Secrets To Finding Top Tradie Talent Transcript

Greg Wilkes (00:01):

The construction industry can be a tough business to crack from cash flow problems. Struggling to find skilled labor and not making enough money for your efforts leaves many business owners feeling frustrated and burnt out. But when you get the business strategy right, it’s an industry that can be highly satisfying and financially rewarding. I’m here to give you the resources to be able to create a construction business that gives you more time, more freedom, and more money. This is the Develop Your Construction Business podcast, and I’m your host, Greg Wilkes.

(00:41)
The number one frustration I hear is that I cannot grow my business because I cannot find enough tradespeople to come and work for me. There’s no one out there that wants to get into this industry. We hear this all the time, and we know from the media that there is a Labour skill shortage. There’s no doubt about it, but sometimes our own mindset holds us back from hiring people. And on today’s podcast, we’ve got Matt DiBara, who’s going to be showing us exactly what it takes to find and attract top talent to your business. He’s replicated this time and time again. Now, Matt is not coming to us from an agency background or a recruitment background. He’s actually coming to us from a construction business, and he recognized this was a problem, and now he’s adapted a course and a product that solves the problem of finding and attracting top talent.

(01:29)
Throughout this podcast, we’re going to be diving into some of the top tips on what it takes in order to find top people for your industry. So have a listen. This is really going to open your mind up to some of the things you’re currently not doing, and if you had just apply one or two of these tips, it’s going to be a complete game changer on how you go and find tradies out there. So have a listen, and let’s see what you think.

(01:51)
So, welcome back to the podcast, everyone. Really excited today to have Matt Dibara on with us. So Matt, would you just like to introduce yourself? Who are you, and what do you do?

Matt DiBara (02:00):

Yes, thanks for having me. Sorry about the American accent. It’s not quite as charming as yours, but if you can’t tell, I’m from the U.S, specifically from outside of Boston. My family’s been in construction 104 years from Italy, so I very much grew up the blue collar American dream. Started at nine years old, picking up trash on job sites and grew within the family business, and been wearing work boots and working in the biz ever since.

Greg Wilkes (02:25):

Wow. So yeah, been in the business a long time. Great to have a family history like that in the business, and I think a lot of us do get into construction because our father did it or his parents before him. So it is often the family run business, isn’t it? So tell us what you are currently doing with regard to construction because with regard to hiring and retention in the business at the moment, because I know that’s particularly why we wanted to get you on the show. What are you currently offering?

Matt DiBara (02:51):

Yeah, so we are in the hiring side of things now, and we got here kind of on accident. I was growing the business here in Los Angeles. I’d taken it over, relocated it to LA and I had a hiring problem. And right around 2018, 2019 almost ruined the family business. So going back to the start, my dad used to say, “Hey, don’t screw this up. You got three generations before you, no pressure.” Well, they almost did that because so much had changed in the hiring space, and so we had a huge issue with being able to hire. We figured it out. It took me about a year and a half. I lost a million dollars in the span of about three and a half, four weeks. I mean it was really bad, real bad. And it forced me to look at ways I could grow and figure out how to solve this issue.

(03:29)
And I told myself if I couldn’t that, I was going to close the business down. And so that sparked a year-and-a-half-long journey, mentors, traveling, looking at other industries, just trying to piece together this way of hiring because the things I was doing just weren’t working anymore. And that’s really what sparked all of this was a system that I developed and then helped people locally, and then we got in the hands of ZipRecruiter, and they got on board, and things kind of grew. So now my passion is helping construction businesses with hiring. We built a course first, and then we started just implementing what we have in the course for business owners because I was sick and tired of the recruiters, I was tired of the staffing agencies, felt like there was a huge gap, and I wanted to be able to take what I, me and the team figured out and give that to other companies in a really affordable way.

Greg Wilkes (04:18):

That’s fantastic. And you’re completely right. I mean, one of the biggest frustrations I hear all the time is I cannot find the right people. I can’t grow because there’s no one out there or I don’t know, I don’t have a strategy on how to recruit. So I think this is probably the number one bottleneck for businesses in trying to grow, especially in construction, because there is potentially such a labor shortage. So let’s just come onto that, talking about the labor shortage then, because this is the problem that we hear all the time. What strategies have you found to enable you to find top tradespeople, not just top tradespeople? Because in a construction business, it’s not just about trades. You’ve then got to find the office staff and maybe management staff, project managers, and things like that. What strategies are you particularly using in your businesses, Matt?

