Adam (00:23):
Welcome to Masters of Home Service, the best podcast for home service pros like us. I’m your host, Adam Sylvester, and I want you to crush it in business. So here’s the scenario. You’ve been in business for a while, you’re doing well and things are humming. You’ve gotten over the early stages of business and all that’s behind you, and now for the first time ever, you are ready to hire your first ever salesperson, and you are both excited and terrified because you have no idea what to expect. How do I pay them? How do I incentivize them? How do I train them? All those questions are swirling around your head right now, and if you don’t get answers to those questions, you’re going to have a hard time. Those first 30 to 90 days were really critical for salespeople. And so if you’re thinking about hiring a salesperson or maybe you hired one six months ago and they’re struggling and you’re struggling and it’s not going very well, today is your day because I have two great guests on the podcast today that know this world, and they’re going to help you avoid all those things you can trip and fall over in those early days and make it as smooth as possible. 

(01:27):
So today we’re talking about working smarter. I have two great guests, Doni and Rich. Let’s first tell the audience what you guys do, and then we’ll get into it. Rich, why don’t you go first? 

Rich (01:36):
My name’s Rich Camacho. I’m the co-founder/CEO of BlueRecruit. We’re a software platform that focuses just on the skill trades, and we connect hiring companies with job seekers based off their certifications, licenses, experiences rather than job posts and resumes. 

Adam (01:53):
Got it. Cool. Awesome. That makes sense. Thanks for being here. Appreciate it. Doni, what about you?

Doni (01:57):
I am from Atlanta, and I’m the CEO of Don’s Tree Service. We are a full-service professional tree care company, and we also now offer landscaping. So we’ve been around for 25 years, and we solve people’s tree problems. 

Adam (02:11):
Bingo. So let’s get into it. What do you think is the problem that people face when they are hiring their first salesperson? What do you think? Doni, why don’t you go first? 

Doni (02:21):
Well, I think a lot of times people hire out of desperation, and when you hire out of desperation, that’s where a lot of mistakes can be made. Sometimes as the business owner, you’re like, okay, I’m doing this, I’m doing that, and I’m trying to do sales, and I’m trying to do invoicing, and you’re like, I need someone. And instead of just taking a step back and taking a breath, we hire the first warm body, and sometimes that first warm body is a great person, and sometimes usually are not so great. So one of the things I tell people is do not hire out of desperation. Make an intelligent choice, and also make sure you’re hiring for culture. Meaning if you have a company and you have certain core values that are important, and you hire someone that doesn’t align with your core values, that might be a problem. For our company, we are really big on family, faith, love. We are kind of a clean company, if you will, meaning there’s not a whole lot of drinking and smoking with our company, which is unusual in the tree care industry. I mean, I remember when I first started, people would go, “So, how do you handle the drug problem?” I said, well, I don’t have a drug problem, thus my people don’t have a drug problem because I don’t hire people with drug problems. But I mean, you’re not supposed to say that, but I try to be very careful about how I talk to people and the questions I ask when I hire somebody. 

Rich (03:42):
You’re absolutely right. Hiring for desperation. Hiring is very, very expensive to begin with, and hiring a bad hire is really, really expensive. 

Doni (03:51):
Really expensive. 

Rich (03:52):
For me, the number one thing when it comes to, and this is especially when it comes to salespeople, is that too many times, especially with first salespeople, is business owners see it as this person is going to build my business. And that right there is absolutely wrong. 

Doni (04:07):
That’s right. 

Rich (04:07):
That initial salesperson, really all salespeople are there to grow your business, not build it. If the owner, those initial leaders of the company haven’t already established those standard operating procedures, those SOPs, that funnel framework for how sales for your particular industry and your particular area operate, all that sales person is going to become is another really expensive thing on your table, and it’s not going to help grow your business. They’re not there to build it. They’re not there to create a funnel. They’re there to continue to grow the funnel that you’ve already created that playbook for. 

Adam (04:42):
Yeah, you want to insert them into a system that already exists. 

Rich (04:44):
Exactly. 

