Taking Control of Your Staffing with Amy Hillis

Joe (00:02):
Hey everybody, this is Joe Zuccarello, your host of the Hey Joe Pet Pro podcast, and I got something really exciting to share. I’m going to start something that I’ve not done before on the podcast, and I have somehow convinced one of my best friends in the industry to do it with me, and that is to start a multi-month. Heck, I don’t know, maybe it’ll lead into multi-year concerted effort of unpacking a very juicy, sometimes maybe even controversial topic as it relates to owning, operating and leading your pet care service business. And that my not newfound friend, but my newfound cohort in that approach is one of my best friends in the pet industry, owner and operator of Social Pet, Amy Hillis. Amy, thank you for being brave and joining me on this journey.

Amy (01:02):
Thank you so much for having me. I’m super excited to unpack all the different topics and have these honest conversations. I think it’s going to be really insightful and informative, and I hope our audience gets a lot out of it.

Joe (01:17):
Yeah, I look back and I always want to create things and put resources forward to the listener audience, to anybody that’ll hear and listen and watch what we’re saying that I wish I would’ve had.

Amy (01:33):
Yep. Same exactly. When I got started in 2014, there was not the network of support that there is today in terms of Facebook groups, in terms of just the connectivity that we have as an industry. And it’s just so great to have all of these different avenues to learn, and I don’t want anyone to feel the way that I felt when I was getting started where I was just lost and had questions and just didn’t know who to ask. So I’m really excited about this and this getting going.

Joe (02:08):
So I think you’re probably a bigger celebrity and presence in our industry than I am, but for any of just the one or two people that might not know who you are, tell the listener audience a little bit more about who you are, about social pet, what got you started in social? I mean, what about this industry got you plugged in that got you convicted to doing what you’re doing, right? Not convicted that way, not like handcuffs, but what geeked you enough to get in it with both feet?

Amy (02:38):
Right. So my husband and I own social pet, and right now we’ve got three locations in the Charlotte, North Carolina area, and a lot of people, we identified a need for quality care in our city, and the thing that really jumped out to us the most was actually not just the lack of quality pet care and the pet experience, but the mediocre customer experience as well. So we were seeing when we were going into different pet care resorts and pet care businesses that the customer experience was just very, it was just mediocre. You go, you pick up your dog, you drop off your dog. There’s not these great conversations. There’s not a relationship that’s being built between the staff and the pet parent. And that’s something that we really wanted to change and that we felt like we could do differently. The relationship between the pet parent and the staff, and then just thinking behind the scenes too.

Amy (03:52):
If the staff is treating the pet parent like this, then that’s a reflection of the leadership that’s taking place. And so how can we get in and really impact people’s lives and help those who want to make a career out of pet care really be able to do that? And so that’s something that’s always been a focus for us is of course having that enriching pet care experience, but then also providing enrichment to our team as well, giving them career path opportunities, continuing education opportunities, and then building that relationship with the client that can then enhance the bond between the dog and themselves. So that’s really driven us to get started and to keep going all these years.

Joe (04:43):
So what I really like about that is that you’re identifying both the external customer that you’re serving, but also the internal customer that you’re serving. So you’ve probably heard me a lot of times I reference that internal customer. We don’t realize that the staff and the people that we walk this business life path with are our customers as well. And not only are they our customers, we’re their customers. That’s how we coexist in that space. And that’s the reason why this particular kickoff to what you and I are going to be doing together on this podcast, we’re going to be co-hosting these juicy topics. And that’s why topic number one has to be about staff. It has to be about finding employees. I think what a lot of times businesses forget because they’re either too close, we’re going to unpack this, but maybe because they’re too close to the action, maybe they’re hiring out of desperation, whatever that looks like. What a lot of businesses forget is that our employees are an extension. They are representing us. I mean, listen, social, pet, I’ve been there. It is fantastic. I love the environment, I love the vibe, I love the culture you’ve created. But I know that when you hire somebody you appreciate the fact, just like in your introduction, you appreciate the fact that these people are representing Amy and Bill Hillis.

