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Dealing with Employees - Good and Bad

8/27/2015

1 Comment

 
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Stopped by my old place of employment yesterday and reminisced with some former coworkers about the good old days.  I was reminded about some of the employees I hired or supervised who committed acts of treachery and deceit, and I lamented my softness - that desire to give someone a second chance.  Or a third.  Or a fourth.  There were many times when I should have bit the bullet and just fired someone on the spot for their poor performance, and probably a few times when I should have passed on hiring someone I knew wouldn't work out in the long run, but I needed someone to fill a spot.

You never know, however, what kind of impact a prospective employee will have.  When I published a monthly newsletter for the company I managed, I usually reserved one page for humor and trivia, and in one issue I included "Nick's Top 10 Favorite Ex-Employees."  Wow, what a reaction THAT got.  It was like someone stirred a pot and knocked Pandora's box off the shelf simultaneously.

Every employee has some value.  Many employees have great value.  A few who have great value make royal screw-ups that you have to fire them for, even if they have great value.  Those were the people who made my list.  These people also make life richer, which I have a genuine appreciation for, as mentioned earlier.

One young woman came in to apply for a Dispatcher position.  She had recently moved from California. She had a background in towing, although she was only in her early twenties.  In fact, her father had run a towing company and had taught her all about it, even teaching her how to drive the heavy wrecker.  I didn't think to ask how she pulled this off at 4' 11' and 97 lbs., but she was convincing.  I didn't really need someone to drive a heavy wrecker, but she seemed self-confident, which is an important trait for a Dispatcher, I believe.  Looking back, I doubt that any of what she told me was true, but it probably wasn't the content of her fiction that got her hired - it was the delivery.

And she was a good Dispatcher, but, like most self-confident people, she rubbed some of her coworkers the wrong way.  She was very crafty - good at psychological warfare.  Even if she made a questionable decision, she could make a good case for it.  Most of her coworkers did not share this talent, so they were at a distinct disadvantage if they had a grievance.  I knew there were things she was not being completely honest about, but she was spunky, and spunky goes a long way in business.

Almost lost in the melodrama was something she started doing that had an immediate positive impact on the bottom line.  We would frequently receive calls from vehicle owners, or former vehicle owners, whose car we had impounded, who could not or did not intend to claim the vehicle.  Often these people were calling after receiving a notification letter from our Lien Department.  Sometimes these people were concerned about how the lien process would affect them, or their credit rating, if they did not claim the vehicle, even if they had sold it someone else before we impounded it.  This Dispatcher recognized an opportunity to put them at ease.  At the time, we simply processed the lien and sold the vehicle for whatever we could get out of it.  Only if the vehicle was involved in an accident, and we knew that an insurance company was responsible for it, would we attempt to recoup the difference if it sold for less than the accumulated towing and storage charges.  Our Dispatcher would talk to these lien letter recipients and assure them that, if they helped to make up the difference when the vehicle sold at a loss, that they would not be pursued further.  Which was true.  And it was also true that our state laws allowed us to pursue further, if we wanted to.  It was simply a market we weren't taking advantage of at the time.

After she showed some success at this, I offered her a percentage of the new income she was generating, in addition to her hourly wage.  She took it upon herself to ask me if she could write up a proposal for a debt satisfaction program, and a week or so later she gave me a notebook with proposed form letters, revenue projections, phone scripts, and multi-colored graphs that blew me away.  At that point, we were flying high with call volumes, and our profit margin was comfortable, so we weren't sure we wanted to make a strong move in this direction.  She kept doing what she was doing, and people sent in checks for $100, or $200, or $25 - whatever she negotiated.

Not long afterward, there was incident involving the ladies' restroom, a garbage bag, and smoke from an exotic weed, which led to multiple incidents involving a drug testing facility and a tainted sample, which led to an angry husband with a history of addiction screaming obscenities.  It all ended very ugly, which is a shame, because she really was one of my favorite employees, and whatever issues she had with controlled substances didn't seem to affect her job performance.  Like I said, though, she rubbed some people the wrong way, and when those people smelled blood in the water, they were swift to strike.

A year or so later, when our call volumes started dropping, I dusted off that notebook she'd given me, and we implemented most of her ideas, which resulted in more than $125,000 in revenue over a 5-year period, with almost NO expense.  Really - I analyzed it at one point and determined that the program was generating more than 80% profit.

You never know where a good idea will come from.

Have a safe and profitable week.

Sincerely,
Nick Kemper


www.TowPartsNow.com

 http://www.hub911.com


1 Comment

Prima Donna at Work? How to Deal with People at Work.

8/12/2015

1 Comment

 
The Prima Donna Story probably is worth telling.  I really didn't mind it too much at the time.  It kind of became a badge of honor, and it probably fit, in a strange way.  
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Within the core group of drivers running impounds at Retriever Towing in the late 80s/early 90s, there were some very individualistic personalities who sometimes conflicted.  It was inevitable.  You really do have to be a little imbalanced to be good at impound towing.  You have to be confident, for sure.  You have to be smart, and a little thick-skinned.

