The Right Fit
Like anybody else you’d hire, former owners have their strengths, and those strengths most often lie in technical work or in supervising that work. Dennis Gehman, owner of Gehman Custom Remodeling, in Harleysville, Pa., says that he’s had great luck placing former owners in field positions. “They’re excellent tradesmen. It’s the business side that people get tired of,” Gehman says. Once hired, he notes, “they get a package … and here’s what you’ve got to build and here’s the hours that we’re shooting for. Most are motivated to do that.” Gehman has had less luck hiring former owners as salespeople. “A big part of the reason they weren’t making it on their own is that they weren’t selling with enough margin,” he says. And, in the several instances where former owners were hired to sell Gehman Custom Remodeling, it didn’t work out because “they had a hard time charging the margins that we require.”
Also, like any other new hire, former owners may start out strong but then slacken. What makes that a bigger problem is that you’re usually hiring them because, among other things, they’ve demonstrated that they can manage their own time and projects. George Christiansen, owner of Pequot Remodeling, in Fairfield, Conn., has twice hired company owners as lead carpenters, both times with mixed results. “I never got 100% out of them,” he says. In both cases Christiansen points to dwindling motivation and a tendency to complain. There was also an absence of certain basic skills. “Can they follow directions, keep a daily job log, and read plans?” Christiansen says that’s what he would want to know today. One former owner failed to adequately supervise helpers on a job. Another hung out at a bar talking about all the future jobs he was scheduled for, while the bartender, who moonlighted as a contractor, jotted it all down, contacted the clients, and wrested the jobs away with a low-ball price. Christiansen says it took him awhile to figure out why his sure-thing jobs were disappearing. “Just because you’re a good carpenter doesn’t mean you’re a good owner,” he says. “It doesn’t always work out that because you’re good in one area, you’re a genius in another.”
Must-Do List
To ensure the best chance of a successful hire, run the credit checks and criminal background checks you’d normally do on any potential employee. Check the person’s driving record. You’ll want to find out if there are any looming legal issues involving the former business or if your potential hire has ever collected workers’ comp. Azarm says that in the one instance where he hired a former owner and it didn’t work out, “I didn’t have good information about their background.” Don’t be afraid to ask for, or seek, such information. If no red flags are raised, owners offer a few other suggestions that might make that hire more successful:
- “Look at his tools,” Christiansen advises. “If the chisels and saws are sharp and everything’s well-oiled and put away, that says: ‘I’m really skilled and I ran a business for five years.'”
- If it’s a project-management hire, send the former owner out to a job for the day and see what the feedback is from the other people who work for you. “We make the [potential hire] spend the day with us, either in the field or in the office,” DuBree says. “That tells you a ton.”
- Look at the last few jobs your former owner/potential new employee did. Talk to his past clients and ask if they’d hire him again. Talk to vendors and subcontractors the former owner worked with. “Right now, times are tough,” Christiansen says. “I have a friend who ran an ad for a carpenter and got 250 responses. There are a lot of owners who have nothing going and will come to work for you in a minute.” Christiansen says he wants to know the last two clients they worked for so he can find out: Were they happy? Would you hire them again?
- If you do hire the former owner for a field position, have them work on someone else’s job before entrusting them with a major project. “I wouldn’t give any new hire a job of his own,” DuBree says. “I have them work side-by-side with one of my leads.”
- And be candid about where you stand and what you expect. Gehman says that “up-front conversations” about “why, when you were out on your own so long, you might want to do things your way instead of our way” are difficult to have, and easy to avoid. Avoid it and it becomes “the elephant in the room.” Have the conversation and “it’s a lot easier to revisit it later.”