Joe (06:19):
They’re representing not only the brand, not only the company, but they’re representing the owners, you to your customers. So you hold that really closely and in high regard. So that’s what we’re going to unpack on this episode is the challenge of staffing mean never before we have in just business in general, just in our economic climate and our social, in this experiment we call social community, we can’t find people to work. We can’t find maybe the people we find to work we’re hiring out of desperation because a couple of those influences, I always want to say, okay, let’s find out. Why can’t we find people? Well, there’s a lot of competition. We’re not competing against other pet care facilities. We’re competing against all other employers, even now since Covid, non-traditional employers like DoorDash and Uber and Uber Eats and these employment options, these job options that existed during Covid but really amplified after. Absolutely. We’ve

Amy (07:43):
Lost people to only fans. I mean, I never thought that would be a thing, but that’s a thing now. So you do. You’re not competing with other pet care businesses, you’re competing with any business out there. If somebody can make a lot of money and it may feel like less physical work or less demanding work, then they might go for that. And so that’s why we need to make our company extremely attractive in terms of the culture, the work environment, the type of clients that we have, and really just creating a space where we’re professionally taking care of our people. Because like you said, they’re our number one client. When we have our marketing plan, we have our marketing plan for our external client and the pet parents and our community outreach, but then also within that marketing plan, we have it for our staff too and just what are we doing not just to recruit, but also to retain and create that space where it’s a workplace that they really want to be and they want to make a career out of.

Joe (08:57):
And really at the same time embracing realities of dealing with people. Anybody that’s heard me for any amount of time I have that one of my dualisms is that people can be peopley,

Joe (09:09):
People can be peopley. So what we have to do is we have to embrace the realities of that and not live in fairytales. So that’s what we’re going to talk about. And really for all of you out there that are listening to Amy and I, it really doesn’t matter if you are one small facility, one small business, if you have multiple locations like Amy does at Social Pet, or if maybe you’re a part of a franchise, maybe you lead a franchise. So it really doesn’t matter if the service that you’re providing is a small, even in-home or at home or in somebody’s driveway type of business, if you have the need for at least one employee, what we’re going to talk about today applies just as much to you at that size as if you have a hundred employees, 150, whatever size. So I think these principles apply, so they just apply at different magnitudes, right?

Joe (10:05):
In different size businesses. So let’s, what we’re talking about, Amy, is taking back control. When I think about owning a business or leading a business, one of the things that I think is it’s a core function of leadership, and that is control if you don’t have control over your business, so you may be soon out of business. So that’s what we’re going to be talking about from the people perspective today, is that control piece. Have you ever felt, I know I have felt out of control with my people in the past. Have you experienced that as well?

Amy (10:44):
Absolutely. And it’s a feeling that sort of creeps up on you in my experience, where it’ll start out and there’s some challenges with maybe a couple of people, and then maybe some people end up leaving and pretty soon you’re in the situation where it’s summertime and you’re extremely short staffed, or you’re just in a place where a good chunk of your staff is just not aligning with the culture or the values that you’re trying to set. And it does, it kind of creeps up on you. And I think that’s why it’s really important to be proactive and to just, for us at least, just always having your eye out and to always be recruiting. Maybe not aggressively recruiting, but you should always be looking for good people because it kind of snowballs. And so you don’t want to hire from a place of scarcity or from desperation. So I mean, yeah, we’ve experienced that so many times and we’ve just learned our lesson to have a strong bench in terms of people who are crosstrained and who can support each other if somebody leaves or just to have multiple people who can do the similar job. It’s just so important because once you have to hire from a place of desperation, then it can get really ugly really quick.

