You don't make assumptions in the sales process. Why did you make assumptions with what you think your employees want?

Just the fact that you or another company is willing to have these conversations where if you sat down and said to your team, "Guys, if I could wave a magic wand, you guys could go to the kids' events, you can do this, I don't know what it would look like, but I'm open to having the discussion and figuring this out together,” I think if more owners did that, you would find maybe all the single guys with no kids go, “Hey, we'll work the later jobs,” or whatever it is.

Because what we found on our crews, when we gave autonomy to the crew leader just to do it, they worked it out on the crews. One guy would be like, “Hey, my kid's got a game tomorrow and I'd really like to go see it. It's his first wrestling match,” or whatever it is. A lot of times, the crew leader would call another crew and go, Hey, you got a guy, you can give me tomorrow?” They would move guys around.

Jeani Ringkob: Yeah. Or give me after this time, whatever it is.

Tom Reber: Or they would work it out where that guy who wanted to cut out early, would come in a half an hour early, get a little more work done. He'd work through lunch and he'd cut out early, but they worked it out. We treated them like adults.

I think a lot of times I've made the mistake where I'm treating employees like they're kids. Really, they'll blow your mind if you let them figure some things out on their own. I think they'll surprise you in a good way. Again, it goes back to “Make me feel important.” They're not leaving your company, by the way, for another dollar.

Jeani Ringkob: I have this conversation, I think, at least several times a week, and I tell them, like, nobody in the research that we do is going to tell you that you're paying them too much.

We will hear that you're not getting paid enough often. But when we ask them why they leave or why they stay, it usually has to do with the people they work with and the culture, we're celebrating the culture and the culture that they work with. They're going to the people and they want to work with those people and there's reasons behind that.

I always try to reiterate that. That's relevant to so many things, it's relevant to like what we were just saying, how do you figure out things, understand our motives, figure out how to accommodate them, or at least try making attempts.

But then also, it's important if I think about it from an employer brand marketing perspective, it's just as important to me that everything that we put out pushes with the candidates just as much as it draws in the right ones, you have to know who you are, what does your team look like? What does your culture look like?

You have to own that. I know some job descriptions or career pages that we've built out, people are like, "Oh, my God, we can't say that. Nobody says that kind of stuff." I'm like, "Just try it." They will appreciate the fact that I had a company, they were doing jobs across the entire United States. They already had them sold. They needed crews that could travel.

I need that, I come from the industry, I understand that pain point. We leaned into that super heavy in the job descriptions, and it was an absolute success. They nailed it, they had no turnovers, but I'm like, “You have to be really upfront and honest with people. They do not like it when they start a job, and it's not what they thought they were signing up for.” Like, “Oh, it's just a little bit of trouble.” Actually, no, you're going to be on the road.

Tom Reber: You are a road warrior.

Jeani Ringkob: Right. When the season's over, we're a couch potato, or you can go get another, like, whatever. But we were honest, we were really, really honest in that. I know it made them so nervous at first, but I think we ran it on LinkedIn and Facebook for two days and that's it. They had 300 applicants. They had one turnover all year long.

Tom Reber: Wow.

Jeani Ringkob: I mean, they just nailed it. They pitched and like, I know when he's looking at it, it was over Christmas week when we tested it out. He was like, “I'm looking at it. I have all these and it's more than I thought we'd get. I'm looking at them and they're actually good.”

Tom Reber: Well, again, it's good marketing attracts and repels. The best marketing messages are when it could be commercial, it could be print, I don't care what it is, because when you see it and immediately go, “Hey, that's for me,” or “Hey, that's not for me,” immediate, that's the best marketing right there. That's what you did with that. You spoke to it, the right people resonated.

Jeani Ringkob: Yeah. I love the sales process that you use kind of uses that same format. Yes, there's interaction and they're not self-selecting, but you're allowing that collaborative conversation that's just a partnership early on so that both of you can say, “We should move forward or we shouldn't move forward.”

Tom Reber: Yeah, that initial phone call that we teach this Shin-Fu thing to do, there are five steps that we walk you through but the whole goal of the first phone call, this pre-qualifying phone call, is should we have a second date? That's all it is. Because right now by getting on the phone and having this conversation, it's like swipe left, swipe right on the dating app. That's all it is.

It's “Can I help you? This is in rough numbers, what this is probably going to cost based on what you're telling me,” which is, you go motive, you go money, step three is the truth, which sounds like this, you go, “Yeah, $10,000 sounds good. If it's around there, we're great.” “Hey, I appreciate that. If you should invite me out to put eyes on your project, I just want to let you know that on rare occasion, we come across a game-changing site condition or something we didn't talk about. In that event, I'm going to call a timeout if it's going to prevent me from keeping it around the $10,000 and we'll have a discussion around what to do.”

If you don't do that truth step, if I tell you $10,000 and then I go out there and now I go, “Oh, you know what, it's actually $20,000 or $18,000,” now I'm the typical salesperson with the bait and switch and all that other garbage.

Then step four is we call influencers, “Hey, who else is excited to do this project? Hey, what do you think they're going to think about spending $10,000 on this?” “Well, I'm not sure.”

We've literally had it where my husband's traveling is out of town and one of my old partners in this who's retired now, it took him three or four weeks to sell a $40,000 water feature to a guy because the husband was traveling and he wasn't going to go out there and do everything and play the typical song and dance till the husband was cool with the budget. He was protecting his time.

Then, then step five is what we call the BS Meter. If needed, it's a consultation fee. We got guys charging $500,000 to go out. If you just want me to come out and give you a consultation and you're not going to hire me and give me a deposit check, it's $500. Don't go charge consultation fees unless you know how to get motive. Because if you do motive right, the spirit of the conversation, and the rest of the steps are good, the consultation fee is a non-issue because you're not even going to be going out there if they're not cool with the budget.

All this is just rooted in an open honest conversation because how many times if you have a salesperson like, they take their secret notes and then they go in their truck and they're going to work it up and then they're typing things, the money is always this big secret, yet both parties know you got to talk about money.

Let's just, “Hey, what's important to you?” in the motive. Sometimes the motive, I charged more for the woman who had the babies, I charged more based on her motive and she was happy to pay for it. You can't get into price unless you really understand motive.

But on the marketing side, you can certainly soften the beaches, if you want to call it that, with what's the average cost of this, or paving this, or whatever it might be, you can talk about those things in your marketing so that you're only attracting people that are cool paying those prices.

Jeani Ringkob: Right, sure, sure, absolutely. Yeah. This has been amazing, and I probably kept you longer than I promised, but how can folks learn more about The Contractor Fight, the book, and how they can get it? Where can they follow you?

Tom Reber: Yeah, hop online anywhere with The Contractor Fight, thecontractorfight.com. I'm @realtomreber on Instagram and I'll be making book announcements there. Then I think it's thecontractorfight.com/sell-unafraid, that's the book.

Jeani Ringkob: Okay, awesome. Awesome. I'm super excited.

Tom Reber: Yeah. I appreciate you having me.

Jeani Ringkob: Everybody's telling you’re right, and we always got to be a student of it. Even when you're good, you got to keep studying.

Tom Reber: Yep, absolutely. And sales should be fun. It's like you're connecting with other human beings. You're solving problems, and sometimes, you're not the solution to the problem, and that's okay too.

Jeani Ringkob: Right. They probably learned something, and you should feel good about that. [inaudible]

Tom Reber: Right. But I appreciate you having me.

Jeani Ringkob: Absolutely, it's always great to talk to you, Tom.

That wraps another episode of The Contractor's Daughter, a huge shout out and thank you to our guest, Tom Reber, for sharing his time, his wisdom, and his expertise with us today.

Now remember, here are your key takeaways. We need to understand our customers, take time to understand them, and ask them questions. Nurturing our company culture and hiring the right people are all essential steps towards achieving success in this world where we are building essential businesses.

Now do not forget, if you enjoyed today's episode, I need you to subscribe and to leave a review. If you've been to any of my presentations during this previous construction conference season, you know I'm always shooting for a 10 out of 10 but in this case, we will take a five-star review.

We also have some incredible resources for you and they're actually pretty relevant to the conversation that we had with Tom today. So if you are wanting to take our Growth Strategy Assessment and get a really clear idea on what the bottleneck is inside of your business that is keeping you from getting to that next big level up in success, growth, and revenue potential, then you're going to want to take this assessment.

You can find it over at storybuilt.marketing/assessment. You can take that assessment, get your results, and then I'm always happy to walk you through those, answer any questions, or if you need additional resources, you know I love free resources and giving you the tools that you need to grow your business so you can always reach out to me on LinkedIn. That's where I like to hang out. In the meantime, keep building, keep thriving, and we will be back soon.

Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of The Contractor's Daughter. If you liked what you heard, be sure to subscribe and review. But most of all, share this with all of your friends, partners, and customers in the highway construction business. Thank you for building the infrastructure that we all rely on.

Jeani Ringkob: Welcome to The Contractor's Daughter, your go-to podcast for eliminating random acts of strategy and marketing in your highway construction business. Hello, friends. I'm your host, Jeani Ringkob. I'm a third-generation asphalt contractor and an absolute brand strategy and marketing geek.

Welcome to The Contractor's Daughter. I'm your host, Jeani Ringkob. Today, we're having another conversation with a good friend of mine, Miles Kaplanides. He has got tons of experience in the sales arena in our industry. There are tons of incredible salespeople in our industry. It's one of the things I love about it. I feel like I was fortunate at a young age to have mentors that guided me, were really just in the car with me, at the table with me, at the desk with me actually having these conversations. I was learning straight from them and it was incredible.

It's sometimes hard today to replicate that situation. I love that he was really willing to open up. I talked too about what it's like to be the business owner who's executing and doing stuff and making sure that I stay in touch with that proactive prospecting piece of my business. How do you think about that for your business and for your sales team? How are they staying focused on proactively prospecting and growing the business? Miles is going to share some great insights into that. Let's dive right in.

I grew up sales, I do my own sales, and I do the deliverables. Now it's like there's a lot going on in my world. One of the things I've gotten back to is that I need to be a student of selling. Because when you're leaving all the different pieces, you lose sight of that sometimes.

That's one of the reasons I know you send me great information all the time, people you follow, and I know that you're passionate about proactive selling and prospecting. I know being from the marketing side, which we're always trying to generate leads and inbound, but I think even then, you still have to turn that background. Even if you see leads, sometimes they don't know what they want.

They're unaware they have the problem. They're unaware your solution exists. They're busy, all of those kinds of things. I want to talk to somebody who is super passionate about proactive prospecting. Is it a lost art? How do we do it and do it right?

Miles Kaplanides: Well, I will tell you, I don't know if it’s a lost art or not. I'm worried it's a lost art. What I see today, and it's maybe just because of the market we've been in, this selling is not just answering the phone when people need something to get on a call but the phone has been ringing so dang much lately for the last few years, which we never would have guessed that through COVID that we've got all these new sales reps and they're doing great, but they've never been through a recession.

They've never been through “How do I show value when this guy really doesn't want to buy something today, but he needs to? How do I explain this to him?” I hear this a lot. “Oh, well, that guy doesn't want to convert the rental because he doesn't want the commitment or he doesn't want the payment” but they never go for, actually go talk to him, or even show him how it could benefit them to actually convert a rental to a sale.

Or why would you want to do a lease rather than a rental purchase? Or why would you do an installment loan over a lease? Those conversations, I've noticed they're not existing as much as they once did. I'm speaking from my experience from what I see every day.

I put out something a few months ago about a fair market value lease and I got replied, “What's that?” To me, that's where I get worried about the proactive selling being a dying art because I started in the mortgage industry back in, I don't even want to say how long ago, but if you didn't know how to prospect, if you didn't know how to get leads, and if you didn't know how to get referrals, you're dead, and you didn't make any money.

That's where this whole thing started. To me, every day is a day where you spend time looking for those leads. Now, where do those leads come from? They're all around us if people would actually look. In my world, there are a lot of gifts, I call them gifts to the guys, there are gifts with stuff that our manufacturer gives us. There are gifts where a finance company has given us. There are gifts in our service department that they give us. But if you don't look for them and understand what they are, you're not going to capitalize on those gifts.

What I mean by gifts is opportunities to go talk to some people about something. I was actually at a conference earlier this year for my manufacturer's finance company. It showed a way that they had three loaders on a lease, they were over hours on them and I walked through a situation where I took those in on trade, gave them three new ones, spun over the preventative maintenance contract, the interest rate went up from 0% to 3% at the time, but it's still saved them $130,000 over the amortization of the lease.

Okay, that's where I could sell. That shows the [inaudible] customer on, “Hey, you're about to be over the sink. If they're over on a lease, it's going to cost them lots and lots of money for every hour you use it. This is a way for them to save the money.” That's the solution to a problem that the customer has. They don't even realize they have the problem yet. We go find a way to help their business be more profitable. To me, the whole crux is you see something, you can go talk to them about their future.

If you know a customer has a machine that he's had for three and a half years, wow, well, what are the reasons why would you want to talk to them? One, it’s got a lot of hours probably [inaudible] get a new one because [inaudible] is going away. Two, probably is depreciated out on his balance sheet and taxes he has had. I mean everybody today still plays a tax game. But talk about their tax benefit of buying the next piece of equipment, do you understand what Section 179 is? Do you understand what bonus depreciation is?

Those are terms that take maybe, maybe you need to go talk to them a little bit, which is honestly about a 30-minute conversation. If you understand those two things, it can help a lot at least in construction now. With marketing and stuff, it's probably a little different. But there are so many things that will get you an opportunity to generate something if you just take the time to look.

Jeani Ringkob: Right. I think if you think about the marriage of sales and marketing, those are private conversations if you're asking your team to prospect that they can have over and over and over again on any one of those that you mentioned.

Creating a guide, bullet point thing that gives them that excuse like half the conversation, “Hey, I have a resource and I can talk you through the resource.” It shouldn't always just send a resource but it gives you a reason to say, “I have something in writing. It's visual, we're covering different modalities.” It gives me the excuse to have a conversation with you. I think it gives that salesperson a little bit of comfort to maybe have something in hand but also have an obvious value add that you're giving right away.

Miles Kaplanides: Absolutely. I mean, obviously, you gotta practice a little bit and before you go talk to the customer, you better honestly practice a little bit before you see that customer because if you're not ready, you're going to come across it but you don't know [inaudible].

Jeani Ringkob: Right. If you were talking to any salesperson, what do you think are some good debut or weekly prospecting habits that salespeople should have?

Miles Kaplanides: I'm going to keep this probably in my industry. Number one, look at your service department. Look and see what's in your shop and see what's broken. That is one of the easiest things you can always do because there's a lot of money getting into that piece of equipment right there. One, they have multiple [inaudible] so that's where I would start.

Number two, obviously, your rentals are probably one of the biggest things they're renting stuff for it for a while and what I find is a lot of sales reps read stuff but then they'll always try and do a soft conversion [inaudible] just the customer say, “I’m not ready to convert,” and it's accepted. Well, you got to dig into it a little bit. You got to understand how does it affect their cash flow? What can you do to [inaudible] them? How can it affect your taxes? Get into more than just a transaction. It's more than just the transaction of “Hey, I’m converting this loader because you've got 10 months [inaudible].”

Jeani Ringkob: Right. That first objection is never the real objection. It's always something else.

Miles Kaplanides: Yeah, I mean, it's no, which means probably not now, or I don't have time right now to talk about it. The other part is that you're going to talk to them without a solution. If you're going to provide a solution to the customer on “Hey, I can convert this for you,” or “I can do this for you, and here's what it will do for you for the next X amount of time. I can save you $100,000. I can do this, that or the other. This is how it will benefit you,” don't just accept the no on face value.

There are a lot of other items out there when it comes to reporting with who's bought what, who's done what. One of my biggest things I look at and people ask how have I grown my business, what it is, and how have I become so successful in business development, it's the association. Get to know people. Get to understand what they do and who can you call when you have a question or you need something.

There are many associations I work with and I'm willing to be a part of because of the fact that that's how you do what you do. That's how you grow a business. That's how you get people to know who you are, and be able to trust you to do the job that you're supposed to be doing.

