Ep. 85 - Stop Hiring C-Players: Using Tech to Scale with Jonathan Whistman

If you’ve ever said, “We can’t find good people,” this conversation challenges the real problem: we’re not building a place good people want to belong. I’m joined by Jonathan Whistman, CEO of WhoHire and founding partner of The Sales Boss, to talk about how blue collar business owners can build a team competitors can’t beat or steal by focusing on identity, standards, and the full human experience at work. 

We dig into why hiring is more than filling seats, it’s a responsibility. Jonathan shares how repeated actions create evidence, and evidence creates identity. That idea shows up everywhere: your company culture, your onboarding process, your leadership habits, and even how your shop looks and feels the first time a candidate walks in. We also hit the traps that crush growth, like chasing revenue with prices that are too low, settling for B and C players, and pretending a quick interview is enough to predict performance. 

Then we go straight at the future: AI in construction, AI in recruiting, AI in sales follow-up, and why leaders can’t delegate learning it. Jonathan explains a simple “Lego block” framework for AI tools so you can implement what matters without getting lost in the hype. If you want better hiring, stronger retention, and a more profitable trade business, this one is packed with practical ideas and hard truth. 

Subscribe for more real blue collar leadership conversations, share this with an owner who’s struggling to hire, and leave a review so more contractors can find the playbook.

Transcript

Welcome And Sponsor Message

SPEAKER_01 0:09

Hey guys, welcome to the Blue Collar Business Podcast where we discuss the realest, roughest, most relevant stories and strategies behind building every corner of a blue-collar business. I'm your host, Sai Kirby, and I want to help you what it took me, trial and error, and a whole lot of money to learn. The information that no one in this industry is willing to share. Whether you're under that shade tree or have your heart head on, let's expand your toolbox. Hey guys, welcome back to another episode of the Blue Collar Business Podcast, brought to you and sponsored by PayDirt Support. My guys and that team over there, they are wonderful. If you're looking, if you're needing takeoff services, quantity take uh quantity quantity estimation. My lord, it's been a long week, guys. I'm so glad to be here. But um, GPS modeling, paydirt gives you X gives excavation contractors the data they need to plan smarter and win more bids. Pay DirtSupport.com to build more profitable projects with confidence. Hit up Ben Bruni and the team over there. Um, guys, I can't thank you enough. I've been looking at some reporting here in the last couple of weeks, and the show's numbers are just doing some really incredible things. And I just wanted to take a moment and thank each and every one of you. I've had a few new members uh through last month. Shout out to you guys. Um, every single time we come out with a new episode, we're just trending to the right, and there's more of us getting involved with the community. I met so many of you out at Con Expo last month and shook so many hands and put names to faces. And just thank you for following along with the show. And I truly hope it's bringing you value in your business and in hopefully your mental space and um, you know, your family life at home. And it's and it's somehow changing you in some way and shaping you. Um, if you wouldn't mind, share it out with a few folks that you may need the same encouragement or may need the same guidance from one of the experts that we have on this show week after week. Guys, I am truly fired up today. This gentleman I actually checked out. Um this gentleman is gonna come at you with some force. Uh, if we're talking about sales teams today, we're talking about culture, we're talking about people, we're talking about future. We are talking about things that I'm very passionate about, but also empowering those people, hiring the right people. And this gentleman has the background, but also has a different, totally different concept. And some of you may already know him. Uh, CEO of Who Hire, founding partner of The Sales Boss, uh, beautiful book. He also just recently released Unrecruitable. Uh, go check that out. And he's also gonna be sharing some information with you later on in the show, some free resources, maybe a free copy of the book. Um, stay tuned for that. But, ladies and gentlemen, I want to present to you, and for the next hour, we're gonna be enjoying the wonderful Jonathan Wisman. Sir, thank you so much for joining me.

Why Identity Drives Performance

SPEAKER_00 3:11

So, I'm looking forward to time with you. Uh, in in the green room behind uh before we got started, already having a great conversation. So let's buckle in, let's do this.

SPEAKER_01 3:20

It literally had me spun through my intro. I was going through some things in in my head, and I was like, man, what a concept. So, sir, if you wouldn't mind, just take us back, uh, give us a little bit of background, um, what you're working on today, and uh we'll spin off from there, sir.

SPEAKER_00 3:36

Yeah, I don't want to go back too far, but I'm gonna go back to a very fundamental thing that shaped my entire worldview and why I'm super passionate about this idea of how do we elevate human potential. I have a core belief that our business success, it doesn't matter what business you're in, you're not actually in that business. You're in the business, if you're a leader, of humans. Finding humans, bringing them onto your team, inspiring them, growing them, bringing loyalty. My newest book, Unrecruitable, How to Build a Team Your Competitors Can't Beat or Steal. And so my whole life has been around that. But I take a different lens at it because I grew up in a religious cult and I got to see, not like not like a pretend cult, but a real true mind control cult, took me almost till the age of 30 to leave that. And I got to see up close and personal how our beliefs shaped and what are people willing to give up or do based upon an identity. And so my entire theory around humans is really around this idea of people's identity. And you know this to be true. People will either change their behavior to match their identity, or they'll change their identity to match their behavior. Super simple concept, right? Uh, if you, as an example, if I see myself as an athlete, it's not hard for me to go to the gym, it's not hard for me to do, right? If I see myself as a Christian, it's not hard for me to go to church, it's not hard for me to pray before a meal. Whatever my identity is, all of the corollary things that show up in my life are a result of that. So if you're building a company, what you're really in the business of is building identity. And people will come and work for you and give you the best years of their life. As long as you're just ahead of their identity. People want to join you and say, when I join size team, I know I can do the best work of my life working for him, the best version of me, not just in work, in my life, in my finances, in my health. And the companies that understand that are gonna thrive. This hierarchical business environment of the last 20, say, 30 years is gone. It's irrelevant. There's a new model, and a new leadership model exists, and you're you're you're seeing it over and over again, right? You're asking someone when you run a business, give me the best years of your life, give me your 20s and 30s. Yeah, I'm uh I'm 50, so I'm not being ageist. But primarily we build our businesses on the backs of people in that core age group. And you're saying, give me 20s, your 20s and 30s. And if you do, what's the promise that you have for them? Like when they look at you as the leader, they look at your leadership team and you say, Yeah, work hard like I did, my entire 20s and 30s. You can look just like me. You can have the same quality of family life, you can have the same health that I have. There's a lot of young people out there is gonna look at you, gonna look at your leadership team and say, No, thanks. You look broken, you look tired, you look wore out, right? These young people are constantly inundated with this idea that they can build their own thing, that they can make 200K sitting on a beach in Bali. And whether or not that's true, that's who you're competing with. Right? You had AI on and top on top of that. We just had our first billion dollar, billion with a B company that's a single person company. Single person company. Wow. I was just on uh on a conversation with a landscaper, young 24-year-old kid, has almost a half a million dollar landscape company already. And I I'm diving deep into his books, and uh he came to one of my events and I was like, hey, I'm gonna just take you on as a private coaching client. It's we're not even paying. I said, I love seeing young people like thrive like this, right? And he had built out his entire tech stack just using AI. He's not subscribing to a single software, and the software that he is in is better than any of the other softwares that are out there. This is the new world that we're living in. So I know that was a rant, but that's the world I live in. So, you know, you asked about the background, coming out of a cult. I I built and sold a couple of companies. Um, and based on that, I got asked by people, hey, what would you do with my company? So I started consulting with them. I got a reputation for doubling companies. Um and and and getting that inside view of what it's usually, you know, if you want to double a company, it's actually only usually like a 5% change. It's not this massive change, but there's a playbook for doing it. And I don't care, like if you build a million-dollar business or 10 million or 20 or 40 million, you're not an idiot. It's hard to build a million-dollar company. It's hard to build a$10 million company. So I don't believe that this business owner doesn't know how to do it. It's simply they haven't seen the playbook. They don't know what great looks like. And if they can see what great looks like, they can get it.

