The Home Service Expert Podcast - Top Recruitment Strategies to Attract High Caliber Talents
Episode Date: September 16, 2022Barb Bruno is the CEO of Good as Gold Training, a company that delivers comprehensive, logical, and easy to implement training to help guarantee that participants realize a strong return on their inve...stment of time and money. She is recognized internationally as one of the top experts in the Talent Acquisition and Staffing and Recruiting Professions. Barb released the book “High-Tech High-Touch Recruiting” in September 2020, a book that talks about providing recruiters with an end-to-end process for recruiting the highest caliber talent that can become engaged employees. In this episode, we talked about hiring, recruiting, training, learning management systems, interviews, performance reviews...
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And when I was an early recruiter and a younger recruiter, I used to judge people.
Like they say something and I think, well, how stupid is that?
In my head, I would think that.
I would never say it, but I thought it.
And then I learned, you know, years later that we've got to listen to people to understand where they're coming from.
Put ourselves in their shoes.
See the world through their eyes.
Because when you put yourself in their shoes, and it's not our job to agree or disagree with anybody.
It's our job to put ourselves in their shoes, understand where they are.
Then how do we put something in front of them that helps their dreams come true?
And I learned a long time ago, Tommy, people want to know three things.
Can I trust you?
Do you care about me?
And are you going to do what you tell me you're going to do?
Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs
and experts in various fields,
like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership, to find out what's really behind their success
in business. Now, your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello.
Welcome back to the Home Service Expert. I'm your host, Tommy Mello, and today I have Barbara
Bruno. She is an expert in hiring, host, Tommy Mello, and today I have Barbara Bruno.
She is an expert in hiring, recruiting, negotiation, training, and leadership.
She's based in the greater Chicago area. Barb Bruno is the CEO of Good As Gold Training,
a company that delivers comprehensive, logistical, and easy-to-implement training to help guarantee that participants realize a strong return on their investment of time and money. She is also the president of H&R Search Inc.,
which specializes in replacement of high-level HR professionals on a direct as well as contract
basis in the Chicagoland area. Barb is recognized internationally as one of the top experts
in talent acquisition and staffing and recruiting professionals. She was selected by LinkedIn Learning to create 15 recruiting courses and
speaks at most corporate and staffing events, conducts high-level consulting, offers in-house
training, and customizes webinars. She released the book, High Tech, High Touch Recruiting in
September 2020. This book talks about providing recruiters with an end-to-end
process for recruiting the highest caliber talent that can become engaged employees.
Barbara, pleasure to have you on today. I'll call you Barbara.
Thank you. That was such a long introduction. My goodness.
So I love recruiting. Recruiting to me is an extension of marketing i'm writing a book
right now that has a lot to do with recruiting and i've probably read i don't even know how many
books literally the book i always start with this came out years ago but it's a good one i give this
one out a lot i'm sure you've heard of this yes so who would uh building a systematic approach but
go ahead and talk to us a little bit.
You started a few years ago and you've been doing this a long time. And I think right now is the greatest time ever to need help with recruiting.
I look at recruiting as it's the lifeblood of a company.
One A player could run circles around three B players.
Absolutely.
Let's go ahead and jump into a little bit about your past, where you've been, where you're going, and a little bit about the book.
Okay.
I guess how I got into this was the way most of us got into it years ago, and that was kind of fell into it.
I was looking for a career change, and I was selling real estate, and I was tired of the long sales process, and I noticed recruiting was quicker.
You know, you could really put people in jobs.
You weren't as dependent on interest rates and everything. And I went to employment firms
actually looking for a job and didn't like the way I was treated. And at the time, women were
nurses, teachers, or secretaries. And I type 100 words a minute. So they kept testing my typing.
And I was like, oh my God, there's got to be more to this. And so I opened Sunshine
Employment many years ago to put sunshine in the lives of the women I represented because I was
upset. I didn't like the way I was treated. And so I entered it strictly to help women find jobs.
And I never thought this was a lifetime career decision for me, but recruiting has changed so
much over the years. I mean, it doesn't even resemble what it was three years ago.
I've been in a studio for the last year and a half changing all my training programs because
COVID has such an impact on the recruiting profession that what worked, you know, even
18 months, two years ago is not working now.
Some of the basics are the same, you know, and then I realized I would go to conferences.
I'm a lifetime learner.
I love to learn. And so I would go to conferences and I'd be sitting there going, they don't know
what they're talking about. They've never put anybody in a job. They're giving bad advice.
And one time I was in charge of a conference, our keynote speaker no-show. So I was the president
of the group. So I drew an X on a piece of paper and said, whoever gets the X is going to go do a
keynote till we figure out what we're going to do for the whole day. We have 1800 people here
and no speaker. So everybody drew first and I got the X. And I remember being in the bathroom going,
I can't do this. Like I'm not a speaker. I'm not, you know, I run a business, but come on you guys.
And they said, you made the rules. And so that's how I ended up speaking. And there were people
from all over the country there. And so they started asking me to speak, and then I realized it was too expensive. When you're in
recruiting, you need to be there. Recruiting is not a job. It's a career. It takes a lot of time
and effort, and I was losing money by being a trainer, so that's when I finally opened Good
as Gold Training because I had to turn the training into a business in order to keep doing it,
but I love recruiting.
I mean, there is no two days are alike.
We change people's lives for the better.
And you're right.
Recruiters are the heartbeat of a company.
If they don't have good recruiters, if they don't have talent,
companies are closing now because they can't find talent.
So there's never been a better time to be a recruiter than there is right now.
Yeah, you know, we've got 60 new employees that started this month.
Oh, God. Okay. Yeah. We've got an apprentice program. There's 40 of them. They start one month in their own market. They come here for a month. They train. Actually, we've got apartments
in Phoenix. We put them in and we run them through. What I say is, listen, I don't hire
anybody in our industry. I hire for attitude. We've got a complete video interview that we do.
That's basically like the sniff test. And then we've got several interviews we do afterwards.
We hire rock stars. What I focus on is I got to kind of a test. Would I go have a beer with this
person? And a lot of it has recruiting, then orienting, getting them oriented, the onboarding
process. People don't spend enough time look a lot of
them say here's your manual if they have one let's say basically uh you're going to shadow
this person for two weeks and then you're on your own and you pick up all their bad habits
and senior people i always tell new hires the greatest employees that work for us never watch
them because they can make one-fifth as many calls as you and get three times the result because they know who to call and how to call and you're right you've got to have a very
structured comprehensive training program and i don't hire anybody with experience either i hire
overachievers who want to sell you know and all i do is look for a success pattern whether they've
been whether it's a person that doesn't have a lot of experience, but they had good grades. I love to hire ex-athletes that played.