Matt DiBara (05:03):

Yes, there’s so many. I think the most important thing to think about high level first is, you know, most of us we get good like me, I got good at sales and marketing before I got good at hiring. So if you’re doing a million to $5 million or pounds, it’s like you probably have a way of selling. And so the way to think about hiring, and I didn’t realize this. This is what messed me up, and this is a big thing that I would recommend anyone avoid is when I was doing it, people would give me these one-size answers. They’d be like, you got to use technology, or you got to use this, or it was like one approach. I found we have over thirty-seven different ways, proven ways to find candidates. Because there is no one size fits all. So coming back to the original point, if you look at marketing, if you look at what it takes to generate a customer, it’s like you have your brand, you have your website, you have somebody answering the phones, you have this whole system, and if one piece is broken in that system, let’s say you got a great website, great marketing, great person answering the phones, things are scheduled, but your salesperson doesn’t send out the quote for a week and a half, you just lost that job.

(06:00)
Well, what I realized was it’s the same thing with hiring. It’s an ecosystem, it’s a framework, and so you have to find candidates, you have to fill your pipeline really big. Then, you have to be able to vet them in different levels of priority. You have to take really good ones, and you have a way to get them to the front of the line, because you’ll lose them in a week, right? You got to take the middle-range candidates and get them through a consistent, predictable process. And the ones that aren’t good disqualify quickly, then you got to know how to hire. Do you give them the offer letter and email, and they shop it to their current employer and never even leave? How do you do that? And then, how do you motivate and retain? So that’s the framework that we teach, and we do, but I find most companies where we really shine is in the finding part because most companies have a way to vet that somewhat works, and we’ll help them with that and then hire right offer letters, things like that.

(06:47)
But the big thing is where do I find, where do I generate candidates? And so we found those specific tradespeople. There’s so many different ways, but a couple of the big ones, a career video. You set yourself apart if you have a short video that showcases who you are in your company, usually 90 seconds long, give or take, shows the ownership, the trucks, the team, fall in love with who you are is huge in ways to get in front of those candidates. I mean, gosh, there’s so many. There’s a technology called geofencing where you can put an invisible fence around competitors or suppliers, and if somebody walks through that location and has their phone or their tablet, they can see your hiring ad. I mean, I think it’s a lot of incremental improvements. One of the tricks we found that works really well is, and you can do this, we’ve done this in the Canada market.

(07:36)
We’re working on the Australia market right now. Let’s say you have a favorite supplier where you buy a lot of your job supplies. You can go to them and say, look, I’d love to sponsor coffee and donuts in the morning. I’d love to sponsor this from your two busiest hours, 6:00 AM to 8:00 AM or whatever the two busiest hours are. You can do it every day. You can do it once a week and say, in exchange for that, I’d love to just put a small little card that says we’re hiring, three little benefits, and then a QR code. What we found is a lot of suppliers, they won’t let you put up a big banner because they’re like, “Hey, we can’t show favoritism.” But if you’re offering coffee and donuts and they don’t give it away yet and you’ve got a little card, we found that most suppliers, if you do it in the right way, will say yes. And what you do is you get in front of those qualified lead senior people that are trusted with a company truck, a gas card, they’re picking up materials. So, I’m just throwing a couple of things out there to show. Most people say, I’ve tried everything. They come to us, they’re like, I’ve tried everything. It’s like we’ve got so many different ways. On average, there are 30 to thirty-five different things that people have never tried before working with us.

Greg Wilkes (08:40):

That’s really fantastic. Just want to dive into a couple of things you said there. One thing that really just stood out for me is when you think of your hiring process, like the sales funnel. I’ve never even considered that at all. What a great idea because there are so many stages to hiring in, and just like the sales final, you’ve got so many stages on what it takes to get from a lead all the way through to a signed customer. I think that’s great. So, just diving into that a little bit more, how many stages do you think there are from top of the sales to getting that lead in all the way through to actually getting someone to sign on the dotted line and recruit them?

