Recruitment for Blue-Collar Businesses

Tom Finn (00:01.546)

Welcome, welcome my friends. Today we are learning from my good friend, Shawn Day. Shawn, welcome to the show.

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Shawn Day- Hire Lead Chill (00:10.058)

Thanks for having me on. Love it. Love it. Well pumped up.

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Tom Finn (00:13.806)

Oh, I am pumped up to chew the proverbial fat with you as well, my man. Uh, and if you don't know Shawn, let me take just a quick second to introduce you to him. He has been rocking for 35 years in the small business world. His journey began with day corp mortgage, a venture that really taught him the ropes of how to be an entrepreneur. And through those highs and lows, he honed his craft, eventually founding PHCS Inc. in 2004, which is a cleaning company that flourished under his guidance. In 2016, fate bestowed upon him the challenge of revolutionizing recruitment. And now small business owners from coast to coast seek his guidance, turning to him and his team for recruiting solutions that go beyond the industry norm. And he's got a ton of information to share. And I want to get right to it.

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I want to get right to recruitment and the fact that this space is facing some transformation and technology advancements and certainly changing workforce expectations. So hit us right between the eyes here from your perspective, what are the most impactful changes and things that you're seeing going on in recruitment today?

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Shawn Day- Hire Lead Chill (01:27.896)

Well, we can't not use the term AI, right? When we talk about anything today, AI, AI. So I think that's a big change. I do the AI thing weekly. I think AI is fine. I think it's a good thing happening if you're taking advantage of it. What I don't want to start to think is that we don't need people anymore. And so I think that relationships with either companies and your clients or relationships with your candidates or your employees, I think that that's actually gonna be even more important because of AI. I think that when we get into the technology part of that, it's gonna be a premium to be a great leader and build relationships and understand how to do that. So I think there's some great things on the horizon. We've revolutionized some things in the recruiting end in our little world of the blue collar sort of space that I'm involved with. So I think AI is probably the biggest thing that I see and just the speed of technology. It used to take, it was a long tail to go from getting the client, you know, digging deep to source for that candidate and who you're going to hire. Technology, I mean, apply now, apply now, apply now on job boards and social media. And they can apply to so many places. Speed is so important, more important than ever.

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Tom Finn (03:01.418)

Yeah, so we can get into AI and we certainly will, but I wanna back up before we sort of blast forward here. So you mentioned a couple of words that most people have not heard in recruitment. You said blue and collar. And in fact, if you are listening and not watching this on your favorite channel, Shawn is in fact wearing a blue collar today. So Shawn, hit us with blue collar recruitment, what you guys do.

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Shawn Day- Hire Lead Chill (03:15.493)

Yeah. Okay, that's right.

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Tom Finn (03:30.986)

I don't think that's a space most of us think we use recruiters for.

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Shawn Day- Hire Lead Chill (03:34.628)

Yep, yep. So real quickly, the PHCS was a cleaning company that I owned. I sold it in 2015. Just to give you a backdrop to answer your question. So when I sold it, the company that bought my cleaning company kept me on and we started buying other cleaning businesses. That was our growth strategy through acquisitions. So we got up to about 100 employees and I said, man, we really need to put a recruiting system together or we need a division to start recruiting, that's all we're doing. And blue collar is high turnover. It really is high turnover. Your restaurants, your window cleaning companies, home service and things like that. So I put a system together and we did something completely different. What we did was we didn't do the staffing agency thing or the temp agency or a direct hire agency. What we did was we kind of created this whole system for ourselves with no vision of doing this for other companies.

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The next thing I knew when we started to do this, it took about a year to put together. We were getting asked by our friends that own home service businesses, as we did, we were colleagues. Hey man, how are you recruiting? How are you getting your window cleaning texture, home texture, your plum mirrors and HVAC? And we got a great system. Next thing I know, I'm recruiting for several hundred clients around the country in the blue collar space. So that's the backdrop to, you know, answering your question. And it's, we've really revolutionized number one, it wasn't something that was considered to outsource at all because you couldn't afford the temp agencies and the staffing agencies necessarily, and certainly not the direct hire, pay a percentage of that first year annual salary type of thing. Really, really expensive to hire a residential home cleaner or a window cleaner for that type of typical old school industry.

