In this poignant episode, Clifton Savage, CEO & Founder of Service Leader Systems, shares how he helps busy entrepreneurs overcome their hiring woes and build high performing teams.
You will discover:
– Why your hiring problem probably isn’t a hiring problem
– The true value of great SOPs
– What returns you should expect from an employee development program
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello Hello and welcome. Welcome once again to the secrets of the high demand coach podcast and I’m here with yet another high demand coach and that is the one the only Clifton Savage. Now, Clifton has gained strengths and insight into the universal principles of effective employee engagement and leadership through his diverse background in aerospace, manufacturing, fitness and construction. Clifton’s massive mission, I’m sorry, is to empower leaders and their teams to utilize their time, energy and resources more effectively and dynamically. Through his firm service leaders society, Clifton focuses on three key areas, optimizing the recruitment and onboarding processes, enhancing or creating training systems or SOPs, and developing employees through leadership and personal development programs. Well, Clifton, I’m excited to have you here. I actually just spent the whole day yesterday helping a team build a performance assessment program. So this feels like perfect timing. I’d love to before we get into that, though, how did you make the leap? How did you go from working in what seems like some larger business environments into this kind of fun, entrepreneurial, fast paced world and doing the work that you do today?
Clifton Savage
Yeah, well, thank you, Scott. Yeah, that’s a great question. I’ve had a couple of journeys into entrepreneurship. I actually had a business back in 2016, I started, ended up selling in 2018, and went back into working for somebody else. And ultimately, that just wasn’t a good fit. The work was great. But then he had COVID app. And it just a lot of variables came into play, where I’m like, No, I need to go off on my own. That’s where the opportunity is. That’s where the excitement is. But yeah, I mean, I’ve been blessed with a lot of great opportunities working for some big companies work with a couple of startups as well. And so I’ve had a wide range of experiences of companies that had their stuff together, and ones that didn’t, and how all of them still had room for improvement. And so that has been like, to me the best investment into me to get me to where I’m at today. So yes, ma’am. Pretty cool journey.
Scott Ritzheimer
Fantastic. Well, fast forward, then to today, what would you say is some of the most meaningful work you do and for your clients?
Clifton Savage
Oh, my gosh, I just got off two coaching calls with some of my clients that I’m actually going to be flying out to their facilities on Monday to unveil this big training program that we’ve been building for their field crews. It’s for a roofing company. And so everyone’s really been excited about that. They’ve been buzzing about it for months. And now we finally get to launch it, we’ve done the soft launch, we’ve got some test users in there, getting some feedback, tweaking some things. But I’m just excited about unveiling this because it does a couple of things. It almost like what you were saying earlier, about my bio enlightening and empowering the employees. And it’s only possible because the leaders care enough to help their employees thrive, and to invest the time and the money, but also the energy to build what we’re building. Right, we’ve got a big part of it, but they had the industry knowledge, they want to do things their company’s way, right, their best practices. And so we’re collaborate on that, and it’s finally come to fruition. And so we got this big unveil on Monday. And so I’m really excited about that, because it’s gonna give the employees opportunities to grow, to learn new skills to learn new personal skills, and technical skills to advance themselves in the company, or hopefully just advance themselves in life and how they deal with themselves, you know, when they do make more money, or have more time on their hands?
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. So there are very few. And I think that’s generous, because I haven’t met one, but maybe you have, but there are very few founders who go out and start, you know, a roofing company, or a contracting business or any kind of business, for that matter who do it so that they can build a performance assessment program. Right? They’re just dying to build a performance assessment program. And in fact, I’ve found that, you know, in a moment of honesty, most of them, at least on the front end will say, I hate that kind of stuff. I actually got out of the big business world to escape really bad performance assessment programs. And the founder yesterday, who was to his credit, totally bought in, but he said, Hey, I’m gonna be honest with you. This is a real challenge for me. I’ve always thought this stuff was bureaucratic BS and a big waste of time. So someone says that to you, how would you respond?
Clifton Savage
I completely understand where they’re coming from. Because I’ve experienced that when I’ve been an employee when I’ve been a manager at other companies. And that’s what I wanted to get away from. That’s why I wanted to create something that’s truly valuable to the employees. Right. It’s it’s tantalizing enough for them to want to put in the time and the effort to take these trainings to advance themselves. But then it has to make sense to the founders as it makes sense to the business owners that investing in their employees. ease is going to bring a direct return to the business. You’re, you’re investing in this employee, and you’re going to give return. If that if we can’t make those ends meet, I don’t even do business with somebody, if we can’t see eye to eye on that.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, I 100% agree. Now, what did those returns look like?
