Building an Award Winning Remodeling Team in a Small Town

00:00
Aaron Horner
What if instead of recruiting new employees, potential hires were lining up to be recruited by you? Well, that’s exactly what’s happened on multiple occasions to this week’s guest, Slate Creek Builders. Sean Beliveau and Cassidy Jones are the president and vice president of Slate Creek Builders, a design build remodeling firm in the small college town of Blacksburg, Virginia. Regardless of the town’s small population, they have still been able to build an award winning remodeling team that’s able to fulfill on multiple million dollar projects a year. On today’s episode, they’re getting into what business practices they’ve put into place to literally always be prospecting and ensuring that their team has a culture that not only retains employees, but is actively recruiting new ones. This is a great episode for you if you’re working on culture and team building, but especially if you’re in a smaller market as well. Let’s get into it.

00:52
Logan Shinholser
Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Contractor Growth Network podcast. I’m Logan Shinholser and today I’m, I have on a pretty cool full circle special set of guests. They’re from Slate Creek Builders out of Blacksburg, Virginia. And if you’ve been listening to this podcast, you know I went to school at Virginia Tech, but what’s cool about this is, well, Cassie, I had way more interaction with you during college because you actually coached me. So why don’t you give the audience the backstory of how you and I, and then Sean, how we all know each other.

01:27
Cassidy Jones
Yep. Yeah, absolutely. So when you were a student, you found yourself in the local CrossFit gym and I was training and coaching there, came from collegiate athletics background like you did. And so I was looking for something to do. And so I actually met Sean sort of through the same lane. He and his wife at the time were business partners taking over that gym. So they owned the gym and I trained and coached at the gym. And you became a client at the gym.

02:00
Logan Shinholser
Yeah, so it was funny because I was on a job. I think it was job tread, like webinar. And Cassidy popped up and I was like, oh, I know Cassidy. Like why is she on this webinar? And then I remembered like, oh, Sean and Carol, they have this building business and all of that. So I have on today. It’s a fun moment because it’s, I don’t get to talk to Virginia Tech people very much. So I have Sean and Cassidy, president and vice president of Slate Creek Builders. And today we’re talking all about what I think would be a really cool topic which is really building a business from like a hiring and an operations standpoint in a smaller local town. Because Blacksburg, I mean, how many people live in like the Blacksburg, Christiansburg area, would you say?

02:47
Sean Beliveau
Do you know the statistics, Cassie?

02:50
Cassidy Jones
The universities of Virginia Tech and the town of Blacksburg have essentially the same population. So we’re both in the 35,000 range. So when the students are gone, we are 35,000 plus or minus. And when the students are here, we basically double in size. But we are definitely a small town, you know, sort of feel for where we do our business. We have some surrounding towns that are much smaller than Blacksburg, so they don’t add a massive amount of ripe population to our area.

03:22
Logan Shinholser
In the, in the area is in southwest Virginia, if you’re not familiar with where Blacksburg is. So it’s also not like this very. I like Blacksburg a lot, but it’s not this super high end, everybody’s got a lot of money area. You know, my cousin went to Radford, which is right down the road. So it’s a. From a hiring perspective, I’d imagine it’s a little bit slimmer pickings versus living in Charlotte or D.C. or Dallas when it comes to. Let’s just talk about the business as a whole. How long have we been in business for? And you know, with being in a small town, are we a jack of all trades or like, what are some of the specialties that you guys are good at from just like a service provider standpoint?

04:07
Sean Beliveau
So we are 16 years in business this year started in 2010, which was not the best time to start a construction business. But it started with just me and a truck and a $184 a month insurance policy, which is kind of funny now, looking at our P and L for last year, I think we spent $35,000 on liability insurance. But we have kind of done everything. You know, I was general contractor when I started, but I was the carpenter, I was the sales. I was the designer and project manager. I was doing everything. And really it took a few years to put the pieces in place and really figure out how to get to where we wanted to go, which is we’re getting there, I guess we’re. We’re doing well, but we’re full service. Design, build, remodeling company.

04:59
Sean Beliveau
We’ve got sales and design in house. We have a lot of professionals on our staff and know it’s gone from me to now 14 of us on payroll at Slate Creek Builders.

05:12
Cassidy Jones
Yeah. And I would say our bread and Butter is kind of the general kitchen, bath, remodel additions. But we’ve been sort of in a lane of large scale whole home stuff lately. So I think for a while our average project was probably in the $250,000 range. But we’ve been kind of teetering on a few million dollar plus remodels a year. So we sort of float between those two places, I would say.

05:40
Logan Shinholser
How are you guys doing that? Because Blacksburg, I mean there’s 30,000 people. The other 30,000 are students. So they’re not hiring you. The cost of living down there, I think my first apartment was $325 per month. So the fact that you have in house. Yeah, well, but even still, I mean, like, I can’t, like, I still remember, like my other brother went to UVA and they, his apartment was 500amonth. And I could not believe my parents were okay with paying that at the time. Like, that was shocking. So like, Sean, I mean, you’ve done it for this long. Like what have you been doing specifically that you could think of? Like, maybe this is like a cool inflection point that like you have in house, you have 14 people on staff.

06:24
Logan Shinholser
You’re doing these large scale projects in an area that like, those numbers are fantastic numbers regardless of where you are, let alone the fact that you’re doing it in a very small rural college town.

06:38
Sean Beliveau
I, you know, I think all of it really comes down to relationships. And I think that’s a lot of what we’re going to talk about today in hiring. But you know, we’re, I’ve been in this community since the 80s and my parents are here. They own a winery on the outside of town. I have a recognizable name. And just generally we do what we say we’re going to do. And we, you know, we kind of have this saying around the office and when we meet with clients, our office is directly next to the gym. Now by the way, Logan, I don’t know you knew that, but we are.

07:13
Logan Shinholser
Not the radio anymore.

07:14
Sean Beliveau
Salon was, is where our office, that’s us right across from the Kroger where all of our clients shop. And we tell our clients we’re going to see you in the shopping checkout line at Kroger. And we’re not going to run away from you because all of us had a bad experience. We’re going to do our best. We’re going to do what we said we’re going to do. And you know, so far we’ve been successful We’ve never been in any type of litigation, which is unusual in this business. So community based business, just a lot of it’s just about community relationships and, you know, kind of following through on our projects and doing a good job. Whether it’s the perfect project for us or it goes well, we always try to finish strong and make sure everybody’s happy with the work.

07:59
Cassidy Jones
Yeah, I think it’s important, Sean, to point out that our the demand for Blacksburg is really high. I think the last report our town did, were 16,000 housing units short in Blacksburg for the demand to live here. So the new construction developers that are here building are building and selling as fast as they can build. Right. Because it is really desirable. It’s a really great place. You know, the college provides a lot of entertainment, activities, culture, great place for kids. Great place if you love the outdoors. You’re going to pay a thousand dollars a month now to live in a college apartment here. So some of that. But what we’ve also found is a lot of our clientele is either coming out of the university and they’re, you know, highly educated and doing lots of interesting research.

08:51
Cassidy Jones
I mean, the stuff we learn about from our clients is incredible. I’m always like, that’s a thing someone can study. Like, that’s insane. We have a lot of entrepreneurs. So there’s a big tech industry that’s landed in the area. There’s two huge industrial parks now. And so we’re bringing in a lot of really interesting startups and we get clients out of that area. And then honestly, we have some sort of oddballs, like work from home influencers, social media influencers who found Blacksburg a great place to live. And so they have money to invest in a home in this community because a lot of those homes don’t exist. Right. So the remodeling industry stays very busy here because the existing housing stock is in constant turnover with the university and is aging.

09:35
Logan Shinholser
We also. Oh, sorry, go ahead, Sean.