SPEAKER_01 8:53

You know, that's so exactly accurate, brother. Like, we just don't know what we don't know. And you're learning, I had nobody teaching me along the way other than my own mistakes and the uh negative profit margins going out the door and the ignorance tax. You know what I mean? Like, but to your point, sir, what a world to be living in. And thank you for dedicating, you know, time to other young folks and other folks that are. I I know you do as well.

SPEAKER_00 9:20

You do speaking events and like I told this young kid, I'm only like 15 minutes of my conversations, like breaking down his numbers. I'm like, your price too low, that's why you're growing so fast. He's like, I can't raise my prices. I'm like, nope, you can raise your prices. I said, today you're gonna text all your customers and you're gonna say, hey, I'm doing a 20% price increase. He's like, I can't do that. He's like, I'm like, then we can't work together. And so he did, and he hasn't lost any customers. I said, you just gave yourself a 20% raise because your your numbers look good because your revenue is growing every year. But what you don't realize is you're just slowing the pace at which you're going broke.

Hiring Traps That Break Culture

SPEAKER_01 10:02

Yep. So it's so accurate. Like it's revenue is vanity, profit is sanity, and I have lived that model of chasing revenue. I got caught up in, you know, to trend down the people lane here, sir, since you've had so much experience there. And I love your concepts on it. But, you know, I got caught up along the way, especially as you see all these excavation guys and owning equipment and having people and profitability took a backseat to that. And I'm like, and looking back, I'm just like, what a freaking idiot. What were you even doing, man? And now I sit out here and I publicly talk about it. But I've built systems and structure, and I have watched, I had more people in that year of 23 that I was pulling my hair out more than ever, 30 plus, whoop-de-whoop, bunch of crews, and the culture was terrible. My leadership team was terrible, and it all started with me. It wasn't their fault. It was I had no, I can't say no systems. We had minimalistic, non-working systems that were very frustrating to get through. There was no structure, no process, and we were still getting by, right? As probably majority of companies are out there not willing to do what I've done over the last couple of years. And we started diving. We we went to the root of the problem. What I didn't realize, I knew it was going to hurt some feelings, but man, the ownership level can think your culture is here. But go spend some time out there with your crews and you'll be very just watch. Don't even interact, just watch. I can watch as I pull up into a job, see a tracco, wheel loader, laying pipe. I can tell within 10 minutes how they're jiving that day, just by how the equipment's running. And then you go over and you don't need anything. You're just you're just watching, seeing who's getting on with who. And I did a lot more of that over the last couple of years and and and started fine-tuning. Oh my gosh. Well, I keep hearing cultures this way, but why am I seeing this? This is actions. And I had to do something about it. And so I didn't know what to do about it. And that's where you kind of come in. But I I literally, uh Tim Grover, Der World, subtraction is the best addition sometimes. And every I just kept adding and kept adding and kept adding, thinking to grow the revenue was, you know, that's what I'm doing. I'm I'm trying to be a$10 million business, but I'd love to be a$10 million business on the bottom line rather than the top line with the headaches that it ensues. But I would love for you to talk about the traps that you have seen, just like myself, walk into with hiring people, keep adding people, revenue, sales. You're agreed. Price is usually too low for that to be a compounding issue. And that can ultimately fix a lot of things. But talk about the trap that we all walk into that you've seen so many times. Number one, it could be the manager, leader, owner not taking accountability for himself and going, well, this is all everybody else's problem, or the teams waiting on the leader, um, vice versa. Love some.

