Entrepreneurial News®

Techniques for Selecting the Right Supervisor to Improve Employee Retention

Big topic, one of the two courses that we first developed when we started the www.bizsuccessl.school.

The reasons was pretty simple: companies we surveyed were telling us that they didn’t have promotion plans, and employees were quitting, or the plans they had weren’t effective. Hundreds of thosusands in costs were being incurred that didn’t need to be.

Everyone else on the internet will give you10-12 techniques to use in supervisor selection, with no recommendations as to what works and what doesn’t. But, it’s Chat/GPT, so that’s what you get…

We  give you two or three techniques that have worked for clients over the years.

And if ours don’t work, jus say so and we’ll refund your purchase price, as long as we have an account to send it to.

So, get out there and make it a great day.

How to Pick the Right Employee

This is a topic which has been troublesome to many small business owners, and we did a course on it at www.bizsuccess.school.

Failed employee hires cost the small business owners millions each year, which is why we did the course.

We don’t want to repeat our School course on hiring, but there are some facets that we should amplify, such as retaining employees once you’ve hired them.

If you follow our hiring guidelines, you should retain about 90% of those employees you hire, but what about the other 10%?

There might be a jewel or two in the other 10%, and there are some things you can do to keep the 90% happy:

  1. Show some attention to them by walking around their workspace and chatting them up;
  2. Memorize as much of their personal and family lore as you can;
  3. Frequent performance reviews, about once a quarter.

On the 10%, do all the things above, but it will just happen that you can’t please all the employees all the time.

  1. Some employees may not like you, your company or your company culture (yes you have one) and they’re worth listening to, because you might find things that you’ve got to change.
  2. Some of the 10% might be among your most creative employees, too, so you want to try to accommodate them.
  3. Some are just chronic malcontents, which might not show up in their hiring process, or their DISC profile. You probably want to fire these people.
  4. By all means find out why people leave. It’s not usually about money.

Our Project 2025

We are expecting Donald Trump to be elected President in November, as long as the swing states don’t cheat again. If they are found to be cheating, cut off Federal funds.

We are borrowing Heritage’s title for our business oriented Project 2025 goals that we think Trump should follow:

  1. Deregulate all forms of energy, such as gasoline, diesel, LNG, etc. Goal is a 25% cut in costs by end of ’25, since it will take time for the cut in crude and other fossil based fuel prices to work through the distribution system. Start exporting to Europe by end of ’25 if not sooner.
  2. Close the remaining portions of the border, even if the Texas chicken wire solution has to be used at first, and replaced by the steel towers later. Threaten recalcitrant states (AZ, NM, CA ) with cutoff of state aid from Federal government if they won’t go along. Reinstitute Remain in Mexico program, jawbone Presidents of Mexico, El Salvador and Venezuela.
  3. Cancel all Biden executive orders until further review.
  4. Eliminate two federal agencies (Education and Homeland Security) entirely and ask states if they will fund any of the eliminated functions. Cut the remainder of the agencies 10% across the board, primarily in personnel. Federal workforce is bloated and unmotivated. Issue an executive order that all government agencies are to be incompliance with the Supreme Court decision on powers, e.g., if a function isn’t in your charter, it will be eliminated by end of 2025. All DEI and CRT laws are to be removed, and personnel in these endeavors released.
  5. Cut some taxes on corporations, that were imposed by Biden and Democrats, but our impression is that most of the tax cuts remain. The goal is to have the lowest corporate taxes among industrialized nations.
  6. Empower local and state police to arrest and deport all illegals who are not grainfully employed.
  7. Tariff all Chinese-made goods as they were prior to 2020. Probably 25%.
  8. Restart on-shoring of American companies. Accelerate depreciation allowances.

Have at it, boys and girls.

