260: Reflecting on Hiring
Summary:
If you’ve been listening to the podcast the past few months, you know we have done a ton of episodes on the hiring process and what it has looked like for us. So, after everything we have learned and experienced through hiring, what are our major takeaways? We discuss it in this episode. Hiring has certainly been a major growth opportunity for the business as well as our personal mindsets. We share some of our mistakes, lessons learned, and how we can do better next time. Natasha answers, “I’m solo, do I need to care about company culture?”
Main topics:
Giving yourself grace
Changes in our mindset
What we’ll do different next time
Ask a pet biz coach
Main takeaway: Growing to accept, “It’s not my fault, but it is my problem”.
Links:
Previous Episodes in series: 247, 249, 251, 253, 257
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
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SUMMARY KEYWORDS
hiring, business, work, staff, hiring process, process, clients, people, understanding, questions, employee, sops, happen, culture, needed, setting, learning, episodes, support, person
SPEAKERS
Meghan, Collin Funkhouser, Natasha
Meghan 00:10
Hello, I'm Meghan I'm Collin and this is Pet Sitter confessional an open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter. Hi, welcome to episode 260. Hello, thank you to our Patreon members for financially supporting the show and helping us with topic ideas and suggestions. And we are so grateful for your financial support every month, it really helps us to continue putting on the podcast.
Collin Funkhouser 00:37
And to learn more about what that means and to support us financially go to petsitter confessional comm slash support.
Meghan 00:44
This is our final episode on hiring, at least for now. We've talked a lot about hiring recently, because it's something that we have experienced. So if you are interested in any of those other episodes, they were to 47 to 49 to 51 to 53 and 257. It's a lot there. Yeah. So hopefully it's helpful. And we'll guide you along in the process. But if there's something else that we missed, or you'd like us to cover, we'd be more than happy to just let us know.
Collin Funkhouser 01:10
Right. So today we're putting all of the technical things aside, and we want to do a review on how we think we did. And our thoughts on the overall process.
Meghan 01:21
Well, with the caveat that this was just our first time our first round of hiring, right, we're obviously going to be continuing to do this in the future. So it's, as we say, to do a business review every quarter or at the end of the year. Is this kind of our take on that in terms of our hiring process.
Collin Funkhouser 01:36
Right. So what are our major takeaways? I think the first one is to give yourself grace, because you will mess up, especially since this is your first time or this was our first time hiring, the learning curve is steep, as evidenced by the previous five episodes of information, there's so much to do, there's so much to timeout, there's so much to get right, there's so much to prepare for that you don't know what you don't know. And you can't plan for every single situation. So to the best you can and ask help for when you need it and be kind to yourself. When we mess up with an employee, we always ask ourselves, what could we have done better? Where was our processes, maybe not up to snuff? Or where they should have been? What did we not understand about this situation? How can we better prevent this from happening next time by changing either our mindset, our perspective or our processes, we have to remind ourselves that overall we are learning and that will never stop, we will never stop learning new things, learning new circumstances having different employees come in that maybe have a different perspective than we've never had before that we have to kind of deal with and work with and work through that process. So embracing the learning and making sure that we are always looking forward to new things.
Meghan 02:51
And that's not to say that every time there's a mess up, it's necessarily our fault. No, but it does mean that we need to analyze that and say, where do we fit in in this? Is there something we could have done better? Or should have done better? Or what do we need to make more efficient for the next time so that this may not happen again,
Collin Funkhouser 03:11
that you're right, that's a really fine line of always blaming yourself versus viewing and understanding your role and changing and you may do an assessment and go look, there was nothing that I could have done better here. That's fine, at least you did the assessment. That's the important part.
Meghan 03:24
And so with that, listen to your staff, just as you are asking them to be teachable with your policies and specific ways of doing things. We as the manager, as the CEO, we need to be teachable, we need to be teachable with them as well. So each time we brought somebody on, we've said, Look, here are all of our processes, here are our SOPs, if something isn't working for you, or you see that there's a better way to do it. Let's burn it down and make something better. We want to be teachable, we are the bosses. So at the end of the day, the buck stops with us and we want to have happy employees. And if that means we need to change something about our onboarding process or change, the questioning for the meet and greet, we need to look at that and analyze that.