A Players And The Human Leak

SPEAKER_00 13:06

Yeah, it it was this is a super complex top topic, as you know. Uh you I always say business would be easy if it wasn't for the people, right? Because people are the messy part. They're also the they're also the joy of the business. The number one problem I see with it people building a company is they stop seeing the human that they're hiring. And I feel like it's a sacred obligation. If I'm gonna hire somebody and I'm gonna say, trust me with your future, that's gotta mean something. Right? And yes, profit's important. Yes, they have to do their part. But I'm in the job of screening that human being and saying, yes, there is a space for you here, and I can help you be successful. And if you join forces with me, we're gonna do something really special together. And the second thing is a leader that has uh a mindset of I'm building a lifestyle business, because a lifestyle business is by definition built for underperformers. Because there is nowhere for an A player to go but out. So you will always be churning through. You like your obligation if you if you have a quality service and you're impacting your community is to make as much money as you possibly can and grow your company. Because entrepreneurs, I think, are the most talented change agents on the planet. More than churches, more than schools, more than politics. Our humans that come and spend time in our business spend more time with us than with their family in many cases, right? So we can we've we've all bought into this false doctrine of HR where like, you know, we keep arm's length because we don't want to get sued and we want, you know, we got all these things. Like, wipe the table of that. I like I would rather take the risk of getting sued and actually sit eyeball to eyeball with another human being and say, let's go do something beautiful together. That if you have that kind of authentic relationship with the people that work for you, they're not gonna sue you, even when things go poorly. The reason they sue you is because they don't they don't see you as a human being. So you like I think it's unconscionable that you have somebody that I love people that get massively wealthy. I'm a huge believer in the capitalist society. However, your people deserve to have the same quality of life and to be able to provide for their families and to continue to grow. You may be on different growth paths, it may be an entry-level job and they may move on. Like when you here's an example. It's gonna sound like I'm totally on the employee side and I'm not, right? Uh like I'm for the business owner. But if you you gotta understand this concept. You take a kid, maybe he's gone to trade school, right? Whatever he's done, and he gets a job with your company, and you have a terrible onboarding program, you have a bad culture, you're gonna turn that kid out. When that kid took the job for you, who did he tell? He probably told his parents, his grandparents, his girlfriend, like, I got a job, and he's proud, and he puts on your logo and he's proud to wear it, and then 90 days, 120 days, five months later, you're firing him, and it's you're saying, Oh, these kids these days, they don't want to work anymore. And you know, to me, that's like somebody saying, you know, nobody wants to have sex anymore. It's just not true. The truth is they just don't want to have sex with you, right? You're not attractive. Like, if if you can't keep people in your business, it's because you're not attractive. It's your it's it's a you problem. You don't know how to pick the right people, you don't know how to train the right people. So, like, get serious about the business. You churn that kid out. We go back to identity. What have you done to that kid's identity? His identity is now somebody that fails. I couldn't live up. Is he gonna go home a better boyfriend, a better provider, a better husband, a better child? No, he's gonna have to do all the headsetting. He's gonna carry that into the next job. I think you damage our community. Let's say you're I I've got clients that churn through 20, 100 people a year, every year, and they're proud of it. They're like, oh, I just, you know, I hire fast, I fire fast, and I'm like, shame on you. You're just dismantling our community. So that's the first problem I see. And then, and then secondly, they think that they're really good at picking. And we should realize I don't care how good your judgment is, we have a 50% divorce rate in this country. And that's in the single most important relationship in your life. You spend a lot of time with them, you go a lot on a dates, you spent right, and you still get it wrong 50% of the time. So when you trying to decide in a 30-minute interview, are you gonna get married with this person, bring them into your company, your your odds are less than 50-50. So you got to use technology, you got to use data, you got to be smart. Uh, that's why I built Who Hire, it's all around how to identify, hire, train, pull people through. Because companies have to get better at that. You look at, and I spend a lot of time in the sales world. I'll just use this as an example, super easy to understand. Let's say you have 10 salespeople in your company. The split on 10 people in a in a normal company in terms of revenue, you're gonna have two A players. Those A players are gonna generate in most industries about a million dollars each. You're you're gonna have about six B players. Those B players are gonna produce about 600,000 in revenue, and then you're gonna have two C players. That's true across hundreds and hundreds of companies that I work with, right? Uh when they first come to us, we we we change that math dramatically. And those two non-performers are gonna produce somewhere around 250,000 to 300,000 a year. Now, think about what this means. That means just by having B and C players on your team, you're leaving six and a half million dollars in revenue on the table. If they were all eight players. If you just move your C's to B's, it's a million and a half. If you had a leak in your business somewhere that was a million and a half showing up on your PL or six million dollars, like how fast would you fix that? The problem is leaking humans and A, B, and C humans doesn't show up on anybody's profit and loss statement, but but it's real. If you're gonna go out and let's say you hire 10 people and that's your map, that's the blueprint, and you do exactly the same thing next year, you're leaving six million dollars on the table. You're gonna get the exact same results. Here's why people don't hire A players. It's hard. And the data says you have to interact with 160 humans to hire one human that's gonna end up at the top 5% of your company. Now, I don't know about you, but there's not many companies that interact with more than five to ten before they make the hire. So it's no wonder they have C players. So that's why you have to use technology. You have to be able to attract at scale a lot of human beings, and you have to be able to see through all of the fake resumes and everything else that we've got, AI-ridden resumes, to find who are your A players. I have this theory about humans right now, and uh I'm gonna try to sell you on my theory. People complain there's not enough people to hire, good quality people. But we're soon going to be in the age where we have so many people displaced by AI that are really high quality people that are gonna be looking for work, and you're the hard part of your job is gonna be to decide of all of those people who's the A player because there's gonna be so many of them available and the people that can pick, and here's you know, we were talking about this in the in the pre-show. This age of having humans managed by another human is gonna go away with AI. Every single person in your company, you're strapping a nuclear powered supercomputer to their back and amplifying their potential. I'll just use like a marketing department as an example, right? Because it's easy. To understand, a company might have three or four people in marketing. Maybe it's an outsourced agency and they've got all this other things, right? And you're going to do a new website. And if I'm the creative genius, I'm like, oh, what how are we going to go to the market? I do the market research. And you know, I hand the vision off here and there. And we we have a planning meeting and they come back and they're doing revisions, and you've got a month. And even after all of that, it doesn't come back to me as the visionary of exactly what I want. But I finally am so worn down about chasing it. I got other things to do. I'm like, okay, it's good enough. We're living in a society where I can, if I'm if I'm the A player visionary, the space between having an idea and actually being able to do it, I can deploy eight to ten agents that do all of that data and research and creative, and I'm simply playing orchestrator. So I need somebody, a player in that mind that has vision, can see where we're going in the picture and the why, they're able to synthesize, which is different than analyze. Synthesize is I got to decide amongst all of these options which is the best one. Because in the time that we used to take your team to come up with one idea, AI is going to come up with a hundred ideas. So I got to have somebody that knows how to pick the best banana. Right? And and then I have to have what I call taste. Like you've seen things that are just slightly off. Like if you can't quite put your finger on it, it's like art, right? You know, when you see it, you got to have a human that's like, ah, this is the right touch. This is this is what evokes the emotion. This is what, and if you can get that in an A player and you strap a nuclear-powered supercomputer to their back, like just get the F out of the way. Because they're gonna do amazing things. They're gonna come to you with things that as a leadership team you would have never thought of. And this idea that you're gonna be able to like direct that human is just wrong.

AI Changes Work And Talent

SPEAKER_01 24:59

No, man, you're that's there's so much to unpack there. Um, but you're exactly no, I I love it because you know, I've sit on this show several times asking guests, like, we live in the hometown of Walmart, in the hometown of some other major players, yeah, top 500 companies, and they have their headquarters here, and there's headquarters all over the country. You know, from what I've heard, they're all just training AIs and learning models. And, you know, just me being a speculator, I'm even a ditch digger. I'm sitting down here, I I force myself every single day to use Chat GPT or Copilot or Claude somehow and somehow to be able to keep up with the times because I understand if I don't, I'm gonna be left behind. And I still have cognitive, younger computer-y skills to be able to transcend into it. Anybody can learn it, in my opinion. But um, with that being said, what's gonna happen with all these white-collar uh jobs?

SPEAKER_00 26:03

So I think 80% of people are gonna be paid to stay home and watch Netflix, and they're gonna get out of the way of the 20% of a player geniuses. That's the society we're gonna live in. We're gonna have universal basic income. I don't care what you think about it. Like, it's the practical reality. We're gonna pay people to stay home because there's not gonna be enough work, right? And I'm with you. This 2,000 years of like everybody has a job and everybody does that. It just like we're gonna have to live in a society where who we are is not defined by what we do for a living, but rather, what do we do when we live? And I think that's an amazing place to be. Yes, it blows people's minds. Yes, there's fear. Yes, if I'm the 80%, that feels awful to say. Well, let's just be grown-ups and be honest. Like people who are saying, you know, you're not gonna be replaced uh by AI, you're gonna be replaced with somebody that knows AI. That's simply not true. You're gonna be replaced by AI. Zero question. I will be at some point, everyone will be. Like, that's the path that we're on. You're not gonna put that genie back in the bottle. It isn't a question of whether it's good or whether it's bad. It is. I think you know, can you be fearful of AI? Sure. Uh, is there bad things people could do with AI? Sure. We have had the ability for the last hundred years to destroy the planet with nuclear weapons, and we've managed not to do it. And I think it's we're gonna have the same thing in AI. Do we have the potential to destroy the planet? Yes. I think at the core, humans are good people. They're self-interested, they have children who they want to protect the planet for, even if they don't want to do it for themselves, and that's gonna win out. That's my view. I'm very bullish about it. I don't think we solve the biggest challenges on the planet by thinking small. We're not gonna, we're not gonna solve all of the health crisis and everything else that's going on by not making taking advantage of every bit of data that's out there.

SPEAKER_01 28:00

No, I agree. I completely agree, but no, I'm I'm I'm with you. Like we are going to have, to your point of having high caliber, there's going to be some high caliber candidates hit the floor. And it's, you know, if they're already coming from a corporate background, construction managers, project managers, like in our world on the trades, they're gonna have to look at us because we're a central. Like, I'm sorry, um, but when a water main's shooting 300 feet in the sky, I think they're gonna take some time to get robots to fix on that. So just to be, and we got to drink water every day. We gotta, yep, we gotta use restrooms. So we're in a need industry, and most of these trades that are listening to you today are in the zero to five people realm. And um, before I go there, to just hit on your point of fans first, and you've got to be your company has to be creating fans first. You have to attract them. I'm gonna hit a couple of the things that you you just shared there in that quick uh monologue because I hear this all the time from in my own market. Well, there's just uh there's just nobody out there looking to hire them kids. Oh, they can't, I can't stand listening to them kids, millennials. Like I've got a bunch of 20 and 30 year olds working for me that are we're killing it now. Have we uh 20 and 30 year olds?

