Soften your senses.
Ways to become a better speaker, listener and follower.
This episode brought to you by The Contractor Consultants.
Made by contractors for contractors.
Learn more at TheContractorConsultants.com.
Alright everyone, thank you for joining us once again on Did You Know?
The Esco HVAC Podcast.
So we're going to kind of shift realms just a little bit today.
We're going to talk about the things that we talk about all the time.
How do you prepare students for the workforce?
As a new employee, how do I prepare myself and market myself to a good company?
And as a contractor, where do I even go to be able to look for the right recruits that
have the right skill sets that I can invest in and I can retain?
Because we're starting to see some shifts in that.
And we really do have some incredible talent, especially when we talk about GNZ and the
up and coming alpha workforce.
We have people that are ready and willing to make changes to the world around us.
And so today we're being joined by Matt DeBarra.
Matt, how are you sir?
I'm great.
Thank you for having me.
Absolutely.
I love the opportunity to talk about other pieces of the trades.
And you represent a different trade than what most of this audience is.
Tell me a little bit about your trade.
Yeah.
So fourth generation contractor, my great grandfathers were home builders and then it
niched down into masonry and concrete, which is what they enjoyed.
And that's kind of where the family kind of core business has been for the last 80 years.
Wow.
Okay.
So fourth generation in construction, right?
You have a variety of businesses that you're developing.
And one of those is the contractor consultants.
Now tell me a little bit about where that came from.
And necessity and pain.
I struggled to hire.
I thought, so I grew up, my peak in taking over the business was right around 2008.
So it was a very different time.
A lot of changes then.
A lot of changes.
And so that was when everyone was telling me not to join a trade, go to college.
It's the worst thing you can do.
And so I had this belief sales solved everything.
I thought if you sold enough work, you'd be fine.
And the last three years has taught us that you could sell as much work as you want, but
if you don't have the right team and enough of the right team and people to grow your
organization, you can work on the books, just sitting there and an inability to do it.
And that's where I found myself and became a problem that I eventually solved through
a lot of different methods and traveling the country, mentors.
I took over all the hiring myself.
I did every interview, every phone call.
I just needed to understand it like a mad scientist.
And I left that with a formula for what worked for me and then took that to other people.
And it kind of grew into a lot of other things.
So let's think about some of those things that we're looking for as a contractor, because
I think this is very helpful for an educator.
When we have students coming through a program, it's hard to determine if they're going to
be really good workers in the workforce or if not, because there's a lot of stipulations
that happen with generations.
And sometimes they're like blindfolds.
Sometimes we don't look past those barriers.
A prime example is technology.
You can have an educator that could look at a student and go, I don't know if they're
going to be really good working with their hands because they're constantly on their
phone.
Without stopping for a minute and thinking, well, that could be the person that's doing
installations and commissionings.
That could be the person that is doing estimates and is doing evaluations.
That's the person that could be using LIDAR on their camera to go out into a job site
and go, here's 3D animation, send it off to the shop.
So let's think about those characteristics that a contractor is looking for so that an
educator and that student can have an idea of what to prepare for once we get out into
the market.
Well, I think that's a beautiful part about today is different from when I was growing
up is this kind of intersection of you have this huge need in the trades.
So a lot of these traditional paywalls that were time-based where it was like when so
and so retires, then you can be promoted.
Now greatness rises and it's independent of age or gender.
And so that's really cool for anybody, any students learning in the industry because
the way you can grow, you really set your own course.
I think there's also different tranches or buckets within the industry like you mentioned.
So you have the hands-on skill set that's needed for most companies.
There's a hands-on physical aspect to it.
For me, when I started, we used to print plans and we would mark them up and add different
color highlighters.
And so it wasn't like the hands-on skill set wasn't super different.
We use Word to type up our proposals.
This was 15 years ago and we printed our plans.
So the gap between me building a stone wall and me estimating our project management wasn't
too crazy.
You had whiteboards, you had Excel sheets.
There wasn't much happening and we had Polaroid pictures that we used to get developed.
We'd go to CVS and develop those once a week.
And so that was the gap from hands-on to the most technical side of the job.
Now it's like you have AI, you've got technology, you've got so many different skill sets within
an organization that I think one of the big things an educator can do is really look at
a company.
And I remember being in vocational high school and I competed in SkillsUSA like I mentioned
earlier.
There were certain kids that weren't great at laying brick but really enjoyed it and
wanted to be in the industry.
And I had a teacher that was like, you'll never make it in this industry.
And that is so not true now.
I'm thinking of Steve.
Steve was really funny.
Everybody loves Steve.
He would have made a great estimator, great product manager.
He was great at managing people.
He just wasn't the best bricklayer.
And so thinking about the different buckets, hands-on, technology, people skills, whether
it's sales or maybe business development, graphic design and some of the things that
marketing skills set, you may like the industry and like the work.