Adam (04:45):
Not have them create the system. I think a lot of times people will just hope the salesperson, they expect too much from the salesperson. The salesperson should lead the cave, kill something, and drag it home. They shouldn’t make the bow, they shouldn’t get other people to follow them. They are salespeople, right? So how do we make sure that our listeners are hiring the right people, the people that are cut from the right cloth to even become salespeople in the first place? 

Doni (05:06):
I was going to say, don’t be afraid to ask hard questions. And during the hiring process, and we are blessed to have an HR personnel that does the first initial interview, and then I get a chance to do the second or sometimes third interview, but ask hard questions. And sometimes that might start with something as mundane as, “What do you like to do on your free time?” If the first thing they say is, “Man, I like to get wasted with my friends and drag race through the streets of Atlanta,” probably not a really good fit for our company, but if they talk about family, they talk about hard work, they have a hobby that they’re passionate about and they want to somehow make a difference in the world, and they’ve read up on our company and they start talking about how they want to bring value to our company. Usually that means that we’re going in the right direction. The other thing is attitude. What type of attitude do they bring to the interview? If someone comes in with the wrong attitude right off the start, sometimes that can be a red flag. Also, if they have excuses before they even get to the interview, that might be a red flag. But sometimes as business owners, we don’t pay attention to the red flags. A lot of times like dating, you’re sitting across for someone and they say something really horrible and you’re like, what? But you ignore it like, well, I really want to date somebody, but when you’re hiring a salesperson, when someone says that thing that kind of jars you a little bit, I always say it’s a sign that maybe we should slow down our road with bringing that person on board with our team. 

Rich (06:35):
I like how you broke down there, Doni, the multiple sales processes. There was this awesome study. It came out, Google released it a couple of years ago. They actually ran it for 13 years, and obviously Google has resources that no one listening to this podcast, no one at this table will ever come close to matching. So it’s like, okay, you know what? I’m going to go ahead and utilize Google’s research on this, but they ran this 13-year study internally to try and figure out what’s the ideal amount of interviews that we should put our candidates through to determine is this person going to be a good hire? And they determined, first of all, you got to figure out what is a good hire. They said, hey, if two years from now this person is hitting their benchmark numbers, obviously they’re still with us. That is what we consider a good hire. What they found was that four interviews was the ideal amount of time that it took, and this doesn’t matter if  they were hiring a salesperson, a developer, a senior leader for the company. They found that four interviews gave them an 86% assurance that if they hired ’em, that person was going to hit that two-year positive mark. And what was crazy about it was that three interviews, like you mentioned, Doni was an 83% assurance. 13 interviews was 91%. 

They were actually putting people through 13 interviews, and it was only gaining a tiny little fraction. They even further broke it down in trying to say exactly what you said, Doni, do an initial phone screen, video screen nowadays, obviously, because everyone can FaceTime or live chat on their phone, but then bring the person in, have them meet the team ideally, especially for our industries, is have them go on a ride-along. And then this part came through real strongly for senior leaders and for salespeople, was to take them out for that fourth interview for a meal. They’re just something about, some of us eat hopefully three times a day. Some of us eat a little bit more than three times a day, but it’s something obviously we’ve been doing our entire lives. We’re very natural at it. And they found that if you interview someone during a meal, that’s when they’re actually their most self. You can’t be that guarded person. We’ve always met the interview rock stars. That have every single question down. They know exactly what to answer, and it’s like, okay, but while you’re eating a Reuben sandwich, you don’t remember how to be that rock star.

Adam (08:56):
The crazy will come out. 

Doni (08:59)
That’s right. And you can also watch how they treat other people. You can watch how do they treat the waitress? How do they come into a room? How do they present themselves to the other people at other tables? What kind energy are they putting off in a setting? Because in your office, they’re going to put their best foot forward, but at a meal, it’s something about that environment that will help them relax a little bit, and you get a chance to see their true self and sometimes their true self is a good thing, and sometimes not so great. 

Adam (09:30):
Yeah, for sure. And I think there’s different characteristics that we have to look for with the salesperson specifically versus like a technician or an office staff or CSR. Obviously there’s different skill levels, so what are some of the skill sets that you guys are looking for? Is personality one or does that matter? What are the skill sets that we’re looking for specifically someone who’s a salesperson? I think sometimes people mistake an estimator with salesperson, and those are different. Estimator goes gets leads from the company and they just show up, but a salesperson is much more aggressive in self-generating leads and that kind of stuff. What are you guys looking for? 