09:37
Sean Beliveau
I was just gonna say we have a lot of our clients have been in their homes for 10 or 15 years and they bought their houses for 250 or 300,000 and they’ve now got them. They owe almost nothing or they have very low interest rates on their homes. So they have a lot of equity they could tap into. And their housing prices have doubled in the last five years. So there’s a lot of equity in our market. And what’s unusual, it’s probably been five years since we actually had anyone Use a construction loan for one of our remodeling projects. So people are using cash, they’re using home equity products. And it just, it’s a good market.

10:20
Sean Beliveau
And the land all close to university is already built, so that, so there’s, you know, the prime stuff needs to be rehabbed and that’s kind of our lane.

10:30
Logan Shinholser
So good market, still very small market. I’d imagine. There’s, you know, kind of what you said, Sean, about the we’re going to see in the checkout line of you. We used to call it the Gucci Kroger, which was like the nice Kroger. Okay, so it’s still Gucci Kroger. Okay, talk to me about, I guess about like the pressure because like when it comes to being selective about projects, everybody wants to be selective. But like if you guys mess up a project in a 30,000 person community, I’d imagine it’s a bit of an echo chamber. The same way that if you do a great job, it’s also an echo chamber. So can you talk a bit about from a project selection standpoint, how you guys are approaching projects, knowing if something doesn’t go exactly how it should go, you’re going to see them in Kroger.

11:13
Cassidy Jones
Yeah. We talk a lot about how, you know, Sean and I both and the rest of our team really, but we kind of have to wear Slate Creek Builders everywhere. So you know, when I’m at my kids sporting events and we’re at home builders mixers and we’re downtown having a drink or dinner with friends or we’re going to the tech football game, like we are representing our business everywhere because in a town this size, you’re gonna run into a client or a potential client. And you know, we, and we’ve had friends, like social friends who’ve hired us, you know, after being our friend. Right. We didn’t become friends because they hired us. We were already friends.

11:49
Cassidy Jones
And so we’ve, we’re honestly our way of operating and this is sort of a Sean business model is we’re just really straightforward and we just try to be very honest and we say like, hey, we want to stay friends when this project is over. And there will probably be a day where you are really mad or frustrated with how something’s going. And you know, there’s a low point to every remodel that people are just ready to have us out of their house. But you know, we’re committed to making sure you’re happy and we’re Going to do what we need to do to make that happen. So like just stick with us. And that has worked out really well for us so far. We have, you know, repeats and referrals are our primary form of business and marketing in a small town.

12:28
Cassidy Jones
So that’s a huge kind of component for how we operate is just, we’re going to just continue to be honest and we’re going to say, hey, we know that didn’t go great, we’ve got it under control, we’re going to fix it, we’re going to satisfy you and we’re going to move on and the rest of the project and keep going. And, and I think just being that honest and straightforward in a small town, people have appreciated that.

12:49
Sean Beliveau
I think going with the honesty thing also we do a lot of pre qualification, we have a lot of rules, if you will, about kind of how we work and we don’t change them. We, we have a process and a system and we try to stick with it for every project, every client and that lets us produce a reproducible product basically. But if somebody is expecting something that we can’t do, which is if you really start to dig in, you’ll find a lot of people that want something that you can’t do, you know, and you just have to say that’s, you know, unfortunately that’s not what we do. But here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to set you up with a few people that we know that are quality people that we think you might be able to work with.

13:34
Sean Beliveau
And that’s part of our relationships within our industry and all of those things. So we often refer people to other builders, contractors, general contractors. People want us to replace their windows. It might not be the right job for us. And so, you know, we like to do the stuff that lets use our creativity and our skills and our design and all that stuff. And if it doesn’t fit it, then we try to help them, you know, we’re consultants in our community I guess.

14:04
Logan Shinholser
So with that said, talk to me a bit about like with this small town approach, which is basically what you’re doing on like the project side. Hiring. What is hiring? Because like. Sean, you’re from Northern Virginia, right?

14:16
Sean Beliveau
No. Well, I went to high school in Blacksburg, but I’m kind of a bouncing around university towns. Ended up at Virginia Tech, but spent a few years in Northern Virginia and then got back here to raise the kids and. Sorry, what was the question?

14:32
Logan Shinholser
Just talk to me about like Hiring, like in a small town like that. I mean, you, you’re in 30,000 people.

14:37
Sean Beliveau
It.

14:38
Logan Shinholser
That’s got to be tough.

14:39
Sean Beliveau
You know, were. Cassidy and I were chatting after we met with Aaron, just about all the hires that we’ve had. And our current set of hires almost exclusively is community referrals of some sort. People that have been in our network, in our personal network, in our friends personal network and our employees personal network in our industry network a lot. You know, we get a lot of people. With the rare exception of my very first quality hire, which was Craigslist. 10 errors an hour, 2012. You remember May. Remember Dave and Marilyn from the gym? I don’t know if you remember those two, but I may know the face. But anyway, Dave, the best on Craigslist.

15:27
Cassidy Jones
To this day, it’s the last thing.

15:29
Sean Beliveau
That ever happened on Craigslist 2012. But since then, our best hires have all been, you know, network people in our networks one way or another. And where we have challenges is when we have to look outside of that, and that’s when we tend to make mistakes and we make wrong hires and. But, you know, that’s. That’s basically it as we kind of developed a culture and a team and people can look into our business and they can say, you know what, that looks like a pretty fun place to work. And if I find myself in that situation where I need a job, I would go talk to those people first. And so we’re getting a lot of that. Actually. We’ve had a lot of that. Lightly, I don’t. Yeah, you know, almost too much.

16:15
Sean Beliveau
We’ve had to tell people we’re not able to bring anybody else on right now, but we’ve really curated a great team right now. We’re really happy with. We still. We’re not perfect and we have our challenges and we’ve got people that need to improve in their roles. But, you know, everybody should want to improve. So.

16:37
Logan Shinholser
And when you’re trying to work your network and hire, are you reaching out to people saying, hey, we need this role and this role. Who do you know? Or is it somebody that just is, I don’t know, a handyman that wants to actually settle in and get like, you know, work for somebody else? And then somebody goes, oh, you know, Slate Creek? I. I know the owner. You should go chat with them, like, I guess. How. How is that flow happening for you guys?

17:02
Sean Beliveau
I would say we have never really, like, specifically pursued anybody away from their position. We have had people who have talked to us about positions in the past and then have gone through some employment that didn’t really work and that have ended up on our team over the years, but now we haven’t really had to go pursue. It’s just more of that, you know, kind of casual conversation. I’m thinking about making a change, and then all of a sudden, you know, we’re having a dialogue about. About how internally and with that. With that candidate of how that could work.

17:39
Cassidy Jones
And yeah, I will say there have been a few hires where it’s like our. Our construction team, our production team is in the field and they’re having conversations with some of our trade partners or our vendor partners who are making a delivery or showing up to do a job site walkthrough. And oftentimes the conversation is, yeah, we could really use one more project manager or we’re looking for another carpenter. And sometimes those people have said, are you really? Like, like, I might be interested. And a lot of that is because they’ve appreciated working with us in the role that they’ve been in. Because, you know, we take care of them, we pay them on time, we’re communicative, you know, all these things.

18:15
Cassidy Jones
So it’s like we’ve had some hires that have come out of our vendor partners just because in passing, were like, hey, you know, if you know of anybody. And then sometimes it’s been that person, right, who’s come back and said, yeah, I’m, you know, I’m interested. We don’t do a lot of what I would consider just posting a job ad and finding a candidate. We’ve tried. And most of the time, our hiring mistakes have usually been the result of we are desperate to hire because we can’t keep business rolling. So let’s post a job, let’s interview people. I mean, we just. Sean and I just interviewed someone, what, a year and a half ago who we found out later had a criminal conviction that is like, absolutely not even remotely appropriate to put in people’s homes who didn’t.