So I look back at almost every person in my classes when I was in high school and they
all have a place now.
Back then, I don't know that they did.
And I think that's the important piece for an educator is to look at a student and help
them understand that, you know what, just because maybe you're not the best at installing
something, doesn't mean you can't have a fantastic career in the industry.
That is such a good point because you're right.
If we looked at the labor force 10 years ago or 20 years ago, you might have been building
a program to focus on one particular thing.
Like say maybe it was installation, right?
Because we're doing a lot of construction.
We need installation.
We're going to focus on this.
We need a lot of this bucket.
Well, that has changed.
And every department now needs people, right, that have the passion for the career that
they have chosen.
So if we look at a classroom and we've got 20 people in our classroom, and previously
we might say, okay, we're probably going to pass 75% of this classroom and we're probably
going to place 50% of this classroom because the other 50% just weren't cut out to be installers.
And the sad reality is there were probably some generations where that was acceptable
and that people wouldn't be placed in this career once they completed a program.
And now we have the opportunity to step back and go, wait a minute.
They were interested in this career, this field, which is why they chose the program.
So now it's up to us to help understand where are they going to be placed?
And now I need to look outside of my traditional buckets.
One of the driving forces for a program is the advisory committee.
It's the contractors that feed the program, right?
What do I need?
Well, as a program and as an educator, maybe I need to be stepping outside of my traditional
box and going, okay, let's look at some contractors that are truly forward thinking and are looking
for more than just the installer.
They're looking to have a successful business and they're going to need a variety of different
types of people coming out of a program.
Absolutely.
I mean, just the ability to take a group of people that all have different hands-on skill
sets.
I think you could argue that if there's that core passion for the industry, I mean, that's
what I think drives a lot of success is just having a genuine passion for the industry.
And there's so many places you can go with it now.
And I think opening up that conversation, I think this is a newer conversation.
I haven't spoken much about this, but I think we're at the precipice of this being a more
common conversation.
We just hired another marketing person and they had no background in construction in
my personal business.
And they didn't have any background in construction, but they loved it.
They had a friend that did it.
And so here we are taking in all these marketing skills.
So it's the diversity within a growing organization and the needs that they have is very, very
different.
Yeah.
You know, there are three facts that you have on your website that is designed for your
trade of our industries, but it really relates to all trades, right?
Fact number one, 88% of contractors have difficulty finding skilled workers.
That's every HVAC contractor you will talk to.
Fact number two, 77% of contractors believe that skilled labor costs will continue to
rise.
Absolutely.
Just like we were talking about as technology becomes more intertwined with what we do, we're
going to need a more technologically skilled workforce, right?
It's going to take more training.
It's going to take more cost.
And fact number three, 35% of contractors are not able to take on more jobs because they're
not able to maintain a workforce.
You're talking about that before we started, right?
Tell me a little bit about that side of it, that fact number three, because that really
pertains to all of our trades industries.
Well, when we ask business owners to...there's a test you can do.
And one of them is if I say, take the largest project that you've ever done or take your
best month and imagine you had two of those in a row.
Are you excited or scared?
And most business owners go, well, I'm excited, but I'm actually scared now because how do
I do it?
And so that's the stress test.
That's the litmus test for, is your company set up?
Do you have a hiring pipeline and a system that allows you to take on more work?
Because what a lot of companies do is, and I love this about business owners and business
managers and people within companies, they set revenue goals.
Most companies, if I'm doing X, they're like, next year we're going to do Y.
Almost every business does that.
I did that even when we were much smaller.
And what that translates to, if you want to grow the company, unless you can figure out
how to grow 20, 30, 40, 50% without adding any people, which is near impossible in our
industry and any construction related industry.
So now what you're saying is, I need a different org structure.
I need different people.
And so really what you're saying is, in order to grow my revenue, I need to grow my team.
And what we find with most companies is they don't feel, a lot of them tend to feel confident
that they can grow the revenue.
But then when we say, okay, you're doing a million dollars now, you want to go to 1.4
million next year.
Great.
You're confident you can do that.
Yeah, I have the leads.
Yeah, we can do it.
We turned down more work than that last year.
Okay.
But are you confident you can get the team?
Are you 100% certain?
And that's usually the weak point.
And I know this because I suffered from this.
Four and a half, five years ago, this was my big kryptonite in the business.
So that's really what we're trying to help solve.
And I'm trying to do it on both sides.
One is helping businesses become better at hiring.
We do a lot of that hands on for them.
So we own the process.
We're results driven.
We put qualified candidates on their calendar.
So we've got a model to do that.
But on the other side, because we have all this data, we also like to show educators
like what we're talking about now, hey, these are the candidates that rise to the top.
This resume, this skill set, this type of person and this ability to be interviewed.