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Tom Finn (05:27.586)

So how do you pull the cost out for that client so that they can get the talent that they need in this setting, but not have to pay a fortune? Because obviously they don't want to pay a fortune for a window cleaner. They want a good service at a fair market price, but they don't want to pay a middleman some exorbitant amount of fees. How does the business model work?

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Shawn Day- Hire Lead Chill (05:53.301)

And it was so interesting because we weren't driven to do this for any other company. What we did was we listened and we listened to our buddies that own cleaning businesses and home service businesses. And what we decided to do, I said, you know, we're in many different parts of the country. Why don't we just add you on to what we're already doing? We're already recruiting for different locations we own.

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We'll just add you on to what we're already doing. So what we did was I didn't know what to charge. Nobody had ever done this before. And so what I, you know, somebody with the first client we had, Tom, it's funny. We had somebody that needed a four window cleaners. They didn't, had no idea how to get recruit. And so what I said, I don't know. I guess we can help you. We found them in like two weeks four great window cleaning technicians. And mind you, one window cleaning technician can produce about $200,000 of annual revenue.

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So that's no small chunk of change for a window cleaning company. We found four technicians. Dude, you got to bill me. This is phenomenal. Thank you. You got to. I don't know what to charge. So he begged. And our first invoice was for a case of beer. So that was our first invoice. I had no idea what I was doing. But I will tell you, we do charge dollars now. And the way that we do it is very much like a hiring a marketing company to do your Facebook ads or your Google Ads on the demand side of it to acquire clients, and you'd pay them a management fee. And then they tell you, well, how many clients do you need to get? And okay, well, this is about what you should budget in advertising on Google or on Facebook and we'll manage all of that for you. We do the exact same thing. We are elevator pitches where you're full-time recruiting department. We go and do everything. You don't ever have to go into job boards. We manage that for you. So we're not necessarily saying, you don't owe us money unless we get you something. We're saying, we're gonna manage it for you, put it together for you. You need to come up with the budget for, or the investment for the advertising on Indeed or ZipRecruiter or Facebook. But we're going to research your labor market for you, let you know how competitive that is. We're going to give you a budget that we think you should invest in advertising on Indeed and on Facebook and on ZipRecruiter. And we're going to do that based on research, number one, and we're going to tell you, if we owned your company, this is what we would do for a budget and kind of consult in that way. Again, we're your full-time recruiting department. We're consulting with you, collaborating with you. You own the company, you make all the decisions. And then we manage everything, and we'll put the strategy together. So if we're your full-time recruiting department, we're going to put the strategy together on where we're going to disperse those investments to find those technicians or the salespeople or whatever it is we're recruiting for.

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Tom Finn (08:43.65)

So let's compare and contrast this with a traditional white-collar recruiting model. So in your particular case, what you're saying is you're taking a fee, likely a monthly fee to manage as a full-time recruiter for a variety of different jobs and locations based on the market research, you're going to, uh, you know, change your fee and adjust it based on what your client wants. In a traditional more corporate setting, et cetera, they're gonna charge a percentage of the first year of the salary, somewhere between 20 and 30%. Those numbers get big. You make 100 grand, you're paying your recruiter $30,000, but they don't charge any upfront fees usually. Sometimes they charge half or what have you just to kind of get the contract rolling. So that's the big difference, right? Am I missing anything else?