You know, I love athletes.
I like anybody that has a success pattern.
Yeah.
Anybody that's had a success pattern.
If they were an overachiever for someone else, you can teach them how to recruit.
You can't teach people how to have that drive and how to want to overachieve.
You can't set their financial thermostat up if they can't.
So I'm with you.
I hire overachievers who want to sell.
They really have very high aspirations
for what they want to achieve in life.
So someone told me, obviously,
I've always known one of my core values
is aspire to be number one.
You got to be competitive.
You got to want to win.
Number two is farmers.
That somebody that grew up hustling on a farm, they know what it's
like to do hard work. They don't have this nine to five. You know the worst thing, and I try to
get this for all of our internal customers, but everybody says I want work-life balance.
There's a great book called Off Balance on Purpose. I just tell people, listen,
I don't care how long you work.
I'm going to give you a set of KPIs and initiatives. If you spend 20 hours a week or 80 hours a week, that's going to be on you. Ultimately, I'm not going to punish you for being
amazing at what you do. So we started using the PI test predictive index, but now we use something
called the predictive predict. It actually looks at what kind of infrastructure we have for training.
And so we test all of our internal people.
Our value, I think, is 84%.
So we know if someone's going to be successful.
Do you agree with personality profiling?
I think that it's good if you know how to read it.
I made it a point to get certified with DISC because I've used DISC for a number of years.
I actually knew the gentleman that developed it way back when, and Dr. Geyer was a friend of mine.
And so they've come so far. And so I hire people that have a high eye that can influence others
because I don't care about it. If somebody is too analytical, if somebody's too detail-oriented,
they're going to have a tough time. And like when you said work-life balance,
anytime I have a coach and I always have a coach, the minute they tell me I'm not balanced,
I go, no, don't go there because I'm unbalanced and happy. Like what you define as balance and
what I define as balance. And I just got back from a conference and there were like 800 recruiters
there. And one kid stood up and said, you know, I will not work after five. I will not make calls
before nine. I want work-life balance.
And I said, great, you're going to be average. Because if you want work-life balance when you
first start, you got to pay your dues like anything else. It's going to take more time and
effort. Can you get to the point where some of the biggest billers in our profession work three or
four hours a day because they figured it out. But there are often, there's candidates that can't
talk during the day. They just can't.
And when I go to technology conferences, they go, you people are so stupid. You call us during the day. Our coworkers are next to us. My boss is across from me. And you're trying to pitch a job.
And that doesn't even work anymore. You can't pitch jobs to people. It doesn't work.
And so the work-life balance thing, I think what's great about our profession is all you
need is your mobile device. That's it.
You can be anywhere, any place. And I'm with you. My people have KPIs. We went totally virtual nine years ago when I was in downtown Chicago for 23 years. And I was commuting from Indiana
for 23 years. And they ripped up every highway. And I finally decided I'm not doing this anymore.
So two thirds of my business off, kept a third. And I've had 16 employees that have worked for me virtual for this whole period of
time. And it was funny because I maintained everything, their comp plan, their benefits,
everything's the same. They're working from home. And my thing is, as long as you hit your goals
every quarter, it's all I care about. If you don't hit your goals in a quarter, then I'll pay 50%
of your benefits. And I have never had any of them pay for their benefits because they might have an off month, but they're
not going to have an off quarter. And I'm with you. I said, KPIs, I don't care. My virtual people,
you know, they know when we have meetings, you got to show up when we're doing kickoffs,
you got to show up for certain things. But again, this isn't a job. This isn't a nine to five job.
If you want to earn six figures,
if you want to be very successful at this profession,
it does take perseverance.
It does take the determination enough
and the drive to be willing to talk to people
when they can talk to you openly.
Just going, uh-huh, when they're at work is not good enough.
So, you know, the work-life balance,
I think people in our profession
eventually have a very good work-life balance,
but you got to earn it. It doesn't come with day one. I don't think anybody in any industry just,
it takes a while. You fall on your face a bunch and then you get back up and you start to delegate
better. You start to own your calendar more. You start to get wiser. Everybody's got to do their
equity, I think, unless you've been, if you're a generational business, maybe, maybe not. But
one thing that's interesting is when you're hiring as many people as me,
I found out there's a difference between turnover and attrition.
Attrition is usually turnover is literally they're quitting because of a
problem with management leadership, or they're just not making money.
When you're hiring as many as I do,
because we're training through an apprenticeship, we have 20%.
But if they're making the past 90 days, it's very, very, very, very long. I'm okay with that
because you can't grow at the speed. We're trying to grow well over 100% a year. Most people say
you grow 10% a year is a good number to grow because 10% a year doubles after seven years,
right? What is your thought on growth and attrition?
I'm in line with you because I've had very large organizations and I've had multiple offices and I've done a tremendous amount of hiring, but I believe that you hire as best as you can. And
then we have an 80-day program. We put them through and every five days they're being tested.
They have to take the training, they're working with people. So we really guide them.
And I only let people start on one half of the process.
We only start them on the recruiting side of the process.
We don't have them doing any client development.
It's strictly the recruiting side because that gets them up and running much quicker.
So for the first 60 days, they're strictly recruiting.
And then at the end of 60 days, we decide, are they going to stay recruiting?
If they've hit KPIs and they've got the desire to keep going and doing client development, we let them. So we have a very
structured program, but you're going to lose some people. And the other thing that I do is that has
really stopped even the attrition as well as the turnover is we bring them into our office.
Now that we're virtual, bring them in and have them work with somebody and watch the job being
done. You can talk about it. You can say what it is. People are hearing how great
recruiting is. Recruiting is now one of the top 20 jobs out there. But part of a hiring process,
after we've given them a job description, they know everything about us. We've had three interviews
with them. We've done a disk profile on them. We bring them in and tell them they're going to
observe for four hours. And we just have them watch somebody doing recruiting calls. And then after about an hour, we say, what do you think? And I'm telling
you at that point, we'll have one out of three say, well, how long do I have to do that before
I don't have to do that? And we're like, what? We thought we were really clear that that's part of
the job. Or that I could do that with my hands tied behind that. Great. Here's a script. Here's
a Gmail account. We want you to make some calls, you know, and just see how you feel. And so we actually have them make calls. We pay them for the three hours,
we pay them an amount for working for three hours, and they don't know that they're going to make
calls. We, you know, we role play with them. We make calls in front of them. And then we just
watch them. You'll pick up phone fear. You'll pick up people that are too social that have to
talk about every up or down, you know, or people that just sit there and they're there, they make one call and then they're like going nuts trying to
pick up the phone, you know, to make another call. And so ever since we've done that, it really cut
down on everything. I mean, because once they tried the job before we hired them, one out of
three make it. So that last part of our interviewing process, and before we would have hired all three of them, just to be honest with you, we would
have hired all three because we had done everything.