The McRaven Rules

ADM Bill McRaven was a former commander of the Navy Seal Teams. I worked with a couple of his teams and have always admired him. Below are 10 Life Lessons delivered to U of Texas graduates in 2014, which are pretty good rules for entrepreneurs:

  1. If you make your bed every morning, you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride, and it will encourage you do another task and another and another.
  2. For the boat to make it to its destination, everyone must paddle.
  3. Measure a person by the size of their heart, not the size of their flippers.
  4. Sometimes, no matter how well you prepare or how well you perform, you still end up as a sugar cookie. It’s just the way life is sometimes.
  5. Life is filled with circuses. You will fail. You will likely fail often. It will be painful. It will be discouraging. At times it will test you to your very core…. but if you want to change the world, don’t be afraid of the circuses.
  6. If you want to change the world, sometimes you have to slide down the obstacle headfirst.
  7. There are a lot of sharks in the world. If you hope to complete the swim, you will have to deal with them.
  8. Every SEAL knows that under the keel, at the darkest moment of the mission, is the timee when you must be calm, composed — when all your tactical skills, your physical power and all your inner strength must be brought to bear.
  9. If I have learned anything in my time travelling the world, it is the power of hope. The power of one person–Washington, Lincoln, King, Mandela, even a young girl from Pakistan, Malala –one person can change the world by giving people hope.
  10. In SEAL training, there is a bell. A brass bell that hangs in the center of the  compound for all the students to see. All you have to do to quit is ring the bell. If you want to change the world, don ever, ever, ring the bell.

‘Chevron’ Impact on Business

‘Chevron’ so named for the oil company that originally ran afoul of the EPA, will have a major impact on business/ administrative state regulations.

In our opinion, the two agencies that have committed the most infractions on the new Chevron doctrine, which says agencies can’t go beyond their enumerated powers, are the EPA and OHSA.

In our opinion, the EPA problems go back to the issuance of the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards. The EPA has said that cars and light trucks must average X per miles per gallon, ignoring a particular manufacturer’s mix of cars and light trucks (heavy trucks are exempt). When I was at Ford, I went through the EPA law and found that the law said nothing about CAFE, only that certain tailpipe and crankcase emissions were going to be regulated, which was within the scope of the law. Ford elected to not challenge the EPA, but had difficulty complying because it sells a lot of light duty trucks (i.e., F150s) which don’t get as good mileage as their cars. And this problem continues to this day. Ford has survived the increases in CAFE with sort of a wink/wink, nod/nod approach…they’re doing the best they can.

One of my companies also ran afoul of the EPA over water quality, but we settled it in our best guerilla war fashion, by exposing what the EPA was doing to a prominent employer to a friendly local TV station, which didn’t like that a prominent Reno employer was being hassled. And then we moved most of the offending division to Mexico, which cost a few US jobs.

For small businesses, the OHSA (Occupational and Health Safety Act) has been a problem, because the OHSA has routinely overstepped its boundaries in regulating workplace safety conditions. Several of our Solutions Forum clients have collided with OHSA over the years, and lost cases.

Unfortunately, Chevron does not allow for recoupment of past damages suffered from adverse OHSA or EPA rulings.

There are probably thousands of past OHSA and EPA transgressions that could be litigated, and I’m sure that they tort lawyers will put a word in, especially under a Trump administration.

So, the business world won one for a change.

Techies, Stop Hiding

I’ve written about this before, but I still see techies who form companies make it rather difficult for outsiders to communicate with them.

First, they don’t list a phone number.

Second, they might not list even an email address.

Third, the owner or the CEO might not even be listed on the company voicemail register.

Fourth, they don’t list any of their key officers, so given items one and two, someone calling them isn’t even entirely sure you’ve got the right company.

And, given all of the above deficiencies, their websites don’t give one a really good idea of what they do, so again it’s hard to tell that you’ve got the right company. One of the companies with all these deficiencies was listed as having 155 employees.

Yeah, we know that companies don’t like to be contacted by telemarketers, even ones that can help make them a lot of money (us), so it would be nice if one could at least leave a voicemail for the owner or the CEO.

So, you techies who run companies, time to make sure you look good to the external world.

The Restriction of the Internet

This post is based on an article that appeared in the Epoch Times on 6/8/24 as the lead article in the Opinion Section.

The central thesis of the article is that Google is restricting searches for political reasons, but the author offers no real proof.

There are many ulterior motives for Google doing this, to influence politics in the US, to promote paid searches, and probably others.

The article does mention the impact on small business, in that they might have to spend more money to get better search results, rather than relying on organic search to be found.

We have not found restrictions on our searches, but we’re not techies. We seem to get the search results we’re looking for, and go on about our business.

Our School, www.bizsuccess.school, is too new, and is just beginning to be found on the internet, so we can’t tell. We are planning on paid search at some point, as soon as we develop all the organic search terms we can think of.