Matt DiBara (09:15):

Yes, I mean we break it. I’m a simple guy, so I look at it in four key parts. How do I find build pipeline? How do I vet quickly directionalize where they’re going? How do I hire which is presents the offer and closes the deal? And then how do I retain and motivate? Those are the four key buckets. And then underneath them, like, fine, there’s thirty-seven different ways, but it gets specific, and fundamentally, it’s like you got to post to lots of different job boards. You got to get in front of the candidates. Our team, if we do this for a company, we get in touch with the candidate within three minutes, we sift sort and screen. We pre-screen. We handle the initial screening so that all the business owner does is do the final vetted interview, and the candidate is willing to wait a day or two now because they’ve already got some buy-in from our team talking to them. As of a representative of your company. So it’s a really unique model. But yeah, thinking of it, the sales funnel is very important. Then you change your framework to, all right, now I understand where some of my breakpoints might be, and most people it’s how do I fill the front end? I don’t have enough candidates, I don’t have selection.

Greg Wilkes (10:14):

Yes, that’s an absolutely fantastic idea. So I think that’s awesome. So I’m sure that if they get in touch you might be able to give us some links a little bit later on how we can get some more ideas on those 30 odd ways that you do that. That sounds fantastic. Just want to touch on one of the last things you said there about motivating and retaining the top talent because that’s the problem, isn’t it? All of a sudden, you get someone who’s absolutely brilliant. They come and start working for you, you’ve got them for six months, train them up, and then all of a sudden they say, “Right, I’m off.” And you’ve invested so much time in them. So, what tips would you give someone? How do you retain a moat of a talent to stay with you and get maximum results out of them? How do you keep them engaged and committed?

Matt DiBara (10:57):

Well, I’m a simple guy, and so what we did is we looked at it. Most of us are not going to get everything right all the time, especially as we’re growing. As the company growing, you’re going to make a little mistake. So I like to build frameworks that work even if other things aren’t working. I call it catcholes, and so one of the things we do is if you hire somebody new, you really want to focus on their first two weeks. The first two weeks is where they’re making a strong impression of the company. So are you going to implement a buddy system where they have somebody they can always go to? Are you going to make sure they have their logins and they’re set up for success? The other thing you can do that’s really simple and easy is, and we do this, I do this in my construction company, and our clients do this is implement a check-in process.

(11:38)
So usually, we do the first two weeks, first 30 days, first 90 days, and then it does a rolling, either you can do it quarterly or every four months, but the importance of that is two things. Number one, you’re sitting down with the candidate early and often, and you have a framework to air out any problems That’s not like, “Hey, I’m going to pull you aside, because you did this thing wrong.” Or the opposite for them where they’re holding things in, they’re like, oh, I’ve only been here two weeks, but I still haven’t gotten my gas card, and I am paying out of pocket. We make little mistakes as business owners when we’re growing unintentionally, a framework to communicate early, and often, we do it where you’re eligible for a raise. So we literally say at every one of these meetings, if you grow quickly after two weeks, 30 days, 90 days, you’re eligible for a pay increase at all of those intervals.

(12:22)
And that’s exciting, but communication is key, and that’s one framework. If you do that, you’re ahead of a lot of companies because it’s a little bit reactive, but it’s a fail-safe. It’s like you’re opening up the discussion in a way that’s proactive. Another one is we have a system. So, a lot of people in the field, it’s a question around how do you motivate people in the field? And if you don’t have a C-suite team, if you don’t have all your numbers perfect, most companies those things are like you kind of know, but it’s not perfect. We have a system where basically, we incentivize the field team. So, you get company-branded poker chips, and then you buy a spinning wheel, and you put in those each wedge different prizes. We have silly ones like a $5 cup of coffee up to at one point in my company, we had a little tiny one that set a dollar-an-hour raise for a year, like a little skinny wedge that you might be able to land on.

(13:12)
And so what we would do is the management team would give these out to the guys and gals in the field anytime they did something exceptional, and then once a month, we would do a breakfast or a team like late lunch, and they would redeem these. And so it was an easy, informal way. You didn’t have to have your numbers. It wasn’t a bonus program. It’s not formalized. It’s like when somebody does something nice, you just reward it and what you find is the whole team sees it, and then they start to go, well, I didn’t get any, and you’re not negative. You’re not saying you didn’t do anything wrong. You’re just not going up and spinning. So that’s a simple, easy hack to really boost culture and morale.