19:06
Cassidy Jones
Didn’t announce, you know, didn’t tell us, didn’t put it in this paperwork. Or like, these are the places that you make big mistakes is when you’re desperate. Luckily, we found out in advance before we made the offer, but, man, there have been the biggest challenges we’ve had in hiring are when we’re desperate to fill a role. If we can fill things organically, we. We get such better people and better fits.

19:30
Sean Beliveau
I think always we. We also have embraced the sort of always Recruiting motto even when we don’t necessarily have a position. And we have a really good example right now with someone who became available, who we have known for years and talked to repeatedly about four times coming on board. And you know, we have a really strong org chart, a responsibility chart, and were able to sit down with the team, talk about how to carve a rollout for this person that would contribute and make everybody else’s life a lot easier. And it’s so far as three months in, it’s working out great. We’re super happy with the hire. And it wasn’t something that were necessarily. But it’s something that’s helping me, it’s helping production, it’s helping design and estimating. It’s really helping the team. And it wasn’t something weren’t hiring for it.

20:26
Cassidy Jones
Right.

20:27
Sean Beliveau
The candidate, everybody else more efficient in their roles just by kind of creating this new role.

20:34
Logan Shinholser
So like specifically what is like always high, you know, everybody talks about like, you know, always be prospecting, always be on the hunt for like good hires. But like specifically, like, what are you guys doing when it comes to like always on the hunt for good hires?

20:49
Cassidy Jones
Yeah. So I mean, just as an example, I mean like I said, we’ve had two recent hires and both of them were. We didn’t have any jobs posted. We have nothing saying we’re hiring. And one in particular literally moved to the area, saw shot, you know, googled some companies that do what he was doing in a different community. Shot off an email. It was like a Monday morning. And we got the email and we all look at our email and we’re like, this is a unicorn. Call him now. Because again, small town oftentimes are we don’t get cold call, you know, qualified candidates. So Sean gets on the phone like within an hour of receiving this email. We have the guy in that afternoon. We’re at PK’s.

21:33
Sean Beliveau
No, he’s had him like an hour after that. Yeah.

21:36
Cassidy Jones
Yes.

21:37
Sean Beliveau
And he was a good sport. He came straight in with.

21:40
Cassidy Jones
No, he just came and were like, look, like we aren’t hiring, but your resume indicates that you have what. What we need in. In this role that is really difficult to find. So. So let’s talk about it. See what you are up to, what you’ve been doing. Let’s learn about each other. Come learn about our company. And literally by the end of the week, we’d hired him and we sat down with our org chart and we sat down with our production team and we said like, where does it fit to put someone in with these qualifications? And you know, Sean and I talked about it from a, like a, you know, how do we find the pay? Right. How do you make your payroll grow to accommodate someone that you weren’t planning to hire? Necessarily.

22:22
Cassidy Jones
But oftentimes we can look at where we have slippage on jobs and we can recognize that if we had somebody in a certain lane responsible for a certain set of duties, the amount of slippage they could manage and prevent covers their salary. Right. And so there’s the ability to pivot when the right candidate shows up. If you have a really developed organizational chart that shows what everyone’s doing and we can look at it and go, where are we struggling? And so we sat down and said, where are we struggling? And if this person comes on board like immediately, they can take over ABCD&E, which relieves the rest of our team from these things that we’re struggling to do. And then magically we’re going to make more money on our jobs because we’re not losing sight of stuff.

23:09
Cassidy Jones
And then paying for a new employee is not the big stressor that it could be. Right?

23:15
Sean Beliveau
Yeah. With that particular one, I think we’re talking about the same person, Cassidy. But we also looked at our pipeline and our, and we had legitimate justification to bring on somebody great and be able to make the numbers scratch out on it.

23:32
Logan Shinholser
So was the goal, like when you said, okay, let’s go meet up downtown, just you didn’t go in saying, we’re probably going to hire this guy as long as like everything shakes out. It was it more of like worst case scenario, we made an introduction and maybe in six months when we do realize that we do need this role, we’re going to reach back out and say, hey, remember us? So I guess like what was the plan?

23:55
Cassidy Jones
I think the small town problem is if we didn’t snatch him up, he was going to end up with somewhere else.

24:00
Sean Beliveau
That’s part of it.

24:01
Cassidy Jones
There’s only so many people in town who do what we do and they’re, and we’re all great friends and we’re not in the business of poaching each other’s employees. Right. Like we, there’s enough business in this area to support a few of us doing this kind of work. So, so we have plenty of work, they have plenty of work. But we very much recognize that when you have someone walk in who’s coming from construction project management of 2 and $3 million jobs in a residential environment in the same state who understands the code, who understands people, who’s professional, who can speak well, whose resume was written well. You know, it’s like all these sort of dominoes fall. It was like if we don’t hire him, we won’t. Right. Because it.

24:42
Cassidy Jones
So I think we actually went in going, we hope he likes us because we don’t want to lose the chance to add this team member on that one.

24:51
Sean Beliveau
I made the decision in like an hour that were hiring him and then I got everyone else to sort of come to the same conclusion. But yeah, I always ask the team for input for sure. And honestly, you know, this person emailed us at 8 in the morning. I called him at 8:45. He was in the office by 10:30. We had half a dozen of us sit down and meet with him face to face. And he left. And were like, not only did he look like a unicorn, but he seemed like a unicorn in person. And after three months he is a unicorn. And it was a really good move and the timing was good.

25:27
Sean Beliveau
We have other, you know, we have other situations where we do, you know, just there’s, if anybody inquires, I’m going to call them, I’m going to talk to them about what’s going on with them, what they’re doing, you know, what are the reasons that they’re wanting to make changes, all those things. And then it may be, you know, it may be back burnered or moved six months down the road or you know, check back in with us and see how it works.

25:52
Cassidy Jones
Yeah, we’re connected to one of our friends or partners who may be hiring. Sometimes we’ve had people call us and we’ve said, hey, we really don’t have a spot that we can make work, you know, in that specific lane. But you know, there’s great people in this community and someone may be looking for a second or a third. So we’re, we have no problem passing people along that we think would be a good fit.

26:12
Logan Shinholser
Right.

26:12
Cassidy Jones
For someone else.

26:13
Sean Beliveau
This was a full university scenario. His wife had gotten accepted to VCom. So at school, yeah, he came to the, coming to the med school so said, I’m in town for four years until she graduates and then I’m going wherever she goes. And so our little community network is already trying to help find her local residency here. So we can keep them for more than four years. But yes. Yeah.

26:43
Logan Shinholser
So one of the things that you guys brought up during all this was like, you make this quick decision, you bring this guy in because he’s a unicorn. But a lot of remodeling companies, it’s the chicken or the egg approach of like, if I had an org chart and I knew where they would fit in and I could get, you know, slippage under control and charge more money, then I can hire people like this. But you guys kind of took the opposite approach, which is like, we recognize that this is going to be somebody that could take us to the next level, but you had enough stuff in place where you actually had an org chart to figure out where do they fit in. But also, okay, let’s actually look at our current slippage. How could they directly help with that?

27:22
Logan Shinholser
Because I’m guessing also then ties into their own metrics and what they’re responsible for. So can you talk a bit about, like, the systems that you guys have within the business? Because that to me, without those, you don’t have the confidence or the vision to be able to then hire somebody like this. But maybe I’m wrong.

27:41
Cassidy Jones
Well, I’ll say, and this is probably more Sean’s lane, but I’ll say from a beneficiary, right. Of his systemizing that one of the main things I think he did is as he’s hired people. So I was the second hire, right. Slate Creek. And just this is my 11th anniversary just last week. Is that as we’ve added people from that point forward, we’ve listed what they’re responsible for. So even if the org chart, right. Like feels like a big lofty ideal for a company, it really starts as, what is Sean doing? List all the bullet points. What is Joe doing? Right. What is Cassidy doing? What does Dave do? Like, it’s just write down what everybody’s doing and then we sort of put them in a. In categories. What’s. Which one of those things relate to business and administration.

