Greg: [00:00:00] So if you are listening to this and it’s May 2023, then you are just in time to potentially book your ticket to our live in-person event in West London on the 30th of June, 2023. It’s be an absolutely incredible event, and I’d love it if you could come. We’re going to be looking at your marketing, your sales.
We’re going to be coming up with strategies on how we can take your business from one to 5 million pounds if you’re looking to scale. And also we’ve got some confirmed top guest speakers that are going to be attending. So you’ll can find out more about it on our website. I’ll put the show note links at the end of this podcast.
But grab yourself a ticket. It’s a great event to network and meet some other like-minded business owners that are just like you, hungry to grow their construction businesses. Let’s jump into the podcast.
Greg: [00:01:00] So today let’s talk about the subject of promoting from within. Now, we always talk about how there’s a lack of skilled trades, and particularly it gets even more difficult when you’re looking for skilled management. We might be be talking about site foremans, buyers, contracts, managers, project managers.
Once you start moving up the management chain, the lack of skillset becomes even more apparent, and it can be really difficult when you’re trying to expand your business, when you know you need to hire people like this or where to look. So today I just want to try and talk about is there potentially that talent pool from within your own company?
Because we often overlook members of our staff for these positions, but actually it could be the best thing you could do is to try and look from within and promote from within, if you can. But there might be a few things that hold you back from doing that. And initially the reason why you might not promote is the first thing that might frustrate you or hold you back is that you worry about their skillset and their lack of experience in the role.
[00:02:00] So maybe you’ve had someone with you a long time. You’re looking to promote them as a project manager, and you think, do you know what? I’m just not sure if they’re going to be up to it. Are they good enough on technology and emails? Have they got the organidation skills to do this role? And these are valid concerns because you don’t want to promote someone who’s clearly not got the skillset just because they’ve been with you a long time and they’ve been loyal to you, clearly they’ve got to be able to fulfill the higher role.
But there are ways of overcoming this sort of thing. One of the things you can do if you’re worried about that lack of skill and lack of experience is really come up with a training plan, a comprehensive training plan for that employee and see if a bit of mentoring, a bit of coaching, and you encourage that continuous learning.
[00:03:00] That could be what gets that employee over the line and upskills them. Think about practical ways of doing that. Can you start initially just testing that employee with extra responsibility? Maybe you want them to do a takeoff on site and say, “right, I want you to measure the materials in this room or the materials on the drawing for a certain part or a certain phase of the project, and send it over to me.”
Then you could check that and make sure that they’ve done the takeoff right. You could let them go and source quotes for the materials potentially. “Right, here are three suppliers. I want you to phone them all, source quotes, get the best quote and put the order in.” Maybe you let them set up the site organization for the day, so at eight o’clock in the morning, they’re briefing the site team about what they want done.
It might be great if you’re off for the day or you know you’re ill, or you’ve gone on holiday. This could be a perfect time to test them out for this and just see are they able to manage a site potentially and organize a day’s work for the site teams? These could be specific ways that you could just let someone off the leash a little bit and test them out to see if they’ve got the necessary skillset set to do this.
[00:04:00] But of course, we can’t expect perfection and expect it to all run smoothly right off the bat, and they’ve got to be given training. I see this all the time where someone will test someone out and go, “Yes, I tried him. He was useless at ordering the materials or useless at the takeoffs.” And, I asked the question, “Well what training did you give them?”
“Oh no, I just told them what I wanted done.” Well, that’s not enough. You’re just setting someone up for failure on that. So really you need to log how you want it done. How do you want materials ordered? What is the process that you go through in order to do that? And then you’ve come up with a skilled process and a proper way of doing it . But once you come up with a serious SOP that works, then train them on it, and then if they can’t follow that SOP, then you might have a problem.
That’s the first thing. If you’re worried about inadequate skills or experience, then training could be what gets you over that fear and you could test them out on in that role.
[00:05:00] Another thing that holds business owners back is a concern about favoritism in the company. Or, you get internal politics, so maybe you’ve had two or three people that have been with you a long time and you worry about promoting just one of them because you think, well, if I promote Bob, “Well what’s John going to think about it if I don’t promote him?”
That can be difficult and we don’t want resentment or discord amongst team members. But often you can mitigate this risk if you are honest and transparent with your employees and let them know that you are promoting basing it on meritocracy. So if someone starts to prove themselves, then you are looking to internally promote from within.
What that does then is that that then gives other people in the organization the thought process that actually, maybe I could get promoted, if I up my game a little bit and take a bit more responsibility on and show myself sensible, then maybe I have a chance of also being promoted to this new management position.
[00:06:00] Also a couple of other things you can do is make sure you are having regular appraisals with your team. Sometimes this isn’t done enough with site members, so we might do this with our internal office staff. You may give your a admin person or a bookkeeper an appraisal, but you need to be doing it on site too with those that work with you full-time.