Joe (12:20):
And I think too, you mentioned earlier about culture and about, and I had kind of sprinkled in there the comment about our staff as an extension of us, they’re an extension of our integrity, our work ethic, our brand. If you would, I think one of the very first places to start, because on these podcasts, what I wanted to make sure that we’re always offering is, okay, that all sounds great, Joe and Amy, but you guys live in this sort of utopic after. Well, what about the before? So I think one of the things that I know that one of the mistakes I made early on as an early leader, as an early manager was that I wasn’t clear as to what my image was. I wasn’t clear as to what my reputation was. I wasn’t clear as to what my brand was. So if I’m not clear, how can I ever expect anybody else to be clear? And I think that that’s one of the very first tips that I would offer the audience is, are you clear about who you are, what your business stands for? How do you want your customers to describe you to their friends?

Amy (13:42):
Exactly. Yeah. And we have to have those conversations deliberately with our team. We can’t just expect them to absorb it through our actions or observation or our branding or the type of client that’s walking in the door. We have to be very, very clear. We need to create values, a mission statement, and deliberately tie our actions and our plans back to those things. I think we need to have deliberate conversations around who our client avatar is. We need to have conversations around all of it. Just be very, very clear because don’t, it’s not their fault as a staff if they’re a little confused if we’re not doing those things. And for us as the business owner, this is our life. And a lot of us will think about it all day, all night. Our business is our baby for our staff. They may care a lot, but they have lives outside of this.

Amy (14:54):
They’re not sitting there making these connections in their head after work and thinking about all of these things that maybe we’re thinking about. And so we’ve just got to be very deliberate. Just explain some of those points to them, really all of those points to them so that way there’s no confusion and that’s just going to make it easier on everybody. And then when they see us model the appropriate behavior, when they observe somebody as they get more experience, and that’s going to help it click together and reinforce it, and we’ve got to reinforce it as well on a regular basis. If we tell our team something and then expect them to learn it, it’s not going to happen. And I think that’s one of the mistakes that we make. And that’s one of the things we remind our veteran employees is just because you told our new staff members something once doesn’t mean they’re going to get it and they’re not slow, just a normal person.

Amy (15:54):
I mean, how long did it take you to learn something? So we’ve just got to normalize learning and education and asking questions and having those deliberate conversations and not have it be a big scary talk or have it be somebody’s in trouble if we have to talk to them about something. It’s just part of the learning process, and that should be part of your culture. And I think once we started to really get a better handle on that, then that’s when our staffing issue started to turn around. When we were deliberate with our hiring, that’s when staffing started to turn around. So there’s a lot of different pieces to it. And we as business owners, we just really have to pay attention to what’s happening in the market, not be afraid to pivot and also not be afraid to try new things. When we were trying to hire groomers way back in the day, we were just going on indeed and hoping for the best. And I mean, we found one really great groomer that way, but it was definitely not the norm. And then she left after Covid, and I was really worried about trying something like Paragon growing our own groomers from within. I just felt like, I don’t know about this. What if they leave? And all of these different things. And the other part of me was like, well, what you were doing before wasn’t working, so you need to try something new. Try it can’t get any

Joe (17:30):
Worse.

Amy (17:31):
Yeah, it can’t get any worse. I don’t think it can. So

Joe (17:34):
Try this. Hey, listen, Paragon succeeded very, very well with that. I can’t get any worse. What do I have to

Amy (17:39):
Lose? Can’t get any worse. And so if what you’re doing just isn’t working, then you need to try something new. And it might be a little scary, but it also might be really successful and it has been for us. So yeah, you just have to have an open mind and just be really intentional with what you’re doing, I think.

Joe (17:58):
Well, and going back to something you had said as far as your culture, and if they don’t, you’re not clear with them what your culture is, they’re going to, you can’t expect that they’re going to pick that up on their own, right? I mean, it’s hard enough to get ’em to enter the right client information, to answer the phone properly, to clean the facility properly. I mean, those are all of the task based. They should not be expected or overburdened or unfairly expected to create their own interpretation of your culture. I almost look at it this way. One of the things that I always talk about is how do you convince people that they want to work here, not there. So why would they want to work with you? Why would they want to work at your company? And I’ve oftentimes looked outside of our industry for parallels. I look outside of our industry and I think, okay, well you got some pretty hardcore sports fans