28:33
Cassidy Jones
Which ones of those things relate to sales? What relates to design, what relates to estimating, what relates to construction and production. And then what relates to post job, warranty, etc. And looking then at, hey, I’m doing a lot, we’ve got somebody doing stuff in this area, and we don’t really have anyone doing stuff in this area. And as our team has grown, we’ve sort of said, hey, we’re going to bring someone else into the sales and design team. Right. We consider ourselves a team up front, but that person isn’t really going touch the design lane because I’ve got the design Lane pretty covered, but they’re going to focus heavily on the sales part and I’m going to partner with them in some places.

29:13
Cassidy Jones
And then we look at our production team and we say, hey, we’ve got two people in this lane covering this scale of stuff. But we’re really struggling with punch out, like job closeout, warranty step fall. We need to bring someone into the production team that’s going to fill that lane. So I think from a systemizing perspective, you can be a three person company and start that org chart now. And so Sean now has the org chart with every single person, but it also has it by role, right. And so the people, right. If somebody comes or goes at any given time, we figure out who the next hire is and then we look at the role and we say, does that make sense or should we steal a couple other people’s duties to better suit this person?

29:57
Cassidy Jones
Or we got someone right now who’s really struggling with the duty.

30:01
Sean Beliveau
How do we cover all these bases while trying to replace this person? That’s, that’s happened before. I will say I think it’s helped us to have the systems because I know a lot of small businesses struggle to make quality hires. And I can look at it a lot of times and I can say it’s because a quality person is going to look at your business and they’re going to say, how do I fit in? What is the future of my role look like? Here we have it kind of laid out and we say, well, here we’re going to do this many million this year, but we think in four years we could get to this. And when we do, these are the kind of new roles that we’re thinking we’re gonna need. I could take someone off the street and show them that, right?

30:44
Sean Beliveau
And that’s going to be interesting to somebody who’s a high performer and there. And it’s going to make them more interested coming to work for us. And I do, like I said, I see a lot of other small businesses struggle because they just don’t have those systems and processes in place. People just don’t know what they’re getting into or they show up and they realize shortly thereafter that there’s none of those things and that’s not really what they want.

31:08
Logan Shinholser
How do you two. Because president, vice president, how do you split? Like are you Cassidy, you know, designer business development? Like you’re more front of house and then Sean, you’re predominantly back of house. But back of house also is hiring. I Guess like how do you guys divide and conquer when it comes to hiring, the org chart, all of that.

31:28
Cassidy Jones
Yeah, so. So Sean really is back of house in the sense that he’s doing all of the business management, the financial, you know, things like that. But from a hiring perspective, he’s also the one who’s thinking ahead in the business. I am really entrenched in the day to day of running the business. So I’m the one going out and doing the networking and the sales meetings and all the design meetings and all the clients. You know, I’m in with clients every day. Sean isn’t anymore involved in the front of house sales piece or the client facing stuff anymore. We usually bring him in when the clients from the office and make sure they’ve seen his face and they know they can get a hold of him if they need him and whatnot.

32:10
Cassidy Jones
But generally, you know, he’s doing the visioning and I think the visioning piece, if you’re in a small to medium business and you haven’t freed someone up to do that, you have a hard time ever getting beyond where you currently are. And so when Sean was having to also do sales and estimating, etc. It’s very difficult to free up energy for visioning and for planning and for looking ahead. And so the way he’s grown the team over the years, I’ve sort of filled a front of house role that’s allowed him to take this visioning piece and dreaming piece. And honestly he’s. That’s where he belongs. Not. But he’s a visionary dreamer anyway. But that’s his, that’s his way of being in the world is what could we be? Right? What could we be? How could this be even better for everyone?

33:00
Cassidy Jones
How do we serve our community better? How do we serve our people better?

33:04
Sean Beliveau
The only reason I can do it is because I’ve brought quality people in. You could take those, take that stuff off of me. I mean. And it’s really hard. I mean, I look back on us trying to get started. It’s hard to get out of that. You know, you’re starting and you want to get to that next level, but you have to get those people in place that can take the stuff off your plate. You have to. And you gotta get people that are smarter than you and you gotta, you have to invest and you just have to, you’re not gonna get. Nobody’s perfect. You’re not going to replace yourself with yourself. You’re gonna get. But you’re gonna get right people and get them in the right spots. And.

33:45
Cassidy Jones
And there’s also a self awareness. I think that. That Sean may not say that he has, but I think he also has a self awareness of, like, I like thinking about these things. I like coming up with our new sales process. I like, you know, and so if he’s stuck in the trenches of executing all the time, he, you know, doesn’t get time to do the things you like. And, like, what fun is it to own. I mean, you know, what fun is it to own a business if you’re not getting to do the parts of the things you like? So finding a way to carve your role to have some of that or.

34:15
Sean Beliveau
Do the things you like outside of work, which.

34:17
Cassidy Jones
Yes, exactly. And vice versa.

34:20
Sean Beliveau
And that’s something that we stress Logan, with our. With our hires too, and with our team, is that I actually will almost discipline people, if you will, for not taking personal time. They’re like working weekends and stuff. I’m like, you’re doing it wrong. You know, you’re here to put in your time every week and help the team move things forward. But you got a whole life outside of this, and that should not. This should not negatively impact that. And probably more important and probably the biggest red flag at a higher is if they have problems outside of work, they’re going to come into work. And so those personal issues are really hard to uncover. Sometimes if they’re in a bad relationship or they’re in a bad situation in life or whatever, it’s really difficult to get them to be good performance at work.

35:10
Sean Beliveau
And that’s probably the hardest thing about qualifying and why it’s so been so successful for us to recruit from within our own networks because we generally had relationships with these people already. And so you’re just. You’re taking a chance when you don’t. And sometimes it works. But, you know, we found a lot more success, repeatable success by hiring out of our networks.

35:34
Logan Shinholser
And before we jump into, like, core values and how you guys, you know, infuse those into hiring, firing, all that kind of stuff, I want to stick one more thing on the org chart because I think, like, Sean, like you, I’m, you know, I own the visionary seat of our organization. So I underst. I always thought myself, like, I’m not a visionary, like, that’s Steve Jobs. But, like, I’m. I love thinking about what this company could be and, like, crazy enough. Like, I love sitting down and creating, like, PowerPoint presentations because it’s kind of like thinking through sales process of like, how, at least for me, how can I string together these thoughts to get this message across in the most efficient but also most beautiful way that I can.

36:14
Logan Shinholser
So I put a lot of energy and effort into it, but it’s like, it’s all fun to me, but like, I’m not able to do that without having the people around me. But when you think of the word org chart and you’re a visionary, you clam up. And you know, I remember I thought it was so stupid of like, how can I build an org chart for the future? It’s me and two other people here. So like Sean, when you were, you know, 20, I guess, Cassie, if you joined in 2015 or 2014, I forget which one it was. But back 10 years ago, did you have this like, hey, this is where we are in X amount of years? And I believe. Well, I, Yeah, talk to me about that.

36:47
Sean Beliveau
I can tell you exactly how it happened. And Cassidy called me a visionary, but I’ve stolen all my good ideas from my builder club members. So I joined a NAHB20 club in 2014 and I left and my head just exploded off my body. And I said, and at the time it was Dave and I. And I was doing everything and he was my helper. And I literally drove back from that meeting. I called Cassidy on the phone, hired her, she started two weeks later or something like that. I promoted Dave to project manager. I hired a bookkeeper. I like I said, I’m doing it. And I had these examples, live examples, 20 other companies in my club who were doing all these things, some successfully, some not.