Jeani Ringkob: I think being a part of those and being active in those gives you credibility. They see you in a place where they're already comfortable, they have peers they're comfortable with. It's a good place. I know for a lot of us, I'm on committees and associations, I speak at events, I provide workshops for associations, actually some associations that are clients, doing projects on behalf of their members, so all kinds of stuff, and they're just great partnerships and they turn into really great friends that know your business that tell you, they can almost direct you like, “This is who you need to meet.” Sort of being around and being seen at those, you just can't stress it enough.

Miles Kaplanides: Exactly. I think one of my biggest successes just honestly as community involvement as well, is being involved with community events, with charities, and giving back to the community. I remember we were in a golf tournament, and I had a friend of mine who's an investment banker. He's like, “You guys are sponsoring everything.”

But if you looked at what was happening, those sponsorships where we could see the return on the investment of sponsorships with people coming to us, people calling me or my sales reps, or whatever, because we're engaging in their children's school, the FFA, the 4-H Program, or the construction design program at the local college. All those things make a difference.

I remember I had the college’s football team [inaudible] want a sponsorship and I said, “No, I'm not going to do that.” But then I went and sponsored their construction program, their equine program, and their FFA program. Those programs are more of what I wanted to focus on to benefit. I wanted them to benefit from our sponsorship, but also I knew that there would be a return on that sponsorship in the future from the people that saw that sponsorship.

Jeani Ringkob: Right. I think being strategic about those things too. Some of those things you mentioned, those are the same circles where you may have contractor ownership where people in these industries are going to see equipment, [inaudible], construction, all of it but also we just talked about before we really got into the episode, we were talking about workforce, as so many of us are, those are really great places to be showing up. I feel like you get a double whammy there because you're also looking at young people, getting in front of them, and sparking some ideas about potential careers.

Miles Kaplanides: One of the most exciting things I've gotten to do was one of my son's local high school, they have a geometry class called Geometry Construction where they build a house [inaudible], and I went to go and I wanted to sponsor that and it didn't work out but that got me hooked up with Habitat for Humanity.

That's amazing because that got me hooked up with Boys & Girls Clubs, which got me hooked up with something else. It just blossomed into this beautiful network of people that I knew and that got it where everybody started realizing that we were really involved in [inaudible], but the most exciting thing about is it got me hooked in with talking to kids who have had troubled backgrounds by showing them how there is a career for them, even though they've had a tough beginning of their life.

That's probably one of my favorite things to do is talk to kids about “You know what, there are a lot of opportunities out there for you and you don't have to go to a four-year school. You don't have to have a perfect life. But you can make a great life for yourself if you just understand that there are these doors open before you.”

Jeani Ringkob: Right, right, and how do you get there? How do you find them? I think a lot of those kids are really eager, I was really fortunate, it was over a year ago, I mean, now I work with a lot of our clients in the workforce side of their businesses and really internalizing that solution for them but this started with a giant project with Texas and we surveyed and interviewed all the member employees.

Interviews were the best part. These kids, they just glowed when they talked about like they had no idea, I mean, these kids were like they started with a shovel and now they're in a lab. “I didn't go to school. I never thought I could do this and I have a family and I have this great career.” They were so excited about that, and doing the research, especially the survey part, one of the things that we saw, especially that younger generations want is they want you to paint a picture for them.

They're not afraid to start somewhere but they want to know how they're going to get somewhere else. I think that's a big piece for recruitment, but it's a huge piece for retention as well. I know we're talking about venue prospecting can be prospecting for team members, employees, as well.

Miles Kaplanides: That's the whole thing is that just social media and getting people on social media, it's funny, I had somebody I connected with. I saw somebody on LinkedIn looking for a job. I mentioned, “Hey, look at our webpage. We've got job openings,” next thing I know, she's hired.

Jeani Ringkob: Oh, my gosh.

Miles Kaplanides: Yeah, and so it's real.

Jeani Ringkob: It's so real.

Miles Kaplanides: You never know who you're going to meet and how it's going to benefit them or you. I mean, to me, that's just the drive every day of growing my business to grow my network is you never know when you're going to need that person, they need you, or something of that effect.

Jeani Ringkob: Yeah, I love it. I love wrapping it right there because think about prospecting, it can be fun. Think about it as it can be fun. There are days that you’ll definitely feel better about it than others, but I always tell myself that these conversations always end up positive.

Even if that one end goal isn't met yet, it's probably progress, you've met somebody knew. You might really be surprised by how many people need you to call them that day or need you to send that email, that DM, or whatever it is. They didn't even know they needed to hear from you. Thank goodness that you were having that mindset, building that network, and reaching out.

Miles Kaplanides: It’s funny, a coworker of mine that works for another dealer called me last night and we're talking for a while and he's like, “Well, you're doing a good job in advices because everybody knows who you are.” He said, “You wouldn't believe how many people say, ‘Oh, yeah, I know Miles and we’re talking to him.’”

It was such a great compliment because I'm two years in on this job and like, “Am I getting where I want to go?” and it's like, “Okay, you just made my day.” Every day, I want to make one new content, I want to meet one person. You know CONEXPO, right?

Jeani Ringkob: Yes.

Miles Kaplanides: People will be asking me, “Why didn't you go?” I'm like, “Because that's not where my ROI is.” For me to go waste time in Vegas, which I hate Vegas, I want to go see all the stuff but it's like, I'm really a homebody anyway, I'm not a partygoer. I don't want to go to Vegas, the blinky lights, and all that stuff. I want to be home with my wife and kids, but I can make better context by doing what we're doing, [inaudible] going to CONEXPO. To me, CONEXPO is just a place for people to go, yeah, [inaudible] machines was an excuse for people to go get stupid [inaudible] the next morning.

You've been there. In 23 years, I've never been there and I don't want to go. I don't have any desire to go. But I've seen it. I've heard stories about and I hear stories of what and I'm thinking, “What the hell are you thinking? You got to do all that stuff.”

Jeani Ringkob: Well, I think being older and wiser now, now when I go and I think we just did this Conference Success Series, now we're doing workshops on it, but I think we all reach that point in our careers or if you're a business owner that you're like, “I know there's value there but I'm starting to question it. I'm starting to wonder how do I measure it,” I think these things can be valuable but you have to be really intentional about making them valuable.

That's hard. That takes work to really be intentional. Start at the top of your company and say, “We're going here, but we're not going here,” and you can't say yes to all of them. You can't say yes to everybody on your team, to all of them. You have to figure out what are the objectives. Are the right people going to be there?

I did a stint in the agricultural commodities trading industry. My husband is in agriculture. We had an ag-commodities business. They do conferences completely different. Their big international fertilizer conference, they go and they rent suites, and all day long, every 30 minutes, it's like rotating meetings. You're either going to somebody else's suite or they're coming to yours.

Our admin staff would spend months preparing binders for our sales team of who they were meeting, what the objective was for each meeting, a brief background on everybody that was going to be in that meeting, room for notes. I can't tell you, if you were to talk about serious opportunity generation, but they also didn't have tradeshow floors, all of that stuff going on.

It was seriously in business development, [inaudible] it and I remember it blew my mind when I first experienced it. But I tried to take a little bit of that and I'm speaking at a lot of events, which is super great for me, but when I'm not speaking, I try to borrow a little bit of that and be really strategic and actually plan meetings that I know what I want to come out of those meetings beforehand because that's the only way that it makes the rest of the time really worth it for me.

Miles Kaplanides: I've always believed that if you don't have a reason to have the meeting, don’t have a meeting. If you have that goal like you just said, don't do it.

Jeani Ringkob: Right. Even if you think that it's adding to your network, going back to the prospecting, that's fine. Somebody said to me the other day, when they set a meeting, they want to at least be confident enough that they're going to develop a client or a key introduction partner. I thought that was such a great way and a good mindset to go into a conversation with somebody.

Miles Kaplanides: That's very well put. I mean that should be the objective [inaudible] someone you're doing business well with Jeani. That's cool.

Jeani Ringkob: Awesome.

Thank you so much. I hope you enjoyed that conversation. I know I did. I've been really intentional this last year about really staying accountable and building processes and systems around proactively prospecting in our businesses. In my business in particular, we've actually added some key people to help support that. But I always want to stay in touch with that myself as the one that really is out there at the events, building the relationships, and I love that piece.

Really having somebody that's constantly reminding me, giving me tips, and reminding me how exciting it can be and how good it can feel to proactively prospect in our businesses. I hope you enjoyed this conversation as well. If you are thinking about how do I integrate sales and marketing with each other to make them each more effective in my business, that's a great conversation and I'd love to have it with you.

Be sure that you get on my calendar. I always love seeing a name of somebody on my calendar that I've met online, I've met at an event, we know from past industry relationships, or somebody brand new. If you have questions about that, I think it's really important that we blur that line between sales and marketing. I'd love to talk to you about your business, what you're doing there, how you're going to capture more market share, and how your marketing can support your sales and your sales can in turn also really make your marketing more effective.

Get on my calendar, you can always grab that link in the show notes, but also visit our website. We've got tons of resources and a quick link for you to get on my calendar. That's at storybuilt.marketing. Can't wait to have you on that calendar.

Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of The Contractor's Daughter. If you liked what you heard, be sure to subscribe and review. But most of all, share this with all of your friends, partners, and customers in the highway construction business. Thank you for building the infrastructure that we all rely on.

Jeani Ringkob: Welcome to The Contractor's Daughter, your go-to podcast for eliminating random acts of strategy and marketing in your highway construction business. Hello, friends. I'm your host, Jeani Ringkob. I'm a third-generation asphalt contractor and an absolute brand strategy and marketing geek.

Welcome to The Contractor's Daughter. I'm your host, Jeani Ringkob. Today, we are sitting down with Miles Kaplanides. He is a true friend of mine, not just a peer in the industry, someone I've known for several years, and we stay in touch because we enjoy having conversations about how to make things work better in the industry.

He comes from that sales side on the equipment dealership and I love his perspectives and insights. We are often bantering back and forth in DM messages and sharing tips, videos, information articles, and we always enjoy getting together when I am in the Denver area.

I'm actually going to share some of the great conversations that we've been having here on the podcast with you. Today, we're going to be talking about how as a contractor, you can build a partnership with your dealer to actually improve your operations, maybe even reduce costs, and really help your business grow.

Not thinking about them as an adversary, somebody that you hope you don't have to deal with, or you just don't take the time to deal with until you need something from them or something's broken down, but how could it look like if we actually had a true partnership and they were paired with us as a partner that actually had intentions about growing our business with us.

We're going to dive right in with Miles right now. Stay tuned. Make sure you're subscribed because we're actually going to be diving into a whole nother conversation in the next episode as well.

We were going to talk today about contractors and why they should actively engage with their dealers, what are some of the benefits, how do they do it, who are the right contacts, what does it really look to really partner with your dealer, and some of the benefits. Let's start there. If we have one more time, we want to go into any of these other topics, I may cut it into two episodes, but let's talk first, Miles, about contractors and their partnering with dealers.

You have a long history of business development in equipment sales in our industry. You're an incredible example of building relationships. That’s part of the reason why I enjoy talking to you is I grew up on the sales side and you really embody that relationship piece. But you have some really strong ideas so tell me, fill me in a little bit more about the contractor side and the dealer, and what that relationship should look like.

Miles Kaplanides: Yeah. What I've seen over my time is that I see contractors who honestly view the dealer as almost an adversary, someone they don't want to engage with, someone they don't want to know anything about their business. From the dealer side, what that causes is a lot of inefficiency for the dealer to support the contractor.

We get [inaudible] engage with people from these contractors and they don't ever want to talk to anybody from a company unless they are needed. Then what happens is when the contractor is down, it's very inefficient for everybody to try and get the right parts, understand what they need, understand their expectations. It causes problems on both sides with this.

Ultimately, machines are going to break. Ultimately, something's going to need it. When you don't know who to talk to or if you don't know what expectations there are from both sides of the fence, how can anybody do anything efficiently? I've watched it for 20 years and it causes strife on both sides.

The contractor is stressed out and doesn't like the dealer. The dealer is stressed out and they almost are worried about what this contractor is going to want from time to time. If the contractor, I don't care if it's a new customer coming in or a current customer wanting to engage in maybe annual pay, let's sit down and talk type situation, let's make sure where we are, what our expectations are, what our job flow is, where we're going to be for the next year.

I learned it really quickly from a really big corporate customer from [inaudible]. They came in with seven people into my store, sat down, and we had a meet and greet. They laid out their expectations of us. We explained our limitations and how things work on our side to make sure that we had a great understanding of that relationship.

It's been flawless since we had that conversation. We've had all those guys. Now they sit down all the time but I had a guy coming in and we'd sit down or we'd have a conference call or we'd have something to say, “Okay, where do we sit down? Where are we going in the next year? Here's what my expectations are,” “Hey, we have a new guy on the team. This is who you need to talk to now instead of the person who [inaudible]”

In the turnover today, it's hard to keep up with that stuff. But on the other side, when we do have those partnerships, the relationship goes better, the support goes better. We can work out situations a whole lot better. Ultimately, it allows both sides of the relationship to be more profitable and more efficient in the way they do work.

Jeani Ringkob: Right. When you say this, it reminds me of like with our fractional CMO clients, we meet with them quarterly. There's a lot of strategy work that is upfront at the beginning of that. That first quarter is really heavy as we're developing that. But when you're on an ongoing basis, we actually set up quarterly meetings and we've been busy executing for them, but we want to know what's working, what's not working, what's confusing, what's missing.

We want to look at metrics and see what's going on. We want to talk about, “Hey, are you pursuing other opportunities or do we need to help you evaluate and have an outside perspective on what maybe market opportunities are there and how you might be positioned to leverage them?” It gives them a chance every quarter.

I think in our industry, there are definitely quarters where it's much quicker and they're like, “Let's just talk about the basics.” But there's always at least one of those meetings a year where we set aside time when we get deeper into strategy and stuff like that.

When I hear you say that, it reminds me of that, and the stuff that comes up in those meetings, I may find out like they may just say something that a customer said to them, about a conversation that a salesperson had with a customer or about a need that a customer expressed to them or something like that. All of a sudden like, “Wait, there's a whole opportunity here.” If they hadn't sat down, borrowed my brain, and just gotten that scenario, it never would have come up.

Miles Kaplanides: Exactly. What I've seen is that a lot of times, a sales rep gets all the phone calls for every [inaudible] In my personal opinion, that's the wrong way to do it. The sales guy’s job is to be the representative of selling equipment. He's not the problem solver on fixing the tractor, or getting a card or whatever it is, but he's the guy or she's the lady that gets that phone call all the time. That's just inefficient on the customer side.

The customer is going to be sitting waiting for the salesman to go hand it off to somebody else to do something else for somebody else and goes down free ladders of the rain before somebody can make action happen. If you know who to call the first time and know who's going to be the person who can get it done for you, not your sales rep all the time, you're going to have a more efficient business and you're going to be happier with your dealership.

It makes sense to actually understand who you're talking to. But the bigger thing to me is almost make sure that your dealership understands what your expectations are. The dealership has to explain to you if there are parts that need to be overnighted, there are all these things that happen and there's a cause and effect to that happening.

We all have to be in this together as a team, not just, “Hey, I'm the customer, you're the dealer. I'm going to pound on you 100% of the time because I want what I want.” If you can have that open conversation, it's going to go a lot better for both sides.

Jeani Ringkob: Right. When I think back to just my years in the industry, I think that supervisors out on a cruise, out in the field, I think it would be really valuable too, and it would feel almost like a perk or an insider thing that you very intentionally knew who to call when there was a problem like that. It wasn’t the salesperson.

You knew that you were going straight to the source, straight to the person that can execute quickly, give you a yes or no, “Here's the viability, here's how long it's going to take.” I mean, that seems like a perk and a benefit, but you have to get in a situation where you can get access to that information as well.

Miles Kaplanides: Yeah. The dealership side of things to be able to give that information to somebody on who are their points of contact.