Rich (10:09):
One thing that I think has become a real big, maybe misconceptions is the right word to use, is that your salesperson is all about personality. That they have to be this eccentric individual that wants to talk to everybody. That does not make a quality salesperson. And please, please, please do not hire a salesperson just because, oh, I love hanging out with Tom. I love hanging out with Tom. He’s so fun. Yeah, just wait until Tom sends you the expense report at the end of the month. That personality alone is not, or I’m sorry, yes, personality will determine their successful salesperson, but not that charismatic individual that I think television and Bravo shows have led us to believe makes an ideal salesperson. 

Doni (10:52):
Yeah. 

Rich (10:53):
What’s that show about marketing from the sixties? I can’t remember right now. I’ve gone blank.

Doni (10:56):
Oh, Draper?

Rich (10:59):
I cannot remember the name of the show, but anyway.

Doni (11:01):
I know exactly which way you’re talking about though. 

Rich (11:02):
It’s all about having someone who understands, especially in this day and age with the technology that’s out there, all the great things on Jobber where you can actually go ahead and automate text messages, emails, phone calls is someone who has that understanding of scheduling because that’s far more important now than being like, “Hey, yeah, Tom’s the kind of guy I want to hang out with and go get drinks with,” which obviously wouldn’t work for Doni’s company for me. 

Doni (11:28):
Okay, we do have some people. Okay. not everybody in our company does not drink, but I mean they don’t have necessarily a drinking problem.

Rich (11:38):
I really hope they’re not drinking while climbing up the trees.

Doni (11:39):
Yeah, no, exactly. 

Adam (11:41):
This is a really great conversation. I want to pause it for a moment to talk about Jobber and how Jobber helps us have salespeople on board and know what their KPIs are. We’ve talked about KPIs, metrics, knowing the numbers. Doni, how does Jobber help you track all that stuff? 

Doni (11:56):
Well, Jobber has been a game-changer for us. It’s not just with our salespeople with the whole company, but if you want to talk specifically with the salespeople, we can actually open up our dashboard, go to sales performance, and actually see exactly what our salespeople estimated meaning, what quotes they did, how many they did, how many converted, and what their conversion rate is. And honestly, I used to have to do that with pen and paper on an Excel spreadsheet with which by the way, that’s not great at that, but with Jobber, it makes it very simple. And so that’s been great. It’s been a game-changer for us. It also has empowered my daughter, who’s now our sales manager, to be able to get data right there in front of her quickly and efficiently, whether it’s on her phone or on the tablet, and she can share it with our team and not have any discussions about who said she said, because the data is already there. 

Adam (12:46):
That’s right. If the salesperson’s thriving or drowning, you know it because of the dashboard, because of the reports. It’s all right there in Jobber. It’s really easy to see, which then motivates salespeople to do better.

Doni (12:56):
Yeah, our thing is the numbers don’t lie. 

Adam (12:58):
Exactly. Numbers don’t lie. That’s exactly right. Whether you are the salesperson for your company or you have salespeople, you need to know what your numbers are. You need to know what your metrics are. You need to make sure that you have a pulse on your business, and Jobber makes that so easy. So go to jobber.com/podcastdeal, get the exclusive discount and start using Jobber today. 

(13:19)
Today I want to get into the nitty gritty of how do we pay them, compensation, those kinds of things, and training and onboarding and all that. How does a company know? There’s a listener out there who’s wondering, “I think I need a salesperson, but I’m not even sure if I need one.” How many leads do you have to have per month to justify a salesperson? Those kinds of questions. I think people are wondering, so how do you guys decide you need a salesperson at this point in your business? 

Doni (13:46):
Well, I hired my first salesperson after I realized I was having people slip through the crack, so that’s a good indicator. Also, when I realized I was not able to do the CEO role as well, because I’m focused so much on sales, that’s when I decided I have to have another salesperson when I just couldn’t keep up and customers were starting to slide through the cracks because I wasn’t able to get my estimates done and respond to their phone calls, and it just became overwhelming. 