Greg Wilkes (13:49):

I love that because sometimes I think we can just be so fixated on we’re going to have our review and we’re going to get a raise and that’s all it is, but actually coming up with these small little tricks to boost morale and motivation, I think that’s a great idea. So yeah, that’s awesome. You briefly touched on this, and I want to dive into this a little bit more. I think this is going to be one of the most valuable parts. You talked about these 37 proven ways to find your candidates. I know obviously that’s going to be in your program, and people are going to dive into that when they work with you, but can you just tease out a few more of those? What other ways have you got that might just get people thinking, oh wow, this is absolutely incredible that they haven’t thought of before?

Matt DiBara (14:28):

So a couple of things that make you really successful. One is auditing your competitors. So, understanding your marketplace. We look at local competitors and figure out what are they doing to hire well in your area. Typically, the big companies much bigger than where you’re at is ideal. They’ve got typically more resources. And you can also go to, and this is a neat little hack, you can go to the biggest cities in your state or your country because you can find it. You don’t have to be the first person to ever come up with this idea, but if you take something that somebody’s doing a thousand miles away and you go, wow, that’s neat. In a huge city with tons of money, and it’s really competitive, and you bring it to your midsize city. For example, we found companies that offer 4-10 hour days or there was a demolition client we had, and he offered a professional massage once every two weeks.

(15:15)
It cost him $40, but it was a way to attract really good talent. One of the people offered essentially no commute was longer than about 30, 45 minutes. I mean all of their work there were super, super local. Another one was like they had these really great per diems, and you’d travel. And so, finding out what is really exciting about your company to put forward to the candidates is huge. Figuring out why your team, so take the two or three best people you have in your company that have been there the longest, do an interview and say, “Hey, why are you showing up every day? Why have you been here for 10 years?” You’ll find these little things that are the tiniest little quirks. You celebrate my birthday, or when I was in trouble and this happened, you helped me. That’s the stuff that then makes you really look good, and you put that in front of the candidates, then it’s,

Greg Wilkes (16:03):

That’s such a good idea because I think what can happen as a business owner, is you’ve got your head in the sand. Sometimes, you’re so busy running the business that you actually forget what you’re probably doing really well. So, having that brief interview and teasing out why do people enjoy working here? Because there are going to be some strengths that you have that you might not even realize yourself. So I think that’s a great tip.

Matt DiBara (16:23):

Yes, we see it all the time. Crazy things. That’s how we found all this unique stuff like birthday things or funny stuff. And it’s always so unique. If you have somebody who’s been there more than three or four years, you’re like, why are you, especially if you’ve got somebody more than eight or 10 years, I mean the average construction career, it’s like you’ve given eight years of your life to this organization. Why? And then you tease out all these things. We had one company where we figured this out. A client of ours in 11 years, this person has never sat home, in 11 years of working with a company, like never. And so we put that in as in the career video. We’ve helped them animate it, and it’s like, I’ve been working here 11 years, the boss is great. I’ve never sat home for 11 years.

(17:05)
We’ve been through all this. And it’s like the owner didn’t even know. He’s like, I never thought of that. I just always tried to keep busy. So you get these great things, and then one of the things you can do is motivate the team you have right now to find people for you. But there’s a module in the course, we call it incentives that actually work. And so if you have seven people on your team and you want them to go out and help you grow your team, the way to do that, the best way we found is to find out emotionally what each person would like. And I learned this when I was getting blood work done, and the male nurse had a baseball key chain of a certain team, and I was telling him, yeah, business is good. We’re hiring needs to draw in my blood for my checkup.

(17:48)
And I said, do you know anybody? He goes, no, I don’t know anybody. But he wasn’t paying attention. So I just randomly, I said, well, if you are, we’re giving away really good seats to the dodgers. I said, if you happen to know somebody, and he stops, and he’s like, my nephew just came back from school is looking for a job. He’s like, let me ask him. And it changed the conversation. So, the framework and the idea was the same, but the way I executed it was different. So we find if you sit down with your team and you’re like, “Hey, for this person, we’ll get you and your husband or wife a night out for you. It’s sports tickets for you, it’s cash.” You’ll find that you’ll get a huge return on what they’re willing to invest. And then there’s all the digital strategies that we could go on and on about.