Jeani Ringkob: Yeah, I could see that would be tremendous. I mean, downtime is expensive. Every single moment we can save there but then also I'm thinking about I love that you said like having recurring meeting, and I'm always talking to clients about who are your customers, who's your competition, but also who are your partners.

I think I was lucky growing up in my family's business. A lot of the people that we did regular business with felt more like partners. But I think we could have even done a better job of that in terms of sitting down and saying, “This is an opportunity that we're thinking about pursuing next year. We're thinking about adding this type of equipment, doing x more amount of this type of work,” or something like that and getting a two-way feedback, like how can this partner help you grow your business that way instead of waiting until all your other decisions are made and just showing up to purchase an item.

Especially these days, sometimes you just can't get what you want when you want it and for years, we all thought we could. Really being a strategic partner in how you can grow your business, how you can manage breakdowns and efficiencies, have stuff on hand, calculating how quickly are you wearing through parts, all those kinds of things seems like would be benefited by this type of relationship.

Miles Kaplanides: Yeah. There are customers that say there won't be a brand than the actual brand. Why? I would think that you would want to know brand A through Z that's out in the marketplace because you never know when you're going to need somebody because your main brand does not have what you need or cannot support you.

I'm talking wear items, I'm talking parts, I’m talking service potential. It's not about just machines. It's about any part of the thing because the dealerships are there to solve your problem. Selling is an offshoot of solving problems and helping customers. Whether the car services say, “We're there to help our customers be profitable and be up and running.”

If you want to go to X and they can't do it, you better go to Y or download Z and if you don't know who you're dealing with, you got some major problems on your offset. To me, getting to know all the players in each market you're in if you're in multiple markets or in just one, it's important, because each of the dealerships have something to offer to you. It's just a matter of finding out who you need to talk to.

Jeani Ringkob: Yeah. If you could design this into a business and look at settings, what would it look like if it was a specific process that was followed with customers and dealers over and over again on repeat?

Miles Kaplanides: Which way do you want to look at, the side of the dealership?

Jeani Ringkob: Well, let's talk about the dealer side first. What would it look like for you in a perfect scenario?

Miles Kaplanides: Well, so you look at okay, so you have a new sales rep and he doesn't know [inaudible], he doesn't know who to go to. I've coached sales reps, first thing you guys do is you have to identify all your customers. The trap of sales reps is from dealerships now if they go find somebody to talk to from a customer but it's not the person that makes the decision or has any influence on anything, it's a labor, it's an operator, it's something but it's not a foreman, it’s not a decision maker, it’s not a VP, and it's not purchasing agent.

You'd have to find out who those people are and somehow get to them but also realize when you're not the right person to talk to. If they have a service department, you need to get your CSR and their customer service rep or your service manager in touch with those people. It's a long process to do.

But when it's all said and done, nothing's easy, but if you give them the information of who to talk to even if you just go and see their main service person or the person in charge of the fleet manager, and you say, “Hey, here's my service manager’s card if you need anything,” don't give them your card. Go give them your service manager’s card, go give your CSR’s card, go give your purchase manager’s card. Go get them something to say, “This is the direct line of communication if you need anything from us on the service side”

Then you go talk to their CFO, their procurement people, whatever. But you've got to figure out the right people to talk to, not just any people because you could spend so much time wasting time and a lot of your own if you just go talk to anybody you can get your hands on.

Then for the dealership, it's a waste of time, especially for the customer, they're not seeing any value in the dealership because the people who are the decision-makers, the ones that really drive their business, they're not seeing the right people from the dealership.

Jeani Ringkob: Right. Before I ask you to give it to me if you were that customer and give it to me from the outside, I want to ask the question because something you said triggered this. Before I lose it, I want to ask.

The piece of equipment is the product that you need, but that's not the whole value. That's not the whole offer really. It's everything else that goes with it. This will help us shift over to that customer side, how do you think customers typically perceive that? Do you think they understand that? What do you think are the most important things that they actually want in addition to that piece of equipment that really makes the relationship really valuable?

Miles Kaplanides: The piece of equipment to me is peace of mind that they see they do a job. What gives them the value is support of that piece of equipment, the uptime of that piece of equipment, the overall cost of that piece of equipment, and understanding those parts of it, I mean, today, we've got fuel burn, we have uptime, and we have repair costs, warranties, and all these things that we can provide. That's where the value is, is that how fast you jump on when machine breaks, what is your part’s pricing compared to the competition. How fast can you get parts in? What kinds of warranties do you have?

If you don't provide that information, the piece of equipment is a commodity. It's not anything but it is a piece of equipment they're going to use up and when they need another one, they're going to get another one because they make money with that piece.

But if you look at say a customer, like your company, your family's company in paving, when that paver goes down, and you got hot asphalt and trucks, what are you going to do to get them up and running so they don't have segregation in asphalt or have to go and just start all over again? How are you going to react to it and then how are you going to perform?

Those are the things you need to prove to your customer and show that you can do it. That's where when you have a customer that's very happy with somebody in their performance, you know what, don't be afraid to be the backup. You know what, they're happy with Brand X, Y, “Okay, well, I'm Z here. If something comes up and they can't provide it for you, give me a call.” Provide a solution that may be not available from X and Y.

Jeani Ringkob: Yeah. I love that. Do you think that customers are good about asking the right questions to understand those extra values and those things that should go along with that piece of equipment to really make the brand that sold them that equipment a partner?

Miles Kaplanides: I would say some are and some aren’t. I've seen customers be very, very comprehensive in their questions, very, very comprehensive in what they want to know, understanding the whole gamut. Then I've seen customers that all they care about is the transactional relationship of buying the piece of equipment and they don't want to know anymore.

I looked at it saying, “Okay, they're paying X amount per machine, but then the product support side, there's no conversations about it. It's only about that transaction.” If you can come up with a more comprehensive conversation, it would be more beneficial for both sides of that conversation.

Jeani Ringkob: Yeah, absolutely. That leads us to what would this perfect relationship look like if you were on that customer side, you came in, and built that? What would that look like?

Miles Kaplanides: I'm basing this on real experience. I had a customer come in. We had gotten a new lineup of equipment we're representing and the customer, we've never done business with and the VP of the company walks in and says, “I need to talk to you about doing business with you today.”

I've stopped everything I was doing. I sat down with them, talked about it, and set up a meeting within a week of everybody involved about what there was in getting things straight on who was who, what was what, and what their expectations were for that equipment.

It was that easy of him coming in saying, “I want to talk to you, guys.” I look at it saying, “Okay, if you're an owner-operator, it's a different dynamic than if you're a 500-employee company,” but if you're an owner-operator, go into your dealership and say, “Hey, I want to get to know you, guys,” guess what, dealerships love to show them their big shiny shops, all the stuff all the time.

But even if you're the medium-sized company or the large company, make sure your people are engaging with your dealerships so you can have the expectations of product support, or coming up with better ways for you as the customer, [inaudible]. Sometimes they’re very open to doing a lot of things that will keep you up and running. But it takes conversations, it takes communication between both sides to do it.

Sometimes it does take the customer's instigation to do it because the dealership is trying to support however many hundreds of customers, it does take the customer to want to talk to the dealer and come in and talk to them. It's not just a sales rep. Come into the dealership, come see what we do, and try and understand the business that we're in and how it works because we can explain a lot of things of why things happen and why things are the way they are if a customer is just to come and take the time and visit with us.

Jeani Ringkob: Right. When a customer does that and then they walk away from that, if it's done well and it's done right, what is the mindset shift that they would likely walk away with if it's done well, and it's done right in terms of how they want to interact with their equipment provider?

Miles Kaplanides: Well, if it's done well, if it's done right, I would first say that there's probably a level of understanding that wasn't there from where they walked in, obviously, I would hope there's a level of trust there that was built just by the conversations, and maybe a little bit of aha moments of “Wow, I didn't know they did that. Wow. I didn't know they could do that. I didn't know that they had that. I didn't know that they could provide that situation or that the solution to our problem.” It is really a situation of learning. What's the word, Jeani, in law? Discovery.

Jeani Ringkob: Oh, yeah.

Miles Kaplanides: It really is a time of discovery for both sides of the relationship to understand each other better, get a lot of things out on the table better, and understand things a whole lot better by just having that kind of conversation.

Jeani Ringkob: Absolutely. Do you ever find benefit or do you guys ever do this in terms of anybody from your team when opportunity arises being out on projects for good, consistent, loyal customers so you can see what their operations are like, the scenarios, and actual situations their equipment is actually operating in?

Miles Kaplanides: That's what I preach 24/7. If we don't understand their job, if we don't understand what they're doing, we're not going to solve a problem for them. We're just going to be a commodity. If we're just waiting for the phone to ring when they need that next piece of equipment, we're a commodity. But if we're out looking at a job site and looking at how things are working, what's breaking down, or whatever, we can actually provide solutions possibly they've never thought of.

It's funny with skid-steers of all things, little skid-steers, the sales rep go to job sites not to look at machines, but to look at what attachments these guys need because that can solve a problem for a guy that maybe they've never thought of. They buy one of those ones every few years, but they couldn't use it in an attachment on a job that we have that they've never thought of.

Going on job sites is probably one of the biggest things that dealers do that could benefit the customer the most. Now I know I've heard it, “God, I hate it when the guys get on the job site. I hate it when they come on.” You know what, I would ask the contractor to welcome him, show him the job, tell him what they're doing because they're there for a reason. They're not just there to get you burritos, which believe me, I know they give them plenty of burritos, but they can come up with a solution or something there to fix a problem, solve an issue, and you might not even realize it’s there.

Jeani Ringkob: Right. I think it's always having those outside eyes that are looking at stuff from a different perspective that we really find those solutions. Sounds good. We get so proprietary about stuff and we forget that we can really benefit from collaborating.

Miles Kaplanides: Yeah. All it takes is communication.

Jeani Ringkob: Thank you so much for sticking with me going through this conversation. I think this is something that's really powerful. I actually wrote an article that talked about developing a strategy from that dealer perspective and we use a hypothetical in this article that we wrote for MOXY: Women in Infrastructure.

I will link to that article in here but we actually break down all of the different elements, what that process could look like from a strategic point of view from the dealership side, how it could benefit your business, the feedback loops that you could build into it, how you could find opportunities for maybe even reoccurring revenue, and really supporting your partners in helping them grow their businesses.

If you'd like to dive into the strategy stuff, you want to think about what could these hypothetical relationships look like, how could we do it better even if we're doing it well, you might want to check out that article. We're going to include the link to it there and make sure that you are subscribed and that you are taking time. It is that time of year that we need to continue to work on our businesses.

If you have questions about strategy, marketing, what does it look like to have a fractional CMO come in and help you fill the gaps in your business, borrowing the brain of that executive strategy level to help you think through the next level of your business, make sure that you're scheduling a call. I'd love to see you on my calendar. That link is also in the episodes and you can also find that link right on the front of our webpage at storybuilt.marketing. Alright. See you soon.

Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of The Contractor's Daughter. If you liked what you heard, be sure to subscribe and review. But most of all, share this with all of your friends, partners, and customers in the highway construction business. Thank you for building the infrastructure that we all rely on.

Welcome to The Contractor's Daughter, your go-to podcast for eliminating random acts of strategy and marketing in your highway construction business. Hello, friends. I'm your host, Jeani Ringkob. I'm a third-generation asphalt contractor and an absolute brand strategy and marketing geek.

Welcome to The Contractor's Daughter. I'm your host, Jeani Ringkob. So excited to be with you here as always. Today I want to talk about two things that are near and dear to my heart. It’s super essential to our businesses but oftentimes, these two elements inside of our business are working at odds or they're not very balanced. We're really heavy on one side and not as heavy on the other side.

If you've been in some of my presentations, sometimes I talk about the analogy of an airplane. The two elements that we're talking about today and how they should be working together is marketing and sales. It is essentially the two engines of your plane, the left engine and the right engine.

I always want to say you do not want to put an engine for Cessna 210 on one side, and Boeing 777 on the other side. It's inefficient. It's not balanced. In that scenario, you're probably not even going to get off the ground, you're probably tipped over. But even if those are a little bit off in an airplane, you're not running optimally. Even if you can get it off the ground, you're not super efficient. That's kind of an analogy for how those two departments should be working together.

The term that I hear a lot because I'm always out, going to marketing events, listening to my favorite marketing leaders in the industry, really thought-provoking leaders, doing all or some of that geeky stuff so that you don't have to, one of the new terms that we're hearing a lot is smarketing, which I actually love because I allude too that let's blur the line between sales and marketing in our business, especially when we are pushing our marketing client facing and not workforce facing, then it's almost blurring the lines between marketing an HR. HR becomes almost a sales. They've got a little bit of sales integrated in with them.

But if we think about that in a traditional sense, we've got sales and we've got marketing, to make them both as efficient as possible, to not have too much overhead or have sales cycles that are too long on the sales side, we need to have marketing. But to control and make sure that we get the most out of our marketing efforts and we are tracking metrics and they’re optimized, we also need to have a strong sales side.

What is the right balance for your business? If we define this new word smarketing, it's sales and marketing alignment through constant and consistent communication. I'm going to take it beyond that. That's the definition I've heard but I also think that it's also an implementation side.

If you look at the customer journey, which oftentimes in my presentations, I show this and we'll have a link in the podcast notes because if you follow me on social media, we'll have a video, we'll have a slideshow about this, but I'll also try to include on the website, you can link this in the show notes on my website and we'll actually have a picture of the customer journey.

But let me explain what that would look like. If you start on the left-hand side, you start with awareness. They're just coming into contact with you. They're hearing about you, just the whispers that you exist. Then they move to knowledge and this is where they're consuming information. Somebody's telling them about maybe a problem that you've solved for them, and they're consuming information.

I want to stop right here at this point because this knowledge in between awareness and then being right in knowledge before we move on to consideration, even still a little bit in consideration, we are really finding that’s where people and especially generations that are moving into those leadership and decision-maker roles, this is where they are really investing their time and energy.

They are consuming content at a massive rate. Even our government agencies, those are still individuals who are wanting to learn and educate themselves before they are in any type of sales conversation, before they're putting things out to bid. They want to know what's out there. They want to know what their options are. They want to know what solutions might be available to them, what brands are offering those solutions. How are those brands showing up? Are they thought leaders? Are they sharing content?

B2B, B2G, same thing. They are going and starting to consume more information. Pre-COVID, a study showed that consumers were 70% of the way to a decision before they would even engage with a company. I would argue that post-COVID, we're actually seeing that number higher, closer to that 80% mark, and B2C is always an early indicator of how B2B and B2G are going to be consuming things, making decisions, going through processes, and we’ve already significantly seen it in B2B and we're also seeing it in B2G.

Knowledge is really, really important. That piece is something you don't want to skip over. We started with awareness, we moved on to knowledge, and then to consideration. This is where maybe they're looking at a proposal, you're bidding on something, and they're about to make a decision.

Then we kind of have that pivot point. It can be called the selection trial or it's the purchase period. It's when they actually approve something. They accept it. They sign the dotted line. Maybe you’ve bid, you've got a contract with an agency, but you're going out and trying to get POs written. It's that moment where they say, “Yes, we are going to allocate money for this project.”

Then they move into satisfaction. If you look at the Clock Model, this is the post-purchase. We have to be aware of things like that immediate regret. There's always that post-purchase, “Did I make the right decision?” Even when we hire people, when we bring them in, if we don't have a really strong onboarding process and we're not still communicating very clearly, incorporating them, helping them reach productivity quickly, they are starting to already think, “Maybe I made a mistake.”

People that make those decisions early are already looking for a way out of that relationship. We want to take them from that satisfaction period and then move them into loyalty. Then right after that becomes advocacy where they're actually helping to promote, they are aligned with your brand. They understand that they can fluidly talk about it. They're easily giving testimonials even on their own in conversations and situations. That is what a customer journey cycle can look like and it's really important to know.

If I lay this out, what I do for a lot of clients is if we're going through a strategy piece, we've identified that there are some opportunities in sales and marketing to align and optimize, we actually lay this whole process out and we get super into the weeds about what we're going to be doing at each level.