Joe (19:01):
That for whatever reason, listen, those players do not know who Bob Smith in the middle of nowhere, Nebraska or nowhere, Wisconsin. They don’t know who that person is. But for whatever reason that Bob Smith is that diehard Packers fan, I mean dawning the gold and green and it just really has this allegiance to their favorite sports team, for example. But if all of a sudden that person starts having any amount of influence or the sports team just allows for different colors to be worn and different name and different, they lose their entire brand. So I guess my point there is we can create allegiance, we can create that stickiness with our staff. But one thing that I think that owner operators get caught up in a trap is expecting that we’re going to keep all of our people forever. For example, I used to be surprised when somebody quit, I’d be like, can you believe so-and-so quit? Right? Or I’d go home and I’d be like, oh, now I got to start all over. I got to start recruiting. I got to start talking to people and And by the way, somebody else is having a fill in because they didn’t quit and give me six months notice. They didn’t come back after lunch.

Amy (20:40):
They had to go to their car and get something.

Joe (20:44):
They went to their car and got gone is what they got. Are they still in the bathroom?

Joe (20:51):
And you go back there and of course they snuck out the back door. I mean, we’ve all listen, if anybody out there hasn’t had that happen to you yet, you just haven’t been in business long enough, you haven’t been around enough people, it’s going to happen. But I used to be surprised. And to your point, and I think it was so perfectly put, it’s okay to always be recruiting, even if you’re going to park a rockstar off stage for a little bit by saying something like, listen, when and if I ever have a position open, I’m going to call you. It’s okay to park them in the wings.

Amy (21:30):
Oh yeah, we’ve done that before. I mean, that’s honestly, with our current trainer at one of our locations, she applied at a time where we just didn’t have a need for a trainer. And we told her, if something opens up when something opens up because it will open up, either somebody will leave or we’ll get so busy that we’ll need to hire a second person,

Amy (21:53):
We’ll call you. That’s exactly what happened. We had somebody leave, so we reached out to her and boom, she was still interested and she’s working for us now and she’s incredible. So that networking, making those connections, just always having your eye on recruiting and finding new team members in different industries, I think we’ve all heard looking outside of the pet care industry and just if you get really great customer service somewhere, have a business card ready to hand that out or go to job fairs if you have local universities near you, and if nothing else, even if they’re not going to work out as an employee, it could still be a potential client. So it’s not a waste of time. So use that to your advantage and help get your brand out there, either from a client perspective or from a new staff member perspective.

Joe (22:55):
So the reality is people are going to be peopley another reality and just listen, somebody once dubbed it, embrace the suck. Just embrace the suck of owning and operating and managing any business specific to our industry, the pet industry. But if as long as you then say, okay, that’s my reality. My reality is I’m going to be blessed to keep some rock stars that stay with me for a long time, but I’m going to go into everything thinking that not that staff is disposable. That’s the wrong. Don’t let this message land like that. What I mean is it is just not reality. To think that you’re going to be looking at the same set of faces a year from now that you’re looking at right now. So be proactive, take control, be a victor, not a victim, and have those conversations. Who knows? You might find somebody who you want to replace an average performer with.

Amy (24:00):
And that’s what I tell our team too, is that there is, and as harsh as this sounds, there is always somebody who’s the lowest performing on the team. And so if you can continue to stack your team with these really high performers, these rock stars, then do that. That’s exactly what you should do. So there’s always space for really high performers. We can always make room for them, maybe not immediately, but there is a place for them, and we always need to be on the lookout for them

Joe (24:32):
And have some plan in place, some metrics in place that everybody’s job gets measured. There’s a way to measure what correct looks like