Greg Wilkes (18:26):

Yes, that’s a great idea. Just talking about looking at your existing team and then motivating them to go and find talent for you. I think that’s such a good idea because the reality is if they’re going to go and recommend someone, then they’re going to want to have to work with that individual themselves. So they’re only going to be recommending people that are good or have similar personalities to them. So that’s a good thing. It’s going to be an embarrassment to them, isn’t it? If they go and recommend someone, that’s absolutely useless. So I think that’s a great way of doing it. Something you touched on earlier, which I just want to dive into a bit more, is the geofencing. So this is a concept that, I know what geofencing is, but haven’t really thought about that at all for talent acquisition. So, just describe that in a little bit more detail because we brushed over that, and I think that people might want to just understand fully what that is. Can you walk us through if you’ve got any case studies of where that’s really worked or what the exact strategy is for that so we can understand it in detail?

Matt DiBara (19:19):

And I want to include that because it just shows I want to expand belief. We’re so many clients that are like, I’ve done everything. There’s no available candidates. And I’m like, have you geofenced, do you have a career video? Have you done? And they go, no. And it’s like, so we find that most companies haven’t scratched the surface on what’s truly available in their marketplace, which is so exciting. The geofencing technology, the way it works is you can plug in certain locations. So we typically do it around two things. One is competitors. So if you have a competitor and they have an office and some people that’s too aggressive, other people are like, I love it. It depends on your culture, but most of the time it’s suppliers. So if you’re buying your material from certain places or there’s somewhere where you know that a lot of construction workers might eat or gather or we’ve done it like work boot, like supply places where you can buy work boots or work clothes.

(20:09)
And the thought process is it’s a really compelling headline, a good image, and it’s almost like you deliver a Facebook ad. It’s the same concept. You have a management, you hire a management company, you give them a budget, they design an ad, they pick the locations, and then they broadcast it. So it’d be like you’re at a supplier, let’s say, and they pull out their phone scrolling, waiting for the forklift to load up the truck and they see top pay carpenters X amount per hour. And they go, huh, that’s interesting. And they click it and now you’ve gotten their attention or competitors even we’ve seen it with, but it works well if you have the right person to manage it. The big thing is they have to have done it. Whoever you hire to do it, we do this, but they have to have used the technology for hiring. We’ve seen clients, they’ll go out and hire a general marketing company who does it for events or things like that, and they don’t understand the psychology of where’s this person, where do I pinpoint it? What’s the headline in the image? That part of it’s really important, but it can work very well.

Greg Wilkes (21:09):

Yes, sure. So I understand there’ll be a whole sort of, again, sales funnel around how you’re going to actually bring that person on once they’ve seen the advert. And is geofencing particularly for Google or Facebook ads, or is it something completely different?

Matt DiBara (21:23):

It shows up when they browse on the internet, they can see the ad similar. It’s like a placement ad, almost like a display ad, is how that works.

Greg Wilkes (21:32):

Yes, perfect. Alright, awesome. So that sounds fantastic. Again, probably if someone’s listening to this, a lot of light bulb moments going off and thinking, oh wow, that’s something I haven’t tried, which is exactly why you’re on the show here, Matt. So, let’s talk about other retention strategies beyond just compensation. So, beyond just a salary increase, we spoke a little bit about bonuses earlier. Are there any other retention strategies that you think can be used to retain this top talent?

Matt DiBara (22:01):

Two things. I think if you really want to own retention, you focus on the bond between your coworkers, you focus on little events and things that put them together is huge. I mean just little things like the team breakfast, we do those once a month if they really, the amount of people, I mean our team, so we’re on the hiring side, so we do so many different interviews. And so we have this interesting data and one of the things we found is that we’ve had a lot of candidates that we’ve interviewed, and they’re like on the fence, they don’t like things about the company, and then they get cold feet, and they don’t want to leave and they’re like, I really like my coworkers. I have a lot of fun when I work. I think sometimes we forget because we elevate ourselves throughout the company.