If you go and you visit the website, you can see this diagram. It's going to be the sales offering on the top. What are the sales activities that are happening during each phase of this journey? On the bottom, what we see is marketing. What are the marketing activities or collateral or things that they're engaging with at each one of these phases that are elevating the sales team, making the sales team conversations easier, shortening that sales cycle, helping them understand the value of what we bring, the differentiation of what we bring, how it's relevant to them, how it benefits them to partner with us and trust us with their problem to help them find a solution?

We go through this entire thing, and we actually get really, really clear with both teams what is happening, what kind of collateral do we need to make, what kind of activities do we need to be engaged in at every single phase so we can really see what the gaps are and how we need to fill up.

This is how I think of smarketing. We have the original definition that says it is the alignment of sales and marketing through constant communication but then also taking that a step further and actually mapping out what are the assets we create, what are the activities we engage in, what are the KPIs that we measure at every single phase of our customer’s journey with us which is hopefully a very long time, and it's continuing to bring value over and over again?

But how do we get really intentional about that? How do we have fewer unqualified leads? How do we increase sales win rates? How do we shorten the buying cycles? Make closing deals easier, increase customer retention rates, and even faster revenue growth. These are the things, the objectives that we're looking at when we really are intentional about aligning sales and marketing inside of our businesses.

I want you guys to just be thinking about this. Think about your sales team, envision your sales team, or envision your marketing efforts, going to conferences, staging booths, creating brochures, creating materials, talking about your products and services on social media, proactively prospecting, and business development online, at conferences, and at networking events.

Even if you're in that government side, but you're still having to go out and get those POs and you're having sales conversations, this stuff can be really, really valuable. It can also be a great way to optimize all the things that you're putting resources to inside of your business.

These are two things that really should be working together. I like to think that sales is also bringing back information, data, feedback into the company, and the marketing is adapting and improving constantly with that. It almost turns into instead of vertical funnel that starts with marketing and goes to sales and then converts to customers, instead, it's more of a flywheel approach, and you guys know how I feel about flywheels.

Anytime we can create something that creates momentum in our businesses, if we can attract, engage, delight, and then continue to do that over and over and over again, even incorporating those customer experiences, and making them optimized and celebrating them in a way that continues to attract, engage, and delight all over again, those are incredible ways to continue to grow our businesses and really get a competitive advantage.

Think about your sales. Think about your marketing. Think about this new term that you're going to hear bantered around smarketing. How could you push those two things together? How could you optimize them? Are yours balanced inside of your company? What would you need to do? What kind of adjustments could you be making to make sure that they're more aligned and more balanced so your business is optimized?

I wanted to share this with you and also make sure that you're going to go and you're going to check out the visual aid that goes along with this. I really tried to walk you through it so you could imagine that journey in your mind, but really seeing it visually can be helpful. We're going to have a link to the website where we will actually have a visual and an example of when we build this out for a sales and marketing team that are really trying to improve their collaboration, build a process where they are streamlining everything that moves customers into their world, and delights those customers so they turn into advocates for them is happening.

I hope you enjoyed this. I hope that you're excited about the opportunity. I think it's a new way to think about eliminating that line, getting our companies working more effectively, and it's a great strategy to grow your business. Make sure you're subscribed. Make sure also that you are on my calendar. There's a link in the show notes always for you guys, and it's also right on top of my website. You can go to storybuilt.marketing and if you add a slash and schedule to the end of that, it's going to take you directly there, but it's always quick access to get on my calendar and I love it when you guys are on my calendar.

I want to talk about what does your marketing look like? What does your sales look like? Is there a way to optimize that to grow your business faster, to give it more security, to streamline your expenses? Be thinking about that. You can get on my calendar and we can discuss this. Until next time. This is Jeani Ringkob on The Contractor's Daughter Podcast signing off.

Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of The Contractor's Daughter. If you liked what you heard, be sure to subscribe and review. But most of all, share this with all of your friends, partners, and customers in the highway construction business. Thank you for building the infrastructure that we all rely on.

Welcome to The Contractor's Daughter, your go-to podcast for eliminating random acts of strategy and marketing in your highway construction business. Hello, friends. I'm your host, Jeani Ringkob. I'm a third-generation asphalt contractor and an absolute brand strategy and marketing geek.

Welcome to The Contractor's Daughter podcast. I'm your host, Jeani Ringkob. Have you been talking about workforce in your business? Have you been talking about it at conferences, with peers, with your team? I get it. I think half of my presentations coming up this conference season are going to be on workforce.

That's what we're going to dive into today. But more specifically, I'm actually going to share with you a question I’m getting a lot about what are you doing specifically? So what am I doing, my team doing with our clients to help them address their workforce problems? Let's dive right in there.

Welcome to the podcast. We're going to just get right into this and we're going to be talking about how we grow our construction businesses, but not just that, we're going to grow them by overcoming an obstacle that's facing us in our industry right now.

We're all about tackling the hurdles that pop up in the growth journey of our companies, finding more efficient and effective ways to build stronger, better businesses, and right now, workforce, recruiting, retaining those people, and having the ability to chase the work that is out there, there's so much opportunity. So many of us are pushing and pulling away from it because we just don't have the most critical asset that we need to be able to pursue that work.

Let's talk about this critical problem and the bottleneck that's holding us back from reaching our momentum. Instead, let's switch the script a little bit. We're going to be talking about how can we address this workforce challenge.

Attracting and retaining the right talent is a universal struggle. We are all facing this in the quest to grow our strong healthy businesses. We're diving into this super deep today.

More importantly, we're unveiling a game changing tool that we've actually been doing for the last several years with our clients that are already engaging us for strategic growth work or marketing fractional CMO services and guess what, now we're offering it as its own standalone strategic project, and also helping with implementation as well based on the specific needs of the clients that are really committed to tackling this in their businesses.

If you're curious about this tool, what it looks like, how to address these three critical problems that we see with the workforce inside of our business, you're going to want to stick around because we don't only break it down but we also explore the specific tactics that we're deploying.

You're going to see how you can also not just deal with this troublesome thing that seems so hard to get around, but also, how is it currently affecting your ROI and how could you change that? How could you make it an actual strategic advantage in your business?

Think about if you were going to buy a business from somebody, or you're going to be passing it on to the next generation, what if you could say that you would actually build processes, systems, strategies and tactics into your business to address this and help you compete for this really tough workforce labor, and actually come out on top?

Grab your hard hats and let's get into what this could look like to build this inside of our businesses. You have this beautiful business, it's great, it has historically ran well, you know the type of people that you'd like to work with, and it's totally unique. It has your own fingerprint on it, and it should be unique.

One solution is imperfect for everybody so why do we have this overarching process that we are using to tackle this? We're actually using the same Growth Strategic Flywheel that I've talked about in previous episodes, we're just applying it to a different problem.

This allows us to help your business stay completely unique and one of a kind. That's why we designed this process the exact way it is. The magic really lies in the simplicity of it, and streamlining the process so that we can swoop in, team up with a business, and swiftly tackle their workforce challenges while maintaining what's so unique about their business, what makes them stand out, and what I always like to say when we're thinking about what actually cuts the mustard, what are we going to say is going to not be on the cutting room floor, it's still on the table, and it is the strategy of choice? First and foremost, it's got to be differentiated. We want to stay true to that also in this process.

If you're ready, we're going to dive into a couple of the areas that we see as being really the main pain points, the pain points that we can address, we can simplify, take a look at, target in our business, and also calculate results. I want you to think about a few questions, think about your business, maybe you actually even have metrics on this, maybe you've been tracking this in your business. If you have, I'm so excited to talk to you. If you haven't, let's talk and we'll help you pull those numbers out so you can really understand if our Workforce Strategy Design process is right for you.

First off, take a moment to reflect on this. Are you shelling out serious cash to external sources to drum up leads for potential employees? We're talking about Indeed, Monster, running expensive ads like you've never had to do before. Is that cost now way higher than it ever used to be 5 years ago, 10 years ago, and it's making your books kind of grow under the strain of it?

Or are you worried that you're about to have to start maybe having this external spend because you see the age of your workforce and you see that they're going to start aging out and you need more of that younger population coming in?

Up next, I have another question for you, turnover. It's the other side of this. We recruited them, we'll get them in, but we gotta keep them. This is hard in our business, we expect a certain amount of turn. If you're in an area where it's super seasonal, that can be a real challenge too. But every single challenge also has its opportunity.

But ask yourself this: Is your business experiencing higher turnover rates than it used to or what your industry pals have historically seen? If this turn is causing headaches, it's disrupting the productivity, it's forcing you to fork out more to replace your team members, then definitely, we should be talking.

Now let's talk about the last area that I think we need to be focusing on. If we can just focus on these three areas, we can impact so much of our businesses, and this is more of an opportunity for us and something that I think some people forget to really build into the equation of their workforce challenges.

It’s that productivity, it's the opportunity cost. Are you finding yourself turning away work or not hitting the productivity levels that your customers are wanting you to hit? Maybe you've got team members playing hooky, they're leaving you short on cruise, you're passing up juicy opportunities because you're unsure you can bring enough folks in to build another crew or two and actually keep them.

Most of the conversations I'm hearing out there, people are afraid to buy the equipment. The demand is there. The work is there. It's “Can we hire and keep the crews if we make this kind of commitment? And can we keep our current clients happy as we historically have because it's getting harder and harder to perform and be as productive as we want to be?

If these scenarios sound familiar, we've got some strategies up our sleeves with our Workforce Strategy Design program. We're going to talk about some of these and talk about what triumphs could look like inside of your business if you can just make some small adjustments on those numbers that we talked about. If you're tracking some of these things, what are your external expenses? What is your turnover rate? What is each turnover costing you? How long is it taking you to get your team up to productivity?

What are the opportunities in your marketplace that you've had to step back from or that you've not executed on the way that you want? Take a look at these three questions and if you're not exactly thrilled with the answers, even just one of them, it's time to dig deeper, understand the real cost of your specific workforce challenges and really leverage those into an advantage.

This can be a game changer for your business. Stop complaining about it and let's do something about it. Even small improvements in any of these areas can unleash tidal waves of ROI, alleviate stress, even open up opportunities that you haven't even thought about lately, because you've been so stuck in this mindset that you can't get past this and everybody's suffering from it, and we're all just victims of it.

In fact, we've been deep into these conversations, guess what, we've cooked up an opportunity and an ROI worksheet. Let's look at the ROI and opportunity costs. We built this spreadsheet to walk you through and we started using it with our clients early on to help us really figure out what metrics do we want to track and what is the outcome that we think we can get and do we want to get, and how is it going to impact our business so that we can actually make even bigger business decisions?

Picture this, tweaking your external spend, gaining control, maybe attracting more talent through your in-house operations, and slashing costs by 5%, 10%, 15%, or even 20%. Now imagine the impact on your business over the next five years. You need to calculate things like inflation. Even if you don't change anything and you don't increase your external spend on this, you'd leave it the same, you're still going to deal with inflation.

We've chatted with companies that are dropping a modest amount of external resources and then we've talked to ones that are shelling out serious dough. Think hundreds of thousands of dollars annually to bring in those crucial leads for the workforce that they need.

Consider the cost of inflation and the price of doing nothing. Remember, doing nothing still costs. For instance, a company dropping around $150,000 a year on leads is staring down the barrel at almost one-million dollars in external recruiting cost over five years. But what if you could make a few tweaks and some savvy internal assets could cut that cost by 5%, 10%, 15%?

Some companies are even wiping it out completely by building killer marketing systems and processes to attract those leads in house. Now that is a game changer for your business. Even if you can just reduce that by 5% or 10% and if you can calculate that save on that spend over the course of the next several years, you're either going to have to spend it or you're not, or your business is going to stall or it's not going to be around.

Let's dive into another example that hits close to home: turnover rates. I delve into some research here and, folks, it's downright alarming when you tally up the cost of replacing something. Think about training, safety training, testing, all of the things you have to do, the men hours that your supervisors are investing into bringing somebody up to speed, the hours that your HR team is putting into getting them through all the tests, onboarding them effectively, and getting them on a team.

A study done by AGC lays it out plain. For the construction industry, it's averaging a whopping 21% of a person's salary every time we have to bring in that new face. Let's be real, depending on their position, experience, and investments made in this person, this cost can shoot incredibly higher than that. I would say it's quite conservative.

Also, there's more. We're not even factoring in the morale hit that it takes on our teams when we're trying to forge within our companies. For these types of projects, I do extensive interviews with supervisors and employees and we also do surveys in English and Spanish. We're gathering lots of insight from these people and these teams that we are so critical to our industry.

When these teams become like family and actually one of the things that when we ask the question of “Why did you take the job?” or “Why do you stay in the job?” quite frequently, over 50% of the time, it's the people, “I stay for the people.” It's not because they specifically love the tasks that they have. They love the people that they're working with every day.

These teams become tight knit and they're reliant on each other. It's crucial that we help them build strong bonds, and that we look at retention as an investment in the productivity of the entire team. Here's the real talk. I've witnessed turnover rates skyrocket in some companies while others are absolutely nailing it, keeping it at those previous as low as can be expected standards for our industry.

Getting this part spot on in your business is super important. Let's talk about this example. A company I recently spoke with was sporting a whopping 48% turnover rate, way too high, but not necessarily abnormal for our industry right now. I see this actually more often than I would like, numbers like this.

Sure, a bit of a turnover rate is expected. We have to expect some in our industry but gaining control even by a small percentage, if we go back to those small numbers, 5%, 10%, 15%, 20%, imagine what that can do. This can work wonders for our businesses if we can control this.

The hard things that we can measure are absolutely there, what it costs us to bring another face in. But then those soft harder things to calculate like the impact on morale, productivity, and also the impact of our customers when they want to see the same faces again, we are providing consistent high quality work, product, and materials every single time.

Let's break it down further. For a company dealing with a 48% turnover, the cost over five years is nudging close to the $800,000 mark, almost hitting a million for some companies. Now that's a hefty sum that we really can't afford to let sit on our bottom line unnecessarily. We can't let this continue to slide in our businesses.

We've got the power to control these percentages to aim for better numbers. It's not about elimination. It's about improvement, progress, and continuing to track and always be improving. It's not just about recruiting, it's about how we train, develop, build teams, retain top-notch talent that comes our way.

If we're going to invest in bringing them in, we have to invest in keeping them. It's time to turn the tides, keep our teams strong, and keep the talent that we're investing in right there with us. Can you see the value of taking a bit of time to tackle those key issues causing major bottlenecks in your company?

These challenges can easily transform into strategic advantage, especially when everyone else is grappling with the same problems. Imagine being the one company in your market to proactively solve these issues. You're building assets, strategies, processes, and systems that attract and retain the best talent. You're tracking what modifications you need to make and you're constantly making this a priority in your business.

Now, let's ponder the last question that I threw at you. What about those opportunities that you're passing up or that you're not fulfilling in your business for your current obligations? I've had conversations where people are having not just one of these problems but both of these problems at the same time.

They're missing chances ranging from a couple of $100,000 to a staggering $6 million, $10 million a year. Picture this: business hesitate to take on more business because they doubted they can hire another crew. It's not about the equipment. They're not worried about taking that on.

There's tons of demand in our industry right now and a backlog of work that needs done. It’s the workforce climate. It’s “Can I recruit them? Can I hire them? Can I keep them? How disruptive is it going to be? How stressful is it going to be? Can I take on those things when I have these workforce challenges?”

But here's the thing, if you address the scenarios that we talked about above, you can confidently say yes to those opportunities. This opens the door to growing your business, claiming more market share, earning incredible brand loyalty by consistently delivering when others are falling short and can't take on the work or aren't performing as they promised they would.

Can you grasp how addressing just a few aspects of your business can have a central and critical impact on its growth? Investing the bit of time and resources now can mean the difference between a stagnant business and the one that not only survives, but actually thriving and becoming a leader expanding into new market.

