Rav: For small business owners who run companies with 10 to 50 employees, some might think that keeping employees motivated should be straightforward, but with first-hand experience, I can tell you that it is not. So in today’s podcast, we’ll talk about the top three secrets to a motivated team.
The official podcast of Sociosquares when we talk about proven practices for business success.
Rav: Hello business owners, I’m your host, Rav Mendiratta from Sociosquares, and landing leads is where my business leads. Today, we are going to talk about the top three secrets to motivate your team. Now, as a business owner, I know this task is really hard. And I have an expert on this subject with me today, Pat Boyle, who’s actually mentoring me as well on how to keep my team motivated. Pat heads and is the president of Boyle Energy, which is a 75-year-old company, and one of the best known HVAC and oil and propane company in the greater Philly area. Thank you so much for doing this. I really appreciate it.
Pat: All right, thanks for the kind words, man. I really appreciate you having me on this platform. It is terrific.
Rav: Now you have an awesome team. And I love the culture you’ve built. So I would love it if you could share more insights, which our viewers can take away today. But let’s start with the employee incentives, which you’ve seen, which do not work. Well. Any thoughts on that?
Pat: Well, yeah, I think that I see that if you don’t do it, it’s not going to work. So it might not work out that well.
1) Showcasing Vision to your Team: So one thing I encourage every leader to do is to kind of obviously, give your team a vision of, you know, what you’re you’re looking for, like something down the road, like, keep on, keep on moving towards that, you know, you’re never ever going to get there, but just give them a vision on it.
2) How to enact in the workplace: So I mean, one thing, what I do is I basically, every Wednesday, I just meet with one of them. Seven o’clock in the morning here in my office. And I just say hey, how are you doing? How’s it going? See what’s going on. And then, and then I’ll talk if I listen to them for a little while. And I’ll say, Hey, this is what I’m planning. This is what I’m thinking this spring, this summer, and this year. And what I do is I have a huge TV screen right here that I’m using. And you know, I sit them down and I say, look, here, here’s all the training that I have scheduled for you for the next 12 months. These are some of the milestones I want you to hit by, you know, June 1 and October 1, and they’re just, you know, arbitrary dates. They’re not, you know, it just gives them something to work towards. And it shows them that you know, you care that you’re invested in their training for your company, and that you’re good at listening.
3) Importance of being Visionary: So I would say to every leader, like, you know, you got to give them a vision, you got to give them something to look forward to and you got to work with them. And the way my schedule works, I roughly have about, say, 25 employees, so that works out to about twice a year. So it’s good, it’s not sitting down, and here’s a raise it sits down, how you are doing checking in with them. And that’s what I think is a good, I guess, thing to do. And if you’re not doing it, I suggest you put something in place like that.
Rav: That’s pretty interesting. I mean, sitting down with every team member that’s pretty awesome. And it’s a big commitment, and it’s quite interesting. Now, as a leader, What all do you do to stay updated to find new things to motivate your team? How do you keep yourself updated?
Pat:
1) Ways to get updated: How do I do it myself? It’s kind of funny, because you want to stay updated, right? You want to be a leader, right? You don’t want to be a boss, you know, when nobody likes to be bossed around, they want to be you know, they want to be led. So one of the things I do is I have a truck that’s 17 years old, so I still have a CD player in it. So I listen to books on CD, I call Windshield University, you know, I mean, I got to update that in a sense too, because you know, the bookshelf at Barnes and Nobles is getting smaller and smaller CDs.
2) YouTube Platform Utilization: But this day and age I mean I go to YouTube and I follow a few guys you know and everybody’s a little different but you know, I follow business guys, I follow motivational guys. All guys that, you know, talk about money and just business in general, I mean to be really specific. I mean, I obviously follow Simon Sinek. I love his stuff. I highly recommend that for anybody in any organization. I follow a guy named Dan Pena who’s one of these in-your-face motivators. I suggest you know, you look at him, but he’s very blunt is one way to put it. Another guy I follow is Robert Kiyosaki. He’s a money guy. I follow that and listen to that. And business. You know, you got it, you got to understand money. And then another guy follows, like Grant Cardone. If you ever heard of him, he’s a real estate business guy.
3) Keeping Organized: So I keep you know, I make time each week I sit down every Sunday, I go through my you know, my thing for the week. This is my finishers journal, I recommend it to everybody who keeps you very organized. And I map out my day for the week. And here I have, you know, Friday podcast with Rav. Nice. So it keeps me organized. I recommend this for anybody who wants to knock out any tests.
Rav: Nice. That’s great. So you gave us four leaders to follow. And I think they are pretty diverse in themselves. I’ve listened to at least three of them out of four. Dan Pena, I’ll definitely check out thank you for those recommendations. And now let’s come to the title of this podcast, right, the top three secrets. And I think one of them is you, you gave us. And you started out, what would you say are the other secrets to a motivated team?
Pat:
1) Self- Esteem:
(i) Recognizing others Self- esteem: Well, if you’re gonna have a team, I think one thing you need to realize is that this is huge. This is like what everyone’s self esteem is. Because for as long as I can remember, I’ve always had pretty high self esteem and I had great parents and a great neighborhood. I grew up in great schooling, I can tell you every teacher I had since kindergarten, I honestly can’t. So I’ve always had that. But some people have that experience. Some people don’t. They didn’t grow up like I did in that sense.
(ii) Its OK to Fail: So when you recognize where their self esteem is, you know, it’s important to focus on it in a sense, because the one of the main things I tell everybody when they first get here, right when they first get its not the first thing but one of the main things is, it’s okay to fail, you can fail, it’s not a big deal, you’re not gonna get fired for messing something up, you’re not gonna get fired for failing and failing is, in school, they, you know, they, they tell you failing is bad. It’s not it’s, it’s how you learn.