This is what our team is drooling over and saying, hey, you better talk to this person
today.
Make space on your calendar because they're going to go.
Man, that is really on point because you have to have that connection.
So if you've got a contractor that's looking for the talent and you've got educators that's
trying to supply talent, what happens if they don't cross?
And unfortunately, we see that a lot in our industry.
We see that path not happening because you'll have contractors going, I'm just not getting
the talent that I need.
And then we'll go, are you participating in advisory programs to help the educators know
what you're actually looking for?
Because what you're looking for today is not the same as it was five years ago, not the
same as 10 years ago, absolutely not the same as it was 20 years ago.
And so it's really important for the contractor to be able to understand what they need and
what the educator to understand what they should be preparing for.
And you do in five basic steps, you really go through what it is that a contractor needs.
Like when they're looking at that, right?
Step one, a clear understanding.
Where do we begin?
Yeah, exactly.
It starts with with getting really clear on who they're looking for and who they truly
need.
The other thing we do is we really look at, we have this exercise called, would you work
for you?
If you knew nothing else about your company, and this is more what we do for them, but
online, what are you doing to attract great talent?
So what does your website look like?
Do you have a career page?
Does that page have a 60 second or 90 second career video that shows off your company and
where your office is and all the cool things that everyone that currently works there gets
to see every day?
And who are your hiring competitors?
Like if I'm looking for an HVAC, if I just get out of a program and I'm a tech now, and
I type in HVAC tech jobs near blank, who are the competitors that are going to come up
and what do they look like?
And so going through this journey, I mean, we have a lot of different ways that we do
it, but a similar flip side for a candidate, right?
So if you're coming out of a program, what can you do to make yourself more marketable?
How do you get exposure?
Uploading your resume online.
Having a resume is certainly helpful.
LinkedIn, there's all these tools you can do as a candidate and what educators I think
can help people do to get into the workforce.
Yeah.
I think it's important that a contractor is showing that, a clear understanding.
What is your career path?
Are you going to be here and just be an installer the rest of your life or have I got some things
of interest to you because our new generations of workers are looking for what can I do and
what can you offer for me, right?
So it's important that a contractor is very specific on what they can do for a career.
I was talking to a good friend of mine that has a very successful contracting company.
He said the most important thing that he does is he builds resumes for his employees.
I'm like, why isn't the, as an educator, why am I not starting that resume construction
and showing my students what they have accomplished so they can see the different paths that they
can take and connect them with the right contractors that can fulfill the path that that student,
that employee would like to go to.
I mean, there's a lot of connections in there that if we're just very clear about our expectations
upfront and it can go a long way.
We taught that in the course.
I mean, in the contractor hiring course, we literally taught where there's a section on
how to reach educators of different programs, how to reach out, what to say, how to be very
clear about where you're looking for.
I mean, that was a huge, for me personally with my masonry and concrete company, that
was a big growth opportunity for us was really getting embedded within local schools and
high schools with trade programs and looking at their alumni list because that's the other
thing is it's not just the students in the program right now.
If they're keeping in touch with the people who graduated five, six, seven years ago,
where did they end up?
And so there's a huge opportunity there, but you're right.
It's helping the candidate set themselves up in number one, a way to be discovered.
How do you get visibility in an online world?
And then number two, I mean, I guess in no order, how do you also understand the different
career paths within a company and know what you're going for?
Because if you're not the best with your hands, let's say, and how do you work that into your
presentation?
Because there's tons of roles for people who are okay or good, maybe not the best, but
want to move into something else and they understand the work.
There's a huge need for that in construction.
Yeah, absolutely.
All of our trades are.
And that's step number two, find, right?
How do you even find the people?
How do you make those connections?
Even like you're saying, even if I'm trying to make connections with my schools, with
my programs, my apprenticeship programs, how do you actually work with that?
How do you work with referrals and digital listings?
That's step two.
That's diving into how do you actually go out and find the people that are going to
be a good fit.
Yeah, filling that pipeline, getting so many different opportunities for potential candidates.
I mean, it's multiples more than what you think, especially some markets are extremely
difficult.
Yeah, absolutely.
Which comes into like step three, then comes down to vetting, right?
Because what if you get abundance of applications and then understanding, you know, what are
their skills?
And one of the things that was pointed out in your step three is the skills assessment.
And so I see that from both ways.
I see a contractor going, all right, let's look at this potential employee.
Let's do a skills assessment.
Let's do an evaluation of what they actually do.
But I also look back at the educator going, all right, if I've got contractors that are
stepping up the game and they're actually looking at this, maybe I should be providing
at least some general assessments of how these students did going through the program.
And as a new potential employee, as the student coming out of a program, I want to be able
to show what I have accomplished.
And it's okay to show the things that I struggled with because it might help make a better fit
for everyone long term.