Give them an appraisal, let them know how they’re going. Let them know what targets you want to set for them for the next six months. If we can do that and they’re hitting those targets, then rightly they should be promoted based upon that meritocracy. So think about that if we can make that a culture in the company, then that will help avoid those internal politics and favoritism claims that that may go on.
Another potential reason a business owner might hold back is a resistance to change themselves. They may have a little bit of a mindset problem over this that “everyone’s comfortable in their current roles and I don’t want to mix things up because that’s uncertain, isn’t it? It could cause problems if we start promoting people from within.”
[00:07:00] That really comes down to the business owner’s mindset because, as a business owner, if you are going for growth, then you constantly need to have a culture that’s embracing change and ready to do whatever it takes to grow. A business leader really needs to change their own internal mindset and the mindset of the company so that people can see that change is good.
You’re going to try something out. If it doesn’t work, you can go back to how it used to be or you’re going to try something different, but you certainly don’t want to hold back. Promote in from within, just because you personally are resistant to change, there might be something you need to work on on the inside on that.
There might be a few reasons why a business owner might resist promoting from within and, and how you can overcome them. But let’s just briefly talk about some of the benefits of hiring within, because there are huge benefits from doing that. Rather than bringing someone in from the outside, the first benefit is there is massive employee morale and motivation boosts.
[00:08:00] If they can see that people are being promoted from within, it really sends a strong message that you are going to be be rewarding people for their hard work and that you recognise loyalty and you recognise their commitment, and that’s appreciated. It’s really important to be able to do that and reward people for that attitude.
That will then create an entire environment from throughout the business, not just to the employee that gets promoted, but the entire company will see that and it will improve all sorts across the board from improved job quality, job satisfaction, productivity. All of that will go up if you can improve morale and motivation and certainly promote from within does that.
The second benefit of promoting within is that it maintains your company culture and your values. So when you have people that have been with you a long time, they know how you work. They know what your values are as a company. They know how you treat clients. They know what to do if something goes wrong.
[00:09:00] It’s really important that people in within the business understand what your culture and values are. When people have been with you a long time, they already appreciate all of that. They already understand it, and they may well embody it themselves because they’ve helped create that culture.
That helps, the crucial elements of your business identity, that helps you maintain that if you can promote within and it helps reinforce that a little bit more. That’s another great reason why you should try and promote within.
The third reason is that it saves you a fortune in recruitment costs and onboarding people.
And oftentimes when we think of recruitment costs, we are just thinking of what we pay to either a recruitment company or what our own internal marketing costs us to find someone. But it’s also the time that we need to factor in because it takes a long time to onboard new hires. Then if that new hire doesn’t work out, that’s cost you a fortune. Either in recruitment fees or just in the time that you spent training them and setting them up on all your software and systems.
[00:10:00] When you’ve got someone that’s within you save those resources, you’re not having to pay that money. You still have to train them and you still have to onboard them to their new role, but it’s nowhere near as involved because they already understand the company’s processes and procedures so that comprehensive training isn’t needed as much. That can save you a lot of money and time in the long run.
One of the four things that it can do, is it can help you with your succession planning and your business continuity. Now, you may not be thinking of this yet, it depends what age you are and what age you are listening to this, but at some point you need to think about the business continuity. What happens, If you decide that you want to exit at some point or you want to leave, or what happens if you really go and injure yourself or you get a critical illness and you can’t continue in the business, but you need it to continue for your family’s income or whatever else it’s going to be
[00:11:00] Promoting from within helps you with that succession plan. You’re always making sure that there’s someone ready and capable to take over in those key roles where necessary. That’s really, really important because when you do decide to exit, at some point you may well be able to organise a management buyout.
That could be a great option for you to get the employees of the business to actually buy the business out. That could be done over a period of time. There’s probably a whole other podcast on that, how you could structure a business buyout from management. But it’s a way of you showing that your value in the business continuity and that you want to see it continue after you when you finish the business.
That might not be an initial concern right now, but it may well be 5, 10 years from now and anything can happen, any unforeseen event can happen that may make that plan come about a little bit sooner than what you’re expecting.
So there’s just a few reasons why you want to be promoting from within.
[00:12:00] It’s going to save you a lot of money, it’s really going to boost morale and company culture from within the company, and it’s great for your employees. You can upskill them. If you’re worried about them not having enough ability to be able to do these tasks, you can upskill them, you can train them. Make sure you look from within first, because yes, you might be able to go out and find a great hire out there, and that could be the better option for your business if there’s not someone in your business right now that you can look at then fair enough! But don’t be too hasty to do that. Look from within and see if there’s someone you could train that you might just see a little glint of gold in someone that you think, “Yes, you know what, actually this person might be the one that I could train up”.
Give it a go and I’d love to know your thoughts and how it went.