(22:46)
We become managers, and we forget what it’s like to spend eight hours. I mean I started in the field laying brick. And so it’s like, what was it like to have fun? One of the things we stumbled upon as an accident, and I think this will be a light bulb moment for you listening, is so when we made our wheel, when I first rolled this out four years ago, we misjudged the number of spaces. And so we had this one extra space, and I had picked all these prizes, and they were increasing in value, and we knew the sizes of the space. It was a whole formula that we had the way we did it. And I had a budget set aside. So I figured each month, based on testing the spins, what it would cost. And so I told the team to make it fun, I said, “Hey, let’s come up with something that doesn’t cost anything, a fun little gimmick prize.”

(23:29)
What are they? I was like, let’s do a rubber chicken. He said, let’s do a funky little squeaky rubber chicken as a prize. So I said, sure, we put it on there. Now, I don’t usually go to these team meetings, so I get a recording because I want the team to be really, and the boss is there. Sometimes it gets a little. So I usually just get a recording later, and I watch it. So, about four months in, I get this recording, and I hear, I’m listening to my headphones, and I hear squeaking, squeaking, squeaking. I’m like, what? I thought there was something with the audio. And I had 11 crews at the time, I think, and 10 of the 11 had these rubber chickens. So they’re all squeaking these chickens. And the 11th one is redeeming a coin, and they’re going rubber chicken, rubber chicken, rubber, and he wants the chicken.

(24:10)
And I’m thinking to myself, that chicken costs a dollar, right? I got a dollar-an-hour raise, a $250 Airbnb gift card, $150 car wash. Like I’ve got real prizes, and yet everyone is laughing, and they’re squeaking. And it reminded me of being a kid with my dad and having fun. And I remember I paused the video and I went, gosh, if you get above, if you fill the positions, which is step one, you motivate, and you have open communication, which is step two, so you can get in front of problems. The last thing to just lock a company in indestructible is where am I having fun? Because that’s so few companies are even thinking about fun right now. We’re going problem, stress, hire, fire, gone. Oh no, what do I do? So if you can create an environment where those things can occur, you own the game. You own it.

Greg Wilkes (24:59):

Yes, absolutely love that. That’s absolute gold there, Matt. Appreciate you running through that. So let’s just shift gears a little bit now and talk about the perception of a company out there in the market because we know that branding is so important to win new work, but we haven’t really touched on how you need a brand in order to bring in the right talent in construction. So why do you think branding is so important? And have you got any examples in how people have changed branding and what a difference that’s made for them in bringing people on?

Matt DiBara (25:30):

Yes, branding is crucial. We have an exercise in the course, it’s called Would You Work for You? And here’s how you do it. You Google your name, you pretend you know nothing about your company, and you only judge if you’re going to work for this company based on what you see, which is the website. And if there are any Indeed or ZipRecruiter profiles. And most companies, there’s nothing overly exciting, and that’s a good thing, not a bad thing. So, it’s really putting yourself in the shoes of the candidate. That’s why that career video is really important. A career page on the website is so important. Having an image of an employee centric company, I believe, and I’ve been saying this for many years, I believe we’ve shifted now and the companies that control the best talent getting work, there’s still a framework to it, but we’ve spent really, I mean I remember when we went from the yellow page before we even had internet, I remember that side of the business. And so, for the last 15 or 20 years, we’ve really been focused on how to market and grow and generate sales. We’re now just shifting and going, oh gosh, we have to do this over here now. So if your company looks great online, if you have these profiles, if you Google your competitors and you look at their profiles relative to yours, that’s the candidate journey in most cases if you’re hiring locally.

Greg Wilkes (26:46):

Yes, that’s fantastic. And so important too. So what key piece of advice would you give then, Matt? If someone’s listening to this, they’re struggling. They’re sitting here thinking, I just can’t find the right people. What parting advice would you give them? Where should they get started, and what should they be doing?

Matt DiBara (27:04):

Yes, I mean, we do this for companies. We’re not a recruiter, small monthly fee. We do it by three positions under $1,500 a month. I mean, we’re out to change the industry, so we help with this. I would say the big things are, number one is get out of, I was stuck in, and I’ll talk about me for a minute, but I was stuck in this, it’s impossible. I couldn’t do it. So the only way I could justify not doing it and suffering was I had to convince myself it was impossible. And so we have clients, we’ll Google their competitors, they’ll say, there’s nobody out there and we’ll find 20 competitors and we’ll pull photos. And we’re like, “Hey, so you have 20 competitors, each one has an average of 15 employees.” Sure, some cultures and things might not be good, but I just find you 300 potential candidates. And we’re not even talking about relocation, we’re not talking about people that are new in the industry, none of that. So, I think really believing and using the logic to know it’s possible is the first thing. If you don’t believe it’s achievable, you won’t put the time or the energy. And then once you do that, it’s find a solution. And we certainly are out there to help for sure.