Rich (14:14):
You completely nailed it there, because we now to live in a society where everyone expects immediate gratification, immediate communication. If you do not connect with a customer within three minutes of them putting in an inbound lead, there’s an over 80% chance you’re never going to be able to ring that person back in. So you absolutely hit it there where you as an owner simply know, I’m no longer being able to keep up. And it sounds bad. No mathematical magic, mathematical equation to say if X happens, you need Y hiring salesperson, but there is that you’re going to start losing revenue. You, as the CEO, the founder, the owner of the company, are now becoming simply another employee rather than actually focusing on the growth of the company. For us, we see the same thing with salespeople with internal recruiters is there’s a point, and most situations owners are actually hiring them too early. And you need to create that playbook, and you as the owner need to have physically gone through the process of knocking on doors, making phone calls, sending text messages, setting up the automation that softwares like Jobber will do for you. And if you have not seen the direct pain points from your customers as to, hey, why am I losing out on this person? Why are we not being able to convert these sales? That owner then puts all of that information together into a standard operating procedure, that SOP, that they can then hand over to that newly hired individual, and we can talk about 30-60-90 plans. It’s very, very critical to, again, not simply assume this new salesperson is really what’s going to grow my business and blow it up now. 

Doni (15:54):
And then also, once you do, you’ve made the decision that I need to hire somebody. Well, if you need to hire somebody, you have to know how to tell them what to do and lead them. Show them what a successful day looks like and what a successful 30 days looks like, what a successful 60, 90 days looks like, and actually set up expectations. And I’ve seen owners just throw out an iPad and tell them, “Good luck!” You’re setting your person up for failure. Sometimes you have to take baby steps. In fact, not sometimes, it’s important to take baby steps so that you know that new salesperson understands each aspect of their job and what the expectations are for them to be a successful salesperson. 

Adam (16:37):
What is a robust, proper onboarding training system look like for you guys? Because if they fail and we gave them everything they need to succeed, that’s one thing. But if they fail and we didn’t really help ’em much, then that’s on us. So how do we make sure that our listeners don’t fall into that trap? “Hey, here’s your iPad. Go make some sales and comment at the end of the day with how much money, maybe.” How do we avoid that?

Rich (16:58):
I think that comes down to knowing when you should have hired that salesperson, because when they walk in, you go through the interview process, you hire them, you establish that 30- 60-90 plan and that 30 even into the 60 day plan, you better be handing that person a sales funnel because if you were not already so overwhelmed with leads and with potential work, then you shouldn’t even have hired this person to begin with. And so that person, and we’ve all been in this situation, they’re not going to create a sales funnel and start closing sales within a month. If you have that expectation right now listening, just stop. You’re not ready to hire salesperson. But if you are so bogged down with leads and whatnot, that person needs to already have those high-quality leads and it’s not marketing. It’s true warm quality leads. And then you can go ahead and, hey, here’s the iPad, here’s the systems in place because again, you’ve already done it internally. You’ve already been calling customers, you’ve already seen the pain points. You’ve seen the issues that customers have—maybe it’s your price point, maybe it’s your availability, you don’t have enough technicians. You know what those, I don’t want to say arguments, but objections from the customers are going to be you’re handing that off to the salesperson in that high-quality funnel line. And like you said, if you give ’em all that and it’s 90 days and they still haven’t done a single landscaping service, then we’ve got another issue.

Doni (18:22):
That’s a problem. There you go. Well, and also for us, we even start off with the basics. So their first day is not with another salesperson or with me. Their first day is actually with admin. We’re setting up your email. We’re showing you how our CRM works, specifically Jobber. We’re showing you how what we need the photos to look like that you upload to Jobber. We’re showing you how we respond. We’re setting up your group text so that you can be in the group text and know what’s going on with the company. We’re going to show you which group text is for the technicians and which one is specifically just for sales and admin. So we’re going to go over those basic things first. Then we’ll pick out, now we just started this, so I can’t act like I’ve been doing this for 20 years, 25 years. Literally this year we started sitting sales people down in the beginning with watching sales training videos, and not just assuming because they’ve got a great personality and they did sales elsewhere, that they are completely understand that or they completely understand the tree care industry. Making sure that’re set up for success, which means you as a leader, you have to make sure you have your systems in place. And being a small business owner, I know what it’s like to have so many things pulling at you that you don’t take the time to sit down and focus and set up a system for your salesperson, but you have to do that. The other tactical thing we do is for the first few days, we’re setting up their paperwork, we’re making sure they have the iPad, making sure they’ve got their phone so that they can communicate with the field, and then they’ll go out with a sales person so that we don’t send them out by themselves, they go off with one of our top salespeople or they’ll go out with me. And that’s how we help them grow their own leads and they see us actually fish before we send them out there fishing on their own. 