Joe (24:44):
For every role that you have. Now some are a little bit more challenging to try to figure out how do we measure their success? Is it just, I’ve often talked about the AAA status, employee attitude, attendance and appearance, and that’s a really great start. Attitude, attendance and appearance, right? So are they AAA rated? Are they a AAA staff member? But there’s other ways, there’s other metrics depending on their position in a company that should define performer or rockstar as you call them, and not rockstar. I mean, they may not be doing something wrong, but they may not be a rockstar. So I do want to talk about, you had hinted to hiring from outside of our industry. So you shared a story with, man, I got the chance to meet this person and great hire. But to your point earlier, when you had an opening for a senior leader position at Social Pet, you purposely went outside of our industry, but you found an industry that had lots of parallels to our industry, and that was the hospitality industry. So why did you go to the hospitality industry and what was the result of that? Who did you find and why do you feel that that was, I want you to be able to tell that story because when you told me that story and I got the chance to meet this person, I’m like, dang, what a great lesson to share with our audience.

Amy (26:10):
So we had a opening for our director of operations position, and this person oversee the operations for the entire company, and she makes sure that each location is operating consistently with each other, that if a client walks into one social pet and then another social pet, they know they’re in the same company and it’s going to be the same experience. And we needed somebody who had experience managing either multiple stores or multiple facilities of something or multiple departments on a really large scale. And so we do like to promote from within whenever we can, and we’re often able to do so. But for this position, we wanted somebody with experience doing this already, a proven track record of success. And so we actually reached out to a recruiter and she was the one who started to put those feelers out, and we let her know exactly what we were looking for.

Amy (27:21):
We wanted somebody who had that experience that we needed, and the industry that we were really looking for was hospitality. And so who we ended up hiring, she came from Hilton Hotels. She had worked there for about 16 years, and she is in, I think she’s in her late thirties. I mean, she’s not old. So that shows that, I dunno how else to say it. She’s young. And so that shows that she has that stickiness. She’s going to stick with a company for a long time and you don’t really see that much anymore. 15, 16 years is incredible. So between the amount of time that she stayed, her experience managing an Embassy Suites, which had multiple departments with not just the hotel rooms, but also the restaurant, the bar, the catering, the banquet, they would hold a lot of events there. So there were a lot of really big pieces there.

Amy (28:31):
And then she also, the schedule that she had, even as the GM of that hotel, she was essentially on call 24 7. So if the night auditor didn’t show up, she’d be going in and she’d be there at two o’clock in the morning. She would, if they were short on housekeeping staff, she would jump in and start cleaning rooms. And so she really had the closest experience to pet care and to what we were looking for without being in the actual industry. And so after multiple conversations with her and hiring her, I mean, she has just been so incredible. And it’s the work ethic, it’s the culture, it’s the organization, it’s all of these different things that translate to pet care. And her background actually too, was that she grew up on a farm. She has experience with animals and she has her own dogs as well. And so just again,

Joe (29:37):
Checkbox, checkbox, checkbox,

Amy (29:39):
Checkbox, yeah, it was just checking every single box. And so when she came in, she was able to get started day one, even as we’re onboarding, I had her sit in on one of our meetings with our managers and she was already giving very appropriate feedback in terms of how to speak to another employee that the manager was having trouble with. There’s so many skills that transfer, and it was just a really great fit. So because we were deliberate and we went outside our industry and really looked for somebody specific, it’s one of the best hires that we ever made for a lot of our employees, a lot of our best employees, their first job in pet care was with us, and they’ve worked their way up. Some of them have worked their way up into management or have started to cross train into grooming, and some have just become a really solid team lead.

Amy (30:41):
And those soft skills in terms of personality and culture fit and work ethic and things like that. I mean, you have that or you don’t, and you don’t need to be in pet care, have experience in pet care to have those things. You can go outside the industry. And I think especially if you have a very specific position that you need to fill a senior leader role or some other role like that, definitely look outside. You want want somebody who can handle the role, and you’re doing your team a disservice if you don’t do that. If we just hired our best performing manager to move into that role, it wouldn’t be fair to that person. We would be setting them up to fail. And we just don’t want to do that, of course. So we’ve got to really be intentional with that process.