SPEAKER_00 29:19

If you want to hire them and treat them the way you are treated, they're not gonna work for you. No, and that's and that's exactly we have zero respect that you're the owner, zero and neither should they like first be a good human being. Here's what I know for sure people don't quit mentors.

SPEAKER_01 29:38

That's good, man. And not just following up on that, once you do find that a player, the the way we do it in the last three years, if everybody had a YouTube channel going and showing your culture or short clips every single day, showing the interaction, like a smile doesn't lie. When I walk up and I'm talking with my crew and they're all standing there and we're smiling and we're taking 10 to 15 minutes and talking about what's going on, you can't fake that. You just can't. And so if you open yourself up, become vulnerable. I'm looking for one person to join our crew for this year. One, that's it. One, and I have over a hundred applications in over the last year sitting in my website to go through. I'm not saying they're all good.

Onboarding That Creates Belonging

SPEAKER_00 30:21

Yeah, I do I do work with Andy Elliott. He just co-authored uh Unrecrutable with me. Um some of your listeners might know him. You know, you either love or hate Andy. There's no in-between. I got that. Uh, but he grew a company zero to a hundred million in three years. He went from a hundred million to three hundred million in the following 12 months, and we're gonna hit a billion dollars by the end of this year. He's following the blueprint uh that that we have in the book, Unrecruitable. The the there is a playbook for doing that. If you walk into his office, he's got about a hundred salespeople. They do sales and leadership development, that's what they're doing. It's a hundred percent commission role. He's got at least 15 guys on his team, all under 30, that all make more than a million dollars in personal income. Every single person in the company, height the fitness, height of their faith, and have a really strong family. In fact, if if if if there's a word that you're not treating your wife well or you're cheating on her, you're fired. If you're if you're out in the community and you're drinking, you're fired. Like there's just no tolerance. Now, it doesn't mean you you have to run your company that way, but here's here's why he's so successful. When people walk into his business, there is a clear identity. This is who we are, and this is who you will be to belong. Humans are tribal by nature, right? Their identity is tied up. And by the way, it's way easier to get people fired up being against something than for something. Like just start a political argument, right? Like it's clear that works. Well, what is he against? He's against mediocrity, he's against people who don't live up to their standards, he's against and and and that is like candy to someone whose identity is that. He's not gonna lose people.

SPEAKER_01 32:16

No, I think the the other thing I want to talk about here with you, sir, is is onboarding. You mentioned it earlier, and you finally do find that one in 160 person, and you open up this onboarding manual and you you throw the dust off of it. Like I do something different, and I've said about it on this show a couple of times, it's not new to them, but me personally, I send out uh right around Christmas time, they take two weeks off. It's it's a little bit of a paid vacation, but I ask for 15 answers to 15 questions professional goals, personal goals, family goals. Hey, is what can I be doing better? Um, what where do you see yourself in three to five years? So I get a little insight about how they're motivated or how they can be reprimanded if needed, so or recoursed, I guess you would be a better word. But what I'm getting at is that I have a couple of red items at the bottom that I want brutal, honest freaking truth. I need to know what I don't know. And I wanted to know the one process that they believed if we could fix it, what would that process be to just flip a switch? And man, out of 20 something plus goals I got back, it was all about hiring and onboarding. And you know, I went to them and I said on a Monday morning meeting, I said, Hey guys, I appreciate your goals. Thank you guys for coming back, whatever. I just want to let you know we are going to be changing up our hiring process and our onboarding process because I hear the message loud and clear, and they were right, they weren't wrong. We we we were cycling through people. Oh, you need a guy, here's a guy, here's a shovel, peace out. There was no training, there was no, hey, I'm SA, this is what we're about, this is who we are, here's our core values, here's our message. Now there is. Now we talk about can can you in line with these core values? Hey, okay, we've gotten past this stage. Let's let's meet the direct supervisor that you're gonna be working with, make sure there's some gel there. Okay, there is, but hey, before you show up, there's 10 videos I need you to watch about who we are, how it is to be on a job site. And so when they show up Monday, they're a little prepared to go hop on a job site. Two years ago, I bet these kids were three, four years ago, were freaking out as they showed up the first day, shoveling hands, somebody's yelling at them, things are moving, equipment's moving, pipes moving, and they're just standing there. And then I get a call about one o'clock. Well, dude, this guy ain't gonna work out. He can't, he can't jump in the race. And I'm like, and then I started looking at myself, am I doing as much leading and training as I need to be? Do I am I taking an hour stuck walking that job site with a superintendent, picking out the goods, picking out the bads, and leading him into a leadership role to be able to lead the people I'm giving him? And I I gotta say, three or four years I wasn't. In the last three years, man, I have dedicated a lot of my time into just that. And I can tell you the results speak for themselves with our culture. And I love we do another little culture piece here is Monday's uh first of the month. Hey guys, we're gonna cook breakfast for you. We're kind of spread out all over the place, but I want you guys all here on Monday. We're gonna talk about housekeeping issues, maybe talk about a safety issue, but also gonna shine some light on somebody that had a really good month based off our core values that one of the superintendents. So we've made this drastic shift. And a lot of people, they don't even know where to start. And onboarding for me was the light at from the owner's lens going, man, I have really been screwing this up. But to hear the concept of, okay, Cy, what if you didn't take the B and C player and you waited out on the A player? Could you have figured it out? So, but talk a little bit about onboarding, if you don't mind, sir.