Collin Funkhouser 04:08
Yeah, our SOPs are not more precious than our staffs ability to do their work, and be and feel valued. I may think I know how I want this all to work out. But if it's not working for them, let's do something different. So as an example, with this, we use Slack for all company communications. And we've talked about that before. But if it starts to become a stumbling block for staff to communicate or stay organized, and it ends up not getting used, we'll get rid of it and find something else. So ask for your staffs feedback periodically and input and make sure that you make yourself and company better through that process. But when you do that, be ready for hard truths. Be ready and open to receive things that maybe you don't really want to hear it remember to not take it personally. If you ask how can we make this company better? What kind of policies and procedures are not working? And what new ones would you like to see? Be prepared for somebody to mention your favorite SOP or your favorite app, or your favorite way of doing things as something that's not working for them. Because if you're asking for honest feedback, don't get upset when they give honest feedback. That's what you asked for.
Meghan 05:13
And obviously, we can't change on the whims of our staff. So we are malleable to a point. Like I mentioned before, we are the CEOs, and we run our businesses the way we want to, but we want our people to be happy. Sometimes it may take a while for your staff to see exactly why we do things the way we do. So give it time, let them know that you've taken their feedback into consideration. You will look into it and get back to them within X amount of time, three days or something like that, about how you're going to move forward. But besides all that, was hiring actually easy for us? Well, I would say yes, yeah,
Collin Funkhouser 05:50
I think I think for the most part, but that's mostly because we knew for certain that we needed to hire that was never in doubt, it was the only way to make our vision for our company work and to get to where we needed to. So we had our mindset pretty made up made up really, really super early that in order to reach our goals and objectives we had to hire so that part was never in question. Getting to that point was was easy for Megan and I. But I
Meghan 06:15
will say when you say just hire, as we've said before, the just is about 18 Steps long. So there's the taxes, the payroll, the insurance, setting up processes, actually picking the person, which was kind of an unpleasant learning process, to say the least. Because it was hard. We had several great candidates to choose from.
Collin Funkhouser 06:36
Yeah, exactly. So it was the there's always two parts to the hiring, there's the deciding and committing that we need to hire. And then there's the actually implementing that. And the first part that was easy for us, I believe, again, because we knew that that was the only way we're going to get to where we needed to, then we had to do all the other work. And that was that was definitely painful. I feel
Meghan 06:55
like in the beginning, we didn't know exactly who we wanted to hire who that person should be, we just knew that they needed to love dogs and get along well working by themselves and with people. But as we went, as the weeks went by, we really honed in on exactly who that person was supposed to be. And the pet care aspect really came to light as the most important part, we really needed somebody who had at least done this before, or who had experience in a professional setting.
Collin Funkhouser 07:24
And so that's important to remember is that you may have an idea of what you think you want, or maybe you have no idea and just to let the process work itself out and trust that it will all take place. And really pay attention to the kind of people that you're getting to the qualifications that they have, and how you want to wait those. And I think by the time we did our third or fourth phone interview with people, we really were starting to hit on all cylinders with understanding, okay, these are the exact things that we need. And that's fine. Don't Don't think that you have to go into this with your exact avatar for the person that you're hiring for that position, let it happen organically and just see where it goes. And at the end of the day, remember, you don't have to hire anybody. There was something we have to remind ourselves all the time, we don't actually have to hire anybody on this list, we can always put this ad back out there.
Meghan 08:11
And this is especially important if you are so crazy busy that you might pull your hair out and you feel like you needed to hire yesterday, don't ever hire out of desperation, because you will likely not get the candidate that you actually need.
Collin Funkhouser 08:23
And when it came to actually putting in the processes, understanding taxes, payroll, insurance, all that stuff, I did have to remind myself that I only have to do this one time. And that was really freeing to know that once I get all of this scaffolding, once I get all this foundation laid, then it's up to us to build and use it moving forward to make our company the way we want it to be. And that was kind of motivating in the times where I was really struggling with understanding what kind of insurance how we wanted our payroll to run, how we were going to manage taxes, that none of that was fun. But what was motivating is I only have to set it up one time, and then it's there for us to utilize and use in the business.
Meghan 09:01
Well, and so overall, we are very happy that we've hired Yes, it has really freed us up to do things that we want to be doing and having our staff write and make stuff and release on our blog and social media has been amazing. having them do the visits has allowed us to be doing things that we want to be doing in and working on the business instead of just in it going through the process has certainly changed us and our mindset is one of those. When we first started, we didn't know what was possible for ourselves. We didn't quite know where to start. And we are so thankful for all of the support and the resources that we were able to use for help. Which is a major reason why we put this series together. We know it's not exhaustive by any means, but it's just our experience and the way that we've kind of done it. We hope that it can help you work through your own questions and really above all know that you are not alone in any of this. It is definitely a steep hill to climb when you are hiring employees. Many people have done it before you and many people will do it after you and we are here with you, you are not alone.