We checked references.
We felt good about them.
They hit the disk profile.
They did everything, but they didn't do the job.
And we realized that, wow, sometimes you don't know until you put the phone in front of somebody
and say, okay, you're trained now.
Go do it if they can do it or not.
You know, I've read this stuff. What's crazy is I've been reading this over and over and over,
and also get them out of the interview because there's professional interviewers,
get them out to lunch, get them out to dinner, look into their car, ask if they'll drive.
Oh, absolutely.
All these things, meeting the significant other, selling the significant other on the job,
because those hard days, and then what Dave Ramsey talks about is do they have
mutual respect for one another? Because if they're having a hard time at home and they hate each
other, it's hard to turn that off. It's hard to say, I can't stand my wife or husband, but I'm
going to come into work as a happy go lucky person every day. Right. And the other thing we do is we
give bonuses to our people all the time that they can share with their family. Like I don't only bonus top production. I've always bonus effort, especially when they're new,
you know, I'll see somebody and I'll give them a dinner for four at, it could be at Applebee's or
if they've got little kids, chunky cheese, $150 gift certificate to chunky cheese or miniature
golfing or to the AMC theater just for effort. And when they stop bringing those home, their
family's like,
well, why haven't you brought any stuff home lately?
And we'll do it strictly on effort
or we'll see them really going out of their way to do things.
So we try to also put bonuses in there
that they can enjoy with their family
because then their family doesn't mind
if they're making a few calls at night.
You know, my kids knew we ate dinner,
they did their homework, I made my calls.
That was just part of the deal.
This is literally gold because I think a lot of people out there need to realize.
The big thing I see is the onboarding process takes, I think, an average of 40 days.
We got it down to 10.
We got it to where when you start with your interview, you're onboarded.
We do drug tests, background checks, DMV records.
We're doing ride-alongs.
We got a ride-along form.
How often are you on social media?
Are you asking good questions? Are you sober? Does your car look clean? All these things.
That's just a ride-along form, but we're not doing what I would call a ride-along for CSRs
and dispatchers. That's something I'm going to change actually right when we get off the podcast.
Implement, implement, implement. So many people, they're going to listen to this podcast. They're
going to go, we really need to do that. We should listen to this podcast again. They're not going to do it.
Well, and if you're having issues, all I have to say to people, it drives me crazy
when people will call or they'll hire me to give them advice. And then I give them advice. And then
they try to argue with me. Well, that's not the way we do it. Well, your way is not working.
So if you love your results, if you're hiring people and you're getting the best people and
they're not turning over, they're becoming engaged and retained, that's great.
But if that's not your case, then quit blaming people.
Everybody's pointing fingers at the millennials.
Well, guess what?
They're 54% of the workforce.
Millennials and Gen Z are 54% of the workforce as of today.
In 2025, they're going to be 70% of the workforce.
That's two and a half years away. And yes, they think a little bit different than baby boomers and other people, but they offer a
tremendous amount, but you've got to know what excites them. I mean, they want to know about
your culture. I don't care what their job is. If they don't know how their job helps you attain
your goals as a company, they don't feel important. They're going to quit. They want a mentor. What I
would have considered micromanaging, they like that constant feedback.
If I did a great job and my boss walked by my desk and said, Barb, great job.
I was fine.
They want it on the company intranet.
They want you to put something on Facebook that they did a great job.
You know, it's the recognition.
You know, so many of the problems, it's not that you got to quit pointing fingers out
and blaming everybody and everything. Every time you point a finger, there's three fingers pointing back at you.
What can you do different? If you haven't changed your manuals, if you haven't changed your training
programs, if you're not recruiting different, the other thing too is, and I'm getting off track here,
but if 40% of your new hires are not referrals, then there's a problem. If your people love
working for you and they love their job and
they love you, they should be bringing people that they know. People are more networked today
than they've ever been. The best resource for top talent are your current employees. 40% of you
hires. And look at this, either your employees are your army of recruiters or they're being
recruited away by your competition. There's nothing else.
They're either your army of recruiters telling everybody, you got to come and work here,
or they're being recruited away.
And so what are your employees?
Are you getting employee referrals?
If not, your employee referral program probably sucks.
Well, that's the problem too, is I give about $1,500 to recruit somebody.
But here's what I say.
Some people say, you know, the old movie, always be closing with alec baldwin i say always always be recruiting and so attribution is one of the
hardest things because some of my people but here's what i've learned we got performance pay
on everything by majority performance pay which you can get out as much as you put in so ultimately
what i love is i've got an eight- step sales process that works every time they follow my process.
They're successful. I've never built an LMS and program for recruiting.
So the other day, you know, a few months ago, I went out and I showed them when I'm getting my haircut, how I recruit.
So we took videos. I went to a bar, recruited there.
Then I went to a discount tire, recruited there. And I just said, keep your eyes peeled all the time. You never know. Talk to customers. The thing is we're
building a process where I call it micro influencers, where you get the family involved.
You teach them how to grow their social media, how to go to a B and I group. I'll stand up in
a B and I meeting and I'm teaching them how to do this. Say, hi there guys. My name is Tommy
Melo. I own a one garage for a service. fix, repair, install garage drawers, but that's not what I'm here to talk to you about. Obviously,
the garage drawer is 40% of your curb appeal. It's the smile of your home. If you need anything,
a great referral. The smile of your home. Oh my God, I love that. I love that. Okay.
We trademark that. And then I say, listen, if you know somebody that's just amazing,
they're passionate, they want to win. They love to succeed. They're
competitive. I've got a job for them. We've got CSRs that are making $30 an hour. My internal
customers, my fellow employees that I work with, they're just an amazing group of people.
We give them, if they've got a will, we'll find a way and I'll pay you $500 for anybody that we
hire. We've got a great way to pay you because you're the gift that keeps feeding us. So we'll
make sure you get paid. I love to give bonus referrals out there to the people that help us
recruit, but just, you can find somebody, a good looking gal at a bar that knows a thousand people.
Absolutely. Absolutely. Look at these energy drinks. So
the other thing too, is if you could have your employees make videos, videos are so important
right now.
That's why I've been in the studio.
Nobody wants to read and somebody wants to watch short videos.
And LinkedIn Learning taught me the first time I went there, they were 15-minute videos.
I'm doing two courses for LinkedIn right now.
And one is how do you identify transferable skills when you're interviewing and hiring?
How do you do that?
So I'm writing that course as we speak.
But it's interesting because now the courses are three minutes, the lessons are three minutes long, 500 words.