37:36
Sean Beliveau
And I could say, you know what, I’m going to steal that from that company and that from that company. And that’s the kind of company I want to look like in five years. And that has helped me more than anything because I always had this idea, I wanted these systems and processes. I had no idea what it actually was until I had a group of people, an advisory board, if you will, mentors and such to help me figure that out. And So I would 100% recommend some type of peer group situation.

38:06
Cassidy Jones
Yeah. And in this industry there’s quite a few places to find that. So.

38:11
Sean Beliveau
But I’ve found NAHB 20 Club.

38:16
Cassidy Jones
Sean’s on the. Sean’s on the state board of the nahb.

38:19
Sean Beliveau
So I’m all local, state and national.

38:22
Cassidy Jones
And national. So. But what we have found is that as we have been in other places representing our business, it always Comes back to if you don’t have other people doing what you’re doing that you can bounce things off of and run things by, it is really limiting to what you’re going to come up with to execute. Like, it’s not just people that are smarter than you, it’s people who’ve run across that scenario before you did and vice versa.

38:48
Sean Beliveau
And so it’s the mistakes you really can learn from. And you’re like, oh, wow, I don’t want to do that.

38:54
Cassidy Jones
And being able to share those and saying, you know, we. And we, I mean we can use this example. We made a not great hire about a year ago. And so, you know, after we finally got that resolved, one of the first things Sean does is we share that with our business mentoring group and we say, man, this really didn’t work out and here’s what we did. And now we’ve got to do all this to clean it up and how do we prevent that from happening again? And I think if you’re in this business that’s so people centered. As much as we say we do construction, well, in fact we do a lot of things with people. The construction just happens to be the medium with which we relate to people.

39:29
Cassidy Jones
You’ve, you’ve got to be able to reflect on mistakes and communicate a plan to avoid them in the future or you just repeat yourself. And if we didn’t have a sounding board, I think we would have made more repeated errors. But we have a sounding board that we go to with all that stuff.

39:50
Logan Shinholser
So I think the more that we’re going through all this, most builders, most remodelers, it’s the owner is the one that still even 10, 11 years later, I mean it would be the Sean show still, but it very much. This is the Sean and Cassidy show. So Cassidy, can you talk to me about like. Because I think pretty much everybody listening to this, they’re trying to find their own Cassie somebody that they can take a lot of the stress. So, but, so that, but that’s like, that’s all part of this stuff is like trying to find. I have here, I have our company, I have my own Cassidy. And like it’s been huge as far as like yes, delegating other things, but also like just like the mental weight of it all.

40:32
Logan Shinholser
So Cassie, can you talk about, I guess like you get hired two weeks after you’re in this. I mean like, what is your growth? Been within slate creek from 10 years ago?

40:43
Cassidy Jones
Yeah, so I came on part time and was Just doing design work. I was actually, I had. He hired me and then I told him I was pregnant. So it was like one of those timings where I was like, hey, I’m happy to come to work. Also, I’m pregnant, so we’re gonna have to plan around that. But we worked out of Sean’s attic, literally. And I, you know, got started. I was, I was already in this industry, right. And he knew that because of our relationship at the gym. And so got started doing that and it sort of became an evolution of, hey, Sean, what have you been doing for marketing? And Sean says, we have T shirts and a website. And then I saw the website and I thought, that doesn’t qualify as a website.

41:25
Sean Beliveau
We use papyrus font.

41:27
Cassidy Jones
It had papyrus fonts. Let’s just go there.

41:30
Logan Shinholser
I had like music playing when you loaded it. It’s like closer to a MySpace than a website.

41:34
Cassidy Jones
Yeah, it was like a MySpace. So. So I, you know, I tend to be. I mean, I’m a pretty high energy human and I’m a pretty highly motivated human. And I want things to reflect the kind of excellence, like Sean already has that level of excellence in the work he produced. So I’m like, I want everything else that we touch to reflect that. So I think I sort of just shoehorned myself in the marketing role pretty quickly, took over the website, took over social media and just started doing those things. And as a result, you know, as we started to grow and see some success and continue to need to build the team, you know, Sean has said this all the time to me. I’ve had to learn now to delegate stuff to our, to my team, right?

42:21
Cassidy Jones
Like to the sales and design team in order to have time to continue to, you know, figure out kind of what this other piece is of representing Slate Creek in the community in a way that isn’t just T shirts and a website. So I started just doing the design. I wedged myself in the marketing role just sort of. Because I’m the type of human who does that. And then now I do. I’ve been full time. I don’t know, Sean, probably. I probably was only part time for a year.

42:51
Sean Beliveau
Yeah, about a year. So about a year. And I’ll throw in here that it changed our sales dynamic tenfold to be able to. For Cassidy and I to go on initial appointments together where it was just me, just some dude going out there on a sales call. It makes a lot of difference to have a team like this to go out and meet people. And actually now I don’t generally go on those calls. We have somebody else that goes with Cassidy.

43:20
Cassidy Jones
Right. But the two of us still. It’s still a team. Right. Approach to doing it. And I think where my. Where my skill set is I think I’m really good at relating to people, making them feel comfortable, and I can be chatty and friendly, and I’m going to find a connection point all the time. And that immediately became a very easy sales relationship. And so I think over time, Sean realizing that I could handle that role allowed him to pivot back more into some of the other roles. Like, he was still doing all of the estimating, and he was doing all the project development. And so as we’ve added people to the team, we’ve sort of recognized, hey, like, people really like meeting Cassidy and Doug now on the sales meetings, and they both balance each other out really well, and they.

44:10
Cassidy Jones
And people seem to respond really well. So let’s not mess with that. So what do we need to fill? But, yeah, and so, you know, Sean and I have just sort of. I think we’ve just sort of figured it out as we win. I think I made it clear to him a few years in that, like, I’m willing to be in this for the long haul if you are. And I think that reflects his leadership, that I wanted to sign up for it. Right. But it also was recognizing that I love what we do and I love how we do it. And so I want to have the biggest role I can in making that happen.

44:45
Sean Beliveau
So I’m sure you can’t ask for more than that from an employee. I mean, she bleeds Slate Creek colors.

44:53
Cassidy Jones
I do. And. And. And I’ll note, Logan, I married a Blacksburg native, so we joke all the time that. And so did Doug, our other sales guy. Every client we go to, every potential client knows my husband knows his wife knows Sean. And. And there is something so human about that we can’t. We can’t, you know, express the importance of that enough that, like. Like, you’re going to literally sit next to me when we. Like, I’m going to the tech basketball game in a couple hours. My daughter’s danc. Right. I’m going to sit down next to someone, and I likely bet that we will be three degrees of separation from a Slate Creek client in some form.

45:33
Logan Shinholser
That’s awesome.

45:35
Cassidy Jones
With.

45:35
Logan Shinholser
With this. I know, I know. I mean, from my side of things, I know what it was like when I relinquished control over sales. It was scary because it was not only the thing that brought, you know, the money in to pay for everybody’s payroll, but then also, like, the amount of nuances that, you know, marketing is so funny. Like, I’m. I’m now in my second remodel in my own home, and I’m learning how much of remodeling is really a jigsaw puzzle, Especially when it’s like, I live in a 1946 house, or you could see where the previous remodels were all done. It’s, like, crazy. It’s a lot of just like, engineering and solution, you know, all that kind of stuff. What was it like for.

46:11
Logan Shinholser
For you, Sean, to be able to like, relinquish control of the sales side of things, knowing that Cassie’s. She’s taking it all not only for payroll aside, but also to make sure that, like, projects are being sold the right way, that clients have the right expectations. Stuff’s not going to get missed on production, I guess. Can you talk to you a little bit about, like, that journey to just.