(iii) Definition of Success: It really is and I have this, you know, this success right here in my office, right? What is success, right? It’s got about seven words on it. Hustle, execution, discipline, ambition, sacrifice, patience, focus, and failure. And I tell everybody who comes in here that that word failure, that’s a good word. And so that’s, you know, so if somebody has low self-esteem, they might think failing is a bad thing. You know, they might think, Ah, I can’t fail, I’m in trouble and you just got to tell them, It’s okay. And then they start to come around.
(iv) Live Example & Conclusion: You know, I had one young guy. I knew lady at my gym. She worked at the high school. she knew this kid. He wasn’t you know, he wasn’t going on to college. She brought him in. She asked me if I’d give him a job. I said, Absolutely. Right. I had them cut the lawn for the first summer, you know, we whack and whatever. I bought a new lawnmower. He drove over a pipe and broke it and 10 minutes after I bought it. Great guy, Mike. Right. So Mike, everybody said, why keep that kid around, I said, give him a chance. You know, it’s gonna work out and we give him a little time. So the day came when Mike came, they came with Mike and had to go get his driver’s license, right? And he failed. He failed. And he called me up and he was upset. He was really upset. He was crying. And he thought I was gonna be mad. And I said, Mike, let it go. Let it go. It’s not a big deal. Now you know what the test is like, he thought everybody in our shop was going to be disappointed in him. And I just said that, Mike, this is not a big deal. You’ll get it. Don’t worry about it. I mean, that was five years ago, and he’s turned out to be probably one of our best employees without a doubt, but you have to realize people’s self-esteem and give him a chance and try and pump them up. I would definitely recommend that.
2) Be in a Smart People Circle:
(i) Importance of being with Smart People: Other things, without a doubt. Mentors, right. Surround yourself with smart people. If you are the smartest guy in the room, leave the room immediately. Right? Go find a room of smart people. I say that to everybody. I mean, so what I try to do is I try to bring in mentors from outside to kind of rub elbows with our people. And you know, so they know like a mentor and Any industry is going to stop. If you ask them for help, they’re going to stop and give you the time to help you out. Because that industry, whatever it is, heating, air conditioning, you know, plumbing, I don’t know, that industry has been so good to them for so many years that they want to give back, it’s you will find these people, but you have to find them. They’re not gonna, they’re not going to call you, you got to knock on their door, you absolutely have to knock on the door. And, and you’ve got to work for it. You can’t feel like you deserve it. Because then you look entitled and that mentor is going to say, See you later. Right? You got to work because you’re not entitled to it. So once you find those people, you keep surrounding yourself with them.
(ii) Live Example & Conclusion: I mean, IT knowledge is just, it’s just, it’s terrific. We had a guy here this morning, right? Wayne Snyder works. He’s the head guy for Carrier Corporation, carrier aircons, head guy, technical guy, he’s the guy that when there’s a huge lawsuit, he’s the expert sitting in, in the courtroom. And Wayne Snyder will call us and say I want to come in and do training for your guys. Because he knows, I believe in getting these guys trained up when he will, he comes in here he prints up books, he only charges you for whatever the book costs, he doesn’t want any money. He’s one of these guys that I don’t come around too often. And I mean, he’s one that you definitely, you know, keep knocking on his door. It’s terrific. And he realizes that, you know, he wants to give back. And there are other things too, that, you know, help motivate some of the guys in your organization if you keep them around smart people.
3) Time away from work:
(i)How it works: And then you know the last thing I don’t know what order this is, but one of the big things I do is time away from work, right. Sounds weird. What motivates people to work time away from work? Well, it does. It’s a thing, right? So a couple years ago, I forgot what summer was when I came up with this. I didn’t come up with the idea. I was listening to all these different people I probably heard from Simon Sinek. But I ended up calling this thing called summer love.
(ii)How” Summer Love” became successful: Right summer love. Here’s the contract I had for summer love. So basically what it was is it took the entire company split it in half. And I matched up guys, right? This guy kind of does the same thing. This lady and this lady do the same thing. This guy, this guy, they all do the same thing. So I made two groups, and basically every summer, pretty much as 12 ish, non-holiday weekends. And I said to each group, I said, Look, you’re gonna get six Friday’s off. Six Friday’s off pay. I don’t care what you do, I want you to go hang out with your family, do what you love hanging out with the people you love. That’s why I call it The Summer Love. But the one thing you had to do to get the six days six was one of those days you had dedicated to community service, eight hours community service, you had to go find something in the community and go there and work for a day, you know, find out why they’re doing this stuff.
(iii)Impact on Employees: You know what they’re doing, the whole organization, the whole story, and I need you to bring it back. And at one of the meetings, I want you to talk about it. And that’s it. Nice. And that’s it. And I mean, everybody, yeah, they signed off. And they talked about how it was contagious. They love to tell the stories of what they went and did. You know, there’s community service and one of the days you know, our guy in he had a Friday off he was able to go with his wife to St. Louis is where she was from, and they happen to see her grandmother, you know, they weren’t gonna go that we can if they didn’t, and lo and behold, you know, unfortunately, two-three months later grandmother passed away and you said you didn’t have that Friday, you know, they wouldn’t been able to see your last time so that that was the first Friday. I remember that story. So time away from work, man. You need that time to unplug. Fridays are great for summary. You know, come back Monday charged up. I think you know, Zandi.
Rav: That’s awesome.. And these are some amazing insights. Thank you so much. Again, this has been a great session, and I’m sure our viewers can take a lot of things away from it. Thank you for doing this.
Pat: Appreciate this historic