Standards And Auditing The Experience

SPEAKER_00 36:02

Yeah, so onboarding is uh one, how do I how do I quickly bring somebody up and have them feel like they belong? Right. And uh one of the ways people discover they belong in a cult is understanding shared stories and having shared sacrifice. So giving somebody the ability, right, to come in and earn their spot and having a moment where they're like, I now belong into this identity. It's an interesting thing. So if we break down how does somebody get identity, it's a simple formula. It is action plus repetition equals evidence. And that evidence is my identity. So let me plug that in, right? If somebody uh if somebody goes to the gym, that's the action, and they do it every day. Eventually the evidence is gonna be I got a harder body, I'm thinner. Uh the identity is I'm an athlete. Right? So it's action repeated over time creates an identity. If I if I'm a Christian, I go to church every week, right? And I pray before my meals, I do that over time. Pretty soon I have and I have evidence of that identity. When you have an identity, you no longer have to think about the behavior. So that's what we're in the business of doing. If if if we're gonna be a business owner, like if you're gonna create a cult, I'm gonna teach you how to control somebody's thoughts. Because you cannot control somebody's actions until you control somebody's thoughts. And people go, oh, wait a minute, what do you mean? You're a thought controller. Yeah, I'm gonna teach you thought control. You're gonna use it for good, the cult used it for bad. Thinking, I want to control how somebody thinks because if I can control how they think, it will control how they feel. And when you control how somebody feels, it controls how they act. And when they act a certain way a certain number of times, their identity changes because they have evidence of that identity. That's it. And then I can quit motivating them. So when you talk about onboarding, I gotta control how people think. Thinking comes from standards. That's it. So, as an example, with a leadership team, in my book, I talk about this think, feel, act, audit. You have to decide as a leadership team, when somebody joins my company, what do I want them to think? And if you had your company, just put one sentence, like you're gonna, you're gonna you're gonna bet the whole company on that. One, you're gonna find out your leadership team all disagrees about what that one sentence is. And that's gonna be a good discussion. And you're gonna find some people aren't aligned with what you're thinking, and they probably should find out sooner rather than later, they can move on as well. As an example, one of the companies I worked for, their core thing was when we got down to it, is we create champions. That's what they want people to think. This company knows how to create champions. And why do they want people to feel that way? Because if somebody thought that way about their company, they'd go, hey, I can align my future with this. Uh, I can be proud of working here, I can trust them with my family's future. And that thought will create the action of, I'm gonna give them my discretionary effort, I'm gonna work overtime, I'm gonna study hard, I'm gonna produce a player results because I want to belong on this team of champions. So, what do you do with that? I've got a single thing. I want you as a leadership team then to audit your entire interaction with that human being. So, with this company, we pulled right outside the front of their building. We sat in the parking lot and we looked at the front of their building. We said, if if a hundred percent of that person's thoughts were just based on looking at the outside of your building, are they gonna think this company knows how to produce champions? Now I looked at the outside of their building, faded paint, big vinyl sign up there with worn out ropes, little tattered, sun, uh, you know, looks like it's been up for 15 years, vinyl lettering on a vinyl sign, flapping in the wind, that says, now hiring, apply within. You walk up to the front of the business, it's this sort of ramp, it's a pitted ramp, uh, the dirt on all the handrails. You go up to the front door, it's locked. And there's a sign saying read ring the buzzer. If you had to judge that 100% on We Create Champions, there's none of that. We sat in their lobby, we sat in their bathroom, we sat in their training room, we got in their trucks, we looked at every single email that went out as part of the hiring process. We looked at what happened on day one. We walked into their conference room and saw all the people sitting around drinking big gulps and thrived food and overweight and unhappy. And they had to look at it again for the first time. Like that disconnect, they're not controlling how people think. And it's super simple. They were spending$20,000 a month on Indeed ads and then churning people out and saying, your prediction hiring software doesn't work. And I'm like, no, it does work. It's a you problem. You're bringing great human beings and you're planting them in here, and you're there's this hypocrisy between what you want people to think and the way you're presenting yourself. And you can say it's just window dressing, but it's not. I'll give you an example. You walk into a uh baseball stadium, right? Sports arena, you go into the bathroom, and it's a mess. And you walk up and you wash your hands, right? And you probably shake your hands like this, and take a paper towel and you scoot over the door, maybe open the door with your foot and you shoot the basket. If you miss, do you worry about it? Probably not. And it's not because you're a bad human. Like, but let's say you go to a really nice restaurant that night, right? Everything's dark lighting, there's you know, towels stacked there, there's probably somebody there offering you a mint. You go up to wash your hands. Do you even think about shaking your hands? They maybe think about it because you're honre, but you don't do it. And if you do drip water, you sort of wipe the things down and you like, you know, you look syllabilized. It's the same human being. That changing of behavior isn't awful. It's who we are. We adapt. So when somebody comes into your business, they're gonna adapt. And then that adaptation over time is gonna produce the evidence which is gonna create their identity. So with this company, now you drive up to their office, the outside's completely repainted. They have three big pictures of human beings: Joe, Bob, and Sarah. I don't know if those are the names. And underneath that it says Joe was working as a waiter 28K a year, now is our operations manager, 156, loves dogs, has three kids. The little bio of everything, and then it says, only champions can work here. Apply within. And you walk up to their front door, and now it's completely smooth concrete, totally nice handrail. It's painted like a red carpet. It's got signage all the way along that are that speaks to greatness in human beings, and there's footprints golden in the paint, and every one of them says, only champion step here. Let me ask you two totally different experiences, one snapshot in time. Which one's gonna have the better humans? Golden walkway, sir, all day, every day. Yeah, right? But this is just organizational design, and leaders get it wrong. They think it's the hiring the human. Yes, you want to hire the right human, but you're gonna put them into an environment and you have to control their thinking. Give me a perfect example of this. Uh, Andy Elliott's group, zero to a hundred million. When you pull into his parking lot, here's a standard bunch of cars parked outside, everybody parks in backwards every day. If you don't, somebody's gonna mention it to you. To an outsider, they're gonna go, why do you have this standard of backing into the parking lot? Why do you guess he has people back into the parking lot?

SPEAKER_01 44:20

So it's easier when they drive away and they see where they're going.

SPEAKER_00 44:23

No, there's no reason. The reason is it's a standard and it sets the tone that standards matter. So imagine a human being. Yeah, imagine a human being pulling in in the morning, they're dealing with family frustrations, whatever they got going, and they're getting ready to park, and they have to come off autopilot and go, oh, we're gonna back in because standards matter here, and they wanna belong. And so before they've even gotten into the business, with no manager telling them they should check their standards, they have to check their standards. Is that it's mind blowing when you think about it? Yeah. This is how a cult works. It's thought control. It's thought control. And you if you are a leader in a business, you sh absolutely should be in thought the thought control business. And that's not evil. People are their thoughts, are nobody has an original thought in life. You're watching CNN, you're watching Fox, you're surrounding yourself with that. There's thought control out there. If you're a good leader, you owe it to your team to control their thoughts. Because without it, they're going to go off and be unhealthy. They're going to like people think that humans want freedom. Like, it's the American dream. We're free. Actually, what people want is safety. They want the sure thing. They want to belong. And that's your job as a leader. To say, if you come here and you give me your 20s and 30s, you will have a great life. That's the promise. If you can't do it, you should get out of business.

SPEAKER_01 46:11

No, I've always looked at it with everybody that's ever come here, worked here at SyCon. I've always said to myself, as long as they're a better human being when they leave here, I get it professionally. They're going to grow here, no doubt about it. But I want them to be a better person when they leave here. Whether it's an entry-level labor job and they didn't didn't mesh and in 90 days, 180 days they're gone. I still want them to be a better person because they worked here. Um and and and I truly believe if every leader would get behind that, especially a lot of the leaders that are calling you and go, man, that's younger workforce, and man, I can't just keep nobody. But also, your your point that you've hit home a couple of times.

SPEAKER_00 46:59

If you looked at those leaders' lives, like if you could re literally look at their lives, go home, sit on their couch, hear their wife, and the way their kids talk to them, they don't have a great life. They have a business that they've sacrificed everything for, and they believe that they can't have it all. And I don't think that's true. We can have a great business, we can have great relationships, we can have great finances, we can have whatever our version of faith or belief is, we can have it all. And we have been sold the lie that we have to sacrifice one area of our life to have the other. We don't have to. And our employees shouldn't have to do that either. Like a fully enabled human being, we are fucking, excuse that, cut it out. We are miracles. Like if the human being in your business doesn't make you look at them and go, you're a fucking miracle, well, fire them. There are plenty of humans out there that are miracles. Like, why are we making it so hard? The only reason, like, if you can't have a miracle show up in your thing and them go, wow, this is a blessing and a miracle, it's because you haven't built the right environment. And you're not attracting miracles. You're attracting leftover, beaten, burnt out the people that are willing to suffer through the same things you've suffered through in your life. I just don't think we have to do that.

SPEAKER_01 48:19

As employers, we have to adapt, is where I was going. We have got just sorry to use myself as an example, but uh, it's just because I've listened to other great people like Jonathan joining us today, of going, man, I really suck at this. I've got to go find somebody that's better at this than me and then set my ego aside and go, yeah, it's all me. I'm I'm Mr. Elderman. But at the same time, the team that I got just hates their lives. And we're still getting things done, but I want to do it together. But as employers, you have got to adapt. Start small. Start by, hey, maybe an actual application, or hey, maybe do two interviews instead of one, maybe a phone call and just start small as they're coming in. But once uh Donathan hit it perfectly on the head, is you have to already have the established environment for them to actually walk into, not the one that's pictured in your head. The one that's fantasized and that you think okay, is actually transpiring. But as soon as you walk out the door, it's a trash can and nobody freaking wants to stand around.

