Small Business 101-Acton

For this blog post, I thought it would be fun to write about the hiring process I have experienced thus far with my business.  I think that this process has been the most entertaining part of my time spent so far.  As I wrote in my previous blog post, I have done some hiring through craigslist and some hiring through word of mouth.  I mentioned my success(or lack thereof) with craigslist before, but my word of mouth tactics have worked surprisingly well.

In my word of mouth interviewing, it has been a lot of fun reconnecting with friends I had lost touch with over the course of high school and college (I went to Lawrence Academy in Groton instead of AB, so I didn’t have the same daily connection with them as I had had in elementary school and junior high).  To this end, it has actually been a lot of fun calling and Facebook messaging old friends out of the blue to see what they are up to for the summer.  Ironically, I haven’t actually been all that successful in finding painters as most of my friends have found great internships!  But I did find a few that were interested and wanted to talk to me more about the job. 

This was probably the trickiest stage for me as it required me to bridge the gap between old friend and employer.  On the one hand, I knew these guys and thought they had the right kind of attitude and work ethic to be good painters.  On the other hand, I had to make sure I set expectations for the summer properly and didn’t give them the impression that they could just slack off and be lazy just because they were working for me.  I think I definitely struggled at first in setting these standards, as I was more concerned with hiring people I knew and felt I could trust than I was in making sure they knew exactly what they were getting into.  However, I think I developed a pretty good approach after a couple of calls and basically broke the job down into the parts I wanted them to succeed in during the summer.  The first part was that I wanted them to work forty hours a week.  I made clear that the money wasn’t coming from nowhere; they had to be able to commit to four, ten hour days a week.  I tried to be as upfront as possible in acknowledging that I knew that this is not an easy commitment, especially for college students who are used to sleeping for the greater portion of the daylight hours in the summer.

I tried to balance this first issue with my second point which was to consider how much time they actually are devoting to painting each week.  Forty hours out of a one hundred and sixty-eight hour week is less than a quarter of their time.  Also, I broke down the structure of the week for them.  The reason we do 4, 10 hour days is because it allows for at least one rain day per week without them having to work on the weekends.  As an employer, I want them working their tails off all week.  But as a fellow college student, I fully understand that everyone wants to have time to hangout by the pool and catch up with their friends and generally have fun.  My mentor, Steve, asked me to consider this as well.  We both agreed that having a four day work week was as close to a happy-medium as we could get where I get forty hours of productivity from each of my painters and they will generally have the weekends off to do whatever they want with friends.

My final part of the breakdown of the job was just trying to be as frank and honest with them as possible.  I told them that my ideal employee is the one that is constantly hitting the goals I help him set, shows up to work on time, and sets a good attitude for the rest of the team.  From my end, I want to do everything possible to keep these workers happy whether it means buying them pizza for lunch every once in a while, bringing a case of Gatorade to the job site, or organizing off-job activities like Red Sox games because these are the guys I want to keep.  Any investment I make in a good employee is worth the expense.  However, I said that those benefits only make sense for me as a business owner for painters that are producing.

In the end, I have a crew that I am pretty proud of.  They are all bright, motivated kids that are invested in painting as a way to make money.  Knowing from my own experience how much it stinks to be a broke college kid, I think this is pretty good motivation and I can’t wait to get them on some job sites and get to work!  Summer is fast approaching, finals are just around the corner for me, and the next phase(actually doing the painting, probably an important part of running a painting business) is only two weeks away!