Well, and the skills assessment is, I mean, we find that with most companies, we're across
the US and Canada right now and eventually will be in the Australian UK markets for what
we do in the hiring side.
And we find that the skills assessment is relatively new to a lot of companies.
And so what would be really interesting is if the candidate approached the company and
said, hey, look, instead of me chatting with you, what I'd love to do is go over to your
shop and do XYZ.
I mean, that would be a whole different level because every business owner that we've talked
to and brought this up and helped them build this out, they love it.
But now it's like, I think there's the educator side of building it out within the program
and having them master that.
But also, I think even the candidate, I mean, imagine an interview where you're like, hey,
look, I can explain these things.
Or if you want, I'm happy to go over and show you.
I mean, that's you want to talk about a candidate hack.
I mean, that puts you at the top of the game.
Yeah.
It moves into like that number four, like when you talk about hiring, right?
And how do you like show in those first couple of weeks, the whole process, right?
Showing them what that new role looks like.
You know, I can tell you just in a large overview of recruiters for professional positions nationwide,
our recruiters are so much more specific about the placement today than they were just a
couple of years ago, right?
They want to make sure that they're placing the right person with the right contractor.
And they're very, very, very tuned to unique skill sets.
So being able to bring someone in, bringing them in, right?
We've done some assessment, they're going to be a good fit, but let's show them in
a short period of time, you know, what that hiring process looks like and be very clear.
Set those paths out right up front so that we make sure that we're not losing that talent
in a short period of time.
Yeah.
It's that clear, clear understanding of what things should look like and communicating
often.
I mean, that's the big one because not, especially if you're a smaller medium sized company,
the expectation that you're going to get everything right all the time and have this perfect onboarding
plan that that's the dream.
And I think everyone should strive for that.
But we have companies with 50, 80, 100 employees and they still don't have it, you know, and
more.
I mean, we have some with thousands, right?
Franchisees.
And so we find that the communication, having regularly scheduled upfront communication
intervals for as a candidate, you know, coming in as a new employee and also as a business
owner helps a lot because it creates room to discuss those little things that, you know,
might be a slight bother, but if they left, if they're left on, unaddressed can become
a big issue.
Yeah.
And step number five, retaining, right?
That whole retention factor.
There was a time decade ago, two decades ago, probably for the last five or six decades,
where when you got into a job as a business owner, you expected that person to work really
hard.
You might even treat them like crap just to see what they were made out of.
And you expected that they were coming back the next day because they wanted a paycheck.
And that has changed, right?
That has changed in the fact that people are much more respectful of individuals today
than what they have in the past.
And I love it.
I think that our culture is making a shift and are a lot more open to in today's generations
to individuality.
And so as an educator, understanding the dynamics and the diversity in the classroom, but also
as a contractor, understanding that diversity as well and making sure that we're giving
access for careers because we all really want the same thing.
If I'm an educator, I want to prepare a student for a long, successful career.
If I'm a student, I want to be prepared for a long, successful career with the right company.
And if I'm a contractor, I want to be a long, successful company with the right people.
And how do you make sure that you retain that talent when you find it?
And I think as an educator, if I'm thinking about this as an educator, one thing that
I think is important is the different types of companies and helping students understand
that because there's really small businesses, five, six, seven, eight people in the company
and there's pros and cons to that.
There's very large companies and pros and cons to them having a really refined hiring
process and maybe they'll take you in without as much experience.
And so I think really if there was an opportunity to kind of break down the archetype of a five
to 10 person company versus a 20 to 30 versus a 50 to 100 or 250 plus, what are the things
that you get?
I've worked for all of those different companies.
I've worked for companies from small up to multi-billion dollars when I was in college
and internships and I think that also ties into the success of the student is getting
them to understand the diversity of different things they can do in the industry and that
it's not a one size fits all, right?
More technology leaning, more hands-on leaning if I were to kind of draw parallels or polarities
rather.
And then the other is the different types of companies in the marketplace because there's,
I mean we look at clients and there's such a diversity of cultures and businesses and
I think if you help a student understand that, then they know who they should be applying
to when they go out.
They go, oh, I want to work for a company like this because I want to do these things
or I want a bigger company that's got a really structured onboarding plan because I'm thinking
five or 10 years out and I know they're going to be a business in five or 10 years.
I know that they've got a proven development plan.
I mean both have benefits but I don't know that that's something that's as talked about
as it could be and I think it's a huge success indicator.
Yeah, completely.
Well, man, I love the things that you're teaching.
They completely apply to all of our trades and how can people find contractor consultants?
Website's great.
Thecontractorconsultants with an S at the end there.com or shoot me an email if you
have any questions.
I love this stuff so I'm always here to help in any way I can.
It's MD and then at the company name, the contractor consultants.
All right.
Matt DeBaron, thank you so much for joining us and I really appreciate this conversation.
Thank you.