Let's face it, the workforce environment will never be as it was 10 to 20 years ago. Everything has changed. How people look for jobs, what they want in jobs, how they decide which job, how they decide if they're going to stay in a job is much different than it used to be and we have to change as well.

The companies that adapt, pivot, and strategize to address these challenges are the ones that won't just stick around for the next decade, they're going to be the ones flourishing and expanding. Some of the companies that don't take this on aren't even going to be around to see it.

What does the process addressing these workforce challenges inside of your business look like with our Workforce Strategy Design and Implementation process? Now that we've taken a peek at the challenges, we can tackle within this Workforce Strategy Design that we built, let's chat about how to kickstart this project with [inaudible].

If you're tired of perpetual cycle recruiting, onboarding, rehiring, cashing out tons of money, dealing with a disrupted team, if getting your hiring right the first time feels like an impossible dream, I completely get it. It's frustrating. You might be wondering if this is just the new norm for recruiting.

But I think that you can tell that I don't believe that it is and I don't believe it has to be. I believe that we have to adapt and become better. Enter the Workforce Strategy Design, your game changing alternative.

Our strategy process here gives you a crystal clear workforce strategy, giving you an exact blueprint and playbook, putting an end to the recruitment headache, and ensuring that you attract and retain top-notch talent that really is the best unique fit for your business, the kind that you truly deserve and that you want to work for each day, that you want to promote, that you want to help build a life and build careers.

Here's the breakdown of how we do it. First off, we do a strategic analysis. We dig into your unique workforce needs, your market, your challenges, what's working, what's not working, what's confusing, what's missing. We get super clear on that.

Then based on that, we build a customized playbook that we craft that is a personalized strategy to attract and keep the best talent in your market. We tackle this from a couple of different perspectives so you're not reliant just on one source like so many of us have become with these external advertising spends on Indeed and sources like that.

We figure out how can we really make sure that we are shored up, protected, and we have a variety of methods. You guys probably know you're in the industry that referral, family, and friends is absolutely incredible, but you also know that it's very hard to rely on that solely.

What if you have one or two great recruiters in your company become disgruntled and leave for another opportunity? You could have a mass exodus. That's why having a customized playbook based on strategy is important.

Then number three is effective implementation. Great intentions don't actually build roads. We have to go out and do it. We can actually guide you through applying your strategy and ensuring that there's success, helping you build the processes, the systems, documenting it so that your team, even as it changes, evolves, and grows, has those to fall back on and they know how to continue to maintain the system at a high level and adapt when things change in your marketplace or you need to have that next big growth, acceleration, and momentum to grow your business because you're taking on another opportunity.

We're rolling out this six-month Workforce Strategy Design for just three businesses at a time. That is all we're going to tackle each quarter. Spots are pretty limited. We already have two of those spots filled right now. We have a couple that were wrapping up and we also have some that are getting ready to onboard.

It's important that you reach out to us and you grab some time on our schedule, you get a free strategy call with us, and we're going to talk to you about are we a good fit? We'll help you understand the numbers that we talked about. What is the actual cost of your external spend? What is turnover costing you in your company? What is your turnover rate? Truly, how can we get as close to accurate as possible so you can understand those numbers?

Then also, let's talk about the opportunities in your marketplace that if you can address this that you might want to be pursuing. Say goodbye to dread and say hello to a future that you can actually anticipate growth and excitement and start to calculate that.

This is going to give you the opportunity to grow your business, to take it to the next level, to be a trendsetter in attracting and retaining top talent. You're going to have people looking at you and saying, “What are they doing? How are they getting this right? We thought that this was impossible,” but you want to be the leader in this, you don't want to be the chaser.

If you've made it to the end of this podcast, let's just cut to the chase. It's time for us to get on a call and chat. Your workforce solution is here. It is possible. It's called the Workforce Strategy Design. My team is passionate about it. I'm passionate about it. I want to see you implement it and get the changes that you need in your business.

Head over to storybuilt.marketing/schedule. The link is going to be in this podcast notes. On our website always, there's a super quick link right on the homepage to schedule and that is the same schedule link. It's storybuilt.marketing/schedule. This is how you're going to be able to get in my calendar and we can actually walk through that calculator tool with you. We can answer your questions and we will tell you: Are you a fit or are you not a fit?

If we're not a fit, we can make recommendations, but it is time to address this problem and make sure that you can continue to grow the strong business that you want. Let's talk about transforming your workforce strategy and propelling your business forward.

Make sure that you've come to visit the website, hop on this link really quick, get your spot at storybuilt.marketing/schedule and let's tackle your workforce challenges together. Thanks so much as always for joining us on The Contractor's Daughter and I hope to see you at some of the conferences this year, are out on the road with a brand new crew, taking on some of those new opportunities.

Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of The Contractor's Daughter. If you liked what you heard, be sure to subscribe and review. But most of all, share this with all of your friends, partners, and customers in the highway construction business. Thank you for building the infrastructure that we all rely on.

Jeani Ringkob: Welcome to the Contractor's Daughter, your go-to podcast for eliminating random acts, exit strategy and marketing in your highway construction business. Hello, friends. I'm your host, Jeani Ringkob. I'm a third generation asphalt contractor and an absolute brand strategy and marketing geek.

Host: So welcome everybody to today's webinar featuring Women of Asphalt. We are an exceptional community of professionals dedicated to advancing and empowering women in the asphalt industry. With almost 3,500 members across 22 branches spanning 28 states, Women of Asphalt has become a driving force in fostering gender equality and creating opportunities for women within the asphalt industry. We are excited to share some news with you today. Something to mark your calendars for is our inaugural Women of Asphalt Day national event, which will be the same week as World of Asphalt in Nashville, Tennessee. It is scheduled for March 27th, and we hope everybody on this call and your friends to join us during that day. More information will come out around that activity and what that day will entail for you as we approach it. So the conference will feature inspiring keynote speaker, engaging panel discussions, interactive workshops, and valuable networking opportunities.

We will serve as a catalyst for personal and professional growth and a celebration of the remarkable achievements women in the industry have accomplished. So, as I said, more details on the registration process will be forthcoming, and we will now just dive right into our webinar today. So it's a great pleasure that I introduce our esteemed mother-daughter duo and talk a little bit about their career in the industry and gain a lot of inspirational thoughts. I had the opportunity to meet with them on Monday and talk a little bit about what we cover here, and I'm excited for them to share all of their wisdom that they've gained and also just ideas of how we can improve ourselves and improve the industry as a whole. So Jeani is a dynamic force in the World of business strategy and marketing, with two decades of hands-on experience in construction and agriculture, she knows what it takes to build and sustain a successful enterprise from navigating family tragedy to thriving in competitive environment.

Jeani's journey is an inspiring testament to resilience and growth. She's a true advocate for entrepreneurs helping them harness data-driven insights and proven frameworks to not only just survive, but to thrive. Sandy, on the other hand, found herself thrusted into a leadership role during a challenging period of her life. After her husband's unexpected passing, Sandy stepped up to the plate, learning the ropes of the business, leading her family through a turbulent time. Her story is a powerful lesson in crisis management and perseverance, showcasing her unwavering dedication to her family's company. So let's join Jeani and Sandy as they share their unique perspectives and experiences and wisdom in the World of business leadership and personal growth. So with that, I will start off and I'll just start asking some questions to each of you and feel free to add anything. If I direct a question to you, Jeani, Sandy, if you have something you want to add, feel free. This is really an open conversation to learning more about you and what we can learn from your experiences. So Jeani, I'll start with you. You've faced a number of challenges in your journey, from your family tragedy to taking on multiple roles in your family's asphalt business. Can you share some key lessons you've learned about resiliency and staying motivated during tough times?

Jeani: Sure. I think having good people around you, I was fortunate, especially during that time, it was really all hands on deck with the family. So I think my family got even tighter during that time. So also we had a lot of previous mentors in the industry. I think our incredible about, it always at least has been in my experience about, I've had a lot of mentors around me in various ages and generations from different parts of the industry. So having them around during that time was really incredible...

Sandy: Especially Michael Leary.

Jeani: Yeah, Michael Leary, he's kind of an icon in the industry and somebody who was a dear family friend of my father and my mom's. So I think he was at all my kids baby showers and maybe not quite at my baby shower for myself, but pretty close probably. But having people like that there with me to surround myself with was really helpful, I would say. I think having a plan for me, I think coming from maybe that experience is why I probably have a propensity to just have a plan, so something to fall back on. I think that was maybe one of those times I've learned. So I think coming past that into other experience I've had since then, the husband and I ran agricultural commodities trading business for... well, I was in that for 10 years, came even longer, and that ended abruptly and transition's always hard and I think from my early experiences I learned to have a plan and really surround myself with mentors.

Host: Yeah. I think that's one of the things that we'll talk about and maybe dive a little bit more into a little bit later, is how important having relationships in whatever type of work you do, how they support you, and how you can support others in that and how valuable it is. Sometimes we take for granted our relationship sometimes and to be able to fall back on those relationships really expresses the importance and how valuable those are for us as we navigate this World, right?

Jeani: Right, absolutely. I would say I've always had a natural inclination. My husband would probably agree to, when things aren't going well, I'm totally fine to just take action, keep going, and shift directions. So I think the counter of that is, I mentioned that having a plan, but you have to balance those two things. You have to have a plan and where you think you want to go, but when things come up and challenges come up, you also have to be willing to make a new plan and kind of step into that.

Sandy: They do all the time.

Jeani: Yes, they do.

Host: I agree, plans are so important. I think sometimes when we're younger and starting to develop what we want in our professional career, sometimes we just dive in and we don't really create a plan and understanding maybe what our three-year or five-year goals are. Because if you don't know where you're going, you don't know what you're doing in the moment, right? Plans are so important. Okay, Sandy, what I want to ask you is as you stepped up as a leader during the crisis, after your husband's passing, how did you find the strength to lead your family's business and what advice would you have for women in similar situations who get thrusted into a leadership position unexpectedly?

Sandy: Oh, gosh. When I look back on it now, especially the first couple years, I don't think I had a plan. I was just day to day making everything work and it was really hard because each the kids needed something. Learning how to work as the salesman and representative for Brazier that I'd never had to do before was very challenging and you're scared, you're afraid. I know one of the things that motivated me really swiftly was early on there was a suggestion that perhaps we sell the company and I just remember saying, well, Denny, who was our accountant, we had just finished the end of the year financial statements and done the tax return and all that because this happened the 2nd of March about January, I mean talking about March. But anyway, I had asked what this number meant in this account, deferred taxes, and he said, ''Well, if you stop the business right away, you would owe that money to the IRS.'' I just remember telling the kids, well, we're going to go back to work because I don't have that much money. So it was like black and white to me.

Host: So I just want to kind of paint a picture for everybody who didn't have the privilege of our conversation on Monday, a little bit about why don't you tell us what role you had in the company before your husband's passing, so that gives everybody on the call feel of what you were doing in the business prior and then how much you took on afterwards?

Sandy: We formed it in 1981, and I did all the books forever back when used up one of these green ledger sheets that my daughter...

Host: She still carried them around, showing notes to me on the green ledger.

Sandy: Write the payroll checks, but everything, the licenses, the permits, all that stuff, because Clarence just didn't want to be bothered with it. He was the salesman, that people person. I was the details and I could also work at my other job, which was cleaning tea, which I loved, and I didn't want to give that up either. So I did the books and gradually over 23 years, I had a very elaborate computer and office manager and a bookkeeper and an accountant. But to begin with, it was kind of just me.

Host: Go ahead.

Sandy: I had to go talk to the people and get work and be at the jobs and all that. I still did the books too, but I think it all saved me, kept me so busy.

Host: So you were in a position that was really I'll say the backbone of the organization, but not really the face of the organization. Then you became the face, which requires a whole another set of leadership skills.

Sandy: Yeah. Where we had ended up working most of the time was in New Mexico and I think I see one of my good mentors on here, Diana, and she was a great help to me too, because there's not many women in the asphalt industry. There's more now, but back in the 2000, not so much. So getting the men there to take me serious and believe that I could do this, they were not very into it at first.

Host: I think, like you said, it's gotten a little better now, but I think it's something that we all face in industries that have been predominantly male oriented. Alright, so Jeani, you've faced a lot of your share of ups and downs while running businesses. So can you give maybe some strategies or mindset shifts that have helped you that could help other women as they navigate challenges within their own careers in their life?

Jeani: Yeah. Just to circle back and add on a point before I move on to this question, and I guess it kind of ties into it, is watching my mom, not only was she taking all that stuff and switching into that role, she was grieving at the same time. This was completely unexpected, happened overnight. So I think I probably learned how to stay busy. I learned how to watch perseverance. I would say I came from a gritty family, like ranchers on one side, contractors on the other. But I think watching her kind of marry that grittiness with that perseverance, definitely develop some mindsets in myself. I would say that's probably something I would find that gritty part of yourself or find what motivates you to persevere in something. I know one of my favorite authors is John Acuff. I would highly recommend. He has several great books.

I love the one soundtracks, and actually his daughters one in college, one in high school actually wrote one for kids. I just had my kids listen to this and it talks about the stories that we tell ourselves inside our own head about situations and are they even true and are they helpful and stuff like that and I think as I've went through life, I've really tried to be more intentional about controlling those stories for myself instead of... because we all have that propensity. But I think as women, we are much more inclined to fall into a trap of playing negative soundtracks to ourselves as John Acuff would say. So we have to be really intentional about figuring out what are the soundtracks that we want to hear, how are we going to develop ourselves? One of the things I think I wish I would've done more, and you kind of alluded earlier to having the plan, I wish I would've, I mean, granted, I was still in college when this happened.

So I was in Colorado several days a week still trying to finish college and then driving to be on the project as many days of the week and over the weekend as I could and I was either on projects or selling, and it is all like a blur, but I wish during that time of granted I had that going on, but I wish I would've had somebody maybe helping me or taken the initiative myself to be more strategic about challenging myself and setting goals early on and figuring out what is it going to take to get there. So now I'm having conversations with my kids about here's a goal, but how do we reverse engineer that to get... my daughter was setting goals the other day and she wants to cheer in college. I said, ''Well, that's great, but let's talk about what you need to be doing for the next six months that are going to help you achieve that.''

She's 11, so she thought, oh my gosh, right? But she's already on the competitive tier team, but she's got some skills that are, she knows she has to develop to even be able to stay on that team. So I wish I would've had somebody to sit me down and kind of have some of those conversations. I think I had great people that were inspiring and believed in me, but I wish I would actually put pencil to paper and been a little bit more intentional about laying out that plan, even if it changed, because it would've completely changed still when my dad passed, but I would've had the skills to create a new plan. I think the mentorship program in Women of Asphalt is a great example of finding people that could do that, but they don't even have to be in this industry. You can find parallel industries, other industries, speakers, people that... find a coach, and I'm leaving for a retreat with a coach at the end of the month to work on finances, mindset, productivity, all those things. We all need those kinds of things. So find those things early, but develop the skills that go along with it, those executive skills.

Host: Yeah. It is so important, and it kind of goes back to what we originally said around relationships and a coach is a relationship, and what you're doing is you're learning from all the different people that you surround yourself with. I know we've heard people out there in the World talking about you are who you surround yourself with, and so looking at who's your people that surround you, and if it's not the kind of people you want to be, then maybe you need to look for other people that are going to help support your vision for what your life looks like.

Jeani: Right. You don't want to do that stuff in a silo. In the end, it comes down to you, but you need people to bounce ideas off of, and you need people to ask those questions when they see you, or you hear yourself telling yourself certain things to say, is that really even true? Does it help what you want to accomplish? I think those are some of the questions that I think are really important when we find ourselves thinking about what's possible or not possible in our careers and our careers and families and our life in all the pieces.

Host: Yeah. A lot of times we're so busy doing all the things in our life that we don't even take the time for that self-reflection, and that is so important to create what you want out of life.

Jeani: Right.

Host: Okay. Sandy, I have a question for you. Your experience during those difficult times showcases how resilient you are. I know we've touched a little bit on it around relationships and the value of relationships in the industry. What kind of advice or lessons can you give us around those relationships and relationships, how they supported you during that time and how that helped with your adversity?