Clifton Savage
So the biggest returns are skills advancements. So someone that can do a job better, either they’re learning new technical skills for their current position, right and moving up in that level, either adding personal management skills, communication skills, project manager skills, so they can be more of a leader on the team. So their supervisor, their foreman, their manager doesn’t have to manage them as much. But ultimately, it’s really about eliminating mistakes, eliminating rework, right, it’s reducing all the waste, getting rid of all that making everybody as lean and mean as they can be, and getting rid of all that excess waste, that is going to bring more profitability to the company. And that’s where my focus, that’s where my origin story comes from is lean manufacturing principles and instilling that in our development programs to make the actual employees more lean, and you no less wasteful Ultimately.
Scott Ritzheimer
One of the things that I’ve found, and this is particularly true in entrepreneurial organizations is if folks don’t get stuff done, we kind of just sit back and wonder what’s wrong with these people, right, instead of, it’s a lot harder to actually take ownership of that problem. And so what I’ve found that does is kind of devolves into this idea that we we’ve got to go out and hire unbelievable people, right? They should know all of this coming in. And we have no idea how to do that. So there’s almost this apathy that comes from it, or, or this like victim mindset, interestingly enough, like, oh, there’s just not good people out there. Have you run into that?
Clifton Savage
Oh, oh, definitely. I mean, that’s, I believe, because we kind of just sit in our own self, that you know, of this lack of effort, or this lack of getting out there. Right, that we believe that story that we tell ourselves, we believe that lie, essentially, we can all be tempted to feel that way, right? Even in my first business, I went through the bad experiences of even having referrals for employees, that turned out to be a complete nightmare. But whose fault was that? was mine. Right? Either I didn’t have a good vetting process, I didn’t have a good onboarding process. I didn’t have good training, and feedback, performance management, like something was missing. And that’s my responsibility as a as a founder, as owner, as a leader to have those things in place. And obviously, many of us don’t do that first, before we get the business going, right? It’s kind of putting the cart before the horse, really, which will make sense. But it has to happen. And so if they don’t do those things, they have no room to ask. I’ve been out in the field where people were at hiring events, asking job applicants, what they look for an employers, because employers aren’t going out of asking the people those questions. I’m asking them for them. Pretty much.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. Yeah. And why? Why is it so I mean, most folks, at least by this stage, they’ve realized you can’t do that with your sales, right? If you if you just wait for sales to come in, it’s gonna be hard to build a successful, scalable business. So why is it that we take so much out more ownership in sales, but we chronically lack ownership in this area?
Clifton Savage
I love the correlation, Scott, because that’s true, right? Like recruiting for quality candidates to just be as important, just as important as marketing for quality clients. I mean, it makes no sense to your point. And I it’s baffled me, because I’ve worked with some major founders and CEOs that are really heavy minded on the marketing side, right, they like got a lot of great ideas for marketing. But then they don’t like just duplicate that process even a little bit for recruiting. Like, it’s like the the something just turns off in their mind. And I believe it’s a history of the economics of the labor markets, that it was more of an employers market. And it got flipped on his head, but even before COVID, but definitely after COVID and the advancement of technology, remote work and hybrid work, you know, having more options, more of us can be our own entrepreneur, right, we can be freelancers. And so now it’s really shifted to an employee’s market. And employers are very sluggish, very slow to adapt to that. And I think that’s where a lot of the hang up is. It’s just they’re not adapted to the times.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. So you’ve got a model for attracting high quality talent. And one of the things that I saw in there, it was a big, giant green, I think box it said SOPs, standard operating procedures. And I know a lot of the especially founders that I’ve worked with would cringe if someone handed them an SOP manual and said, go do this, right. It’s just like, get that out of my way. I know what to do today. To my way, why is that so attractive though, for the high performers that we’re actually looking to build a business with?
Clifton Savage
Well, it gives them that confidence. So I literally just got off a call with a client, and he’s a director over a service department, right, this roofing company. And he said, If you were to go look for another company to work for right now himself, he would be looking for the things that we’re building right now in their company. Well, the SOPs, the training, the onboarding, we use the DISC assessment for recruiting purposes. And, you know, the verbiage that we put out there, he would look for those things. I would look for those things, because it’s either one, you go into a company and you look at the job description, what do you first see all the responsibilities? All the things you have to do? But where’s the company’s enabling you? Where is the company empowering you? And enlightening to you, this is the way we want you to do it. So when it comes to review time, you’re not set up for failure. We gave you the guardrails, we gave you the guidelines, companies miss that they don’t even share that they have not even proud about that. And they should be, because that’s what would attract the right person. Because now they see, oh, you’ve given me the roadmap to success. I don’t have to blaze this trail myself, or hope that I’m not walking through a minefield. It’s a night and day difference in the types of people you’d attract by promoting that.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. And I think kind of underneath that is an important almost mindset issue. And that is that you’re not actually hiring yourself, right? You’re not hiring people that are exactly like you. That one, there’s only one of you. So that is not scalable, by by definition. And so understanding who you do need to hire, and what motivates them and drives them and gives them the confidence, like you mentioned, is, is a massive, massive mindset shift. And it’s a huge asset for folks who can really embrace it. Yeah, I, what would you go ahead?