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Shawn Day- Hire Lead Chill (09:41.508)

No, that is exactly right. And in regards to the percentage from a recruiting agency, and then you've got the staffing and temp agency part of that too, which is normally, hey, we've got an hourly rate that you're gonna pay us, and then we'll take a cut of that, and then we're gonna pay there may be a good place for temp agencies and staffing agencies. I'm not familiar with using them. I've never used them, but I do know that it can hurt your culture quite a bit when you're talking about high turnover industries like restaurants, like a lot of salespeople in car industries, for example. That's a pretty big turnover. And in all the home service businesses that I've mentioned. So we are really big and you'll, you know, we align with you completely on how do we retain these people? Because we're talking blue collar business owners that a lot of times were technicians, they were out cleaning the windows. They're going, man, am I making good money? I want to hire some employees. And like a lot like Michael Gerber's E-Myth, they're the technician. They get stuck at, OK, I got my first. I got to get out of the truck. I got to get my first employee. We actually will help coach through as part of our management fee. How do you do that? How do you retain employees? Leadership. Of course, pay attracts a good person, but you have to have that leadership and that culture and other things that are going to retain them as well. So there's a lot that goes into it that a staffing agency doesn't do, that your direct hire doesn't do as well.

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Tom Finn (11:12.522)

Yeah, I want to come back to that because I really want to, I really want to talk about why white collar industries are not using your model. So I've forever have thought, why are recruiters paid so much and their answer is typically, you know, because we find the best talent and without us, the best talent wouldn't find you right and that's usually the answer. But but I've always thought about your model, Shawn.

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Shawn Day- Hire Lead Chill (11:33.608)

Right. Yeah.

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Tom Finn (11:42.062)

As that you're addressing the blue-collar market, which is fantastic, but I feel like it should not be so narrow into just one particular segment of the business. Why can't everybody have a monthly SaaS recruiter that does constant recruiting for them as an organization? Is it because they don't need it every month and there's too much, so much turnover in the jobs you're talking about that it wouldn't be cost-effective?

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Shawn Day- Hire Lead Chill (12:05.052)

Great question. We actually have tapped into some outside of the blue-collar industry to a point that we used to have our branding blue-collar recruiting. And I changed it to Hire Lead Chill because we started to get daycare centers dental office over here, I pull in an attorney's office, and so like chiropractor, those are not blue-collar, typically considered blue-collar industries, right? And so we have tapped into that and we continue to tap into that. So to your point, it can be used. And we're fine if somebody needs to hire two people a year. So you pay us a couple of times and you're done. One of the things that's unique though with us, and I think maybe towards this work does work for the higher turnover industries a little bit better than maybe some of the white collar industries. And that is that we charge a monthly fee and at the end of the day, high five, thank you, Shawn. You've done well for us, your team's great, but we're all set. In fact, maybe we have one too many people. We wanna stop the service right now. That's an option or we've come up with a really cool thing that we've learned a very hard lesson with in our own businesses. And that is we can move you from the $500 a month that we charge somewhere in there, depending on what the situation is. But that's an average charge for us, between three and 500 bucks a month. When you're done, go away if you want, come back and use us again, that's fine. Or let's put you into what we call the, you'll love this, the ABC club for 140 bucks. You're not actively recruiting, but we don't want to turn off everything. We want to still engage with people because we call it the ABC club, always be crutin'. Always be crutin'. And so when you have 10 window cleaners out there and you've got maybe one too many and we stop everything, and then all of a sudden Joe breaks his ankle and Fred stops showing up.

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You just lost two out of 10 people, 20% of your workforce overnight. Now that takes a month or two to replace unless you're in the ABC club because you're gonna get some interviews coming in and you're gonna be flowing in some people. There's a difference between being in a high turnover industry, Tom, and being short staffed. The ABC club solves that problem.

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Tom Finn (14:32.542)

Alright my friends for those of you that don't know what Shawn's talking about the ABC Club is a reference to a movie called Glenn Gary Glenn Ross and ABC is representative of always be Closing and Shawn's iteration of that is always be Crutin So for those that do not know the movie Glenn Gary Glenn Ross go pick it up. It's a short film, I'm not sure which app it's on. But but you can certainly find it. Very well said, I get it. So what you're trying to do is say, look, I've got a fee, I'll actively recruit if you want me to passively keep your name out there, we lower the fee, we keep you engaged. And then when you want to turn up the volume, we can turn up the volume as well. So how do you make money at this? Because I would guess if I called a traditional consultant recruiter and said, my buddy Shawn is charging 500 bucks a month, which includes some costs for LinkedIn or Indeed. And then he's got this other plan that's 140 or 150 bucks where he's actively supporting you as well. They'd fall out of their chair and say, how do these guys make a living?

