CASE STUDY: DAVE SAMUELSON, TOWN & COUNTRY ENTERPRISES

Here’s a sneak peek into my upcoming book: How To Hire the Best: The Entrepreneur’s Ultimate Guide to Attracting Top Performing Team Members (Releasing September 15, 2020)

TOLERATING MEDIOCRE

When you tolerate mediocre team members, work quality suffers, and you spend too much time managing the mediocre team members.
 
For one lucky family in upstate New York, SuperBowl LIV was less about the Kansas City Chiefs and more about a 60-inch TV screen—a state-of-the-art system won through simply posting pictures of having fun on the job. But not just any job. The winner works at Town & Country Enterprises, a landscaping business where owner Dave Samuelson is reshaping how the company finds, and keeps, exceptional team members.
 
Staging a selfie contest for a supersized SuperBowl TV is just one of the proactive and innovative solutions Samuelson has discovered to make it easier to attract A-Players to his team. It was clearly time for a change. When one job post for the ideal employee garnered 172 resumes, Town & Country invited 90 percent to apply, and only 26 applied—a number that whittled down to 10 phone conversations, two interviews and one potential candidate. While it was an effective way to reduce the amount of hours Samuelson was spending on the vetting process, it was also an indicator that the business might need some more creative ways to attract A-Players.
 

Dave’s Immutable Laws

“There are certain things you can change, but if somebody is a jerk, you’re not going to fix that,” recalls Samuelson of one young hire he figured could be changed or molded to fit the company. So, after learning the Hire the Best™ process, Samuelson decided it was time to change the company a bit.
“It’s a bit of a change in philosophy,” he says, “a mindset of becoming a great place to work.” To make sure everyone is on the same page, he’s posted a list
“nonnegotiable rules we live and die by” (i.e., Immutable Laws) on the career opportunities page:
 
  • Respect for our clients, team, vendors, equipment, tools, money, time, and yourself
  • Purpose with urgency
  • Don’t wait for perfect
  • Be aware of your surroundings, engaged, and observant
  • Be a positive team player who will be missed if gone
  • No jerks allowed. We work for great clients and have the best employees and vendors.

A New Culture, A New Plan

A new culture that begins with these rules, along with a very detailed hiring plan, is pointing the company in the right direction. Samuelson also incentivizes potential hire referrals—offering an initial $250 followed by another $250 upon the hire along with employee-manager one-on-ones in which the employees share what they like best about Town & Country.
“We’re learning about the guys, and what their hot buttons are,” he reports.
 
Sometimes, that hot button just happens to be on the remote control during the SuperBowl.
 

For tips on how to work through these problems and coach your team more effectively, please be sure to check out How To Hire the Best:The Entrepreneur’s Ultimate Guide to Attracting Top Performing Team Members, releasing September 15, 2020.

About The Author

Dr. Sabrina Starling, The Business Psychologist and international best-selling author of the How to Hire the Best series and The 4 Week Vacation™, is the founder of Tap the Potential and host of the Profit by Design podcast. At Tap the Potential, we work to free business owners from the constant demands of a growing business.

We believe work supports life, not the other way around. Clients in our Better Business, Better Life coaching program have more time for what matters most and more money in their bank account than they’ve ever had. Next, we send them off on a 4 Week Vacation™ to celebrate their hard-earned journey to take their life back!

Dr. Sabrina and her team at Tap the Potential are on a mission to change the story of entrepreneurship from one of long hours, grinding it out, to one of sustainably profitable businesses that support and enhance life. The Tap the Potential Solution™ and our Tap the Potential Family of Business Owners are disrupting small business as usual. We are on our way to making the Tap the Potential Solution™ the mainstream model for growing business.

By 2023, 150 Tap the Potential clients will have taken 4 Week Vacations. These are the trailblazers, role modeling what’s possible for entrepreneurs. In many entrepreneurial circles, it is becoming more and more common for one entrepreneur to ask another, “Have you taken a 4 Week Vacation™?” (as opposed to asking “How many employees do you have?” or “What is your annual revenue?”). Taking a fully unplugged 4 Week Vacation is rapidly becoming the recognized symbol of entrepreneurial success.

Never one to accept the status quo or back down from a challenge, Dr. Sabrina’s How to Hire the Best series grew from her desire to solve the toughest hiring challenges interfering with her clients’ growth and profitability. What sprang from her experience working with entrepreneurs in rural areas catapulted her into becoming the world’s leading expert in attracting top talent in small businesses—no matter what hiring challenges those businesses are facing—and earned Tap the Potential’s reputation as the go-to resource for entrepreneurs committed to creating Great Places to Work with thriving coaching cultures and highly engaged team members working from strengths.

As The Business Psychologist, and with her years of driving profit in small businesses, Dr. Sabrina knows what it takes to find, keep, and motivate exceptional performance out of your biggest investment—team members.