Yeah. So if you could have your employees, like your CSRs and the people that, I love my job,
and this is why, and they post that on their social media site, those kind of on their phone,
on their iPhone, they just make a video themselves. That really does attract people.
All of you listening,
if you're not using videos right now, you've got to do stay interviews for your employees that are there. Too many companies do a hiring interview and they do an exit interview. And there's no
stay interviews. There might be a performance review, but stay interviews are the key to
engagement and retention. Once a quarter, you need to take your employees out to lunch, out to dinner,
not you as the boss, but somebody in the company and just say, why do you love working for us?
What is it about our company that you love? Would you make a video for us? We would love to
highlight you on our website. And also, where can we improve? Because if you want to stay ahead of
the curve, if you want to really improve engagement and retention, and you want to become that magnet
for top talent,
you got to do stay interviews once a quarter with all your people. And I don't care how many people
there are, get them out of work and take them to lunch, take them to dinner and just talk to them
because they'll tell you what you're doing right. They'll tell you where you need to improve.
And you got to ask them. The thing is, is you got to have a path too. I have a direct path. People
know how to get ahold of me. They don't use it very often.
But there are times that you get managers
that are just poor leadership.
That's why I look at,
I look at fallout rate per hiring manager.
And obviously I had my top guy say to me,
yeah, everybody's a little bit different.
I said, no, I need you to say the same questions.
Now they might go a different direction.
It should be like a decision tree.
Here's what I'm looking for when I interview somebody.
I'm looking for scenario questions that are yes or no.
I'm looking for them.
When is the last time you did something very successful in a past career that you're proud of?
And here's what I'm looking for.
I'm looking for them to say we.
You know, me and my team, we, we, we.
But if they say I, I, I.
There's a great book called The Destructions of a Team.
But the other one that he wrote, he wrote a lot of books.
But it's
oh, wait, man, what is it? He said that the top three things and people are they're smart,
they're hungry. Oh, I can't remember the name of the book. Darn it. I was going to show you.
So this is what I had done a couple of weeks ago, and I haven't got a lot of time to really mess with this yet. But do you know that with Beard Shove Dollar Shaving Club, they didn't advertise to men?
You know, most of my technicians happen to be males.
It's just the world we live in that we hire females.
But ultimately, technicians, I'm trying to be a two-to-one ratio.
I'm trying to get two technicians for every one person supporting them or installer.
So my guys are not job jumpers.
And where's the best place to hire somebody?
Somebody that already has a job, not an, you know,
indeed zip recruiter, career builder, monster, all these work.
Oh, here it is.
He was never home.
He actually was working 70, 80 hours a week sometimes at home
until like nine or 10 or something.
He was gone all the time.
He missed, you know, sports events, school events.
You know, he missed a lot of that because we couldn't afford for him not to miss work.
They kind of let us down.
There was a promise of like a guarantee that fell through.
There was a promise of like a certain amount of calls that Eric would get, and that fell through.
Well, he had other sales jobs, and they weren't fulfilling the products that he was selling.
I did research on Tommy. I did research on this company and I was like, look, they're doing this, they're doing
that. And so it was kind of like a no brainer for us. A1, and I mean this sincerely, if you're
looking for a job that will give you satisfaction, will allow you to make as much money as you are
motivated to make, they have your back
i didn't think he was working because he came home so happy like literally like he'd come home
and such a good he's like you can tell he was tired he was genuinely anyways no that kind of
stuff i'm always thinking i want to get my guys out there coaching their kids in soccer and baseball
i want to show people that this is the real deal. And I want to say, you have a choice out there. Like you said, a lot of people, I think the stat is over 68% of people are
unhappy with their current environment or willing to leave. According to LinkedIn's latest, I do
courses for them. So I've got access to their big data. 82% of all people would make a change.
The other thing that's important for everybody listening to this to know is that last year in 2021,
companies spent $2.5 billion with a B on job board ads, $2.5 billion, and it's not working.
Why are all those job boards going into different businesses? Why are they all offering different
things? Because job boards only attract 15% of the job seekers, 15, one, five.
The other 85% are out there working and 80% of them would make a change if you would talk
to them, but you can't pitch a job to them.
If you want to recruit people, just ask them, what do you see yourself doing next?
The biggest problem people make when they're hiring is they advertise or they use the same
means that everybody else is using.
No, go out there and talk to people that are working and don't say you've got a job and talk about a specific job.
What do you see yourself doing next? What's important to you in your next move? What do
you see as your next career move? And then when you find out what's important to them,
then show them how your job can offer them what they're looking for. The biggest mistake people
make on in-mail, email, voicemail is they're pitching, pitching, pitching, selling too soon before they let the job seeker talk about what's important to them. Once you
know what's important to them, and if you want to know why they'll leave their job, if you ask them,
why would you make a change? They're going to give the same 13 answers they've been giving for the
last 30 years. Ask them this question. What are the five things you change about your current job
if you were your boss? That's the reason they're talking to you. If you ask somebody, give me the five things you would
change if you were your boss. If it's only money and advancement, they're going to take a counter
offer. So it's got to be other things that a counter offer will not address. And that's the
way to find out why people are really leaving. And one more question, what must be there for
you to accept a job today? Those two questions, now you know what has to be there, what they change.
And they might tell you what they change about their current job.
And you realize, uh-oh, that exists here too.
Then you know they're not a match.
So that's the way to find out why are they really looking.
And then what must be there?
And then you, you know, job seekers feel like a number right now.
They're tired because everybody's looking to hire.
They're being tired of being pitched. And so we have to quit pitching specific jobs and pitch questions about what do
you want to do next? What's important to you? And then when you find out what's important to them,
then you realize, okay, can we offer them what they want? Then you can go into what you have
to offer. But we got to quit selling so quick as recruiters, slow it down a little bit, which I
never thought you'd hear those words out of my mouth. But nowadays you have to do that. Find out what's important to
them and position yourself as a solution. Hey, I hope you're enjoying this conversation. I just
want to take a five second break to let you know that the tickets for my next Vertical Track event
are now on sale. Just go to verticaltrack.com to learn more and get a guaranteed seat before the prices go up.
Now back to our interview. I love that. There's a great book by Dale Carnegie that I'm sure you're
familiar with based on your book style background, How to Win Friends and Influence People. And it's
active listening and digging in more and more and more and saying, really? Now that really
interests me. Tell me more about that. And just acting engaged, you know, we hired what you call a dream manager. I don't know if you ever heard of a dream manager. There's a book called Dream
Manager. Her job is literally to work with our people. We focus on a hundred dreams. Some of
them are your 10 year anniversary. Where do you want to travel to? What's your bucket list? Some
of them are home ownership, great credit card scores, moving up in the company.