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Shawn Day- Hire Lead Chill (15:56.292)

Yeah, that's a fair question. Well, a couple of things, technology, so automation workflows and things like that. But the main answer to your question, Tom, is we take the risk of our investing in LinkedIn and job boards and so on. We're just managing this for you. If you hired a full-time recruiting person at your business, you wouldn't expect them to pay for Indeed ads and LinkedIn ads, right? Then we're not going to do it either. You're paying us a management fee to manage everything for you. We recommend a budget based on our research. You need to invest in that budget. So the risk is, it goes from us, the recruiter, if you will to the client for a much smaller price to get you into the game.

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Tom Finn (16:48.202)

And what's the amount of time if I wanted that window cleaner and, uh, let's say I'm in, uh, I don't know, Nashville, Tennessee, uh, and I need a window cleaner for my team. How long does it take to find somebody like that?

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Shawn Day- Hire Lead Chill (17:05.336)

Normally what happens is after we get you set up in our system, which we have to do to get all the automations and workflows, it normally will take about a week to get the application flow coming in. And we've got a really cool proprietary scoring system so that by the time they see the job, let's say, on Indeed, click on it, they automatically get redirected to our online application that is also a scoring system. The candidate doesn't know they're being scored. And we've got it down really well with some data-driven questions where we know within five minutes after they complete this, because it's very user friendly, very easy to complete, not to qualify, very easy to complete. We know within five minutes if they're worthy of an interview or not. And then all the automations go out and everything happens. So application flow in a week, probably a couple of interviews set up in week two, maybe a higher or two in week two, definitely by week three, you're getting your window cleaner up and going. And that's for people that just start with us. Now, if you've been with us a while and we get you in the ABC club and we're working it for you, you can get people hired in about a week or two.

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Tom Finn (18:19.318)

Yeah, that's fantastic. I mean, speed to market and speed to job fill is so important for organizations. It really doesn't matter what business you're in. Uh, when those jobs sit empty, you typically are losing productivity and revenue and, and also putting a lot of pressure on those that still remain at the company because they're having to pick up the extra shifts in this case, or the extra hours, um, which puts a lot of stress on your workforce. So that speed in recruiting is critically important for really any company. So when you when you think about your competition, do you have competition in this space? Who who do you have to compete with?

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Shawn Day- Hire Lead Chill (18:58.048)

Well, you got some great questions. We had nobody to compete with, and now we've got about five people that basically took everything we do and created a market. We've created a market. We've revolutionized something that we're very proud of, and it came organically, not because we were profit-driven at the time, not because we had this, how are we going to make a ton of money off our colleagues type of thing. They came to us. We created something together and it's worked beautifully. And at first I was, what are you, these guys are stealing everything we're doing, you know? And somebody sat me down, my business partner, he goes, dude, it's the nicest compliment in the world and it's only gonna help our colleagues even more. And I said, and I looked in the mirror and I said, it's gonna make us a hell of a lot better. And because we're gonna have to be on our toes now and this is no longer just us in the game. So it's elevated our team, our staff, and certainly me to make sure that I'm doing the things we need to do to take care of our clients.

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Tom Finn (20:00.366)

Can you do this in any city?

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Shawn Day- Hire Lead Chill (20:02.54)

Absolutely. Yeah

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Tom Finn (20:04.162)

So there's no geographical requirements because you're doing everything online. So you could be in Seattle recruiting in Florida or in Ohio recruiting in Texas because everything's done digitally, is that right?