SPEAKER_00 49:22

In my book, I have a whole think feel act audit step by step. Really?

SPEAKER_01 49:27

I guess I'll have to read it.

SPEAKER_00 49:30

What are the things? And and uh we do a two and two a two two-day event live uh in Scottsdale to teach people how to do interviews, how to create their environment, how to audit themselves. Um in your in your show notes, if you want to put a link to it, is the salesboss.com, but for your listeners who hire uh 100, they can put that code in, they can come for free. I don't want you to think I'm trying to pitch your listeners. Uh, and and people pay me 10k for that. That this will fundamentally change your business. Because you're gonna sit and for the first time, you're gonna think about what does it mean when I'm entering into a sacred contract with other human beings.

SPEAKER_01 50:12

That's just I I guess I'm I may need to come. I may need to come to that event because think, feel, act. I really like those three words.

Practical AI For Owners And Teams

SPEAKER_00 50:21

You just mean come come on out. We got we got one coming up, I think 2021 this month. You should just come down and come as my guest.

SPEAKER_01 50:29

No, it uh we might have to do that, sir. I'm actually we're gonna be in Colorado Springs at the end of this month for another conference as well for A11 shout out.

SPEAKER_00 50:38

I'm doing two days on I'm doing two days on unrecrutable, then Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, I'm taking a break, and then Thursday, Friday, and half a day, Saturday, I'm doing the AI-enabled uh executive. And we're gonna do real live building AI tools that will just make you smarter than 99.9% of the planet. You just come spend the week with me. We'll have a great time.

SPEAKER_01 51:07

Well, yeah, I'm I I guess I'm gonna have to take you up on that. I can't, I can't tell that opportunity, no, but let's uh let's figure that out. But you're you're so right. Is is this how I view AI, it's like if you wanted somebody that does you need somebody solve your problem in maths, you're probably gonna go find somebody you in a degree in math that has, you know, the experience and the expertise and what these AI platforms have every degree in everything known to man. Yes, there's guidance. You need to be able to have a good understanding of uh what it's feeding you, but the amount of I am not an Excel guy, but being able to create an Excel sheet that my wife can look at or or the accountants can look at while they didn't have to create any work. And I am telling you I am not an Excel guy, but I can make them a beautiful working Excel sheet by punching some stuff in Chat GPT. But I think as everybody starts to understand that, that you truly can be these other positions by not adding a ton of time to your day by utilizing AI tools. And yes, the blue collar world, we go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 52:20

You're gonna strap a nuclear-powered supercomputer to your back. Every human's gonna have it. Truly. The question is, are you as an owner gonna know how what to do with it? And and that's that that's the problem, boy, right? Like I could have a nuclear-powered supercomputer, I might just not know how to use it. I'm scared to death of that. The difference is a a leader is used to delegating. This is not something you can delegate because without playing with it, you don't understand what's possible. And you're gonna get beat by somebody who understands the possible, understands how to hire around it. So, in my in my two days that uh that we're getting together and and doing it, I hired my first AI employee six years ago. And I put him on with my team and said, I just want you to tell me what's possible. And he's like, What do you want me to build? I said, Nothing. I just want you to play. And I want you to tell me what's possible. And I've been, I've I've I've spent well over a million dollars in my own education in AI. I sold the first quantum computer on the planet. This is a space I know really well. Things are changing. You if you're gonna lead in this age, you you have to understand this. Um, you you you you can't delegate it. There are some things you just without actually playing with it. So I'm I teach you this framework like Lego blocks. So if you think about Legos, right? Like the first time a kid gets a set of Legos, they like they follow the instructions and they build this, like whatever, the building or a car or whatever it is. And then they throw all those Legos in a bin, and pretty soon they get this bin of like thousands of Legos, and they have an idea, and they just reach over and they build. Like they they have an intuitive knowledge of what do those blocks do, and they can build anything. And that's how we have to think about AI. The tools are happening so fast. So, what are the core blocks you need? What are the core Lego blocks you need? Well, you need a knowledge base, right? You need uh video, you need language, you need marketing, you need these are these are core blocks. For each of those blocks, there's an AI tool. There's probably four or five or ten of them that could work. And you would you just want to know what those are. And then I'm gonna build something. I'm gonna use those just like Legos, I'm gonna build something. When a new tool comes along, I don't start from scratch, I can just pop that block out and go, okay, well, here's a better language model. And on we go. And that's gonna prevent this like being paralyzed by fear of like what's the best. What's here's the best AI tool. It's the one you're actually using, and that is being implemented inside of your business in a process. I I'm not that interested in a cool toy, and there's a bunch of cool toys out there. Those cool toys can help you do really cool things. I closed a half a million dollar deal with a cool AI tool that I built. Like, like, and and I built it on airplane Wi-Fi flying from Nashville to Phoenix three and a half hours on my mobile. So you can do really cool things, but that's not the point. If you're the leader, you won't know if the person that you're enabling with a nuclear-powered supercomputer on their back, are they actually using that the way it can be used? That's the that's the that's the gift. And this hierarchy, uh, I I I put out a 15-minute video this morning on my uh Facebook channel that is uh you just gotta rethink how you how you think about it. Like that whole hierarchy layers gone. So my team, my team, I have an AI officer in my company now. Every single employee learns something in AI every single day, and they have a project every week they have to deliver. Wow. Zero zero choice. We are going to lead. It's not a maybe, it is it's not coming, it's here. That's it. We're not gonna be overwhelmed by it, we're not gonna be left behind by it, we're gonna be leading, we're gonna be teaching. And we're so as an example, you like we do hiring, right? For companies. That's like we don't do the hire, but we have software. We have a now a company signs up on our platform. Let's say they're an HBAC or plumbing company. The salesperson sells that. That whole sales call is recorded, it's in our CRM. Our CRM automatically dissects that call, goes out, researches as soon as they as soon as they make a payment in our platform. So we're gonna onboard them onto our software. It does all the competitive analysis. It looks up every single competitor in their marketplace, looks at their website, compares their pricing structure to all of their competitors, looks at all the open jobs they have of their competitors, writes a whole competitive analysis. Where are they competitive, where are they not competitive, looks at all of their competitors' social media presence, takes screenshots of anything to do with the hiring process, and produces about a 50-page research report about where they can improve and compete in their hiring market. That is 100% done by AI and delivered back to the client. I used to charge$100,000 for that report.

SPEAKER_01 57:44

That you can now do in 15 minutes or I don't even have to touch it.

SPEAKER_00 57:48

I wake up in the morning, it's there. Wow. Right? So this this is not uh to me, this is not about getting rid of humans. Although I do believe there's gonna be a lot of humans out of work. Uh and I actually think that's a good thing. Like most humans don't like to work anyway. Like, I mean, there's a lot of we tend to think people's value comes from work. We only think that because that's been true for thousands of years, right? That like you give any human that's sitting in a call center somewhere answering phones all day, can they have a meaningful life not doing that? You know, and we've been sold this lie that, well, when people get on welfare, they get dependent. That's actually not true. There is a subset of people who will do that. There's a but there's also a subset of people that are alcoholics, there's a subset. I don't believe that humans are broken. I think systems are broken. And you take a broken human, put them in a in a in a in a system that is sound and solid and you know, with love and and uh and accountability and structure, most humans get better. I I know there's mental illness, I'm being an extremist. There are people on the outskirts that are whatever, but 99% of the planet are good human beings, right? But when we de-risk making a living, what do we open up in a human? Like there are a lot of people that would take risks on music or the arts or research or uh uh study and investigation curiosity. Like I would I would love to be a professional student. The only reason I'm not is I I just couldn't I couldn't provide for my family doing that, right? But if you de-risked my livelihood and I could have a standard of living and still do those things, I I would be a very productive member of society. Now, get it, you know, I do think you're gonna have the 20% who are engaged to able to strap on a nuclear-powered supercomputer and they're gonna they're gonna have the rewards for that.