Collin Funkhouser 10:05
I think a major mind shift change or understanding that we came to was, was really understanding what this phrase meant. I've heard it before, but I didn't really see how it applied to me until we started hiring. And it's, it's not my fault. But it is my problem. That phrases, it's not my fault, but it is my problem. Now, it was true before with clients and their expectations where they may have a false expectation or misunderstand something and assume something's going to happen. It's not actually that way.
Meghan 10:36
Or they may leave for a trip and not notify you until they're already on the road. And that's not my fault that that happened. But now it is my problem because I need to provide pet care.
Collin Funkhouser 10:46
That's always fun when that happens. And it's even more true with staff, they'll eventually do something that we didn't cover that we didn't train for it, it's it'll cause an issue, right? Something will happen that it may even upset a client. It's not my fault. It's not Megan's fault that it happened. But it is now our problem to resolve and make it better. And we've accepted that that is just part of this. Right, we will continue to try our best to train and support our staff. But we know that things happen. Sometimes they happen sometimes to us while we were in the field while we were doing all of the visits, it will also happen to our staff, and to not be hard on them and to not be frustrated with them when those things come up. Because that's part of running this business. And that's a huge step in acceptance and interest and in belief in your processes and moving through this. A major fear of hiring is what if they mess up? Well, yeah, they may make a mistake, something may fall through, they may encounter and experience or encounter a situation where they've had no training or understanding of. But that's part of this, that could just as easily happen to us. And we have to be okay, and accept that. And again, understand that it's not my fault. But but it is my problem.
Meghan 12:00
So we said there would be mistakes. What is there anything that we're going to try to do different next time?
Collin Funkhouser 12:05
Well, we would start putting the ad out a lot sooner. Yeah, yeah. We actually left one open for our local service area. And we will probably ask even more questions for both the written and the phone interviews.
Meghan 12:16
Yeah, I feel like we need to get better about seeing how different backgrounds and experiences will play into our business. So we had some people apply who were a cashier or a maintenance worker, how would the skill sets for those type of jobs play into being a pet care provider, we also want to ask more questions about what they did, and how they did it. During the interview, we really want to get an idea of what skills they actually have. And this is also important because we hired in two different locations, very different demographics, for each one is a thriving city, and the other one is in rural country. So what are the differences there? The thriving city was actually our remote location, it was two hours away, we needed hires that had a lot of experience, and were very self reliant because we couldn't be holding their hands, basically ever, past the point of training, we needed them to be on their own and be independent. With our local area, we knew that we could work one on one directly every day with the hire a bit more, and we had a lot more oversight. But does that mean that we lowered our standards? No, it doesn't, we actually ended up with extremely self reliant people in all of our positions. And that is awesome.
Collin Funkhouser 13:29
Other things that we learned through this process? Well, sometimes people are going to quit, and I need to figure out what to do with
Meghan 13:36
those. And that happened to us. Yes, yep. Yep. You
Collin Funkhouser 13:39
heard that right. Of our very first two hires, one quit. After the very first team meeting. Boy, was
Meghan 13:46
that a blow to the morale?
Collin Funkhouser 13:49
Yeah, so what, what, what, how did we process that? What was it like we were so I mean, we were so excited. We had the first two hires, we had our team meeting and our new office and everything was off to the races. And then one of them called us and said, I'm actually I don't think this is going to work out. I need to withdraw, I need to quit. And what should we do?
Meghan 14:08
So we immediately started within ourselves asking, oh, my gosh, what, what did we do wrong? How could we have done better?
Collin Funkhouser 14:16
Yeah, exactly. And recognizing that, okay, this is going to happen again, we weren't going to beat ourselves up, I wasn't going to try and convince this person that they needed to stay and beg them or anything like that. So we just asked two very simple questions them and we told them that they didn't have to tell us anything. This wasn't like an exit interview, or anything like that. But we just wanted to know genuinely. And because we respected their their decision and we respected their input. We wanted to know, why are you quitting? And what could we have done better to prepare the next person
Meghan 14:47
whatever answers they give us that information to refine your job ad process, make it better make it more clear?
Collin Funkhouser 14:54
Yeah, it turns out that this person was quitting because it wasn't what they expected at the end, because that they recommended that we put more emphasis on the scheduling and what a typical day looks like during the hiring process and put that information a lot sooner. And it's what led to my phrase, we earn our living 30 minutes at a time to help to get new hires to try to understand exactly how the business operates.