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Shawn Day- Hire Lead Chill (20:07.769)

Exactly. That's absolutely right. And again, remember how we started. It was we didn't, our vision wasn't to do this for other companies at the very beginning in 2016, but we had six locations. So when I put this together for our own company, three primary things I thought of were it's got to work with data driven systems because data to me and systems to me means it's consistent. And so it had to be that. It had to work in multiple parts of the country because we were in six or seven states ourselves at that time. So the whole thing came about. That has to be true then because we were buying companies in different states. So it has to work in different parts of the country. And the reason I like to do the labor research it's a hell of a lot more difficult to recruit in a rural area in Ohio when you're next to an Amish community compared to maybe some other parts of the country like Cleveland, you know, the Cleveland area and the metro Cleveland area. So there's some different, and it's an amazing thing. When you look into the keywords and job titles and things like that, these are things that I look at and we research because for an example, Texas loves to use the word maids. Maids on a mission is one of our clients. Buckets and bows, maid service. Most other parts of the country don't use the word maids. So if I thought we can just use that everywhere, we'd lose application flow. And that just decreases your odds of getting some really good employee or candidate to the interview table and hire.

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Tom Finn (21:57.698)

So with all of this recruitment work, do you still manage, are you still a part of those businesses that are doing the cleaning work?

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Shawn Day- Hire Lead Chill (22:05.792)

We sold a lot of them because we started bookkeeping as well. And the bookkeeping actually shot through the roof even more than the recruiting. The recruiting shot through the roof at the first few years when we already sustained and had a lot of customers. And we've got a phenomenal guy that's doing the bookkeeping stuff, Dan. And we're looking around going, why are we doing these other businesses right now?

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We've got to focus on what we're able to focus on to make some money and help people out. We still do own one or two, but we don't own as many as we used to.

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Tom Finn (22:41.07)

Well, look, I mean, the name of the company's, uh, what, probably one of the best that I've, I've ever seen hire lead chill, um, that is about as good as it gets. So what you're really doing though, is you're providing the professional services to a blue collar industry. So we've got, I get it. We we've got the recruitment piece. We've got the bookkeeping piece, which is a pain for most businesses. It's either very, very expensive accountant or you're doing it yourself and there isn't a whole lot in between. Um, like bookkeeping, which is a skill, but can be done on QuickBooks online and others that's pretty efficient. Um, so are there any other parts of the market? You're an entrepreneur that you are thinking about that you might want to enter or that would be part of this suite of services.

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Shawn Day- Hire Lead Chill (23:33.956)

We have a new partner that is a marketing genius. And so he handles the marketing, the capacities or the demand side. I handle the capacity side, the employee side, recruiting side, and Dan does all the bookkeeping for our clients. So there's sort of that trio, you know, and the biggest concern that somebody should have that is especially in a home service in a business is capacity and demand. It's so hard to match capacity and demand in a high-turnover industry. You don't want too many cleaning technicians, for example, because then pay starts to go down for them because you've got too much capacity. If you've got too much demand and not enough people hired, then you've got some quality issues and you've got some stress to your point earlier, Tom, you hit it right over the fence. That really starts to affect your culture.

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Your A employees get a little bit burned out or quite a bit burned out. Your wife's about ready to get divorce papers because you're having trouble sleeping at night. We literally, and I tell my staff this and I don't tell them this enough, but we, in our own little world, we actually change the world big time for our clients. I mean, when you can be comfortable with your staff and you're staffed properly, you've got great culture and you actually love coming to work because your people thing is solved. Your family life's better. You're a better father. You're a better husband. You're a better wife. I mean, you truly are. And we hear that. We get that feedback from our clients.

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Tom Finn (25:07.038)

Yeah, I think you're hitting it right on the nose here. You know, all of those things lead to a better family life, a better work life, more integration between the two. And you know, look, providing these services to mostly blue collar companies makes a whole heck of a lot of sense. So when you think about leadership, and you think about sort of helping and helping be a leader and helping these companies figure out leadership. How do you help a blue collar, former, you know, right out of the truck person, it's gonna say guy, but let's not be gender specific about this, right person coming out of the truck. How do you, how do you have a conversation with that person to say, look, you need to kind of, you can't act the way you did in the truck, you got to act a little differently. Do you have those conversations?