Adam (20:01):
KPIs. Let’s go there. Key performance indicators. Let’s talk specifics. What are the most important KPIs for salespeople? What are they? What do we need to give them in those first three days to make sure that this is how we know you’re winning this metric, this metric, this metric. Not just like, sales. 

Rich (20:16):
One, the most important KPI that has to be established even before you ever give anything to that new salesperson is you as the owner has to say, why am I even hiring this person and what’s the KPI for this hire? Every single employee in your company needs to generate X amount of revenue for you. Obviously, some roles are never going to directly generate revenue from the customer, but their services are what’s doing that. With salespeople, it’s very easy to do because you say, hey, how much do they bring in? What is this person costing me? So in most companies, and this is relatively broad, but in most companies, until a salesperson is generating five times their salary, they’re actually losing you money. When it comes down to taxes and benefits and just the cost of having employees, that person’s not actually generating you any revenue until they’re five times their salary. Ideally, in the service-based industry, we want to be a 10x the salary. So if this person, for easy numbers, is bringing a total salary of a hundred thousand dollars, they should be generating a million dollars of revenue. And that right there is that successful hire. And then it comes down to, and I’d love to hear Doni’s view on this is, okay, this is what me as a business owner wants to see from this individual. Now, in order to get to that 5x, that 10x, what do we have to do? 

Adam (21:32):
Yeah, Doni, what is a salesperson? What’s their compensation like in your organization? Are they getting paid a base plus? 

Doni (21:38):
The tree care industry is unusual. Some people pay a really high commission with no base. For us, we’re somewhere in the middle. We pay a really good commission, but we give them a small base. And the reason is not everybody has the personality for you to just throw them up against the wall like spaghetti and just hope it’s sticks. I want them to give them a little bit of comfort, so they actually have a higher base. Actually, they’re strictly a salary for the first 30 days. And then if they’re out with one of the other salespeople and they do make a sale, they’re generally getting help from another salesperson. So they’ll split that commission. So they actually don’t get their full commission for what they do until their next 30 days, because the first 30 days they’re getting a higher base or basically a salary while they’re in training. 

But as far as going back to KPIs, I want them to do the basics first. So for us, we want you to do 25 calls, 25 texts, and 10 estimates per day. A new person does not have their funnel set up yet, and we’re not going to give them 10 new leads, and they just started. So we might give them one or two that they can actually do with another salesperson, but they’re responsible for following up with that client, which will actually count as one of their calls, and then following up with a text that can count as one of their texts. But other than that, they’ll also go into our CRM and they can call old leads. So that’s a way that they can start generating income, but I try to get them to follow old leads that are up under my name or one of the other leader’s names as opposed to the other salespeople. That way they’re not taking commissions from somebody who already had their chance. There’s a little debate in our company right now about that, but I’m like, hey, if you haven’t followed up in 30 days and the new person follows up. So that’s actually a debate approach. 

Adam (23:28):
Agree. Going back to my previous life almost, I call ’em “b-leads and insurance”. We used to call ’em b-leads, and they’re basically just old leads. They might be three months old or two years old, and that’s a great way for a salesperson to cut their teeth on sales. Just call this stack of old leads and see, and if they can drum up business, then must be good. And if they can’t, then they might not work out. 