And our job is to help them accomplish their dreams. No one really cares that if we hit a billion dollars, like my goal, they care about what does that mean for me? Obviously, we're
changing an industry. They're happy about that. We're doing some cool things, but getting them
to buy into the core values, the mission, vision. And I always say my dream, my vision, my goals
have to be big enough to fit everybody else's in there too. It can't be just me winning.
And my next book I'm writing is basically all about everybody needs to win.
People ask me, well, what's your why? I say, it's pretty vague. I want to do what I want,
when I want, with who I want. But now I want that for each and every person I get to work with.
Another thing that we do, Tommy, that really works is right after Thanksgiving every year,
I have people write 10 non-negotiable goals for next year.
What are you trying to do in all areas of your life that are important to you?
It could be career, money.
It could be health.
It could be personal.
It could be spiritual, philanthropic.
If they really had a great year, earned great money because they're doing a great job,
what would they do for themselves and the people they love?
But more importantly than writing down the 10 goals is I ask them to write down five dated
action items under each goal. So each goal, they have to break it down into five steps that are
dated because if people give goals, what I realized my people did for years was they give me their
goals. And then I'd ask them the next year to get, do their goals. They'd pull them out from a drawer,
change the year. Cause they still liked them. them you know they would just change the year give me the same goals again and i was
like wait i gotta do something here so now i make them do five steps under each goal and they're
posted and if you can see right there there's my goals above my flowers those are my 10 goals
and as i'm achieving them i'm highlighting the. The five dated actions are the steps. And most of my
team right now, because we're more than half the year gone, most of them have hit six or seven of
their goals because a lot of us add goals on as the year goes on. But unless you see in front of
you, no one's going to hit a, you know, be better, do whatever for your reasons. They're going to do
it for their own reasons, not your reasons. You know what I'd like to do if you're open to this and maybe you could use yours or white out, you know, white out. I'd
love to get a sample of this. If everybody wants to go to homeserviceexpert.com forward slash B
and then Bruno. So B-B-R-U-N-O. I'm going to have everything on her page. Do you have an external
course for people?
What I do is I teach people how to recruit. So I've got tutors that I developed online. Like I
just had to design a new learning management system that I actually launched this past Thursday
because I did all this recording in a studio, not thinking about, I had my own LMS that I've
done training in 15 countries for 15 years. Okay. But I didn't even think about,
okay, I'm converting all this written training into video. When we went to load it on my LMS,
we almost blew it up. It almost crashed. And I was like, crap. Well, then I tried to buy an LMS,
but they charge people per user per month. And the cost is really, yeah. So I developed my own LMS
that I launched last Thursday. And now I'm taking all my courses and putting on that. So I developed my own LMS that I launched last Thursday, and now I'm taking all my courses
and putting on that. So I have a 10 day course that teaches talent acquisition people, like
people in companies, how to recruit, how to do what we do. And then I've got courses for the
staffing and recruiting profession on how do you do what we do? So I have these tutors and now
they're all videos that we're just launching now. They're all brand new things that I've just
recorded over the last couple of months because a lot of things have
changed and I also needed a new LMS. But what I can do is I've got training that I'll share with
you that you can share with your listeners that shows them how to do the top 10 negotiable goals.
The other hint I want to give everybody, there's something else that was a life changer for me.
And I got this from a coach, God, 20 years ago, where I just felt,
you know, best use of your time. You can't manage time. You can just manage what you do.
But all he had me do was write down my top six priorities every night before I left work.
And for me, it's six things that are closest to the money. And I try to get four done by noon.
For other people, it could be six top priorities every day because we're so busy and technology
is so distracting.
You know, like I've even teach people don't answer email all day long. It's usually the
priorities of other people. How do you make best use of your time? And so I've got all kinds of
things that I try to teach people that I've learned by mistakes. But if you just put six
top priorities every night before you leave work that you're not going to leave tomorrow till those
six are done and 10 outgoing calls, because too often we're controlled by the incoming calls by the incoming email so i
want everybody that works for me what are the 10 most important calls outgoing you have to make
tomorrow and what are the six top priorities you have to finish and do four by noon then every day
you leave feeling very very satisfied because what you're doing, your priorities is helping those goals
come true. But I'll send you that goal training free and you can just-
Yeah, I love that. Yeah, we'll make that available for the listeners. One of the things that I tell
people is own your day. I mean, if you look at my calendar, it is, I own it and everything's
got to make the calendar. It's communicating with relationships. If you don't build time,
you'll never get the time. There's this gal, I listened to a book. I don't remember who it was,
but she said, and I haven't done it, but she said, write your one big goal. Cause that one big thing
takes the most time. And you tend to wait until the last minute to do it, but you write it on
the back and you don't leave work until you get it done. And every day you got a new sticky note
on the back of your, uh, that's just reminding you i think a lot
of times it's so hard because social media is still so many people's oh god social media tv
the news all that good stuff you know if they would just replace it with reading a book every
two weeks forever news is so negative like i i literally would never get up and watch the news
the only time i turn the tv on is when I'm traveling and training because I'm lonely in a hotel room. So
I'll turn it on for noise. And then I realized how noisy, like I consider negativity noise.
And the other thing I think that's important when you talked about listening earlier,
I think that we've got to listen when we have customers or clients. And when you're trying to
recruit somebody, when I was an early recruiter and a younger recruiter, I used to judge people. They say
something and I think, well, how stupid is that? In my head, I would think that. I would never say
it, but I thought it. And then I learned years later that we've got to listen to people to
understand where they're coming from, put ourselves in their shoes, see the world through their eyes.
Because when you put yourself in their shoes,
and it's not our job to agree or disagree with anybody. It's our job to put ourselves in their shoes, understand where they are, then how do we put something in front of them that helps their
dreams come true? And I learned a long time ago, Tommy, people want to know three things.
Can I trust you? Do you care about me? And are you going to do what you tell me you're going to do?
If you do that with your employees, if they could put that to the bank, if they know they can trust you and you can't tell them you care about them. Everybody
laughs that I should be from Missouri because I talk as cheap. I don't believe half of what people
tell me. I just don't. I watch what they do. If you tell me this is your priority, then I'm going
to look at your calendar and I'm going to see where do you spend your time and your money?
Because that's really your priorities. So people want to know, can I trust you? Do you care about me? And are you going to do what you promised me? And if your
people can answer yes to all three of those things, they're not going to leave you. No one in my
organization has a title manager. They all have the leadership title because managers have
subordinates, leaders have followers. I want my managers to lead my people where they want to go
for their own reasons.