SPEAKER_01 59:56

No, it's uh such an interesting conversation. It truly is. I uh I think it's absolutely admirable um to be forcing uh literally your team to be the leaders in this because to hear you've already taken a product that you used to sell, turned it into AI, getting a report spit back out that is, if not even maybe a little bit better than the report that you were producing after you give it a full review and give it the cookies, like that's insanity. And then, hey, ready to like that it's hard for my brain to compartmentalize that already going.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:37

Let me show you something I developed for a client uh this last week. Uh they're uh they they they they're one of the largest RB dealers in the nation. Actually, they're the largest. I shouldn't say that because now you know who my client is, but the I'll say one of the largest. Their salesperson, they sell on the on the internet. The salesperson gets on, right? They got a lead come in, somebody's typed in a certain bin number, whatever, they're like, ah, I got it, and I can ship it to you. And people are uncomfortable buying something that size on the internet. Like, what's the support's gonna be and all this? We're analyzing that sales call immediately afterwards. We know what the buyer's life situation is. They're getting ready to retire, they're one day they will order they want to take their kids, right? Whatever the story is, like people have a story about why they buy an RB. And also what their concern is. We create a digital copy from the owner that looks like it's him. He's casual, he's sitting there, it looks like he shot it on his iPhone. He says, Hey, Cy, I know you were talking to Mike and you're getting ready to take your bride. You've worked hard your whole life and you want to hit the road. And I just wanted to tell you, as the owner of the company, like I get that it's uncomfortable buying on online. I want to tell you, I've been in business for 55 years with my family. I took it over, and I'm planning on running this in a way that I can pass this on to my kids, just like you probably would want to pass on things to your kids. And one of the advantages we have, if you buy local in Wisconsin where you're at, and you have a problem when you're out in Seattle, they're gonna want you to take that RV back to Wisconsin, and that's gonna be your cost. Because we ship all over the U.S., we have service centers everywhere. I'm gonna have you taken care of right in Seattle, and you're gonna continue to have that vacation with your bride. Anyhow, Mike's gonna take good care of you. But I just wanted to welcome you to our family. That's all AI driven, it looks real. His mother can't tell that that's not him. For sure. There there's no there is no chance that his competitors are gonna beat him. No, absolutely not, right? So this is but this is the world that we're living in. And so if people are just sort of like toying around right now in our in our hiring platform, there's still people looking at resumes. My clients never look at resumes. Like, why would you look at a resume? A resume is a work of fiction, right? I can predict how somebody's gonna do in that role. We have uh Mercedes-Benz as a as a as a client. The potential salesperson comes in, they take a questionnaire, we output a prediction. This guy's gonna sell 50 cars a month, 40 cars a month, 30 cars a month, they're gonna stay around 12 months. We get to within 15% pre-hire. Completely de-risk this hiring process. Not only that, our clients, somebody comes in, they they do an application, right? And they the the people the people are trying to hire. They grew up with like Uber and DoorDash. So, like you ever order like a late night burrito? Oh, of course. Yeah, right? You get the munchies. I don't know why you'd get the munchies late night, but you you you you order a burrito, right? How many times do you look at that app between the time you order and the time you get it? Maybe once. Oh, you're you're unusual. Most people is like, you know, the dashers left, the dash is at the door, dash is on the way. Like, they want to know. Oh, I'm watching, I just watched the map, watching him the whole way. And it doesn't change how fast that gets there, but we want to know that like this is the environment our applicants grew up in and are living with. And then they hit our website uh and apply and they get this little like box that says somebody will be with you shortly. Like our clients, a little bit of time passes, you're gonna get a text message that's me talking to you. It's not really me, but it's gonna talk to you, it's gonna say, Saiya, I noticed you applied and you have some interesting experience at XYZ company mentioned out of your resume. That might be interesting for us here. Hey, we've had a massive demand for this thing. So if you could just answer these two questions on your cell phone video, it's gonna help me understand where to uh route you. And we've got two other steps you could be hired by Friday.

unknown 1:04:43

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:45

Which company do you think is gonna win the war of talent? Every time. Every time. It's not even this is the fun world that that we're living in right now, and I'm just playing full out.

Free Resources And Where To Start

SPEAKER_01 1:04:58

Well, I can't tell you how much I've learned today, like already. I'm just sitting here going, like, it's it's it's kind of, you know, it's there, you know what's happening behind the scenes, and I'm trying to find new ways to use it, whether it be personal or professional or whatever, but forcing myself, but man, you are you are on a totally different uh opposite end of the spectrum.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:22

Yeah, but here's the thing uh there is a blueprint for it. This is like Lego blueprint for AI as an example. Like once you master the concept, and I think that's I spent a lot of time really thinking through what's a framework that we can help people. Otherwise, without a framework, things are just chaos. Like you don't know where the knowledge fits. But if I have a filter, it's you know, with if you have the right filter, the noise goes away. And it's the ability with all the noise to go, okay, what's real? What actually matters today? And how do I feed myself enough so I don't lose context? Right? How do I not become the person that doesn't know how to program the clock on the VCR? Right.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:10

Man, we could sit here and have this conversation for the next four hours. And uh, but guys, if uh just real quick, one more time, Jonathan, where can we find you again and those great.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:22

The salesboss.com. The salesboss.com, you pull a thread there, you'll find all my books, everything. You know, I'm I'm I'm a pretty public person, the salesboss.com. If you do forward slash free, just for your guests, uh, I did a great event with Ben Hardy. If your audience doesn't know Ben Hardy, he wrote the book Who Not How. He wrote a book called Scale. Uh, like he's he's a master when it comes to humans. I um uh hired him to come out and teach a private session with some business owners here locally. He allowed me to record it. I'm giving that away free. It is a masterclass. Uh and a bunch of like guidebooks on hiring, that sort of thing. So forward slash free the salesboss.com.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:01

Well, there you go, guys. First, I mean, that's awesome. Thank you for the extra added resource. These guys needed. These are the men and women building America every single day. And to dive off into what could possibly be most of their strategy. Hey, if you're sitting there with four employees, it sounds like you're in the you're doing better than I am. You know what I mean? Like you have opportunities. I this wasn't a thing 10 years ago when I was building a company.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:30

This wasn't this wasn't a thing 12 months ago.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:33

Right. Like it's just changing so fast. And you know what I last thing here, and we'll shut her down, but I I accounted to equipment in my world. If 10 years ago I knew that they were gonna have literal full autonomous working machines on site, I'd have probably spent some more money on equipment and less on people if I knew they not to be anyway, love my team, etc. But I I went the wrong route with too many people. Man, I could have equipment to null and like completely negate three or four labor positions with uh a couple of pieces and and it would have traveled the entire way. I had no idea I would have watched three pieces of equipment completely operatorless work together seamlessly.