Rich (23:47):
I completely agree with y’all. At the end of the day, that’s not Sally’s leads. Those aren’t Eric’s leads. Those are Don’s Tree Service leads. You’re an employee of this company, your company generated those leads. It belongs to the company, not to an individual salesperson. And once, if you have that kind of, in my opinion, kind of childish bickering going on, I’m not talking about you, but if that’s happening amongst the salespeople, there’s a larger leadership issue in place at that company. And we were talking a little bit about the commission structure, and I completely agree with you. You want salespeople to be hungry. You don’t want them to starve. Once someone can’t figure out, “Oh man, I just started this new job. I’m not going to make a sale for 30 days. How am I going to pay the rent, pay the car loan, get my kids to school?” They’re not going to be a successful hire because now all they’re thinking about is putting food on the table and supporting their children. 

Doni (24:40):
Sometimes the best thing for your current salespeople is a new salesperson. It makes them perk up a little bit. Like, wait a minute, I don’t want this new person to do better than I’m doing. 

Rich (24:50):
I had a boss years ago who there was a similar type bickering between salespeople, and what he said was, “Whose actions ultimately resulted in our company receiving this revenue? And that’s what I care about most. I don’t care if they came in last week, two years ago. Whose actions, whose phone call, whose email, whose visit generated revenue for the company.” Because at the end of the day, that’s all that mattered. 

Adam (25:14):
That’s right. So I’m a big fan of this belief, which is a complex commission structure or compensation structure is like the death of all salespeople relationships. 

Doni (25:24):
Yes. 

Adam (25:25):
And so let’s talk about this for a little bit because there’s two scenarios. One, you’re not quite sure of how you’re paying them. “Well, what happens if this happens, boss? Well, I hadn’t really thought about this. What about this? What if I bring a ride-along and they help me make the sale? Do we split it or is it 50, 50, 60, 40?” There’s a lot of things you have to figure out with sales because as soon as they feel like you are unfair, they’re gone. How do you make it simple and understandable and easy to follow and easy to track, right? The data has to be correct. How do you guys do all that? 

Rich (25:55):
Your base salary should become about 40% of your total salary, so your non-commissioned base salary, that’s what we have. So you don’t end up starving. After that, there’s no commission max because at the end of the day, I’ve never understood why companies are putting on lids. You generate more and more sales. I should have no problem whatsoever paying you more and more commission because our company would’ve never seen that revenue to begin with. We do 25% of each sale regardless. There’s no.. 

Adam (26:24):
This service has more, this service has less commission. None of that. The percentage is the same. 

Rich (26:28):
$10 came in, those are $10. What that dollar bill looks like doesn’t vary because of what service we did.

Adam (26:36):
But Rich, there are some services that are much more lucrative

Doni (26:38):
I was going to say…

Adam (26:39):
How do you handle that? 

Rich (26:40):
If you’re a plumbing company, hot water heaters, and hey, we got to go ahead and trench to the front, that’s where the money just raking in. But at the end of the day, that water heater costs you X amount. And not only that, you were brought into that home. I know this happened to me two months ago. I always try to use our customers whenever I have services at my own home. They came in to fix an issue with our AC. Turns out I had two other problems wrong with the plumbing system. Well, guess what? Upsold. And it was funny. I was actually just about to sell that house, and I was like, my luck is this thing’s going to blow up in the next two days, and the home inspectors are going to find in a week from now. I’m like, yeah, here’s an extra $650 and that’s where that money goes. And the tech, I was like, congrats dude. You got me. At the end of the day, it’s on the wash. 

Doni (27:32):
For ours, it’s a little bit different because we do have to look at, I know you primarily deal with software, but with us, we actually have certain costs that have to be covered. And so if a salesperson is out there just selling, just doing great, they’re getting their commissions, but they’re underbidding the job, meaning they actually did not price the job properly, that becomes an issue. So we have to be mindful of that also. But I wanted to bring it back to something that sparked a thought when we were talking about the beginning of training a salesperson on the calls. If you’re training a salesperson on follow-up calls and they’re following up on old leads or they’re doing door knocks like in a service space business and they have a problem with rejection, that means that’s a soft area that needs to be addressed right then and there as opposed to waiting until they get out in the field and you find out they’re sitting in the car at Starbucks because they’re afraid to go knock on doors. You need to know that ahead of time. And so by getting in front of them and seeing how they work on old leads, how they work on rejection, how they work on when you’re in front of them and a door knock happens and it doesn’t go the way they want, you have to be aware of that. And that way you can also put some training in place to help them understand that, hey, this is going to happen. 