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Shawn Day- Hire Lead Chill (26:01.032)

I do a lot of speaking around the country. And one of the things that I love the most about what I do is after I do a speech or a presentation at an association or something like that, people come up to you and ask questions and you shake hands and things like that. I always see the guy or the gal kind of waiting for everybody to go away. And I just could notice that person and they'll come up to me and they'll say, hey, Shawn, thank you so much for that. Do you have like five minutes? I really have a couple of questions for you. That five minutes is usually a two hour conversation with this person. And he's literally telling me in tears often about his personal life going to hell about how he's not sure if he should just get rid of the three guys he has and start over. And these are conversations that we have. And one of the things, Tom, to answer your question more specifically, I'm a big believer in putting your ego on the shelf. And we chatted a little bit, we've chatted before, and you've heard me say this, you know, when I think too much about Shawn Day, I get in trouble. Okay. I get in trouble when I think about Shawn Day. So I need to solve that problem, the only way I can solve that is by thinking of other people. That's how I stop thinking of me. And so one of the things that we do, and I hate the word mindset because it's overused and it's a bit of a platitude today. So I use the word perception, okay? I call it perception leadership or perception management. Not what people think about you, but how are you treating people? So if we treat clients like the best people and we jump through these hoops and we'll come out on Sunday and we'll do whatever it takes to take care of them. And one client in the, and let me give an example, in the window cleaning industry, one client is worth about $3,000 residential, maybe $2,000 a window cleaner goes out and produces around $182,000 of revenue. So my first conversation is, who's more important to you? What is the biggest sale of your life there? Is it the production of $180,000, or is it the $3,000 client? And I'll tell you now. You'll get clients. If you're good, you'll get clients. That's not a problem. It really hasn't been in the last several years. The problem has been the employee part of that. And when you lose, if you get 100 clients one day or 200 or 300 and you lose three of them, you will still go out to dinner. You'll still pay your mortgage. We don't like it, but you'll replace them quickly. If you have 10 employees and you lose three employees, you're gonna wonder, you're not gonna sleep that night and you're gonna wonder how you're gonna make it through the day the next day. We really push that mindset of it's the biggest sale of your life recruiting it. You give me, Tom, give me any sentence with the word marketing in it. I'll take that word marketing right out of there, throw the word recruiting in there, and it works every single time.

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Tom Finn (29:00.15)

Hmm. Yeah, look, recruiting and, uh, building teams requires a certain mindset. It really does. And, and leadership and management and being able to communicate effectively are cornerstones of success for really any industry. You can't be successful as a leader. Um, any more by being a jerk, uh, you know, those, those baby boomers that was their style are quickly dying off like the dinosaurs and, uh, and you're having to have much more empathy for other people, much more understanding, much more of a two way conversation and meeting in the middle. Whereas generations perhaps of the past, they just didn't operate like that. And, and there's a whole host of reasons why they didn't. Um, and there was reasons, good reasons that they had to behave in those ways in certain generations after world war two, et cetera, but, but look today. If it doesn't matter how old you are, if you're getting out of the truck, you can be 20. You can be 70. You've got to be able to have a conversation to recruit people to have people want to come work for you. And you've got to understand what their needs and wants and desires are, and how you can help them fill the gaps in their own life, both professionally and personally as well.

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Shawn Day- Hire Lead Chill (30:23.872)

That's about the first 15 minutes of my presentation. When I talk about recruiting, you just probably did most of the 15 minutes of my presentation. We would love to think certain things about people that we're hiring, but we've got this thing called reality. We've got to deal with the reality that we're in today, not what we hope for or what should be. And a lot of the people that we're hiring today and over the last COVID plus years is our people that are the first generation, if you think about it, to have a screen in their hand from the day they were born. They're the generation when, you know, when we were in the car going on vacation, my mom or dad said, you better just enjoy the view. What are you, and pipe down back there and just, you know, figure out the, what do we, the generation working for us today in the industries that we serve. Here, Junior, here's a video. Look at that for two hours. We're gonna drive.