Meghan 15:19
Because again, we are kind of a strange industry, nobody really understands. And that was very evident when people during the interview process would use the word shift. No, we don't operate. At least our business doesn't operate in shifts.
Collin Funkhouser 15:31
Yeah, and I can maybe offer you five hours a day, but it's spread across 12 hours, obviously dependent on labor laws, and all sorts of things like that. So that was something that we realized, okay, we do need to get better do a better job at communicating this to people very early on in the process.
Meghan 15:45
We also learned what trusting your gut is very important. There are so many times, you should trust your gut when hiring from the first time the job application comes into your email, to interviewing to figuring out if this person needs more training, it is very important that you your first instinct is what you go with. Since hiring is all about giving up some control of your company. At the end of the day, you have to be okay with the decisions that you make. Don't compromise. Don't settle for anything less than what is going to get you to your goal for your business. Don't push your boundaries. Don't push your business policies to satisfy a client or staff. It's your business make decisions based on where you want it to go and let the rest fall
Collin Funkhouser 16:32
away. We really hope that you've enjoyed this series. And I'm sure we'll revisit it periodically. As we learn new things we try new things and new experiences come up. If you ever have any questions or want help in your own business, please feel free to reach out. I like to think of myself as good at identifying problems and figuring out ways to solve them. So I've just offered some new consulting services to help troubleshoot any concerns that you have in your business. And you can go to petsitter confessional comm slash consulting,
Meghan 17:02
there are so many resources out there for hiring. So hopefully, this series is just part of the mountain of information that you will consume during the hiring process. Be sure to look within the pet care industry and outside of the industry as well. We talk a lot about culture in business. Is it something that you need to be concerned about if you are a solo Walker? Well, business coach Natasha opionion is going to answer that question.
Natasha 17:25
Absolutely. Because you're you're the first player you're the first staff member you're the first employee. So you're not treating yourself well or creating that culture for yourself. Mindful morning routines, evening checkout routines, onboarding your clients properly, applying your systems so communication and in frequently asked scripts are talked about showing clients where to book and how to pay and what's expected and what happens with emergencies and holidays. That's all culture. And when we're all sitting around with question marks walking around, we're just walking around with question marks on our head. That's your clients extra culture even for yourself. So yeah, you you're the first employee, you're the first staff member pay yourself definitely right. So that means your employee now. But yeah, you have culture with just setting up your success in the way you communicate with your clients. It's 1,000% is really what culture beat is there, you know, is there alignment in the business and that's you,
Collin Funkhouser 18:24
because you get to take that starting with ourselves, we then get to go and apply that to people all around us. And maybe down the line you do want to hire or you do want to bring in an assistant or part time help, it's a lot easier now to bring them in and work them through those processes that you are you yourself are living out and working every day.
Natasha 18:43
Absolutely, I was just gonna say that column the one thing that I regret is not designing my business when it was just me and it was slow. And it wasn't crazy. That was the biggest regret was not designing all these systems when nothing was even happening. So always start with the end in mind, you know, I never thought I was going to go to products but if I would have designed my business with a brand you know, I had solo dog walking was my brand and then I decided I want to do products I had to do a whole new breed brand to support products. So designing your business with the end in mind really helped you out and also you don't have to go backwards trying to fix it. It's just you, you know what you like you know the way you want it. Who better to set all this stuff up now then you so as you're learning and as you're going through everything Document Document Document,
Collin Funkhouser 19:33
it may feel weird writing down your quote unquote your company policies when it's just you but they're so valuable when things change or it helps you be consistent as well when you apply it to clients or if you do bring on staff and
Natasha 19:45
many of us would like to sell our businesses one day so if you have a solo business that's operating smoothly and you have all of your everything documented your clients or streamline that's going to be a great devalued business to sell. So think about all those little Things we need if I'm gonna buy a business I want to look at the back end I don't get what you got going on the front end and that can be easily done by yourself to to sell as well.
Meghan 20:14
If you would like to be part of Natasha's monthly membership group you can do so at start scale sale calm and use the code P SC 20 for 15% off. Again we thank you so much for taking your most valuable asset and your time and listening to this today. We are so appreciative and if you are in the hiring process or you know another pet sitter or dog walker that is feel free to send them these episodes and hopefully it will be a benefit to them. And if you have ever have any questions, please let us know. We will talk to you next time. Bye