Joe (31:39):
Well, and you know what? I liked that you’re saying. You’re not saying that we’re not going to grow people from within. You’re not saying that you’re not going to hire for attitude and train for the job. You’re not saying that there’s not a career path because you mentioned that early in this episode that one of the things you want people to start in pet, whether they stay in a career at your place, but listen, there’s only so many management roles. So if people grow up, they might grow out, and that’s okay too. Again, we shouldn’t be surprised. We should see it coming, and in fact, we should actually be in control of that path. But what I like about what you’re saying is you hired her at that level because you wanted her to come in and teach you something. You wanted her to come in and teach the staff something. If all we do is continue to stay in our own world, we might be missing an opportunity or we might get passed by in the competitive landscape of our market

Speaker 3 (32:43):
Because

Joe (32:45):
They’re bringing in experience from the outside that you might’ve missed. But you decided, again, going back to the beginning, how do you take control of your staffing situation instead of just taking what comes at you, you took control. And this is another example, another way to take control really is embracing the idea of growing your own from within. We talked about groomers, we talked about trainers, we talked about your reception staff, we talked about management. However, whatever that looks like, it is okay to grow your own from within. But again, part of that very necessary attribute of successful leadership and management is that one of the four primary functions is control.

Speaker 4 (33:36):
And

Joe (33:36):
Too many times we’re too close to the action to be able to have a clear path of control. So one last piece before we wrap up our time together. So we talked about people get people, we talked about recruiting, we talked about taking control and going hunting. Go find them. Don’t wait for them to land in our lap. I mean, they’re just kind of touching, grow our own, bring in people from the outside to teach us something, but then when we have them, what are a couple of techniques that, and I’ve got a couple, but what are a couple techniques that you feel have helped you retain people? You have staff that’s been there, I met them. You’ve had staff that’s been with you for, in some cases, several months is a long time, several years is even longer. What have you done under your leadership, the tone from the top, if you would, that’s helped you retain people and have them feel like they’ve got a fulfilling job?

Amy (34:43):
I think with staff retention, you need to think about it like any other relationship, like a friendship or a relationship with a partner. What I see typically happen is that at the beginning of the relationship, maybe when you first hire them, there’s all this communication, all this check-in, all this attention. How are you doing? Are you learning everything? Okay, how was your first week, your second week, third week, go work with this person, have your buddy system or your mentor system. And then at some point it starts to drop off and there’s not as much communication with us. What we do, and this is something that our director really helped us tighten up, was maintaining that communication throughout the duration of the relationship with the employee. And so that will look like regular one-on-one meetings where we’re checking in and not just about how are you doing with work, but also just what goals do you have?

Amy (35:52):
What are just getting to another level, giving them that attention that they need and a space to just kind of process what they want to do professionally. And those one-on-ones don’t need to take a long time. I mean, 10 minutes, 15 minutes is usually good. Sometimes they’re a little bit longer, but spending the time with them and planning events is something else that we do where we can bring our team together and we’ll do quarterly hangouts. So we’ll just plan different things around the community where they can go and the company pays for, they can just hang out with any relationship. You’ve got to maintain the communication and the interest. And if you’re married, they say you should always continue to date your partner even if you’re married. And it’s kind of that way with our employees, we’ve got to keep that communication and those experiences going. If we see that they need something, how can we help meet their needs or guide them in a direction where they can meet those needs? So I mean, that’s really the biggest thing I think, is looking at it as a relationship, which it is, and then giving that person what they need in terms of communication, socialization with their team, food, just anything like that. Whatever you can do, whatever you can provide that’s appropriate, then I think that’s something that you should do. And that’s been a game changer for us.