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This is the first generation where if you showed up to the little league game, you got a trophy and a ribbon. That's all you had to do. I'm not judging any of it. I'm just saying that's the reality of the people. And therefore, and you've mentioned this a couple of times, Tom, that's what makes leadership even more important today, because some of these people, we can't blame these, the generation, because we're the ones that created that generation as parents. It's not their fault. And I can say this, every business owner I talk to that gives me the, nobody wants to work anymore, this generation, this and that, or this, they're the ones that have a difficult time executing on their hiring needs. The ones that say, I get it, I know that's the problem, Shawn, what are our solutions, are the ones that are executing on their hiring needs today.

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Tom Finn (32:06.25)

Yeah, look, every generation is a little different for the time that they grew up in history of the world. That's really the fact of the matter. And we're all different at different generations. And I don't know that one is better or worse than the other. You're just a product of the time you were born. And you do your best to understand the time that they were born and what tools and resources they had as youngsters and what they grow into and then you have to really work within a leadership team or understand how to communicate differently or get a coach that can help you to understand how to be a better communicator and leader and face some of those tough conversations. But there are ways to do it and it doesn't matter if you're a dishwasher or working at a restaurant on the front of house or windows or as you said in Texas made service. You know, it doesn't really matter what role we play in society. We all have to figure out how to communicate better.

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Shawn Day- Hire Lead Chill (33:08.396)

Absolutely. And there's so much out there. So the technology, the books, the authors, the coaches, so many opportunities out there. I think sometimes that actually makes it a little tougher at times, depending on the perception of the person, because it's hard to weed through some of this stuff. And we see all these things and we go, give me it all or I want to, and then it's, you know, you really need to find a good coach and I, you know, one of the questions I get, what do I regret or what would I have done differently? I would have gotten a coach much, much sooner and saved the several hundred thousand dollars that I threw down a toilet that I could have probably hired a coach for a few thousand bucks or more and saved a lot of money and aggravation.

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Tom Finn (33:55.23)

All right. So that begs the question. How did you, how did you stub your toe? Give me an example of something that you, you know, thought you were doing right, but turned out was the wrong direction.

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Shawn Day- Hire Lead Chill (34:05.808)

That's the one thing is not, and it wasn't an ego thing. It was just like, I'm not comfortable going to conventions. I don't want, I'm a little bit iffy about a coach. One-on-one, I can, I'm great at one-on-one. I'm great at presenting. I don't get nervous to present to 500 people or whatever it is. If there's 15 people at a table. I'm very uncomfortable. I don't like the, there's too much chatter going on. There's normally when I'm talking, somebody turns away because they're all of a sudden somebody asks them, something has, I just can't dig that vibe. It's just not for me. So I would say a coach, number one, I would say, to do it the way that your gut tells you to do it. Not what others should think. I have a lot of conversation about people that wanna be a $3 million cleaning company, a $5 million, there's a huge industry right now is hanging Christmas lights. I've got clients, this will blow you away. I've got clients that are doing $3 million in four months, hanging up, taking them down. It's a huge, I'm going to San Diego in two weeks to do a presentation at a Christmas-like convention with about 200 business owners. It's crazy. But is that what you want? Do you want a two million dollar business? Think of what you're asking for.

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Or do you want to, I've got customers that just want to do enough so that they can fish and go hunting and have a family. And they're happy with five employees and they're happy with making about a hundred grand a year and that's all they want. And they've got plenty of time to do the things they want. I think that's a mistake that I made was I want to grow and be this big. And I just did whatever and I did shortcuts to get there and I didn't do the right things to get there because my vision wasn't aligned with my why and what I really truly felt important in my life. And you brought this up earlier. That can change, too. You know, it changes when you have a child. It took us 12 years to have our first kid. Let me tell you what changed from my marriage from the first 10 years to that, to the one we had our first child. It took us one night to have our second. So all of a sudden I went from I'm still like a 20 year old because I don't have any kids for the first 12 years of our marriage to you got two kids, dude, you better change. So what does that mean professionally? All those things. So those are the things, I hope I answered your question. There were a lot of things like that, that I just, I didn't find out what I really wanted out of life. And instead of saying, I want this business to dictate what my life is going to be like, I should have said, what is the life I want? And am I okay with making 100 grand a year or 80 grand a year and having all kinds of time to golf and fish and spend time with my kids?