46:36
Sean Beliveau
Stepping back and it’s still a journey. It’s, you know, the one. One thing after doing this, bringing people on. I used to stress so hard when people would make the same mistakes that I had made, and it would burn me up. I would lose sleep, all this stuff. And now I’m like, you know what? People are going to make mistakes. We’re going to miss stuff. It’s going to happen. And you can’t train every mistake to every employee. You can’t do it. You have to let them trip over something and screw up. And it’s. It’s still hard to watch it happen, especially when the numbers start getting big on it. But, you know, that. That’s probably been the hardest thing. I will say the day that Doug took overestimating for me was the best day of my life.

47:30
Sean Beliveau
So that is like, if you talk to people in this business, like, getting out of estimating is like kind of the holy. The holy grail. And Doug is great. He is so process driven. And he. When he came to work for us, he was so thrilled that we had a process, but we had an estimating process. So we had templates, and we, you know, he just puts the numbers in and that’s the number. You know, I would put the numbers in, and I would be like, I can’t say that number out loud to a client.

47:59
Cassidy Jones
We call that head trash at the office.

48:01
Sean Beliveau
He yells it across the room like he has threats or something. I’m like. I’m like, doug, tone it down.

48:08
Cassidy Jones
Here’s what we say. About that. Here’s what I’d say about that. Sean, because he really loves people, and he’s immensely loyal and, like, wants to do right by people. He also, I think, is like me, can be emotionally attached to the thing. Right. Put someone in your estimating role who is not emotionally attached to the thing. Doug is the perfect human in this role, because data is data to Doug. And there’s no emotional human attachment to data for him. It’s just data. And so when the numbers come out and it says Your job is $500,000, I’m over here like, oh, my gosh, I really want to do this job. I don’t want us to lose this job because it costs too much. And Sean’s like, maybe I can cut something here or skirt something by here. And Doug’s like, the data says 500.

48:59
Cassidy Jones
Yeah, the data says 500. Stop head trashing yourself. We’re going to make sure that the end of their job, they’re going to say, we would have spent more if this is, you know, like. Like we got more value than what we paid. And so if that’s our business mentality and every hire has. Has bought into that. I can’t tell you how many times Doug has said to us, I am so glad I work here. His wife has texted the women in the office and say, thank you so much for being such an incredible work environment for Doug, because we’re all each other’s cheerleaders, and we’re so grateful that everybody brings the skill set they do so that I don’t have to say the number.

49:36
Cassidy Jones
If I had to say the number, I would cry and puke in the bathroom beforehand and come back out and be like, you know, Doug just says the number, and he moves on. And I’m like, thank God for Doug. You know, so. And if Doug gets the number wrong and something in the estimate screwed up, we all say, we’ll figure it out. Because we know Doug’s giving his full effort on every project to get the numbers right, because that’s what makes him feel good about himself. Right. I’m making every effort to have relationships with the clients, figure out what they need and solve them in design, because that’s what makes me feel good about myself and what I’m doing for the company. And so if. If we all know that everyone’s making that kind of full effort, then we can. We can.

50:21
Cassidy Jones
We can look at mistakes and move on and get on with our lives without having that emotional attachment to it.

50:28
Logan Shinholser
Yeah, we talk about that’s. Why athletes have agents. Because otherwise, yeah, hey, come win the super bowl here. We’ll pay you X amount. And agents, like, hold on. That’s not, you know, the allure of the super bowl is nice, but so, yeah, when it comes to the hiring process, you know, you, you have a, a, A Doug who’s able to step in. And I mean, estimating is a very tough role. What are you guys doing to actually hire? Like, you have core values. I know that with that unicorn from three months ago, that was very much like a. Let’s go grab lunch. Okay, you’re in. I’d imagine not everybody’s like that. So what does your hiring process look like?

51:07
Cassidy Jones
Yeah, you know, we’re pretty laid back in general about how we operate. And I think that is what’s attracted people to us. We don’t have some, like, stiff corporate culture. We actually have a hire. Who he was our appliance sales guy for what he was in Plances for decades, but forever. And he’d sort of made a comment in passing about how he might be ready to pivot in his, you know, later life and do something different. And for the first year he was here, it stressed him out.

51:39
Cassidy Jones
If he wasn’t the first person in the office and the last person out of the office, and if he left the office for 20 minutes to, like, walk to Kroger and get a snack, he felt like he had to tell us all he was leaving because he came out of this strict corporate culture of like, be at your seat at this time. Do not leave your seat at this until this time. And, like, everyone must know where every minute is accounted for. And we have consistently had to be like, david, go have lunch with a friend. Like, come in late tomorrow. You got home late the night before from a travel. Like, you’re good. Like, we trust you’re going to get your work done. So, like, just get your work done. So our hiring process has started with. Let’s just, let’s bring someone in.

52:21
Cassidy Jones
Now, whether they’ve applied through a formal application, when we have done that, or they’ve emailed us and expressed interest and we might, it might be a fit. We bring them in the office. A few of us will sit and hang out. We’ll find out what they’ve been doing, we’ll find out what they want to be doing, and we’ll sort of express what we do and how we do it and what kind of person is the right fit for the kind of thing we need we talk about our core values. We talk about the. The goals we have for the business, but we. We talk a lot after they leave about vibes. And that is so, like millennial code.

52:57
Sean Beliveau
So. So Logan, generally. Generally, I’ll make a phone call to the person, depending on where we’re getting this, you know, where this person’s coming from. But it’s almost exclusively. The first interview is going to be some type of a group interview with our staff. And so I am more interested in it being a good cultural fit for our staff than I am for me making some kind of superstar hired. Like, I want the staff to have buy in on it. And. And I’m not going to generally speak. I said on that last one, I already made a decision, but everyone else agreed with me, so we didn’t have to go to combat or anything. So, you know, group discussion, like Cassie said, we. We chat afterwards. What are the vibes? She mentioned this.

53:44
Sean Beliveau
This other person that came in, and were like, wow, man, that guy was cool. And we really, really needed somebody.

53:52
Cassidy Jones
We were. That’s.

53:53
Sean Beliveau
And were like, there’s. But I was like. I said, you know what? There’s just something. It’s like, we don’t know him. There’s just something. And then Casta gets on her phone, she goes, oh, yeah, criminal. Like, we’re not even going to say what the camera is like, okay, yes, the fatal flaw. Let’s. And then one of the things that we’ve been trying to do, and it’s hard to do this every time, but again, with the cultural fit. A lot of it, and a cultural fit, but also, you know, trying to identify that. That work, life balance, like, if people just aren’t going to be able to have that right, it’s not going to work. And that’s like 100% of the time.

54:37
Sean Beliveau
So we’ve actually been trying to do things like, hey, how’d you like to go out to bring your significant out to dinner with us and just like, you know, try to meet the. Their situation, trying to get an idea of their situation, where we go into that level of commitment. Of course, on a lot of our hires that are coming from our community, we already know the spouses and the situation, the families, all the stuff. So it makes a lot easier. But those things are hard to do, and it’s hard when you. Again, when you’re desperate, it’s just. It’s so much harder. And sometimes you just. You almost have to just make a hire and just hope. And I I hate to even say it, but you know, you got.

55:20
Sean Beliveau
We have people that are counting on us, so we gotta put somebody out there.

55:24
Cassidy Jones
Yeah, I think. And, and we did like we said last year, we made a not great hire, but we did all the things right. We, we did the phone call, we had them in, we chatted. This is someone we knew already, so it wasn’t coming to us from a blind thing. Sean called references, we called people who’d worked with them before and we had gotten some feedback that was hey, like likable guy. Sometimes we’re not totally sure, like if he’s work, like if he’s getting his work done. Like we’re the. There’s some gap there. We had a good experience with him as a trade partner. He was a likable guy. He spoke the language. Right. And we joke a lot about you gotta be able to talk professionally to clients. You gotta know and understand construction and you gotta have some competency in technology.

