Transcription
Hey, my name's Alex. I'm out of Greenville, South Carolina. I founded a turnkey construction safety company. Okay.
And so, right now, what I'm looking at is I'm working 60-70 hour weeks. The phone's non-stop. And when I'm at the house, my mind's still trying to figure out work problems. So, I'm not always present with the people that I care about. And I've got a third baby on the way, and I'm missing some of those moments that you don't get back, right?
So, business-wise, we're making about 2.1 million. I've got a goal of getting to 5 million by the end of this year. And we've experienced some rapid growth. So, I'm starting to get—I'm not starting to, I've been getting pulled back into the type of tasks where I feel really competent and I was really good at as a safety guy. And instead of hiring the people that are better than me and building those systems that the business really needs to scale.
So, I guess my question is, is how would you attack that problem if you were in my shoes? What's profit? Profit, we're at about 22% right now. Okay, so 400 a year-ish on net, but you're growing right now, correct? Correct. Okay, so call it pacing 600, something like that. Does that sound about right? Yes. All right. Sounds right. So, I'm just trying to see what we got to work with.
Okay. How much does it cost to get the person that you need? So, I'm thinking we've—I just hired a director of operations and he's in his second month, so he's still learning our systems and our culture and all of that. And then I'm looking at bringing in a person underneath him to start helping. We have a—we field safety professionals. So, we've got about 13 people across four states. And so, really that secondary person's going to handle managing that talent and that workforce because that's where a lot of the phone calls and the text messages and the emails come from. So, I think really, if for another person that we need, they'd probably be about a $150,000 guy or gal.
Okay. Is your director going to watch this? Because I can um blur—I'll remove your name, too, if that helps. He will not watch this. Okay. So, I'll tell you, like, let me ask one question before I say what I'm going to say. Did you feel relief from that director coming in? Huge relief. Okay. Okay, fine. Then he can live to fight another day.
Okay. So, the director came in, you're going to hire some guy underneath him that's 150k. So, what's stopping you from doing that right now? So, I think what I'm running into is, as we grow and the demand continues to increase, I'm also trying to acquire the talent and get the talent in while executing all of the tasks. So, I think that's where I'm stuck.
Got it. What's your hiring funnel right now? It's been referral, just proximity, people that we see on job sites and we've worked with. And now we're starting to get on the LinkedIns and the Indeeds and things like that. Yeah. So, I mean, referrals obviously always the best way to grow. Do you have—you have 13 guys in the field. Do they know people? They do. Okay.
What incentive do you have for your referrals right now? So, currently our referral program's all based around finding other safety professionals that we can ship out to job sites. So, we pay a bonus program of essentially locate the guy and if we hire him, we'll pay him—we'll pay $500. If they stay for 90 days, then we'll pay them an extra $1,000. And that was built in your boardroom about two weeks ago. So, that's— Okay.
Well, we're going to do—I love the spirit. We need to tweak one important thing. How much do you make per $150,000 per year guy? Um, that per—we, our average person right now is about 70k and we make probably about 200,000 off of them. So, I'm not sure with this guy. Okay. So, let's just use those numbers, right? 70k, right? And well, how much do you think this guy will make you? It's more than that, correct? See, it's—yes. Yes. Okay. He'll make more than that, but I think he's going to—he's going to take me out of—we have one funnel for staffing, which is what I've been talking about. We have other funnels, which is consulting and things like that, that pulls me out in the job sites. Yeah. And I think that person will probably revenue, I'd say at least a quarter mil from this guy. Mhm. And this guy's 150? Yes. Imagine. So, that 250 is extra or in total on 150? I think it would be in total. Mhm. Where we stand right now. Yeah. I don't love that. I like the 70 to 200 better.
So, let me—I'm going to do a couple things. So, number one is on the new referral program that you're about to roll out or just rolled out, I just think the economics need to be changed. So, you have your 500 and then 1,000, so that's $1,500 total. For me, if I know that somebody can make me $130,000 in gross profit, I'm willing to pay 10%, 20% of that, like no problem. And so, I think that if you made this thing like 10 grand or 15 grand, I'll bet you your guys would be significantly more responsive at working their networks. Do you agree? 100%. So, I think number one, cuz if you're going to pay a recruiting firm that much, which you would easily pay 10 or 20% for a kind of repeatable role like this, you'd pay 10 grand for that role. So, I'd rather pay my guys that than pay an outside firm. Yep, and we've been doing that. So that's a really good point.
Okay. So, I think we go from 500 to 10K at least to start on the referral bonus. And it's fine cuz you're going to ROI it. And you can still delay, put a thousand bucks up front, 9,000 on the 90-day success, and I think that'll solve number one.
Um, now this other more specialized role, are there specialized recruiters who do who hire for this particular person? There are, but we haven't had success with them. Okay. Are they contingency-based? Some of them. Okay. So this is what I do. When I have a one-off role, I'll go recruiters. If I have a repeatable role, I build a whole system around it because it's like core to the business. So like the guys on site, that is a repeatable role. I mean, you know, like if you have 13, you're going to need 30. You know what I mean? When we three or four X, right? So that's where it's like we need to have dollars in, dollars out. The referral programs are a great start. We need to ultimately get into the—we run this many ads. Our cost of acquiring talent, just like you have CAC, we need CAT. CAT and just like we have LTV, we have lifetime gross profit per employee, which is what revenue gross profit do we make per head. And then that becomes the kind of supply side economics of that funnel. So that has to get made and the same exact sales methods apply. So it's like you'll run an ad, you'll have an opt-in page, you'll have a VSL, right? That'll sell them on why the company's awesome and then you'll push them ideally to a group call because it takes a lot of time to take his initials and then you can select the people from that group call who you think are legit. So that'll take some of your—
It'll remove some of that time constraint that you're dealing with having all these interviews, right? Yep, that makes a lot of sense. That's the repeated role funnel. The recruiting funnel, I would like you to spin up like add a zero. So at like 10 recruiters, all contingency-based, and then let them work.
Got it. Okay. Yeah, no, I mean, I've— So, I do more. Do more is what you're saying.
It's just—and it's just sometimes it's a belief issue on that, you know what I mean? Like when we scaled a sales team for one of our companies from zero to 80 in 90 days, we had to hire 80 sales people, right? And so it's like we—we gassed all the ads we had, we gassed all the funnels, and we spun up 15 sales recruiters. And we paid five bucks ahead, which we negotiated cuz we were doing volume. So they had a standard fee of 10. We said, "Well, if you—I mean, we're going to get 80, so you know, do it for five and we'll take as many as we can." And they were like, "Let's go." And so we got 15, and so we got 80 guys hired and then kept 50, and then within 90 days we're doing five million a month in extra sales for that company. And so I think it's just a violence thing of like one or two didn't work. Of course not. It's like, you know, I didn't—I worked one or two leads and I didn't find a customer. It's like, I mean, it's just—it's a much bigger numbers game.
Yeah, I reframe my mind around treating it like a lead in trying to chase hunt new business, right? It's just hunting down that new talent. So that's a good reframe. It's a bow tie. So you have demand gen funnels and supply gen funnels. It's the same thing, but you need both in order to scale if you're a service business. Everyone misses the backside.
Makes a lot of sense. I really appreciate you, brother. Thank you. Appreciate you. Congratulations on the business.
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