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Tom Finn (37:10.842)

Yeah, I think that's an individual choice that we all make. And the, you know, when you get past sort of your, you know, I'm going to sort of throw a dart here, but you get past sort of your mid thirties ish, you know, certainly as a guy, you start to think about, okay, I've climbed some sort of ladder, I've got some sort of experience doing something doesn't really matter what it is you've done something. Because you're in your mid thirties. What's next for me? Is this all there is? You know, a lot of us ask that question, right? Is this all there is? Is there something else better out there for me? Do I want to be million dollar a year guy that never sees his family and travels all over the world? Plenty of those people exist and they love it. Right? Or do I want to be, you know, as you said, Shawn, 80 hundred thousand dollar a year guy and I'm fishing every weekend, I don't work Fridays, I play golf with my buddies on Tuesdays. You know, do I want to be that guy and of course there's everything in between, but I think I call that a life by design. Design the life that you want, not what your parents wanted, not what your friends want, not what you think your ex girlfriend is looking at you on Facebook for. None of that stuff matters. Design the life you actually want and then go execute.

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Shawn Day- Hire Lead Chill (38:32.23)

I think that is about as well as I've heard it said. And that's exactly what I did not do. I did the opposite. I said, I want this company and it's gonna dictate what my life is gonna be like. I just did it backwards. And I think young people will do that. And because you do go after shiny objects a little bit more until you get burned. And you do go and you do, especially to your point, Tom, with social media, you're looking at other people out there going, yeah, I just did $3 million this year and I'm gonna open up another location be good for you, I don't know, but that's good for him. That doesn't mean you should feel bad about that. When you start comparing yourself to people, you're going to get in trouble. And I'll tell you, one of the things I've kind of figured out being an old guy is getting older is we always compare ourselves to others, not when we feel good about ourselves, when we don't feel good about ourselves. You're never going to win that deal, man. You just never are going to win it. And normally, we're comparing our inside feelings and our emotions and our sort of our ego a little bit. We're comparing the insides of us to the outsides of others, not to how they're feeling inside. That's a losing game every day of the week, and you need to stay away from it.

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Tom Finn (39:53.138)

Great advice, my friend. Shawn Day, hire, lead, and chill. Again, one of the best names of a company I've ever heard. Absolutely fantastic. Where can people get in contact with you, my man, if they wanna get in touch? Maybe they wanna come work with ya. Maybe they wanna be a client. Maybe they just want some advice because they're in the space and they could just use a friend to talk to. How do they get in touch?

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Shawn Day- Hire Lead Chill (39:59.921)

Hehehe. Absolutely. So two ways. One is Facebook. I'm all over the place. You'll find me very easily on Facebook, Shawn Day, Hire Lead Chill, or just go to my website at hireleadchill.com.

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Tom Finn (40:34.21)

Put all that in the show notes. You don't have to write it down if you're driving an automobile. If you are flying in an airplane, no, go ahead and write it down. That's totally okay as long as you're not flying the airplane. All right, Shawn, thanks for being on the show, my man. Thanks for dropping the knowledge, not only on the blue collar space and how that works, but how you're looking at recruiting differently and how you're looking at bookkeeping and marketing. I think it's all good stuff, man. Appreciate your advice and counsel today.

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Shawn Day- Hire Lead Chill (40:45.872)

Tom, thanks for having me on, appreciate it. Everybody out there, if you want to set up a call with me, Hireleadchill.com, I'll talk about anything you want to talk about.

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Tom Finn (41:13.143)

I love that open invitation. Thanks, Shawn.

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Shawn Day- Hire Lead Chill (41:16.176)

Thank you.