Joe (37:35):
Yeah, I love that. I’ve talked to so many people and I’ve introduced that pretty much the same concept. And oh, I talk to my staff all the time and I said, you do? Oh yeah, I talk to ’em all the time. When I walk in in the morning, I see them, Hey, how you doing? And I said, no, that’s not necessarily what I have in mind. What I’m recommending is that you have a very purposeful time when you sit down with each person and listen, I’m going to give you the conversation, Dar, I’m going to give you the conversation starter. Just say, how are you doing? And don’t settle for fine. For all of you dudes out there, you know that fine doesn’t mean fine, right? I’m just saying fine doesn’t mean fine. I learned that from my wife from a long time ago, right? Fine does not mean fine. But my point though is to have a purposeful time that you set aside and meet with them, I failed. This is one of those areas that I failed. I failed at doing that. I only talked to my staff when something went wrong.

Amy (38:39):
That’s where we were at for a while too. And I mean, that’s awful. When they see you coming, they know they’re in trouble. I mean, who wants to feel like that,

Joe (38:46):
Right? Yeah. I mean, I get called into the principal’s office, but you know what I also like to, so I love that, Amy, that you bring that up because I think that now for all of you out there, that’s one of those areas you’re just going to have to trust us.

Speaker 4 (39:02):
You’re

Joe (39:03):
Just going to have to trust us that if you start that and you stay with that, we cannot tell you what you’re going to find out. We cannot predict all of the things that, the danger that you’re going to be able to avoid or the frustration that you’re going to be able to avoid. I cannot predict that future for you. But one thing I can tell you is that once you get that conversation started and you keep a conversation going, it is kind of remarkable what happens naturally. And sometimes we discover that together, this role isn’t for them, right? Amy? I mean, again, let’s go back to our just being humans. Sometimes we have to discover together and decide together that maybe a role, maybe it’s a position in the company isn’t for them, and maybe there’s another position. Maybe it’s just square peg, ground hole inside the company. It’s just not the right fit. And sometimes they’re just not a right fit for us or we’re not a right fit for them. Again, we’re trying to remove the surprises.

Amy (40:15):
Yes, exactly.

Joe (40:17):
We need to remove surprises so that when surprises do happen in our business, we have enough brain space, enough thoughtfulness to be able to address the things that we cannot plan for that come up. But the things we can, through little adjustments like this, my challenge is to everybody out there, try it. You have nothing to lose by having these regular conversations with people.

Amy (40:42):
Well, and I always say too, you’re going to end up spending the time one way or another, whether it’s on the front end, being proactive and really working to build the relationship or on the back end when something goes wrong. And you have to be reactive. So you might as well spend it on the front end and have those positive touch points is going to actually save a lot of time in the future. And again, it doesn’t need to be a big formal thing. It doesn’t need to be an hour long sit down, go out to their work area. If they’re out in the yard with the dogs, go out there and spend 10 minutes and have a conversation and that, that’s a great start. And a lot of times that’s the bulk of what it takes. There may be times where you’ve got to spend longer or those conversations may look a little bit different, but if it does end up being that you need to part ways, then at least you’re parting ways on positive terms. And that’s best case scenario for us.

Joe (41:44):
So I’m going to give you an example and we’ll close out with that because well, one, I’m so fortunate to have you as a partner in what is coming up as a series of podcasts. So thank you again. I just always want to share my gratitude with you. But because the audience needs to hear you, you’re just a wealth of knowledge. I’ll leave you with this. I’ll leave the group, the audience with this story. When I was leading a chain of pet care facilities and I was there, I had a chance at really an opportunity to lead this chain of pet care facilities for about 20 years. And I tell this story, but many have not heard it. That conversation about where they’re at, you just help me remember this really awesome story. And that was, I arrived on scene at our largest facility. And what I didn’t know until after I left the company was that they would see me pull in, and then I had this code word that they would announce over the intercom that I was on site, which is not fair, but they did. It was kind of fun. So I made a practice of going to every department and saying hello to people. Now, I couldn’t talk to everybody every time I would stop by, but I would go to the furthest out play yards. I would go to the furthest out pet enclosures just to see who’s out there and talk to them the furthest away from the building. It’s easy to say hello and be familiar with the reception team.

Joe (43:20):
And then all of a sudden, all you ever realize is that those are the people that you talk to and you don’t talk to anybody else.