Sandy: Oh, well, my family was, they never said, don't do that.

Jeani: We were all certifiable.

Sandy: She went out and got the contractor's license and Dustin started a driving truck and all kinds of stuff. But to build the relationships that I had to build to be that face and the sales person for Brazier, that was hard and they're invaluable. Some of those people that I met then are really, really good friends still. So Michael, Larry, I already knew through Clarence, and he actually did the eulogy for my husband's funeral and came that day and took over because I really was in a fog. He's just priceless and people like that, and he still is. So even though it was hard with some of those gentlemen in New Mexico, especially in Santa Fe at the higher levels of the DOT, because I'm sure I was the only female contractor that was bidding, and so there was a lot of negativity. They wouldn't return my calls or wouldn't see me when I decided to start going by dropping in, and no one would see me. They were busy and it was hard, but you just have to never give up because I knew that I had to do this. Once I got my foot in the door, the majority of them I liked very well and worked well with. But if anyone would've told me that a year before this happened, I would've said, oh, absolutely not. I could never do that. So sometimes you are forced into doing something and it works that you've never thought you could do, and that builds on itself then. So relationships are just key because those things got me work for, it's still getting the company work. Right.

Jeani: I would say as an observer of that, everybody in my family was part of building those relationships. We were either on the crew, but all of us were salespeople too. I went to sales marketing for Koch Industries and then back for Brazier Asphalt, and then several other different companies in the industry and then outside of the industry. But it was, when I think about those particular relationships, they were the hardest one because first off, they were looking at this company and being like, are they even going to be here? Is this woman going to keep going? Is she going to be here? They didn't know. So in that regard, you can't blame them for being like, I am just not even going to deal with this. I'm just going to ignore this, right, or whatever. Or they just doubted it or whatever it was. But I think our team inside the company stuck with us. My mom has always had incredibly low turnover.

Sandy: Yet, the employees...

Jeani: They stuck with us. Our partners, at the time, it was Koch industries...

Sandy: Which was Diane and Michael Leary.

Jeani: Now it's Holly Asphalt, they're in New Mexico. They stuck with this. So I think when they start to see the other relationships, they started coming around. But I would say those relationships now are much deeper because they were the hardest one. When I look at the last 10, 15 years of running this company for my mom, even when I look at it now, and Joe has purchased the company, but he was with us for over 30 years. He's basically a family member as well. And he was

Sandy: He's still, working because he was there in the 90s, I think 95 or something when we hired him and he's the person I sold her to a year ago.

Jeani: To that, when mom brings that up, and I would say part of the legacy that my dad gave us is that it was all about relationships with him. He didn't talk about or brag about his relationships, but Joe was in a really bad place when my dad and him connected and my dad was watching him and seeing how he responded. When he came to my mom and said, I want to hire this guy, and here's the situation, which we won't talk about the specifics, but my mom was like, oh my... no, this is bad idea. We can't do that. He said, but I believe in this man, and I want to try. I can think back to lots of relationships that my dad did that and kind of set the precedent and that paid off, I think, for us later when people were willing to take risks. But then we also kind of carried that on and have been willing to take calculated risks on people and relationships.

Sandy: But even with the other employees, there is probably a third of them that were there before Clarence passed away, and that's 30 years now. Then the new ones that we've got that came on after I was there, they're still there.

Jeani: Very little.

Sandy: Very few, very small turnover. So I feel like I did get a good relationship with the districts and the people in charge and with our crews, our people.

Host: Well, and your low turnover, and the fact that people want to stay in the organization is a testament to how you treat people and how vulnerable you are with them, and they can be with you. I know on our call Monday, you talked a little bit about always trying to get out in the field, making that connection, knowing who your employees were, who their families are, and just kind of know in general about them. I think your relationship with them and the loyalty that they have to your company and to you and your family, I mean, is a testament of that.

Sandy: Yeah. Well, what Jeani was the salesperson, and when she was going to go on to back to Colorado for a while, she found a gentleman, and he's still there, though.

Host: You can't get him to use a digital CRM, but he's still there. So that's and that probably bothers me more than it bothers anybody else.

Sandy: He's a people person. That's how Clarence was. Yeah. I think he wrote one check in our entire life together.

Host: Okay. So next question for you, Jeani, as a successful entrepreneur and advocate, you've helped business owners and leaders grow stronger businesses. So how can women in the asphalt industry assert themselves as leaders and contribute to the growth and success of their organization?

Jeani: So I think one of the things, and I think I just left, it was just that women in construction, and one of the topics I was speaking on there was recruitment and retention. Specifically we talked a lot more about millennials and stuff like that, but I think it's relevant across the board. Then I was just talking with some other sempais about the same concept and its engagement. I think about engagement, and I'm a research person. Part of the process I use with clients now, and whether it's to help them build workforce and recruitment in their businesses to help them grow their sales and marketing, brand strategy, whatever it is, it always starts with research and data and what do you know and stuff like that. So I think the same is true. So twofold. I would say learn about your organization, learn about... really understand what matters to the success of your organization as a whole, and understand how they're perceived in the marketplace.

That may also dictate how happy you are there. So it's an important thing to know, but understand that. So know the research, know what are their products, who makes it tick? What's the history there? What are the things that make them or break them? How do they make their money? What are their biggest challenges? So I think knowing that is going to really impress upon other people that are influential in the company that you've done some footwork on your own because that stuff is very rarely actually given to you, which is probably a flaw in how you retain people and that kind of goes back to that engagement piece. Engagement is the number one thing. Only 26% of millennials feel engaged in the company they work in, and the American economy is losing over 3 billion in their economy due to lack of engagement, directly related to engagement and workforce issues. I think that problem is only getting worse with generations, starting with my generation and moving down, it's really, really important. So get engaged and engage people that you want to influence your career and engage the people that can be. I guess I always am a little bit strategic about business.

Look at the people that are going to benefit you and engage with them. It's strategic for your career, but you have to be because nobody else is going to be for you. So the two things that really come to mind are do your research. Know what success looks like. I'm a proponent of helping companies build and help educate their team members on what success looks like for them. But most companies don't do that innately, they're too busy with other things. So take the initiative to figure out for yourself. An example of that is what are the three things related to your job that if you did those three things every single day, or maybe it's every single week, you would actually be making progress towards the objective they've set and make sure you prioritize those and that you're focused on those and they're front and center.

Doing something like that is going to make you stand out above everybody else. I mean, just night and day. It'll put you leaps and bounds in front of that stuff and being able to prioritize even when people are asking you to do other things. Yes, you might want to lean in and help but know what your priorities are and you may have to do a little digging to actually even figure out what that is. But if you go and you're asking the right questions of the people above you to try to understand that you want to know what success looks like and what objectives and metrics you can apply to that, and then what are the three main things you should focus on? They would be so impressed by your initiative and your willingness to really understand that and lean in and really be productive and engaged. I think that shows engagement right there. You're also going to get a lot more satisfaction out of every role you have if you do things like that and you're more focused. I think about we all in this group right here, we have the pool of family, we have career, we have everything else. So that is also going to give you some peace of mind and some bandwidth to really be able to be productive. It's those people, those women, they're like, how do they do that and how do they keep excelling and reaching goals, is probably because doing something like that.

Host: Yeah, I totally agree with you on that. Sometimes we get so caught up in how do I advance? What is my goals? What does my future look like? That sometimes we forget to say, well wait, I'm working for an organization that I can make a difference in. To your point, understanding all of the important things about that organization, what you can do to support the organization. I mean you just said it beautifully that with your three things and with connecting with the people, showing them what you have to offer, what you can offer the organization and in kind that comes back to you because they know that you care about the organization and it's not just what's my next step? How do I move up? How do I make more money? All of those things, which are important...

Jeani: They are, but those things will come if you're engaged in where you're working and if it's not a good fit for you culturally, if you don't like how that company is perceived in the hearts and the minds of the marketplace that it's in to its customers, to its partners, doing this research is going to help you figure that out as well, which is, that's not a curse, that's a blessing.

Host: Right and to take the next step in, okay, if this isn't a company I'm aligned with personally with my values or with my passions, then like you said, it's a blessing. You get to decide, okay, where does that lie? You may leave, but obviously you're leaving where you will become more engaged in that organization because it's really where you see yourself and you're more aligned with.

Jeani: Yeah. Then I think some of the comments you just mentioned remind me of, I think it was at CONEXPO this year, a client of mine brought his daughters and his wife along for just a few of the days and weren't going to come to CONEXPO and his daughters are both in high school and I said, ''You know what, can you bring him one day I'm going to get him passes and just come, we'll have lunch together and just give me like two or three hours and let's hang out for two or three hours.'' He was like, they're not going to like this.

I tell my kids all the time, I don't care. That's too bad. I said, ''Well, just try it. It's amazing.'' So he did, and I got them passes. We went and toured around. I took them to the back of the press room area. I went and introduced them to several women around the group, actually took them over to Women of Asphalt and introduced them to several people at the booth. I took them to several companies that I thought... I mean one thing I was not aware of, and I think even growing up in the industry, but yet you're still in your own bubble like where I was in a family business, I got to know that business really, really deep. But I maybe didn't get to know the industry really, really wider until I went and worked for Koch Industries and some other stuff.

Even now I am amazed at how wide the breadth of this industry is and the opportunities within it. If you want to be a videographer, if you want to be a journalist, you can do almost any career inside of this industry. So I wanted to show them that. But then also I was very honest with them and I think I have a pragmatic approach to things, probably you've realized. But I also told them this is an industry where you can accelerate in a career as a woman faster than other industries. It is a strategic advantage as any young woman to target industries like ours and say, I'm building a career there because right now our industry has never been so hungry to have women at the table and there's also rules and regulations that are forcing them to do that. But as they're doing that, I know lots of men that have been just saturated in this industry forever that are saying, I'm so grateful for the women that are rising into leadership in my business now.

They're making huge differences. They're showing us perspective we've never experienced. So selfishly for women everywhere and selfishly because I love the industry, I think this is a great place for young women to say, it doesn't matter what you're into, you can find a place to build a career here and probably accelerate the top faster than almost any. I know my daughter loves beauty products, but I'm like, it's not there, honey. Sorry. It's the book, the Blue Ocean Strategy. It's the same concept. I tell my clients, how can you get yourself out of the bloody water and go over where it's blue water, where you were different and you were the only one and you can really set yourself apart. That's how you capture market share. It's the same thing in our careers, in our business. Get out of the bloody water industries and come over here because it's incredible, especially for women. So I would say that's something that we should all be telling young women who are entering college, moving through college, leaving high school that don't want to go to college. I know that supervisor roles on crews and moving into operational management positions are incredible opportunities even for women with families.

Yeah, and you make me think about when you talk about the options available, a lot of times people get fixated on construction is in the field on a piece machine or behind a paver versus all of the other jobs that create and keep an organization going. So like you said, IT, Marketing all of those things. A lot of those positions have really come about more so in the last five years or so where you are seeing more women kind of come in those areas. But the opportunities really are endless as far as what you can apply within an organization. Yeah.

Host: Yeah, that's wonderful advice. So Sandy, on your journey with leadership, and I know we've talked a lot about leadership because really you became the leader of your company due to unexpected circumstances during that challenging period, what kept you going or where did you find inspiration to keep moving forward and to not give up, because that's one of the things you said a little bit ago is you can't give up, what was driving your drive really?

Sandy: Well after I got past the, I don't have that much money, so I have to keep working.

Host: That's a good motivator.

Sandy: Being numb there for a while. But I think once I got out there and met the district engineer and district six, which is where I got my first job of my own, you have that... it just makes you feel good and then you cannot let them down. I can't control how hot the oil is myself or how the people do it well, but if you care about your crew and they know that and they know it's important to you, they give a lot more effort and I think because I went out with them and sympathized with their day-to-day problems I saw and I thought, oh my Lord, this is way harder than I realized. I didn't spend a lot of time on jobs when he was there because I had a family and work. But just you don't want to lose the relationships and you want the finished product to be good. We got to where we won best of road awards and that's just the greatest thing ever. So I think in my specific instance, I grew to love what I was doing, where to start with, I was just doing it because I had to and then it kept me busy out of the house. That was good. But I grew to love the people and the crews and I wanted to feel pride in those roads and I grew to really love it. I think anybody, if they don't love their career, they're never going to be truly successful. Where now at that end where I sold it, I'm really proud of what I did and I couldn't have done it without Jeani and Dustin and Joe and all the other guys there and my banker...

Host: And your insurance.

Sandy: Yeah, and the insurance people. Everybody was really good to me or helped me and then I became built relationships with them that I didn't have just myself before. You've got to love what you're doing.

Host: Yeah. So in your relationships, did you have mentors and supportive networks that helped you through that?

Sandy: Diana Reed, their polycell has been priceless forever, ever and ever, her and my daughter went to a conference in Taos, one time, New Mexico and had a great time.

Jeani: We won't expound on that, it's fine.

Sandy: I went to many more after that with Diana and I had another lady that is a great friend now, Karen, who we used to call ourselves we're the partners in crime on Broadway because she owned a traffic control company and I ended up having them dip my traffic control and that's how I got to know her better. So it was great mentorship to go to lunch with her and talk about what's going on the deals and the work and all this stuff. We've become really great friends, as with Diana. Yeah. Then of course, lots of the engineers are real good friends and just a lot of good friends down there now.

Host: So one of the main mission of Women of Asphalt is creating that comradery, right? Creating that support group between women specifically in this industry. What can you share about... you've talked about your relationships with other women, but how important was that for both of you that you feel really supported you during that time or even afterwards? How important is that, do you think having that support group of females? Obviously men are a part of helping support us in the industry, but specifically especially for Women of Asphalt, how important is that? Do you feel was important for you in your journeys?

Sandy: Oh, extremely in my case, yeah. Diana was there from the start because I already knew her. I just didn't know her in the way that I got to know her. But very supportive, very helpful. Then when I heard about the women asphalt coming about, that was great.

Jeani: Yeah, I always joke with people now where were they when I was this young girl myself?

Sandy: Yeah, we needed, Jeani was out there?

Jeani: People out, men out to dinner and talking about these Novi chip and all the new processes and gap grade, all those things. I was having all these conversations. I would say, what you asked kind of makes me think, I think there were those couple people in New Mexico, not as many in New Mexico, but Diane, Karen, there was those few there and I think it makes the relationship and the bonds even stronger. Then when I went and worked for Koch Industries, I was in Illinois working for their pavement solutions and performance roads and in the marketing business development, they only had three women in the United States. That's it. They were only hiring engineers for that role at that time because they decided that we need engineers because we can train anybody to sell. I don't know if I would necessarily agree with that now. But I do think in the role and how they had a design, that was definitely a strength. I was the only one that was brought in that was not an engineer, and it was because I had that strong contractor background. There was nobody that could speak to the contractors or speak from that perspective, that actually had... they would hire engineers out of college, but they didn't know anything about actually putting product down the road. I lived in Champaign, Illinois, which was right across the border from Terre Haute where they had labs and we would go there at least once a month and do not tell anybody this, but I secretly loved hanging out in the labs with the engineers and the geeks, and they're like... I loved it.

So that was probably a perk that they saw in their mind like, well, she'll work because she's into that. So specifically there was two of us in Illinois, it was Natalie Eker at the time, Natalie Williams now. She was actually in my wedding. We became incredible friends and she was a really strong engineer and I had a lot more sales skills and actual contractor experience and we actually ended up, instead of us just covering our own areas, we actually ended up, both of us traveling a lot more, but actually working together quite a bit. She would say, ''Hey, I need the knowledge you have in this meeting next week. Can we coordinate and do this?'' Then I would say, ''You know what, I'm going to need some engineering elements and I can put these three visits to clients and doing some road assessment together over here.''