We don’t know if other small businesses have been affected, particularly those who make their living off their web presence.

But, we’re alerting you to the problem, so you can deal with it. We’ll keep you advised of what we think we see.

Cox Clutch

Well, the poor dears at Cox are probably clutching their pearls.

We had several outages on Cox over the Memorial Day weekend, and Cox fixed all of them, eventually (one took five hours).

So I called them Tuesday to complain generically, because the service people were somewhat less than friendly, and didn’t want to authorize me on the account (even though I’d reported the outages without incident.

After much discussion, it’s pretty clear that the Cox culture isn’t too customer friendly, despite what they say in their ads. And there are a lot of ads, leading us to think that they’ve exceeded their capacity, at least in our area, which is Northeast Scottsdale.

I also had problems accessing a part of the Cox website for an area that was supposed to be there.

I was sufficiently annoyed with their lack of caring that I filed a complaint with the AZ Department of Consumer affairs alleging that Cox wasn’t doing a good job.

That kicked over the hive.

I got a call from Tracie, assistant to the President of the Cox Arizona/California Division. She was very earnest about how Cox was trying harder, but she really didn’t get the idea that the Cox culture had to become more customer facing (along with the website). I have one of my Solutions Forum members, who heads a website design firm investigating. We don’t hold out hope.

What this tale means for you small biz owners is don’t let your culture freeze up and become static. Keep it customer facing. Empower your people to delight the customer in deeds, not just words.

And keep your website customer friendly. Test it.

I’m not optimistic that Cox still won’t clutch its pearls when someone like me complains.

Entrepreneuring is Manifest

Last night Coast to Coast AM had on a medical doctor talking about manifesting, or how to become what you’re intended to do.

The doctor, for what it’s worth, is James Roy, of Stanford.

We are similarly inclined. And we’ve started a school www.bizsuccess.school, to help entrepreneurs manifest their destiny.

People decide to become entrepreneurs, not always for the best of reasons, which is one reason we started the school, so entrepreneurs could realize their manifest.

After I got my MBA, I went to work on the Ford Finance Staff, one of the plum jobs in American finance. Cool. Paid well, promoted rapidly.

But, even at Ford, it was like I had a big ‘E’ (entrepreneur) tattooed on my forehead. My boss, the President of Ford Credit, put me and my staff in charge of minding the financial affairs of six little divisions, and helping the divisions grow.

And, after about seven years, my Dad approached me about joining the family company, because he wanted to retire. My boss at Ford Credit wasn’t happy about me leaving, but, since he’d come from an entrepreneurial background, he understood.

I wanted to do it, because I felt that I’d trained for it, and it was manifest that I do it.

And there was tremendous growth potential in the family company. So my Dad and I worked out an employment agreement and off we went as a family (wife and two kids) to Reno. And took two Fords with us.

I’d not thought about it until Dr. Roy’s program on Coast, but it was manifest that I ultimately became an entrepreneur.

Many of you out there may be feeling the same, which is why I’m writing this.

It’s ok, just research the market well and how you’re going to do what you were manifest to do.

Colleges and Universities, Heal Thyselves

The colleges and universities in the US are in trouble.

They don’t for the most part, offer a relevant education, meaning something that students need to know.

I have one grandchild who’s in the Naval Academy Prep pipeline, and I hope she gets a good education. Naval Academy is about as good as it gets, and she’s got all the right background. We’ll see.

I have another who’s training people in AutoZone branches, and he has no use for college. It’s not relevant to him. He gets more relevance to talking to me about his employees and taking courses at our Small Business Success School.

A third grandchild is a pastry chef, and college has no relevance to her, either. She’s not really into supervising anybody.

The other two grandchildren don’t have to make advanced schooling decisions yet. Maybe by the time they have to, colleges and universities will make themselves relevant again.

The point here is that college isn’t really relevant to any of them, where it could be and should be.

Even my undergraduate college, Antioch, with its work/study program, isn’t making itself relevant. And Wharton has been silent, when the Penn leader has been in the dock.

The campi aren’t secure, either; the schools need to do a better job at figuring out who can and can’t be on campus, without violating free speech and assembly.

So, here we are, an advanced society, with an unadvanced education system. It’s gotta hold us back at some point.