Hard Truths And Final Takeaways

SPEAKER_00 1:08:17

Here's the thing people are gonna get into philosophical discussion about okay, well, what about that person that's out of work? I get it. I get it. And I'm happy for us to figure out some way to take care of those people. But here's what here is what you're not going to get around. Just imagine there's voice AI right now that answers the phone, sounds better than any human being could, follows the plan, pennies to operate, requires no office, no phone, nothing. Uh, I've been talking about this for two years. I was like, if you are in a call center, you better get out because you're gonna have multimillions of people that are in call center jobs out. Let's let's say you're American Express, right? And you run this call center, you have a hundred thousand people in the call center. And you say, you know what? I'm not gonna cut all these jobs. You're gonna have Visa who cuts all those jobs and uses AI. And here's the truth. We're gonna take our business to Visa because they can give us a better rate, they can do better service and lower quality. So stand on your high horse if you want. They tested this. You you tell people, people say, You want to buy America first? You're like, great, that TV that you just spent$400 for is now$5,000. Guess what TV people buy? It's not America First, they buy the$400 TV. This is the business reality. You are gonna cut human beings. Like, so my theory is make the life as great as possible for the human beings you do have. And not like incrementally better. I can take somebody that I was paying 60K, 70K, and pay them 300 or 400K and completely change their life because they are a miracle. And they are gonna come up with things that I would never dream of as a leader because I trusted them, I found them, and I put a nuclear-powered supercomputer strapped to their back and I got the fuck out of the way. It's gonna be amazing.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:16

Well, sir, I ask everybody on the show, um, honestly, man, you've got my mind going, dude. I can't wait to have a little bit of extra conversation. But uh truly, I ask everybody that comes on the show, what's that entrepreneur that's maybe, or that labor guy, or maybe that person in the call center that we were just talking about? Um, what's a takeaway for them? If they're just absolutely stuck currently, they don't really know what to do emotionally, physically, mentally, um, how can they convey themselves in a different manner moving forward?

SPEAKER_00 1:10:59

This is uh advice that changed my life. I'm gonna give you two two two of them because I think they're side by side. Uh somebody said to me once, they said, uh if you lie to yourself, why would anyone else trust you? And so I think if you're a human being, you need to decide what's true for you and you need to live that. So if you say I value my health, start valuing your health. If you say I uh financial security is important to me, you show by your life that it is. That same human being that says financial security is important to me, goes home, cracks open a six-pack of beer, and sits on the couch and watch Netflix, they're lying to themselves and they're medicating themselves and they're reserving the right to feel sorry for themselves. If you lie to yourself, why would anyone else trust you? So just get serious with yourself about what are you lying to yourself about? Like, I think that's the same. Because as you start holding honor with yourself, that shows to other people, and people are like, I can trust this person because they your your own self-confidence, your own self-worth comes into play. So I I think that's it. Like it and it's if somebody, if somebody is stuck, I think being stuck is that they're just not being and they're letting fear stand in the way. I have zero fear. Here's here's the reason why. My tent, like literal tent, I love the backpack, is fully paid for. And I'm happy to sleep in it. Like, there's nothing you can take away from me. Right? So I can take any kind of risk. So like I think like if you're at that point, you get one life, if you're stuck, just fuck it all and do one thing. Right? And by the way, if you if you can't think what that one thing is, I would give you this one thing. Focus on your health. Because people throw away their entire health to chase wealth, and then they get old and they spend all of their wealth trying to get their health back. So when you finally get out of the slump you're in, you're gonna want to be in the best shape of your life to enjoy and go after that thing. So while you're figuring it out, and by the way, when you put good food in your body and you exercise, your mindset's gonna change, your confidence level is gonna change, people are gonna look at you differently. When people look at you differently, you're gonna look at yourself differently. No, that's that's fantastic. Quit lying to yourself. This is I have an employee, and I know I'm like rambling, so you can cut this out if you but I have an employee, and I just love this like be really honest with someone. So I hired a new sales guy uh here 60 days ago. Uh, and he's going through a sort of a rough period in his life. So I got like knee to knee with him, and I said, I don't care your about your past. I care about who you are and how hard you're willing to work. Because I have an opportunity here that's life-changing, but you're gonna have to change your life. And he committed to it. So first day of work, I said, we went for a walk. I said, Hey, uh do you want to just have the casual like conversation, new boss, new employer, or do you want to get real? He's like, No, I want to get real. I'm like, great. So tell me what's important in your life. Like we started talking about it in the interview, but there's some things like HR you're not gonna talk about in the interview. So he said, Well, health's really important to him. I said, Great. Uh, what do you mean? Well, health. Well, I need to lose some weight, my, you know, I gotta do this, and I just on and on. I said, Well, what's it gonna take to do that? He's like, and he knows everything to do, like we all do, right? He's like, Well, I gotta work out and I gotta eat healthy and gotta do my macros. I used to be in great shape. I'm like, great. So, how important is that to you? Absolutely important. I'm gonna get healthy. I said, Great. I hear you making a promise to yourself. He said, Yeah, I said, great. So here's the deal. If you don't text me a picture every single day that you're in the gym and you don't show me your phone that you've tracked your macros for the day and you don't have 10,000 steps in every day, the day I don't get that, I'm gonna fire you. And he goes, Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, what do you mean? I was like, Well, you just got done telling me that this was important to you. Like, are you lying to yourself or are you lying to me? Because if you're gonna lie to yourself, why should I trust you? And I don't want you on my team, even if you sell me a million dollars. Literally. Literally. So he's like, no, no, no, you can hold me to this. So I get a text message from him uh or uh a uh and and and we moved from that conversation. He said, I need to make a lot of money. I said, Great, what's a lot of money to you? And people don't want to have the money conversation. And I said, I want to cut through the BS. What's the most money you've ever had in your bank account? Like, can we have that sort of conversation with people? Like, let's quit dancing around. What does your future look like? No, I love his real number is different than my real number. Let's just talk about it. It's just a money, it's just a it's just a digit in in in the in the sphere of nothing. But we have this embarrassment to have real conversations with real humans. So he tells me how much money he has. I said, great, we're gonna put a hundred times that in your bank account by the end of the year. For sure, if you do the work. He's never gonna leave. I get a I get a voicemail from him Friday. He's in tears. He's like, Man, I just can't tell you. I've been in the gym. I feel so good. I feel like a child again. I feel like I'm actually getting to know myself again. I'm like my energy is better. Dude, we are just getting started. Thank you. I love you. This is from an employee they got hired 60 days ago. That's amazing. This is an unrecrutable team. Right? That's what that's the blueprint I have in the book. Guys, the whole model is different.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:06

Literally, please go check out unrecrutable. I would love a copy. It sounds like I need to need to run through it really quickly. Um, there's a lot of good ins and outs. But truly, Mr. Jonathan, thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:19

Thank you. Honored to be on your show. I love the backbone of America, the blue-collar worker.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:25

Literally, they are the men and women uh building this country every single day. Guys, I uh go check out salesboss.com, get your free um your free resource there, four-hour conversation with them. The sales boss, the sales boss. If you just do sales boss, the sales boss, you'll get me. Thesalesboss.com. The man, the myth, the legend. Thank you so much for your time. It's gonna help a lot of people. And uh truly looking forward to the relationship forming, sir. Awesome, good to know you. If you've enjoyed this episode, be sure to give it a like, share it with the fellas, check out our website to send us any questions and comments about your experience in the blue collar business. Who do you want to hear from? Send them our way, and we'll do our best to answer any questions you may have. Till next time, guys.