And when you start developing that kind of attitude, it just works. You're not going to lose your people and you're going to become that magnet for talent. You'll become a company that's
noted that you care and you will attract the people you need to hire. We're working right
now on gamification and just contests. And I'll tell you as a millennial i think i'm like 1983 was the last year so i'm like right when it started but i just love personal development but
i love winning as a team and i just think prizes and gamification is just when we do gamification
and we have contests we see shit just fly through the roof with the behaviors we want and if you
get people give them a short-term goal and keep having them do it, it starts to become a habit.
So, you know, it's interesting what you learn over time.
I love your four hours.
It's something I'm going to initiate right away.
So tell me your little tricks and best practices as far as interviews.
What seems to make a huge difference?
Well, let me tell you what people do wrong.
Okay, let's start there.
They assume that what somebody is doing is what they want to do.
When you hire passive candidates who are working, don't assume for a minute that what they're
doing is what they want to do.
That's why you can't put your job too early.
A lot of people want to do something different.
Number two, too many people hire who they like.
Instead of having a process, they just hire who they like.
If they've got the same bad habits as you do, you hire them because you like them.
The third thing is they don't have five performance objectives up front.
And this amazes me that people don't do this up front.
If I'm going to hire for a job, I know the five performance objectives.
I know what this person has to do in six months or a year to get a stellar evaluation. And I can tell you, I have
people call and they say, they tell me what they want. They gave me this long laundry list of what
they're going to hire. And then I asked for performance objectives and half the time they
don't even know. And I said, well, how are you going to evaluate this person in six months to a year?
And then I see this tremendous disconnect between all these
skills they told me they have to have and how they're going to evaluate this person. They've
asked for things the person's never going to do. And they didn't ask for things that they're going
to judge this person on. And then I have them break down the job by percentages, like interviewing.
You can't interview somebody unless you know how you're going to evaluate them. You can't
interview them unless you know what percentage of the time are they doing what?
If a job has, say I'm installing a garage door and I know nothing about installing a
garage door, nothing.
I know there's that big spring that could kill somebody.
That's all I know.
And I know when my garage door breaks, I'm on the phone instantly getting a new one,
you know, that you just do that.
But say that there's five parts to the job.
Well, if you tell me to find you a garage door opener and you give me five things, I'm
going to think they're doing all five things 20% of the time.
And half the time, one thing might be 90% and the other four might be 10%.
That's a very different job.
So break down your job by percentages, what percentage of the time, figure out how you're
going to evaluate people, and then ask the same questions of every person you interview.
I'll give your listeners another thing and remind me after this one, I'm promising because
I'm not writing it down.
But there's 10 questions you can ask and you should ask them in every interview and it'll
prevent you from doing a bad hire.
Even what job offers have you gotten and turned down?
People don't ask that and you can have the same exact job they just turned down and you're
wondering why they're not taking it. So I'll give you a list of 10 questions that you can share with all your
listeners that if they ask those questions, they're going to know. And I'm going to give
you the question and then what you're trying to learn by asking the question. So I'll give you
the top 10 questions. Yeah, I'm really looking forward to those 10 questions. How do you create
urgency? So one of the things I found out was our background check took way too long.
So we got a faster background check.
The drug test could be a pain in the butt.
What do you think gets in the way of a lot of people with the hiring process?
What gets in the way is people are not only interviewing for your job.
They're very well connected.
So the minute they go to interview with you, they start interviewing with other people.
They reach out to even their passive candidate not looking.
If you get them looking for a job and you're only talking to them about one thing, they're going to
start looking at other jobs on their own. And so timing is everything. And I believe in asking
people, what is your target date to start a new job? Because we forget to do that. We think, well,
if we move fast enough and maybe they've got a birthday party at work that they don't want to
miss in three weeks. I mean, you've got to know that timing is everything in recruiting. If somebody says no to you, when you're trying to
recruit them, you've got to form a lifelong relationship. You've got to get them in your
database. You've got to keep sending them birthday cards or keep them in the pipeline. Because when
people say no one recruiting, it's not like dating. No one recruiting says not yet. When someone says
no to you, timing is not right. But very few people
are going to retire from their current job. So when someone says no to you, they're saying not
yet, keep them in the pipeline, but get their target date to fill. And then tell them your
hiring process and make your hiring process one week longer than it is. So if something stupid
happens, you're going to get faster than they're expecting. Because if you tell them, well, we're
just going to run this check. We'll have it in a couple of days. If you don't call them in two or three days,
they're rejecting you because they feel you rejected them. So you got to get a life.
Even when we buy companies, people don't understand. This is their life you're dealing
with. This is everything they do. This is yourself in their shoes. They're putting food on the table.
They've got plans. This is their everything.
Sometimes we go, oh, sorry, I didn't get to that.
Well, that's just saying, sorry, your life doesn't matter to me. Right.
I just don't think a lot of people have the ability to put
themselves in another person's shoes.
It's unfortunate because
literally, if we're partnering
with a company that's been around for 40 years,
some of these people,
they're like, are you
interested? You haven't called back. We don't know if you like us or not. Same thing with an employee,
you know, and I call them, you know, my coworkers here. When we have an opportunity to hire somebody
that we love, it's up to us to move quickly because we know they have other options.
Oh my God. And you can't ask somebody if they're interested because they'll say yes.
What you have to do is quantify answers.
When someone says yes, on a scale of one to 10, 10 being you'd accept a job today, one being you hate us.
Where are you?
Because they could say I'm interested and then you ask them how interested I am for.
Well, they just told me they were interested.
I go for what would make it a 10.
Well, nothing because I found another job I'm interviewing with that's two blocks closer and is paying more money. So when they're interviewing, make sure that when it comes to interest level, timing, or whatever, you quantify answers on a scale of 1 to 10.
When you use numbers, that's why I say get a date that they want to change on a scale of 1 to 10.
Because everybody's going to say they're interested, but they could be a 2 on a scale of 1 to 10, and you're wasting your time.
If they say a 2, I'm going to say, so you're saying there's a chance.
I love you. I love you. I love these conversations because literally what the podcast has done for
me, I've been doing this since 2017 and I get to ask any questions I want.
Right.
People have the same questions.
So I'm here in the fight that we're all in every day trying to get, you know, we've got a little over 500 people
and I still think I'm in the fetal stages.
Like the one thing I will say is sometimes I implement too quickly.
I'm like, let's go.
But Adil, you've been doing this a long time.
You're very, very good.
You're a specialist.
You're not a generalist.
You know how to recruit.
So we should probably be listening.
And how many companies do you think
you've worked with in the past?
Oh my God.
I've had over 30,000 people go through my tutors.
And I've had 2.4 million take my LinkedIn courses.
I love that.
Yeah.
I love it.
So how does those LinkedIn courses work?
You just go to LinkedIn learning and type in my name and all the courses pop up.