56:12
Cassidy Jones
We use, you know, project management software. We use technology to communicate. Yeah. We use job tread. And so we go through all these things and all of those things are a yes. Right. So it’s like all of the green flags were there. And we realized very quickly into the first project that this, you know, person managed that the little nuggets that we’d heard were the big nuggets, like the little bits of. We’re not totally sure sometimes if he’s on the job or not turned into. We’re not sure if he’s ever on the job, you know. And all of our little fears kind of came to be. But again, our worst hires have always come out of we have to fill the role because we have work to complete and nobody to complete it.

57:03
Cassidy Jones
So when we’re in the scenario that we can hire not out of desperation, we will drop a lot of things to hire. And in an effort to prevent the desperation hires because those have always been the ones that have been a challenge to succeed.

57:19
Logan Shinholser
What was the outcome of that one? That hire fired lasted six months.

57:23
Sean Beliveau
Yeah, yeah. Three months too long. Yeah, we really, we do a 90 day trial for everybody and we had a really hard look at it and our production manager, Chris and I kind of made a decision that we needed. We did. We couldn’t afford to not have somebody in that role so we let him stay on. And it.

57:46
Cassidy Jones
With, with a lot.

57:47
Sean Beliveau
And it came down to just one day. It just, I said we are done. And, and I, I don’t get Angry very often. But I was pretty upset with him. And it’s. And just taking advantage of us. And again, you know, small team, if you’re not pulling your weight, it’s obvious to everybody, really obvious. And if you have problems outside of work, generally speaking, those problems are going to surface and you’re going to cause all kinds of chaos within and you’re going to cause problems for your teammates and all that stuff. And is every one of those things and so. But what’s Jon, we hired two project managers at the same time.

58:27
Cassidy Jones
Yeah, that’s what I was going to say.

58:28
Sean Beliveau
How desperate were. And we thought he was the superstar and the other guy was the questionable one. And as it turns out the other guy is a superstar. He’s also nice still with us. And so you don’t always, you’re not, you don’t always get it right. I mean you just.

58:44
Cassidy Jones
Yeah, that was a difficult time because we had to hire two people simultaneously. And two hires in a small town is way higher, harder than one hire in a small town. And we hired someone who weren’t sure even really wanted the job. The other one, and we’ll call him G. Weren’t sure G even wanted the job. Mr. G. Weren’t convinced. Right. But he was willing to take the job and we really needed him. And here we are a year and a half later and we’re like, he’s great. We have had moments along the way where we’ve had to sit down and have conversations about expectations, execution, follow through, et cetera. But his clients love him and he wants to succeed here. Like he wants to be part of what we’re doing.

59:32
Cassidy Jones
And I think that has made him such a better hire and a better employee down the line as he realized the value in being part of the collective we here. That warm fuzzy, right. A little bit was worth it to him to like make some course corrects along the way because that gained sort of acceptance and community. And you know, went, what’d we go? Like a couple months ago we took the whole team out to the river and went float, did a float down the river and everyone could bring their family members and we got the kayaks and inflatable stand up paddle boards and we took the whole team out.

01:00:06
Cassidy Jones
And I remember watching him that day and him just being like, I’m just so grateful to be part of a team that like wants to socialize and hang out and, and so we are all shocked if you’d asked us at the time of hire, where we would be sitting now. But I think there’s something to be said for creating a culture people want to be a part of. And if they don’t want to be a part of it, then they. Then they’re never gonna want to. Right. So he very quickly realized he wanted to be a part of it.

01:00:36
Logan Shinholser
What did it take? Because, like, hiring somebody that you’re going in, going. I don’t even know if they want this position. I mean, that is a. That’s a tough thing to coach, basically, and figure out as an owner. And, you know, like, man, like, what. How do we actually do. We convince this person that this is a good job and they should, like, actually really care and enjoy it. So, like, did you have, like, certain conversations that I did?

01:00:59
Sean Beliveau
I. I did. And I kind of said, you know, George, we’d love to give you G. Mr. G. He was George, we love.

01:01:09
Cassidy Jones
Good. Yeah, he’ll watch.

01:01:11
Sean Beliveau
He’ll love it. But I think it was more of, let’s do the 90 day. And it can be like a mutual 90 day. Like, sure. And, you know, and Sean, you started.

01:01:21
Cassidy Jones
Him in an hourly, right?

01:01:23
Sean Beliveau
Yeah, we. Yeah, we started at a lateral lady.

01:01:24
Cassidy Jones
And that was a big piece of it too. Was that sort of afforded some protection. And over the, you know, like, let’s kind of have you come in hourly, learn the ropes, shadow, check things out, learn the systems. And then there had to be a few conversations about, like, we like you, but we need A, B, C, D and E. And then eventually, you know, he said, you know what? I really like how you do things, and I like you guys and I want to do. And we said, great. So he, you know, became salaried after that and is now an integral part of our team. So I think we just had to model it a little bit for us. And I actually think it wasn’t a reflection on us as much as it was his experience in other jobs that made me skeptical.

01:02:07
Cassidy Jones
I don’t know that he really thought he wanted to do this again in the sense that he had been in a similar looking business and didn’t have the most positive experience. And so I, I think we did our job the same way we would do it for anyone. And he had to be convinced because of his own stuff, not because of our stuff.

01:02:31
Logan Shinholser
Were there certain, like, conversations that you had where you remember, like, because again, like, I. For me, if somebody doesn’t, like, one of our core values is love your impact. And it. And the first words, love, like, you got to enjoy this stuff because, like, you’re. You’re spending more time at this company than you are with your own family when you, like, look at it collectively. So, like, are there certain conversations that the light bulb went off in G’s head that it seemed like, okay, he’s bought in? Because I. I would just candidly for myself, it would be tough for me to want somebody to be here and succeed more than they want to be here and succeed and still continue to pour into them.

01:03:14
Sean Beliveau
I, you know, during that 90 day, you know, the trial. The trial, you know, we call it, there wasn’t. There wasn’t much. Like, he just kind of got to know us and got to feel his way around. And I think by the end of that, he was like, I dig this place. Like, I want to be here. But then we’ve had some conversations with him since where it’s like. And one of our core values is. Is candor and communication. Like, we gotta be able to tell each other what we think without getting butt hurt about it. It’s like, that’s just what it is. And. And, you know, take it as my perception of the situation. You know, we’re all adults. We should be able to talk about it. And same with our clients. You know, we need to be able to do that.

01:03:59
Sean Beliveau
But where we had to sit down and say, you know, George, these things were just. I think this is the way that you’re used to doing things, but this isn’t the way that we do it. And we re. You know, we can’t. I can’t make you, like, fit in to the program. You got to fit in yourself. You know, I can’t. But these are the things. And he has done a fantastic job of.

01:04:22
Cassidy Jones
Yeah. And I do think, Logan, it’s important when we have figured out what motivates people so that particular hire is not financially motivated. Like, it wasn’t really about how much money he was going to make or what the salary package or benefits package was. He really wanted to do something that mattered and. And serve people in a way that mattered. And he happened to have extensive construction knowledge and experience, so that tended to be the way he did that. And I think when we’ve approached conversations around, you know, corrections or improvements, and it’s oftentimes sort of jokingly, but because we know he cares about that, we’ve said, hey, George, we would like you a lot better if you finished your jobs on time. And, like, we can now. It’s the joke, right?

01:05:12
Cassidy Jones
But it’s like, we know his attraction and like, satisfaction to with the company are often grounded in the peopling, the relationships, the like care for one another, the doing something that matters, that. And I think he realized that we all really care about each other and we care about the work we do and we want you in the fold. But I think we had to realize what motivated him. And when you can use that little nugget toward improvement, you know, and if someone, honestly, if someone was just motivated by money, they probably aren’t the right fit anyway. So most of the people who have succeeded here, I, you know, not that we, you know, we’ve been conscientious about making sure people earn a good living so they can go enjoy their life.