Speaker 3 (43:24):
So

Joe (43:25):
This one time I walked all the way back. Now this facility could hold about 400 dogs a night, right? I mean, the capacity of this building was massive. And so I walked all the way back and it still had the outdoor indoor outdoor runs, and you’d have to hose out the hose out the nasty out of some of the rooms outside. So I go out there and there’s this young man, I think he was like 17 years old, and he had these big red rubber boots on, and he has this big red hose, and he’s out there and he’s hosing, hosing the outside area down. And I walk up to him and I’m like, Hey, how you doing? And he’s like, fine. And I hadn’t met him before. And I said, I stuck out my hand and shook his wet hand. Who knows where that hand had been when he was cleaning?

Amy (44:10):
Better not to know.

Joe (44:12):
And I just said, what’s your name? And he said, well, I said, I told him my name. I said, Hey, I’m Joe. And he goes, yeah, I know who you are. How? Because he heard about me or heard about it on the intercom or whatever. But he goes, I’m Mike. I said, oh, Mike, so what is it that you do here? And I could clearly see what he’s doing for minute. He goes, I’m just a hoser. This is my mike, the hoser story. And I’m like, oh, well, just a hoser. What do you mean? He goes, well, everything was just, I just clean out the rooms, hose poop and pee into the drain, and then I hose the drain down to the drain. And I said, Mike, I said, Hey, go ahead. Put the hose down for a second. And he said, and I think he thought like, oh crap, I’m in trouble.

Amy (45:02):
What did I do?

Joe (45:02):
And I said, you described yourself as a hoser or just a hoser. I said, do you know, I think you’ve got the most important job here in the company. And he’s like, really? And I said, yeah. I said, because if you don’t do your job with excellence, this pet doesn’t come back.

Speaker 4 (45:19):
And

Joe (45:20):
If we get enough of them that don’t come back, we all lose our jobs. So the way I look at it, you’re not just a hoser. I said, I’ll let you get back to doing what you’re doing. And I left and I walked right back up to the general manager of that facility’s office, and I said, do we have a job title that’s hoser? And she said, yes. I said, change it today.

Amy (45:41):
Yeah,

Joe (45:42):
I think we changed it. I think we changed it to housekeeping, something like that.

Amy (45:46):
And that mattered. I’m just a hoser. Yeah, that’s part of just a bath. Yeah. I mean, he’s got to tell people what he does for a living when people ask about his job and he is going to say he’s a hoser. Yeah. And I mean, all of those components are so critical to the health of the dog. It is a super important job. And so give it a title that really labels the level of respect that it deserves. It’s so important. That’s a great

Joe (46:19):
Insight. And not only the level of respect it deserves, the importance that it really does factually have in the

Speaker 4 (46:25):
Business.

Joe (46:27):
Right? Absolutely. So Mike Deser, he stayed with us for a few years and he ended up going off to college and he’d come back and work during the summers on break and during Christmas break and things like that. So I always wonder whatever happened to Mike Deser, but I can tell you that after that, his new job title was housekeeping. I

Amy (46:46):
Love it. Yeah. That’s great. That’s a great example.

Joe (46:49):
So Amy, thank you very much for the audience out there. I hope you got some things that you can put to work today that you can start having a different perspective. And if that’s the case, then we’ve done our job, but we’ve got lots of other juicy topics to unpack with you. We will be doing this series at least monthly. We’re going to bring this to you monthly. We’ve got lots of different topics, and you can reach out to Amy at Social Pet or to me at Paragon, and if you’ve got some juicy topics you want us to cover, bring it, right?

Amy (47:21):
Oh yeah. We’d love to hear it. Challenge, yeah, we’d love to hear what you want to hear us talk about. So we’d love to hear from you.

Joe (47:29):
Excellent. Amy, as always, you’re awesome. Thank you for being a partner in what we’re doing here, and I can’t wait to unpack the next topic for the audience next month.

Amy (47:39):
Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. I’m looking forward to our next one.

Joe (47:42):
Alright, thanks.

Amy (47:44):
Thanks.