So that was really incredible and I think women are great about that, and especially if you get quality women that are in it. Both, we were driven by similar things. We wanted to see projects work. We love the partnerships of finding the contractors, partnering with the agencies, took pride in our work. We really collaborated and used each other's strengths and weaknesses, and it made it really incredible. I think I see women doing that a lot in this industry. So I think, I don't know what it is necessarily, but I think we're willing to say to each other, this is my gap. This is my deficit, and I see that you could fill that. So how could we work together? I was actually reaching out to some partners for my business this week, and I just thinking, some people aren't good partners. They're not the ones that are reaching out to you, so you have to find...

Sandy: We'll, not admit they need, I think women don't care about that.

Jeani: I think so.

Host: Yeah. I think it goes back to that self-reflection, right? Where am I lacking or where do I need to improve? And identifying those and then to your point, finding the person that can support you with that male or female within your organization. Just again, to be the asset to not only the organization, but also helping you develop even more personally. Well, we are getting close to the end though. I think we started a couple minutes late and I've got so many more to ask you, but maybe we'll do a part two at some point next year. But why don't we end today's session with talking a little bit about inspiration. So I'll start with you, Jeani, this time. What do you see in the industry around the changing dynamics in the workforce? I know you touched a little bit on it earlier, but strategy and calculating as far as career or for people who may still be in college or taking college courses to better themselves. Specifically, I know you talked a little bit about taking the risks, so any words of wisdom before we end the call today around that?

Jeani: So I think one of the things when we're developing a brand strategy for a client, before we actually get to anything, any of the tactics being implemented, I have a litmus test that everything has to go through and is it differentiated, does it set you apart? So it goes back to that blue ocean, like let's not invest time or energy in something that's not going to differentiate you. Then is it relevant? Because while we're differentiating, a lot of times we become irrelevant to the problem we're trying to solve or the people or whatever it is. Then sustainability, can you sustain that advantage? I think when we think about our careers, that's a great litmus test for that too. So thinking about your continuing education and the skills that you're developing when you're going to conferences. I know right now I'm running a conference success workshops based on some content we put out because conference season is coming up.

Really look at what sessions could I go to that maybe are slightly out of my purview. I had at Women in Construction, a woman came up and talked to me afterwards and she's in marketing, but she came to my session, which I talked about recruiting and retention millennials. So by default, I always have a lot of HR people in that or owners and stuff like that. But I love that she was in marketing because one of the things we talked about is that marketing is an under-leveraged tool that HR should have access to and should be using and I always jokingly say, even though it's completely real, like your job descriptions suck, HR should not write your job descriptions, let marketing help them too. They support sales, they can support that. They really can be leveraged in more ways. So she was really excited about how maybe in marketing she could go back with a fresh perspective of how she also could create value for the HR department.

So she was differentiating herself by adding some of these skills or even just opening her mind up to it and it was very, very relevant because it's going to make her more valuable and it's going to address one of the primary problems she knows her organization has right now. Then sustainable, it's absolutely like she has some marketing skills, all she's got to learn to do is apply them in a slightly different way. So things like that, think about your career that way, and it kind of goes back to understand the struggles that your current company is having. What struggles and talk, some of those higher ups get them to tell you and open up to you about what are the core top three problems, and then think outside of the box about how your role might be able to impact that or how those three priorities that you think you're narrowing in on might be able to have an impact on that.

Sometimes you need to communicate that value because don't assume somebody else sees it. One of the key things for her is... and I told her, I said, ''Figure out who you need to talk to about this when you go back.'' We talk about that in my conference success workshop that we're doing is when you leave a conference and you leave some kind of education session, figure out who do you need to involve in this decision? If it's interesting enough and exciting enough that you want to take action, identify a couple of things you're going to take action on, figure out who you need to recruit or inform or get on board and then set time aside to do it. Before you walk out of that room, I actually made everybody in that workshop actually block into their calendars. You've picked a couple things we've talked about, you've identified who you need to incorporate, set up some time in your calendar in the next two weeks to actually work on it because we leave these conferences and we're overwhelmed, but our industry has conference season coming up. So that's a great time for all of us to really be thinking about what do I want to do? I want to meet certain people and add them to my network? Do I want to attend certain types of education? Do I want to understand a certain problem that my company's facing better that I don't understand? Who do I want to connect with on LinkedIn that has information about these things? So you need to be proactive and intentional about those types of things, and that's going to really set you apart.

Host: Yeah. That is such great advice timing for us because with the conference season coming up and starting of the first year and then World of Asphalt, and then when we have our Women of Asphalt day, it's a great opportunity to put those things that you just told us in place. Sandy, with you, before we leave the conversation, is there any last minute words of wisdom that you would like to share with the group?

Sandy: Well, I really think that the comment about that you need to love your career is really important. I would not have been so a success with that if I had grown to love it and I really did. I still have days I want to go back, but you got to be patient. You need to be honest and you need to follow through with whatever you commit to. I've had to redo roads more than one because we are not going to do roads that aren't really good. But sometimes you have to do it over for free, and that's not only money, but a lot of time. But you've got to commit to that.

Host: Yeah, because again, it comes back to how people view your company and giving that quality work so... well, I just want to say we've been getting a lot of comments, no wonderful comments from people, and we just want to thank you both for joining us. I feel like you've given a lot of information. I would recommend that everybody on the call, watch it again, because there's all kinds of nuggets that we can take away. We certainly hope we'll see you, Jeani and you Sandy at our first annual Women of Asphalt Day at the World of Asphalt in March, and we hope to see all of you who participated in the call today. So thank you so much. We appreciate everything and we'll see you soon.

Jeani Ringkob: Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of the Contractor's Daughter. If you liked what you heard, be sure to subscribe and review, but most of all, share this with all of your friends, partners, and customers in the highway construction business and thank you for building the infrastructure that we all rely on.

Welcome to The Contractor's Daughter, your go-to podcast for eliminating random acts of strategy and marketing in your highway construction business. Hello, friends. I'm your host, Jeani Ringkob. I'm a third-generation asphalt contractor and an absolute brand strategy and marketing geek.

Welcome to The Contractor's Daughter Podcast. I'm your host, Jeani Ringkob. We made it. We are in part three of our three-part series about workforce. I am speaking on this topic a ton. Everybody is talking about this topic, I'm having conversations with clients, I have clients onboarding every single month for this process trying to figure this out in their businesses.

So I wanted to bring you some of the things that we are seeing, doing, and implementing to help get you thinking about how you can not just minimize this problem, improve your recruitment, or reduce your turnover, but how can you actually own the solution inside of your company, therefore solving the problem for yourself, allowing yourself the opportunity to decide how much you want to grow and not be limited by the bottleneck that has been holding you back, that workforce bottleneck, and also to increase the value of your business by building this asset inside of your business?

The first episode, we really reframed the whole problem, because in order to have the right mindset to tackle this problem, you have to be willing to think differently about it. In the second episode, we talked about some of the divisions, resources, team members that you may already have inside of your business that are actually going to be part of building the solution, letting you really leverage what you already have there and also giving you a little bit of clarity if you have some gaps that you need to be thinking about in order to internalize this solution.

Today, we are going to kind of wrap this all together and give you marching orders or give you something you can visually see, how do you move forward from here, and we are going to go back. You're going to want to make sure that you're subscribed to the podcast.

If you haven't already, not only are you going to want to go back and probably start at the beginning of this series, you might want to actually go back and check out our Strategic Growth Wheel series where we talk about the model that I developed inside of my business working with clients to develop their brand and their market positioning strategy and how we actually turned it into something that we're using here. That's what we're talking about today.

We use that same model. There's just a whole toolbox full of models that I pull out and use. But this is one that actually works to help give us a path and some guide rails and how we know where do we start in this process, what comes next, what comes last? It doesn't have to be more complicated than those three steps. I'm going to talk about the activities that you engage in during each step. This is going to be partially a review of that Strategic Growth Wheel but then also how does it simply apply to our workforce solution development inside of our own businesses?

Now remember that you can use this as a step-by-step guide so that you can develop your own solution. We use it to help companies develop their strategy, their marketing, their market positioning to launch products, all kinds of incredible things, including their own workforce strategic solution inside of their business.

Workforce challenges should be seen as opportunities, opportunities to create strategic advantage. I cannot say this enough, and I have said it in all of these episodes around this, but the companies that figure that out are going to be the companies that win the war for talent.

I really believe coming from being one of the owners, growing up with parents who were owning these companies in this industry who came from multiple generations, I believe it's really, really important to own our own solutions, to figure this stuff out, and thereby also increase the strategic advantages that we have in our marketplaces continue to grow our businesses into something that has more value on the backside, whether that's something you're building for a family, whether that's something you're positioning to sell to a current employee that's coming up through the company, a competitor, whether or not you're positioning to be purchased by a larger company, whatever it is, if you're going to start this company and putting in all the risks, you have to be thinking about the long term game, the long term plan, and increasing the value of that business. But do it right now so you can also reap the rewards today.

Let's talk about how we use the Strategic Growth Wheel to do this in your business. The first part of that Strategic Growth Wheel if you remember is Investigate. You can always start with a thesis. It's hard if you're actually in your business, working on it, to not have a thesis about what you think the solution is going to look like, maybe what you've seen somebody else do. But you always want to inform that thesis with actual research and data, the data and the research that is unique to you, your marketplace, your competition, all of those things that are unique and different about you and your scenario.

The best employees for your competition might not be the best employees for you. But you need to know that before you embark on this journey. That is something that you need to identify early and build towards. During this Investigation Phase, one of the things that we're looking at is understanding your own current asset. Who is your team? What drives them? What motivates them?

For some of the top performers, what is their background? What are they looking for? What were the key things that happened that triggered them and helped them accelerate through the roles in your company and really helped them feel like they wanted to be part of it? They were clear on the mission. They were clear on where you're going. All of these things can be done by interviews, surveys, and conducting that research.

Also, look at your competition. Now when we're looking at strategic competition, we're looking first off, where could your customer be spending that dollar that they may be spending on you anywhere else? That's your competition. Also, who provides the same solutions or solves the same problem as you, and then who has the same products or services as you?

We have to actually cast the net a little bit wider when it comes to workforce. They could be going and working in drastically different industries. Some of them are willing to relocate geographically for certain reasons or at least a certain distance. We have to look at all of that and it can be very unique to your marketplace, your competition, the types of employees that you're wanting to attract.

We have to get a really clear picture on that. Then we have to figure out which of those competitors are the ones that we really need to focus on, compare ourselves to, position ourselves against, look for how to differentiate ourselves from, and how to stay super relevant to the right types of employees.

Once we kind of look at this and we put all of these pieces on the board, the opportunities start to rise to the surface and this is the part of the work that I do that gets really exciting. Another thing you want to do during this investigation stage is you're going to have to look at your current brand strategy. How are you perceived by your employees? How are you perceived by employees that you're trying to attract?

If you have partnerships with schools and other associations and organizations and you're trying to build pipelines and funnels and create awareness about not just the industry but your specific business, how do those students or young individuals perceive you early on? It does not benefit you to sit down and make presumptions about this.

Do not assume that you know how you are perceived. You have to do the research. You have to also decide how you want to be perceived, how you need to be perceived in order to get the results that you want and really leverage the solution inside of your business, and you have to intentionally create a strategy that is going to do that.

It will pay off your business tenfold and will actually increase your market positioning, it'll increase awareness amongst your customers, your business partners. Doing this brand work is super essential, but it's essential and critical to this workforce solution.

The next part of the Strategic Growth Wheel is Identify. You have to build that strategy. We talked about that. You figured out how are we currently perceived? What is true about our culture, our mission, our goals, what's unique and different about our company, and where do we want to go? How do we want to be intentional about that? Then you have to build a strategy that's going to get you there and get your internal team on board.

You have to identify what that is, actually map that out, and determine how you're going to build that. Then identify which assets you have in your business. This is really important. You may have some marketing assets and HR assets. All those things we talked about in part two of this episode, which ones do you have and where might you have some gaps?

If there are some gaps in your business, is it really part of what you want to do to bring somebody internal in? Can you outsource that and really incorporate whoever you outsource or partner with into this workforce solution? They can provide that value for you because it's not the right time or doesn't fit the rest of your strategy to have that in-house? Those are gaps and things you're going to have to identify before you move on to the final stage of the Strategic Growth Wheel.

When you're looking at this stuff, prioritize, I'm going to tell you, you're going to want to start with that strategy. Know what it is. What is our brand going to look like because it has to be able to attract the workforce. That is how people identify with you, determine that they want to engage with you, determine that you might be the right fit, all of those things are super important and we want to be able to communicate that really quick, really effective, because your competition is going to figure out how to do that and you have to master that.

Then and only then can you move on to the implementation side of the Strategic Growth Wheel and here is where we look at those internal assets and we start building them. What do you need? Do you need a landing page? Do you need a place that when people are coming in looking, you're capturing those leads?

It's just like your sales leads. They may not be ready to take on that job right now or it may be a time in your season when you don't have that great role for them right now, but they're really interested and they like what they're seeing about your brand and your company so much that they want to know that they're going to hear about it first when you have that position available and open for them.

That's what we're trying to generate here. We want people actually waiting in line, raising their hand saying, “When an opportunity opens up, this is the company I want to be with.” That's what we're trying to create. But we have to have a way to capture them, to bring them into our environment, and be able to nurture them, tell them more about it, and maybe share other opportunities, ways for them to get their foot in the door, all of those kinds of things.

This could be landing pages, opt-ins, lead generators, a funnel where you can continue to communicate with them, tell them about opening positions, share the stories of your current employees, continue to share about the brand that you are that they were initially attracted to so they stay interested and you're always top of mind.

We also need to think about where do we deploy the messaging. The messaging would have been built during that brand strategy. That's part of that brand strategy you’re building. We use that messaging to create job descriptions, to create the words that we use for our internal referral programs. We have to communicate that to our internal employees, help them understand how it benefits them, how do they communicate it, how do we make it super easy for them to do that, all of those things are part of that messaging, and they're an extension of creating that brand and that feel that we're trying to intentionally create.

Then also you're going to want to implement partnerships. Once again, your messaging could be very critical in order to reaching out and really opening the door to have partnerships. As we move forward in trying to solve this workforce strategy issue, a lot of people are going to be figuring out the value of partnerships in their areas. You're going to want to make sure that you are really desirable and you're out in front of developing these partnerships.

Another thing you're probably going to be implementing dependent on the strategy and how you prioritize is an onboarding system. That also integrates highly into the referral program. We want to make sure that we're getting people up to their full productivity as soon as possible.

Also, when they're at those peak filling levels, when they really had great experiences with us, those are the best opportunities to also make sure we're educating, informing, and reminding about that referral program that we've intentionally built into the processes and the systems that are probably managed by your HR department.

Then another thing that you're for sure going to want to implement is what is that quarterly content strategy and brand awareness strategy? Are you running specific campaigns because you know you're going to need a large influx of workforce at a specific season? How do you ramp up for that? Where do you put it? What are the words that you're saying? How is it integrated with a referral program? All of that needs to be mapped out likely on a quarterly basis, and not every quarter is going to be equal in most of our businesses.

These are just a few of the examples of the specific activities that you would be doing during each phase of the Strategic Growth Wheel as you're trying to develop this workforce solution into your business. The Investigate Phase, Identify Phase, and Implement Phase.

Make sure that you're thinking about this, that you're looking at that Growth Wheel. You can find diagrams of this on our website with quick reminders and prompts that are going to trigger what activities happen in which part of this flywheel that you can always reach out and get a hold of us if you want to talk about it more, talk about what you currently have, get help clarifying what are the gaps, how do you move forward.

Now remember, I always like to say the best day to plant a tree was yesterday. If you didn't plant it yesterday, you better get that tree in the ground today. If this is dropping when I think it is, probably about in January, this is the perfect time to be thinking about that next big hiring initiative that you're going to have to take and getting this stuff into place.

This needs time to ramp up to build that awareness and that attraction and start getting those partnerships put together before you're going to actually see results. You need three to six months to really know that it's in place, the processes, the systems, how you're going to capture it. You want your onboarding ready before you're loading on too many people at once. You want those processes and systems built.

You can always build and continue to refine stuff as you go but it's really helpful if you get this stuff in place before you're so deep in your season that it makes it a little bit harder to prioritize. Now is the time to do it. Make sure that you are focused on building your own workforce solution into your business as soon as possible.