I tried to keep to myself as much as possible when I ran impounds.  I worked swing shift mostly, and for many years was the only swing shift driver on duty, which suited me just fine.  I enjoyed the freedom, and I enjoyed being trusted to work without supervision.  I sometimes went weeks at a time without interacting with my supervisor.  I wasn't a completely by-the-book employee, but then again, neither were any of us.  I often gave the appearance of being a by-the-book employee, which is just as effective, if you ask me, and provides better results.  That's one of the things that working alone can do for you.

I did like to keep the other drivers doing things by-the-book, however.  This is one of the secrets of gaining an advantage in a commission-based pay system.  Commission drivers compete with each other, just like commission salesman do.  A lot of managers and owners and faint-hearted commission drivers and salesman will try to tell you that the workplace should be a team atmosphere where we all work together and strive for harmony and peace and all that crap.  I'm sorry, but that's not reality.  You can help each other, yes.  I do believe that.  And the one or two drivers I worked with over the years that I actually liked and respected, I was more than happy to help.  Everyone else--they were on their own.  And you know what?  They got better because of it.  They had to find ways to be self-sufficient, and to accept and deal with my chicanery, just like I did with theirs, and we all got better as a result.

As I was saying, part of the chicanery was to strive for the double standard of getting away with cutting corners and stacking the deck, yet shrewdly exposing similar efforts from others.  I don't know how good I was at that, but judging from the animosity I regularly faced from my co-workers, I must have been relatively proficient.  There were many complaints to my supervisor from other drivers, but they were sadly lacking in significant factors like evidence, documentation, and proof.  Fortunately, this is still generally an innocent-till-proven-guilty society.  I, on the other hand, rarely complained to my supervisor about other drivers, mostly because I wanted to avoid all contact with him, but when I did, it was accompanied by voluminous documentation and, in some cases, photos.  I also liked to accumulate reportable data, because an avalanche gets so much more attention than a daily snowball, so to speak.

Our graveyard shift driver was a former company manager who was bitter about how that adventure ended, and he seemed to like being on his own even more than me, so graveyard shift was perfect for him.  For most of my time with that company, we had the contract to impound all of the abandoned vehicles for the City of Portland, which meant that every weekday they would call in a list of vehicles to be towed, and we had 24 hours to complete the tows.  In the first years, our dispatcher would write down each tow on a call slip, and he/she would dole them out one at a time to the drivers.  We used a complex rotation system for the drivers that had many nuances, one of which being that drivers did not have to take an abandon unless another driver was clear.  Abandons were obviously low-priority tows.  They paid as well as a regular police tow, but there was no telling what the condition of the vehicle was, and some of them were from distant corners of the city.  Not to mention that they took you into some interesting neighborhoods.  You could take an abandon if you were the only clear driver, if you wanted.  I came up with the idea that you should be able to take two abandons at once, because they were often close to each other, and sometimes one was gone or moved, and it just made sense to not have drivers criss-crossing and zooming around willy-nilly in search of old pieces-of-crap.


 

The hidden wisdom of this clause was that it gave you the opportunity to "shop" the abandons, especially if you somehow got ahead in the rotation.  You could take two call slips for vehicles close together, and choose the ripe Ford Escort with inflated tires over the GMC Vandura with no wheels and a vile stench.  Of course, once you committed to one of the two, the other one was fair game.  This was where the conflict started that led to Primadonna.

The graveyard shift driver was covering a day shift for someone, and he had taken two call slips from the dispatcher.  The abandons that day were close-in, and we were knocking them out quickly.  Once he committed to one, I took the other, because it was a nice easy one.  I made it back to the lot just after he did, and when I got there, he was haranguing our dispatcher, a relatively gentle, passive young man who clearly wasn't used to being questioned about his integrity.

I came into the office and saw the graveyard shift driver, who was about 6' 3" and outweighed the dispatcher by a good 75 lbs., pointing angrily and yelling at the dispatcher for "giving away" his call, the second abandon that I had taken.  It was not pretty.  Now, I'm not an imposing figure, but I couldn't resist pointing out how he didn't seem able to grasp the finer details of the rotation system and how the abandons were portioned out.  It was like he was just waiting for me to intervene.  He turned to me, re-pointed the finger, and I don't remember exactly what he said, but it started with this:

"Listen, you little Primadonna...."

Other people were within earshot, and that's how it got blown out of proportion.  He was upset, there was no doubt about that, but he knew I was right.  It wasn't really about the abandon.  Most outward rage isn't really about what is happening right at the moment.  It was about other things I had done to upset him, about other drivers making more money than he was, about working a day shift and not having control over everything that happened during his work shift, about making sacrifices to become a manager and then having that not work out.  I could see all of that.  I let him have his say.  I didn't complain to my supervisor about the outburst.  We would have other conflicts that were scarier, late at night, without others nearby to save me from getting pummeled, but 95% of the time, we got along just fine.

Sometimes the imbalances balance each other out.

Have a safe and profitable week.



Sincerely,
Nick Kemper
www.TowPartsNow.com


Check out more at http://www.hub911.com


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