Greg Wilkes (28:05):

Yes, that’s so true. It all starts with a mindset, doesn’t it, of actually realizing, I don’t know how many construction people are out there in the US, Australia, UK, we’re talking hundreds and hundreds of thousands, millions of people that are there. It’s just that we just need to bring them into our company, don’t we? And find them and use the right strategies. So Matt, you’ve given us some absolute goals today on the podcast that I think there’s going to be a ton of strategies there that people are going to be able to use. If someone wants to get in contact with you and learn a little bit more about the strategies you teach or the offering that you have. So just tell us a little bit more about what you actually offer and is it a software or is it, just tell us a little bit more about that so we understand it fully.

Matt DiBara (28:45):

Yes, I mean, we do everything. So we built a course, we built a 63 module course, and then that was doing really well. We got endorsed by ZipRecruiter, and it was amazing and that was great. But then I got some hate online. I got a person that commented, and he was like, if you know this so well, why don’t you just do it a hot shot or some online hater? And at first I got upset, I was like “what a “$%@!”, I’m trying to help the industry, I self-funded all this, we’re not a big VC company.” I said, I really love this industry. And then I said, you know what? Let’s just do it. And so that’s what we’re doing now. And I studied the biggest pain points in businesses. So when we do it for 1500 bucks a month, we do it by position. So you could say, I need a carpenter, I need a bookkeeper, and I need an office manager.

(29:25)
Well, those are three positions. We’ll hire for all three of those. Some clients make one, two, or three hires in the first month or two, but it doesn’t matter because it’s per position. So we do it per position. We do the job posting, the headline testing, we do the candidate screening. So basically, all the business owner does is show up to a second-round interview. That’s it. So our mission is to work and help every construction company that we can, and it’s really client focused. It’s like, I’m not a coach. I’m not going to tell people what to do. Our vision with the company now, it should just do it. Here’s your candidate. When would you like to talk to them? 11 or two? That’s our business model.

Greg Wilkes (30:02):

Nice. Yeah, nice and easy. And that’s great because a lot of construction business owners, they want to concentrate on what they’re really good at, winning the work, delivering the work, and maybe the recruitment side. It is great to just potentially pass it off to someone else and have it done for you. What countries are you currently doing that in, Matt?

Matt DiBara (30:18):

So we are in the US. We’re in Canada. We’re getting close to Australia. I think we’ll have that fairly soon. So if anyone’s listening and they want to reach out, I think that’ll be soon. And those are the bulk of the spots right now.

Greg Wilkes (30:30):

Awesome. Okay. Well, we’ve also got a lot of listeners from the UK here, so let us know once you open up in the UK too, and I’m sure you’ll be, you’ll have a large audience there too.

Matt DiBara (30:40):

Sounds good.

Greg Wilkes (30:41):

Awesome. Matt, thank you so much for your time today. You’ve really, I think, expanded our mindset on what’s potentially possible with hiring and retaining acquisition and retaining good talent. So really appreciate your time today, Matt, and I wish you all the best.

Matt DiBara (30:55):

Thank you. I appreciate it.

Greg Wilkes (30:57):

Brilliant. Thanks, Matt. So if you want to just tell us what the website is, how can people get hold of you?

Matt DiBara (31:01):

Yeah, it’s The Contractor Consultants, plural. So thecontractorconsultants.com.

Greg Wilkes (31:09):

Excellent. Great. And what we’ll do for everyone listening is we’ll stick that in the show notes, too, so you can just click on the link and see what Matt’s all about. Thanks, Matt. We appreciate all your advice and everything you’ve given us today. It’s been awesome.

Matt DiBara (31:21):

Thanks for having me, Greg.

Greg Wilkes (31:33):

If you’d like to work with me to fast track your construction business growth, then reach out on developcoaching.com.au.