Really? Yeah. All of you should follow me on LinkedIn because every piece of advice,
I do two posts a week on LinkedIn and they're all about recruiting. They all are. And then I also,
LinkedIn lets me open courses that I could open my virtual interviewing course for the whole month
of June. Anybody could have taken it free and it taught people how to do virtual interviews. And so the
courses, how LinkedIn learning does it, you pay like, I don't know, so many dollars a month and
you can take all the courses you want. And they've got courses on every possible thing you could
possibly imagine from photography to gardening, to recruiting, to anything else. They've just got a massive amount of training and it's
extremely reasonably priced. So if you had to say your top three courses for someone in the
home service space, do you know off the top of your head? Yeah, I would say just the fundamental
recruiting course that would teach them. If somebody has their own business, what they would
be smarter to do, I mean, the LinkedIn learning courses are great virtual interviewing. You absolutely should take because that will teach
you how to do virtual interviews where a lot of people are not doing them. Well, the course I'm
doing right now, that'll be launched in November, which is how do you recognize transferable skills?
This is one of the best courses I've written. I just wrote four lessons over the weekend. So,
you know, look for that course. The other thing is my book is a textbook
on how do you do recruiting. When Kogan Page came to me from London, they said, Barb, we need a
textbook. We're the largest distributor of textbooks in colleges and in libraries. Can you
write a textbook on recruiting? And I said, sure. Who is it written for? And they said, well, it's
written for people that are hiring, that are finding people jobs, hiring managers for talent
acquisition people and staffing and recruiting firms. And I go, well, that's two books because staffing and
recruiting firms do it different than in-house. And they go, are you saying you can't do it?
And I go, oh no, no, I'll do it. You say yes. And then you figure out how you're going to do
it afterwards. But that is really a textbook. There are scripts in there. It's my brain dump.
And I just wrote it last year. So it's very current. It's high tech, high touch recruiting. It's 25 bucks on Amazon and it's a handbook on how do you recruit.
I'm looking right now. I think I have this, but I just re-bought it again, just in case.
So when it comes to these things, there's a lot of stuff that it goes on. You said you do three
interviews. Let's go over real quick. What's the three interviews? Well, there's a lot of stuff that it goes on. You said you do three interviews.
Let's go over real quick. What's the three interviews?
Well, there's an initial, I don't call the screening on the resume and interview, but obviously when you look at a resume or CV, we're looking for a track record of success.
I want to track record of success. Then there's an initial interview and we ask people 20 questions.
We've come up with the 20 questions that we need for our business to know that they're
going to succeed with us.
And so that's interview number two.
Interview number three is an interview with our team.
We've given them a job description.
We've given them everything to know that we have the team take them to lunch because
we want an interview off premise because we learn a lot when somebody is not on premise.
And then the final step in our interviewing process is bringing them in and actually having them do the job, having them see the job and do the job.
Because I don't care how much you talk about a job when someone sees it. I go to conventions
all the time and recruiters go, you know, I can't believe how much they want me on the phone.
Are you kidding me? That's the job. And so just having them see it and touch it and feel it and smell it, it's much different
than them hearing about it.
You know, I got so much out of this and I think everybody that's listening did.
I don't know if you'd consider, can we do a part two after I fly through your book again?
Oh, sure.
Absolutely.
Anything I can do to help people.
I'm at the point of my career too, where I'm really giving back as much as I can.
That's why I do so much on LinkedIn free
and do other things for people.
So I would welcome it.
And I love your energy.
You know, I don't usually podcast.
I'm kind of going like, oh my God,
it's the hour here yet because it's kind of dragging
and you're just fun to interact with.
So of course I would do that for you.
That's great.
Yeah, no, I actually love these things.
There's certain interviews I do that I'm like,
oh my God, I can't do this.
I'm literally counting up till the hour.
Yeah.
We really focus on getting really great people on here
that really understand what it's like in professionals.
So, you know, I've got some questions we didn't hit,
but I always ask the same thing.
Let me just ask one more thing real quick.
Sure.
And I've got a few questions we'll close out with.
When it comes to
creating performance
reviews, one of the things
that I've always recommended is at least
I love one-on-ones.
And I've got this weekly form
that actually people, your direct
reports actually, they present
to you. They're saying,
what were my biggest struggles this week that I accomplished
what I was trying to do? What were my KPIs? We go over them, but they're presenting to me and giving the presentation
skills. I think so many people, they try to manage their people through team meetings rather than
one-on-ones. But overall, what would you say is the best way to accomplish really good performance
reviews? Well, again, we're doing quarterly
stay interviews, which really help us. And then we do performance reviews every six months and
we give the employees a form and we fill out a form and we have different performance reviews
for different jobs. I mean, because we're basing it on, we look at the performance objectives of
each job and the performance review form mirrors the performance objectives of the job because you
want them to know, like we tell them when we share performance objectives with new hires,
this is what you're going to be evaluated on in six months to a year.
So they know it.
Their leader knows what they're being evaluated on.
So the performance review is reflecting the performance objectives of the job.
And then we have them fill it out and they grade themselves on a scale of one to five
in various areas.
And then we fill it out and we copy it before the performance reviews. It's one-on-one we meet
and we compare our performance reviews because sometimes somebody gives themselves a five,
which is a great score. And we give them a two and they're like, oh my God, you know,
I thought I was doing, you know, and so it's really interesting to see how they grade themselves
as compared to how we grade them. And then we ask them things
like, are there any skills you have that you're not using? What do you like best about your job?
Where can we improve? So we're also giving their feedback in the performance reviews on how they
feel about our company. But I think when you have them fill it out and you fill it out, eventually,
like right now, my tenured people were spot on, same exact numbers, same exact review, because
they know what we expect.
We know what they're doing. And performance reviews should be respectful. You don't take
any interruptions. They have your undivided attention because that's what people value
most is your time. And when you show them you care, remember, they want to know if you care
about them. You care enough about them to do a personal evaluation. It means a lot to people.
If you capture a person's heart, you capture their spirit, and they're going to be very dedicated to you. And you're
not going to capture their heart. Their mind's going to follow if they feel cared about. So I
think the one-on-one is very important. I love this stuff. It's gold.
That's what I'm talking about. It's good as gold.
You named it perfect. Good as gold training.
So how does someone get ahold of you
if they want to reach out?
My personal email is bbruno,
b-b-r-u-n-o at goodasgoldtraining.com.
They can connect with me on LinkedIn.
It's Barb Bruno, you know,
and I can give you our office number
if you want to give that out.