I'm super excited about this series. I know after all the conversations we've been having out there that this is going to be an incredible resource and something that's going to get you pretty inspired about the possibilities of not being beholden to outside sources for mediocre low quality candidates. You can actually own this asset inside of your business.

Now we've also mentioned that we created a resource very specific to the solution. It's actually on the website. It's there for you now. It's going to take you out five to seven minutes and you can take our Workforce Playbook Quiz, and it's going to give you kind of a health score of where are you at in terms of the health of your workforce internal strategy, and it's also going to give you some prompts for next steps that are likely what you need to be focused on in order to start implementing this in your business.

Make sure that you go take that assessment. That is at storybuilt.marketing/workforce. Take your assessment, connect with me on LinkedIn, send me your results, tag me with your questions, send me a DM with your questions, I would love to hear how does it go for you? Where's your business right? What questions do you have? Where do you think your next steps are in building the workforce solution that your company needs into your business so you don't only have the solution but you have an asset in place? Make sure you subscribe. We have some incredible interviews coming up and all kinds of exciting content, so you're not going to want to miss a thing.

Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of The Contractor's Daughter. If you liked what you heard, be sure to subscribe and review. But most of all, share this with all of your friends, partners, and customers in the highway construction business. Thank you for building the infrastructure that we all rely on.

Welcome to The Contractor's Daughter, your go-to podcast for eliminating random acts of strategy and marketing in your highway construction business. Hello, friends. I'm your host, Jeani Ringkob. I'm a third-generation asphalt contractor and an absolute brand strategy and marketing geek.

Welcome to The Contractor's Daughter. I'm your host, Jeani Ringkob. I am diving into part two of a three-part series about none other than workforce development. It is on everybody's minds these days. In the previous episode, if you haven't heard it, if you're not subscribed, be sure you're subscribed, but you can always go back and it really is helpful to maybe listen to that episode first because it's helping you rethink and reframe the problem of workforce.

When I am out speaking on this topic, when I'm having a conversation with a current client and a prospect, or anybody where I'm sitting here talking about workforce, I feel like 9 times out of 10, the first thing we have to do is reframe it. If you are not willing to say that this could be not just a challenge in my business, but actually a strategic competitive advantage for me if I tackle this in the right way and I find the solution and bring that solution into my company as an asset, then you're really on the losing side of this.

That is a mindset that I like to see in all of my best partners, the people that I admire the most in this industry, the people that I think are making the biggest changes, and the people that are positioning their businesses to be long-term successful factors in this industry, real leaders that are going to be around for the long haul, and the ones that are going to be able to take advantage of all the opportunities and demand in the infrastructure world right now as we see it and moving forward.

We really rethought that. We talked about why it is so critical and how we can actually shift that mindset and actually gave an example about a presentation that I had that really brought it home recently at the Women in Construction Conference.

Let's dive into what I promised. I think a lot of people are excited about this because as I'm having these conversations, a lot of the time, what we're discovering is you probably already have a lot of the resources that you need and that you can leverage to build the solution into your business already.

If you don't, there are things that you can easily outsource, borrow, or start developing in your business that are probably going to help you not just with this problem, but really be relevant to other areas of your business and level up your business in other ways as well. I love when we can build a solution, find a strategy, or an objective for a client that solves more than one problem.

We always have to start with the most essential problem or bottleneck that we're leveraging into an opportunity. But if we can build that and design it so it does multiple things for us, I think that's a great way to always stay on the edge, to be ahead of the competition, and to keep building strategic advantage after strategic advantage, so why not do it?

The solution that we've created that we're talking about in this series definitely uses those types of processes and that mindset to get you where you need to be. What if you didn't have to pay tens of thousands of dollars for outside leads to the workforce that your business needs?

Honestly, as I'm watching these budgets increase and I'm talking to people constantly and they're tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars for some companies depending on the size of that company, we’re seeing the steady increase and really people branching out into using more external paid resources to build the funnel into their business at the leads that they're looking for.

But what we're also seeing is most of those external sources that we're paying a significant amount to year after year also really doesn't tip the needle because they're not bringing us the quality best-fit candidates. They don't understand our industry, that is not the target pipeline that they already have access to, and they don't tend to really solve the problem.

When we really break it down and I get into not just that initial hiring cost, but the cost of actual turnover, the cost of morale, decreased productivity, doing training and testing over and over again, all of those kinds of things, it's really exponential, and when you think about it, you're paying for it over and over again if we don't get higher quality, better-fit canvas up front.

Really, the expense that we're talking about is really high. It's really incredible, and it's all external. This investment that we're making over and over again is just filling a need and it’s kind of filling a hole in the boat, we're just constantly shoveling out the water instead of fixing the hole, plugging the hole, and then getting the water out. We want to shift how we're looking at that.

I've referenced in the last episode a model created by Mike Michalowicz’s The Business Hierarchy of Needs. I want to mention it here because it gives you a great visual aid. If you go to my website and you watch some of the videos that we're going to have about this conversation, you'll have a visual aid, we’ll actually map out that business hierarchy of needs, what that looks like.

If you think about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, it's the same thing but Michalowicz developed it for businesses, and at that lowest level is sales. Sometimes we don't think about this workforce challenge as a sales issue, but it absolutely is a sales issue because we don't have the workforce, you don't even have the equipment.

If you sell something to somebody but you have no means to actually execute on that, that's a problem. That means you're not going to get paid and a sale isn't complete until it goes full circle. You get to sell, you deliver, and then you get paid for that. That is a complete sale and that's the oxygen. That's the lowest level of the business hierarchy of needs that our businesses need.

Not having workforce, delayed work, having to go back and say, “We can't complete work,” having to turn down opportunities that our business needs in order to continue to grow, we have plenty of other things in the world right now that are increasing in cost that we have less control over.

This is an area where maybe we've traditionally felt like we didn't have a lot of control but I actually believe we can have a tremendous amount of control over. We need to tackle this. It is essential and for a lot of us, it's one of the very first things we need to be tackling in our businesses.

What if you didn't need to rely on those expensive, external sources to filter poor quality leads that [you need to] pain for over and over again, multiple times, sometimes multiple times even in a season.

Here are some of the things that you probably need to leverage that you may have access to inside of your business. Some of these are going to be things that you're already doing in your business, you already have departments, resources, or people working on these things in your business. Some of them are going to be things that maybe you outsource to somebody but you could also include them in an add-on like this strategy for what they're currently doing or pivot it more in this direction.

Some of them might be things that you haven't taken on yet, but you're thinking that you need to take on your business. Do you already have that HR department or is it integrated more with your admin or are you outsourcing that but you're thinking of bringing that internally into your business?

All of those are things that maybe will be reconsidered as you go through this process. But they are things that commonly, most of the businesses that I talked to are doing many of these things already or have easy access to bring these things into their business.

Let's talk about a few of these things. First off, brand strategy. I think I mentioned this a lot but people don't realize that it's one of the early things that we need to control in our business is how we're perceived by our competition, our customers, our partners, and how we're perceived helps them quickly make a decision about what category we fit into if we're useful to them, if we're a desirable partner, if we're a desirable solution provider, if we are a desirable employer.

Brand strategy is actually really, really important, and too many companies let their brand strategy be dictated by circumstances instead of actually designing and intentionally deploying that brand themselves. This is something that if you're not already doing inside of your business, you should be doing and it's part of actually developing the solution into your business.

Another area of your business is marketing. This has lots of subcategories that are directly relevant to the solution that we're finding that people can build into their business to really use to attract workforce. In your marketing, it could be using all or a portion of your social strategy to put yourself out there, really convey that brand strategy, talk about your culture.

Sometimes people don't even know that the jobs are there once they start following. Are you talking about that? Are you communicating that? Messaging is a big part of your marketing that needs to be established really early on, and it's the filter that everything needs to go through. What are your products? What are the problems that you've solved? How do you solve them? All of those things are controlled by a message and they help people, they tell people a story so that they can quickly understand what we need them to understand.

When you think about connecting people to us as a great career opportunity, a lot of it is in the storytelling and the messaging. That all follows and falls under the umbrella of your marketing.

Video is a great asset that falls under this umbrella too. Content, if you think about not just the content you're putting out, but what is your content strategy, a lot of us deal with seasonality so that content may change as we're leading up and we know what's coming in front of us.

Is it this season where we see more drop-offs? Is this season we want to be really pushing for referrals? Is it a season we want people to get excited about starting the season backup of this? What is that we want to be conveying? Are we sitting down and developing a strategy? We're intentional about the content that we're putting out there.

Also something that's highly overlooked is internal communication. Once again, this is directly linked to your messaging. You want to have a messaging framework in place, and that's the filter that everything goes through. It's really important for internal communication.

I know some of the larger companies that I talked to, I have a lot of really great contacts inside of their HR departments and I love to hear what they're doing, what they're seeing. They have huge budgets for measuring metrics, experimenting, and tracking stuff, and a lot of their HR departments are directly linked with an internal communications department.

Part of that internal communications department is actually working on the messaging to build referral programs, to partner with marketing about how to talk about the workforce that they need, gathering information from your current workforce, especially the ones that are thriving and doing well, the ones that you want to replicate and you want to have more of, understanding that and integrating that into your communications, your messaging, and your marketing.

All of that can fall underneath in marketing umbrellas for your business, and many of us have that anyway. Even if we are in a situation where we're selling to government agencies, a lot of us know that our sales teams need marketing to support their efforts, whether it's helping them communicate clearly when people are making a selection about project and solutions for their assets, all of those kinds of things, but what types of collateral, what types of presentations, all of that messaging should be supported and developed to help support your sales team and that comes from marketing. Marketing can be a great asset when it comes to your workforce solution.

Another one is obviously HR. HR needs to be deeply integrated into this process, working with marketing, understanding that brand strategy, collecting information on a regular basis for current and best employees about what their perception is, what they're looking for, how they found this, what would make them refer, do they understand the words it takes to refer, do they understand your referral program, all of those kinds of things really can be activities that fall under HR.

Then we also have a few more, there are several more but we're only going to talk about a few more today, partnerships. This can be managed by either marketing, maybe managers, or a lot of the times, it falls under HR. There are great strategic partnerships that you can find locally in your regions that can be great pipeline fillers for your program.

But those people want you to have a brand strategy. They want you to have marketing and messaging that you can clearly communicate before they want to start filtering people into your industry and to your actual place of work.

But I mentioned last time and I mentioned at the beginning of this episode, I just presented at Women in Construction, which is the parent organization of that conference is CIEF (Construction Industry Education Foundation) and they're one example of an association doing incredible work on the lower levels, high school, trade schools, really trying to capture some of those younger generations, educate them on the construction industry, build pathways into that construction industry, and actually even pair and partner local vendors and construction industry businesses with those pipelines and with those education sources.

That is an incredible partnership. That's just one example. There are actually tons of examples and I know a lot of businesses where we've actually developed and created the strategy, the messaging to go, approach, and build partnerships directly with local institutions that have great resources that have people that are best-fit candidates that just need to understand the industry, the career paths, the opportunities, and get that exposure, so that they actually start believing that this is a path they can take, they know what the next steps are, and they get familiar with your brand. Partnerships are a real integral part.

These are some of the things, training is also another area that if you have this in your business or you outsource it in your business can be really relevant. Also, you may look at developing training that houses under your HR department.

One of the reasons I think about this is when we think about our onboarding process. Onboarding can be integrated with your referral process because we know that there are certain times during the journey of an onboarding employee that we need to bolster them.

We need to make sure that they are confident about how to integrate into our team, how to really get up to productivity quickly, they get satisfaction out of those things too, then in turn, they also will participate better in referral programs which are one of the least expensive and best-fit opportunities to bring a pipeline into our business.

These are some of the things that you probably already have going on in your business or you have the resources that you can quickly integrate into your business and they would probably be providing you value on multiple levels.

That was brand strategy, your marketing which houses so many of the resources, you'll need social, video, content strategy, messaging, internal communication, communication to partners, all of those things, and they would be highly leveraged with the HR department which really may be owning this asset in your business and be that key pivot point that's managing everything else, measuring the metrics, always improving the systems, collecting information from current employees to really advise and inform the rest of the strategy on an ongoing basis.

You may have a lot of these things already in your business. You can just leverage them in a new and fresh way and leverage them in a different direction that gets another really incredible benefit for your company.

I recommend that you let all of these assets increase their ROI by building the solution to your business. You have or you need these assets in your business anyway, but they can really get an even better ROI and leverage everything you're doing in your business by creating this asset where you control this and it's an internal operation within your business.

You control your brand. You control your strategy, your messaging, your partnerships. You control how you can improve your referral programs, how your HR is managing this whole thing, how you onboard people, how you create loyalty inside of your company. You can control all of this.

With a lot of the marketing pieces, the partnerships, the referral programs that you can build in, you can have a steady pipeline of quality-fit candidates coming into your business and you can track that just like you would a marketing or a sales funnel.

You can actually see that. You can see what things are increasing it. Where do you get the best candidates? Which ones turnover more? Which ones turnover less? All of that stuff can be tracked so you can have an optimized solution built into your business.

If you don't have these assets in your business today, you can still own the solution. None of these assets are hard to borrow. Many companies in our industry use outside contractors or consultants to actually bring these things into their business until they're ready, or to help them build these assets into their business.

We actually build entire workforce programs into people's businesses, help their teams build the processes and assistance so that after six to nine months, they actually own that asset themselves. We can help them fill the gaps of anything that they're missing in their business so they actually can own it in their own company and then they can continue to operate it themselves. You can always find those outside pieces yourself to do that.

That was a quick overview of the main things that you need to be looking at inside of your company. Are you thinking about brand strategy? Are you having a session for you and the top executives, the key players in your team have decided what is the brand strategy? Where are we going? Who are we? How are we positioned in the marketplace? What are our objectives moving forward? Are we trying to be a Ford or are we trying to be a Ferrari? All of those are questions that get answered when you develop a brand strategy and they very much influence the kind of workforce that you're going to be able to attract.

Also, your marketing, your HR, and your partnerships, all super key things you already have. Discover the keys to owning your own workforce solution. This is what I challenge you to do. Look at the current assets in your business. Think about where you might have some gaps.

If you need more clarity on this, we've actually created a workforce playbook quiz. This helps you go through by answering very key, very targeted questions. In about five to seven minutes, you're going to get an idea, basically the health of your current workforce scenario.

It's also going to, based on those questions, based on the feedback you provide, give you some of those next steps to start getting you going. This conversation right here should have also helped you identify “What assets do I currently have that I can probably leverage and maybe I'm underleveraging to help me solve this problem inside of my own business?”

Make sure that you go take the quiz. It's going to help you think through this process. It's going to help you really narrow in on where you need to start, how much you can get out of a process like this, and building the solution into your own business. Then it's also going to give you some clarity on what are those few next steps that I need to take.

You can take that quiz at storybuilt.marketing/workforce. Go take that quiz. Get those insights into your current situation, but not just that, where do you go next? How do you start down this path? I'm going to help you next week in the third part of this series, we're actually going to take a look back at a model that we've already talked about, the Strategic Growth Wheel, and we're going to look at how can that be a simple guideline or a 123 process to break this down and make it really simple for you to implement and start building a solution into your business.

Now is the perfect time to really take this on and say, “I'm not going to have this problem next spring and next summer when opportunities are knocking on the door. I don't want to be delayed on projects. I don't have to be because I haven't taken action to solve this problem.”

Make sure you take that assessment now. Set aside some time to think about these things and to start implementing and building the solution into your business. Next week, we're actually going to be talking about how to use that three-step wheel to start doing that and actually break it down into those three steps for you.

Make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss that and make sure you go take the quiz so you have a little bit more clarity before we reach that part. That's at storybuilt.marketing/workforce.

Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of The Contractor's Daughter. If you liked what you heard, be sure to subscribe and review. But most of all, share this with all of your friends, partners, and customers in the highway construction business. Thank you for building the infrastructure that we all rely on.