01:05:55
Cassidy Jones
But like they’re motivated because they like being part of something where people have the same care, level of care and value for that. It is really hard to work anywhere when you know your coworker doesn’t care as much as you do about the outcome. Right? Like the equal balance of care and concern across the team is a huge factor I think for people’s retention.

01:06:19
Logan Shinholser
So I love that because it’s, you know, it’s when you let somebody go, if you hold them for too long, it actually says a lot more to the team than you think it does. But once you let it go, it says a lot. So last question around all of this, like when it comes to hiring and all that, like, are you having to bring people in and then train them? I mean, like, you know, if it’s an entry level job, that’s one thing. Or an, you know, maybe an office person, that’s a little bit different because you can learn a lot of this stuff, but like a project manager, you know, a carpenter, people, an estimator, like these are all not like you come out of college and within three months you take what, you know, YouTube university and you got it down.

01:07:01
Logan Shinholser
These are very skilled positions. So what is Yalls approach when it comes to hiring for a more skilled position? Are you, hey, we’re good with bringing somebody in early and then just saying, look, it’s going to take you six months before you’re on your own or a year before your own? Or are you practically saying you got to be a great culture fit first, but ultimately you need to be able to like stay on your own very quickly?

01:07:24
Sean Beliveau
Completely depends on the role. I mean, project manager. We, you know, we’re going to give them a, you know, an onboarding checklist of things to do, which we have a generic One for everybody. But we like everybody in the company to know how the whole sausage factory works. So we’ll have people go on initial sales consults and sit in design reviews with clients and go to pre construction meetings with clients and you know, go to vendor showroom appointments, whatever is on our calendar coming up. We’ll try to slot those new hires in to go tag along so they can see sort of how the whole team functions and then get an idea of where they fit in. But on the production side, they’re generally expected to hit the ground running.

01:08:11
Sean Beliveau
You know, if we’re hiring somebody who’s experienced project manager, you know, within a couple weeks they should be able to run a job for us. You know, we have things like job Tread, for example. Everybody’s required to use job tr. Our whole company, our whole system runs through it. So. And job tread’s great. They have their own training modules. You can just. And so an estimator, for example, like Doug started, it was six months really before we expected him to be fully integrated in his role. And that’s a challenging role. But you know, we’ll have some type of expectation on time period, but we’re realistic. You know, it’s going to take people. And again, we do this 90 day trial.

01:08:58
Sean Beliveau
Usually the 90 days is basically us investing in them and training them on the systems and process and then, you know, hoping that it works out at the end and then they start really contributing and adding to the bottom line, if you will.

01:09:14
Cassidy Jones
I think one thing I maybe wish were different in our scenario and it just isn’t. But you know, we are here in a college town and as you know, Virginia Tech has a big school of building construction, has an interior design school, it has a NKBA kitchen and bath design program. We have worked in and adjacent to and with. I have taught as an adjunct in some of those departments. We guest teach on campus, we guest speak in classrooms. Sean’s dad was in the school of building construction for decades. You know, we are integrated with this major university, but it is very difficult for us to hire straight out of the university. And I think that is maybe more unique to the size of business that we are. We don’t. Because everybody’s role does not have a lot of overlap.

01:10:03
Cassidy Jones
It is very hard to pause anyone from full speed business all the time to bring in really green, brand new folks. We have had some success with a lot of summer help out of the building construction department, guys who are happy to come over and Help clean job sites and pick up materials and kind of learn the ropes and shadow. We’ve had some great interns out of the different design departments who’ve come in and helped draw as built or put together presentations for clients or just help in the showroom with samples. So we’ve had some great opportunities there. But it is very hard to transition any of that role in the business, our size to full time employment. We really struggled to create a lane for that so far.

01:10:52
Cassidy Jones
Maybe that’ll come here eventually, but right now most of our hiring is usually coming to us with a pretty significant professional experience in the industry already.

01:11:04
Logan Shinholser
Yeah, I know from our side like I. We’ve probably brought in a dozen interns over the years and like even for something like oh, social media, like they’re young, they know TikTok. Like they’re good just teaching about like this is our ideal client. Like hey, that’s. They don’t really care about what you know, their marketing agency people ate for breakfast. They care about how do we get them better jobs. Like stuff like that. So it’s a lot of like training and teaching and like they may know that the tools but like the application of it and how we do things usually they learn that by the end of the three months and then they’re back in school. So we’re in the same boat where we’ve tried it thinking like oh this would be great. But ultimately it’s.

01:11:43
Logan Shinholser
We didn’t have the right system set up to then take them. So basically anybody that we bring in now has to have that, you know, skill set already coming in with years of experience because you know, I wish we could do it where. Because there’s a lot of like marketing, you know, in Charlotte. Like there’s a lot of schools that have. Yeah, yeah, well that need it and they come out of college but ultimately it’s a hard transition to then explain.

01:12:04
Cassidy Jones
Like yeah, I have found that some of our best hires have come from other corporate industry adjacent businesses where they did go from college into a internship or a training program into a first job into a promotion and then they’ve come back to small business and wanted to be in a hands on small business. But it’s usually not college. Right. To small business. I think that’s a very difficult transition.

01:12:32
Logan Shinholser
Yeah, real last question. What’s the best part about living in Blacksburg, Virginia?

01:12:39
Cassidy Jones
Hey, I mean I’ll say because I, I came here for grad school, married a N. Blacksburg native and stuck around my Parents just moved here from Chicago, so, like, I can’t le now. Like, we’re stuck. I mean, to me it’s the small stuff. Like literally I’m going to. I said earlier I’m going to a Virginia Tech basketball game tonight. My daughter’s dancing in the halftime show. She gets to hang out with the high tech dance team. She gets to go to free clinics with the women’s basketball program. My son gets to hang out with the baseball team at their camps and see them at Kroger. And they come to some of our events in town. And I just think there’s nothing cooler than getting to be adjacent to, you know, we have theatrical shows, we have sporting events, we have community events.

01:13:25
Cassidy Jones
And I just, I’m. I didn’t grow up anywhere near university and now I can’t imagine doing that differently. So the venue matters. Right? I love where we are geographically, I love our scenery, I love our activities. But that being adjacent to Virginia Tech is 100% a lifestyle thing that has just benefited my family immensely.

01:13:47
Sean Beliveau
Oh, I completely agree. And I’ve had the benefit of being able to personally and professionally travel like all over the world. And every time I fly back into Roanoke, I look out the window and I think, wow, I get to live here. And I’m kind of glad everybody doesn’t really know about it. We were in the building industry, so, you know, we need business to happen, commerce to happen. But, you know, it’s a small town. You know, you can tell by our, the way we’ve been able to recruit and hire. It’s a very community oriented town. So we’re all very active in all the various things that we do in our industry and our, in our associations and our, in our personal and religious groups and stuff like that. It’s. It’s amazing. Yeah. Cool.

01:14:38
Cassidy Jones
Yeah.

01:14:39
Logan Shinholser
Well, I love it. Well, Sean Cassidy, I appreciate you guys coming on. This is awesome. My biggest thing, just from my side of it is really everybody hates saying the word orc sharp. But like a lot of what you guys are able to do, like the words about the vibes and they’ll always be recruiting. That all works, but it doesn’t work without having like the systems and the confidence that you’re able to then bring that person in. So it’s the least sexy thing, especially if you’re like a visionary. But like, I mean, we went through a, we had a meeting today. We went all through our accountability chart and like, you know, redid all the roles and like, it’s both overwhelming, but it also shows you the gaps in what needs to happen. So that’s awesome.

01:15:21
Logan Shinholser
So thank you both very much, and hopefully we’ll be seeing each other soon.

01:15:26
Cassidy Jones
Thank you. Thanks for having us.

01:15:28
Logan Shinholser
All right, see you guys.