Clifton Savage
Oh, I was just gonna say I have an identical twin. And we both taken the DISC assessment, and we’re role is almost identical on the DISC assessment. But I could still not place him in my chair right now and say, Oh, everything’s gonna be fine. It just doesn’t work that way. So it’s yeah, there is no, replicating yourself like that. You need to have different people in your circles to succeed.
Scott Ritzheimer
Absolutely. Absolutely. So I’m wondering if you could make this because you seem like a real practical guy, give us one or two practical steps that leaders can take today to take more ownership of, of overcoming their hiring challenges or retention challenges?
Clifton Savage
Yeah, I mean, if you can, if you can overcome, if you can focus on overcoming your retention challenges, you’re going to make it a lot easier for the efforts that you put in on recruiting. So I kind of like to reverse engineer and start at where’s the where’s the leaky holes right now, it’s typically while people say they can’t attract a talent, it’s also because they can’t keep good talent, or they can’t even keep subpar talent, right, and word travel. So just like with marketing, you can either be proactive, and get a good word out. Or you can just let the complainers complain. And then that’s going to sound louder than any success that you have. So you got to be proactive about retaining great people. Before you can even worry about dumping money into trying to recruit more people. You know, it’s more sustainable when you plug the leaky holes first. So yeah, we’re Why aren’t you retaining people? Why do people want to leave? Right? We see the posts all the time on LinkedIn and social media. People don’t leave bad companies, they leave bad bosses, right? They leave unfair pay, compensation, lack of benefits. A lot of reasons. You need to find that out. You need to find out why people are leaving authentically, why are they leaving? And what are they looking for? And it fix those things first, before you start trying to throw money at anything else? gotta fix those holes. Yeah.
Scott Ritzheimer
So true. So true. So here’s a question I asked all my guests and I’d like to ask it of you. What is the biggest secret that you wish wasn’t a secret at all? What’s that one thing that you wish everybody watching or listening today knew?
Clifton Savage
Oh, man, if there is something that I wish everybody knew. The biggest secret I guess I would say is that about me?
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, so about, about this about what we talked about hiring and performance assessment and building a strong team.
Clifton Savage
Yeah. I mean, I believe the biggest thing is learning to get out of your own way. Like is the scariest feeling right? Because I’ve been growing my team we’re in a rapid hiring phase or growing phase right now myself, both on fulfillment and the marketing side of things. And we’ve been growing at a rate that when I was out sick for two weeks, nothing stopped. In the business, nothing stopped. And at first I was freaking out. And then I came back and kind of felt kind are worthless. And I was like, wait a minute, no, this is a good thing. But as scary as hell once you’ve gone through it, but until you can learn to let go and realize that you aren’t the most important piece you are because you’re building all those other assets and the people investing in them. Until you do that, it you got to stop, you’re not the most important piece of the business, and you’re gonna go to that it’s gonna be scary. But it has to happen for you to grow and for other people to flourish.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, there’s this transition that happens for businesses where you move from being kind of that Captain on the field, I am the most I’m the centerpiece right to being a coach on the sideline. And it is like, what do I do with my hands? You know, you got this like Ricky, Bobby thing going on? And and yeah, but it’s true, you have to embrace that there’s a new role and a new way that you can show up and I couldn’t agree more. Now, I know, there’s some folks out there thinking, wow, this, this guy really knows his stuff. But you’re challenging their their presumption, and you’re giving them a new hope that they can actually find the talent that they need? How can they find more out about the work that you do and get connected with you.
Clifton Savage
So the best way to find out more and get a visual of what we do is to go to our website, which is serviceleadersystems.com. And they can go on there and actually look at what we’ve been talking about, which is the attraction system, which is the service we provide, as well as they can get my free ebook, The Attraction Blueprint on there as well. If they want to learn more about my thoughts, and engage with me, they can find me on LinkedIn. And my name is just Cliff S Savage. And they can find me there as well.
Scott Ritzheimer
Fantastic. Well check it out, had a chance to to visit those sites as phenomenal, some great resources on there. So we’ll put the links in the show notes. For all of that, get a copy of the ebook today and you will not regret it. Well Clifton, thanks so much for being on the show. Just appreciate having you here. And for those of you watching and listening you know your time and attention mean the world to us. I hope you got as much out of this conversation, as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care.
Contact Clifton Savage
Clifton Savage has gained insights into the universal principles of effective employee engagement and leadership through his diverse background in aerospace, manufacturing, fitness, and construction. Clifton’s mission is to empower leaders and their teams to utilize their time, energy, and resources more effectively and dynamically. Through his firm Service Leaders Society, Clifton focuses on three key areas: optimizing recruitment and onboarding processes, enhancing or creating training systems and standard operating procedures, and developing employees through leadership and personal development programs.
Want to learn more about Clifton Savage’s work at Service Leader Systems? Check out his website at https://serviceleadersystems.com/
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