Adam (28:45):
One of those metrics that really matters with sales is your average job size. And so if you’re a listener listening to this and you don’t know what your average job size is, what your average sale is, whether it’s a $1,000 for a tree or 3,000, then you won’t know if your salesperson is underbidding everything. Because you won’t have anything to compare it to. 

Doni (29:01):
That’s right. 

Adam (29:02):
And so if you’re training a salesperson, you have to know what your average job size is because then 90 days from now, when your average job size starts going down, you’ll know who the culprit is, that guy’s just selling everything too cheap. Can’t make any money.

Doni (29:12):
Yeah, he’s no longer with us. 

Adam (29:13):
Guys, this has been a great conversation, and I think it’s really helped crystallize what people need to do when they hire a salesperson. I’m going to narrow it down to three actionable items that people can actually start doing today in this whole process. Number one, is I love the interview, the final interview over a meal, whether it’s lunch or dinner. I’ve heard some people say they take out their spouse with the person, too. The true colors really come out. If they’re crazy, it’ll come out in that meal interview, but they might be great, and you might really their true colors there, and it’s a good or bad thing. Number two is your metrics really matter, and you need to know what the metrics are before you hire them. So you need to know what your close rate is so that if your close rate’s 50%, then you need to be able to compare it to, maybe they’re only 25%. That’s not good. Your average job size, if you’re always at $2,000 for tree take takedown and they keep selling things at $1,200, then they’re not charging enough—dial those in before you hire them. And number three is you want to put service over greed. Salespeople should really care about the person that they’re serving more than their paycheck. And as long as those two things are in the right order, they’ll usually be successful. What you guys do is hard. You guys are both CEOs of your company. It’s not easy. Why do you guys do it? 

Rich (30:23):
I love waking up at five o’clock and starting to work and answering emails till nine o’clock at night. No, I mean, no, I do not enjoy that whatsoever, but that is reality. When I first started the business, the number one thing I was like, you know what’s going to be awesome one day? Is hiring my first employee. And I actually remember that, and I remember the first time we ever hired an employee, and it was like this person can now support their family. And for us, we’ve now done that over 80,000 times across our users, across the US and Canada. And that’s awesome, just knowing that people are building careers and really building lives. 

Doni (30:56):
Yeah, I think I love it because I love our industry. I grew up in the tree care industry, and I did not really understand how awesome it was until I actually decided to start my own tree service. And I started my own tree service because I was in a place in life where I wasn’t happy. And I started my company 25 years ago with $43 and a dream. And the reason why I started was because I knew there was something about this industry that brought me joy. Being outside, working around men, and also being able to make a difference. It’s amazing. You can look at a plant, something that, not to get too spirit, with something that God created, put a price on it, and if the price is right, somebody pays you for it, and you’re able to then give people jobs. And I just feel like that’s the American dream. And I believe that this industry gives me the ability to live the American dream, not only for myself, but also be able to give opportunities to other people. And I wake up knowing that by building my dream, I’m helping other people build their dreams. And I want to be able to show people that you can build a great company without hurting people. 
You can build a great company and build a culture where you not only support your people, but you support the communities around you. And that’s pretty much why I do it, because I love it and I love the opportunities that it creates, and I love the fact that I can wake up knowing that I’m doing something good and making people feel safe. 

Adam (32:15):
Well, Rich, Doni, you guys are crushing it. Your businesses are doing really well. The people that work for you are blessed to have you. So keep it up. Keep crushing it. Doni, how do people find out more about you? 

Doni (32:25):
Well, they can reach out to us on our website, donstree.com—D-O-N-S-T-R-E-E dot com, or you can hit me up on Instagram @thetreelady or our tree service, @donstreeserviceatlanta.

Rich (32:37):
bluerecruit.com. If you’re looking for workers across the US and Canada. And of course, we’re on all the various socials. 

Adam (32:44):
Great. Well, thanks for being here. I really appreciate it. I hope that you heard something today that will help you hire your first salesperson and do it really, really well. I’m your host, Adam Sylvester. You can find me at adamsylvester.com. Remember, your team and your clients and your family deserve your very best. So go give it to ’em.