Our phone number is 219-663-9609
so if they want to have a conversation with me about any training or that just call that number
and you know we'll be in touch with them okay same question i ask on every interview is there's three
books obviously the e-myth is one that always comes up ultimate sales machine there's a lot
of great books who i can go on or
not but are there three books that maybe aren't the average cliche books that really have helped
you grow your book obviously is is a great one here high tech high touch recruiting are there
three books that really stood out to you that helped you grow whether it's personal or business
right and you're going to hate this because one of the books is a book that everybody talks about, but I read Think and Grow Rich every
year. I read it between Thanksgiving and Christmas every year. And the reason I do that is because
every time I read it, I learned something new because I'm reading it as a different person.
Okay. My second favorite book is All the Places You'll'll go and it's a book by dr seuss
and every time i place somebody in a job in a new career every time we hire somebody
we give them the book i know isn't this crazy this is crazy that i do that and the reason i do that
is it's a very simple book but it gets people to really think about it and i've gone into ceo
offices and they've got my book on their desk and they go, Barb,
I love that.
Like, I love that.
My other favorite books right now, I'm reading a lot of Jeff Gittimer's.
Jeff Gittimer wrote the sales Bible.
Jeff Gittimer.
I got all of his books.
I got the trick.
I love him.
I love him.
He's a genius.
I just got his last book, the yellow one.
I don't believe.
So I've been reading a lot of Jeff's and Jeff and I have spoke at the same conferences on
several occasions and he gives very good sales training and he's just a genius.
Yeah.
He's genius sales trainer.
So I've been catching up on some of his books.
I used to buy this book, who moved my cheese and I'm thinking about doing it again, but
have you ever heard of the book?
Go for now, go for now.
Now it's a tiny book.
Okay.
And I give it to every one of my salespeople and the concept is always go
for no instead of counting how many yeses you get hit 200 no's in a week because when you go for no
there's a guy and he basically bumps his head and meets a different version of himself and he goes
remember when we used to be working at the men's apparel store and he's talking to the rich version of himself he's like right yeah he goes remember when we sold twelve hundred
dollars to that guy we sold him everything we showed him so we sold the belts the jacket the
shoes the pants yeah and he goes you remember what the manager said to us and he goes yeah he said
you set a record that day but when did the client say no and the guy goes what do you mean
he never said no he said yes to everything and he goes there's a full store here full of apparel
he could have probably spent 20 000 you thought it was a lot because it was a record 1200 but
he might about 20 000 so go for no i think it's a really cool little book but i'm gonna start buying
all the places in the world so we got think and and Grow Rich, all the places you'll go.
The other thing, too, is I firmly believe if you're in sales, I believe you got to talk to 20 new people every day of your life.
20 new people every day.
If you tell 20 new people how you can benefit them, you can't fail.
And if you're not getting rejected every single day, I was a single mom for years.
And if I would go on a date, they wouldn't call me back.
My girlfriends are like, aren't you affected?
And I go, I get no 15, 20 times a day.
I go, rejection on a date doesn't affect me.
Are you kidding me?
You're like, if you're not getting no's every day, you're not making enough calls.
You're just not making enough calls.
So to me, no is a good thing.
And I view objections as, you know, like that's a buying sign to me i'm going
to try to overcome every objection there is because to me that's a request for more information
so yeah go out there and get a lot of no's every day i totally agree with you
and then here's the way i finish this out we talked about a lot of things today
a lot of very very tactical what do you think I am real quick in the disc assessment?
Oh, you're a high D and a high I for sure. Oh, that's exactly. High D, either like match.
Exactly. Mine are at the top. And you and I, our personalities are extremely alike. And it's
interesting because the man I married is a high D and I, and they say we're not compatible. We're
totally compatible. Like I love other people, no different than that's why people hire people who they like. Now you're a high D high I.
And again, you're that idea person. The only thing that you probably do, which I did a long,
you know, I want to do too much too fast. So I really have to say, okay, what is the one thing
I always tell my people implement one new idea every month, give yourself a chance to replace
old habits with new habits. So if you've got a lot of ideas from this session, there's no power in what I've just
said to you, Tommy, none.
There's no power in your podcast where the power is if the people that are listening
to us change something, if they implement something.
If you try to do too much, you're going to do nothing.
So my last piece of advice is pick the two or three things you liked that Tommy and I
discussed and implement one from now to August
and implement one a month later. If you implement one idea a month and you do that consistently
throughout your life, imagine what you're going to accomplish, but don't try to do too much because
I do that. I get excited and I want to implement everything right now and then it doesn't work,
then it doesn't work. So just pick one thing. What's the one thing I said that made you cringe? Like, I'm not doing that. Do that first.
You know, I think Steve Jobs said it, it might've been Steve Jobs, might've been someone else,
but he said, it's amazing people's ability to think what they could get done in a year,
but underestimate what they could get done in five to 10 years. And the fact is 10 years is a snap.
You're like all of a sudden, man, I'm about to turn 40.
And I'm like, holy shit, where did my 30s go?
Like, it's so quick.
I'm happy where I'm at.
And I'm not unhappy by any means.
But at the same time, if you really sit down and set goals that are realistic and give
yourself enough time, but work hard at them.
My problem is, if you don't set quick deadlines, you've got this ability to just push it off.
And I love deadlines, man, more than anybody.
If you give me a deadline, and I'm always checking in on people because they'll wait
till the deadline to do stuff.
So we got to have a check-in period.
But guess how powerful it is, Tommy.
If everybody that works for you has their goals at their desk and they've got the goal,
they've got five action items and they're dated, like the end of March or by April 15th or by whatever.
And maybe have them do five
from now to the end of the year
and post them where they work,
where they're looking at them all day long.
When you want to reward them,
when you run into contests,
just look at what they're trying to do
and make one of those things happen.
And my God, you get their buy-in like crazy.
If you had to pick,
you got 10 things in front of you.
What's the largest one
that you want to do this year if you don't front of you. What's the largest one that you want
to do this year, if you don't mind sharing? The largest thing I want to do this year is I want to
get this LMS and all these new tutors out there because this has been such a big lift. Like I
thought I was going to do it six months ago and I had to develop a new LMS. So getting all this
training out there, again, because I didn't have the videos and that
I'm traveling too much, you know, too much is on me. And I like my business to run when I'm not
there. So my biggest goal right now, I can reach a lot more people by having this online training
than to just go and train or go speak at conferences or that. I want people to have
access to me online. Killing it. Barb, you're amazing. I'm really impressed. And I will follow up with you.
Send me that email. I'll make sure my team gets this out here quickly. I will do that. I will do
that. We'll reconvene again. And like I said, I really, really respect you a lot. And what I want
to do, I'm going to read your book. It'll be here, I think, in two days. It'll be here Wednesday.
And then we'll set something up here for part two. Absolutely. Absolutely. It's been a pleasure. You're awesome.
Thanks, Barb. Appreciate you. Thanks, Tommy. Bye, everybody.
See ya.
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