As your business gets up and going you start to hire team members they will begin to look at you as the rich boss. If you aren’t careful a culture of asking for loans will develop. Lee Godbold with Junk Removal Authority tells you why you need to be compassionate with team members but proceed with extreme caution on loaning money or granting special favors to team members. Check us out at https://www.junkra.com Subscribe to this channel for all the best junk removal industry info Like and follow us on Facebook at Junk Removal Authority
What’s up guys? It’s about 12 o’clock on a Sunday. I’m heading into the office to get some truck maintenance done on a day that all the trucks are down. We always had a couple guys come in every other week and maintain trucks. This is one week, they’re in our Charlotte location working on the trucks. I’m just going to spin on in here and just take a look. Make sure we don’t have any wore out tires or anything that’s just any glaring issues. That we’re going to be good to go for the work week next week.
What I want to briefly touch on right now is loans and favors to team members. I’ve done it. I’ve been burned 95% of the time. You want to be compassionate with your team members. You definitely do need to be compassionate, but you can take it too far. Start loaning the money then they’re going to start telling everybody else, “Lee loans money” and “Joe loans money.” Even if you tell them not to, the words are going to get around. Everybody’s going to be trying to borrow money.
One time, one of our guys had a trip. He needed $500 to go with this trip. It turns out he was taking $500 to buy drugs with it. So, we had to let him go. Of course, I never got paid back the $500. If you are going loan, don’t do what I did on that particular loan. He had not work. He had no hours on his own his check, so I could take that money out. If you’re going to loan, have that insurance policy. Don’t loan more than he’s already worked. You can use it as a pay advance, but make sure he already worked the hours. Don’t loan money right there at the end of a pay period. At the beginning of a pay period when he hasn’t worked already because what they’ll do is they’ll take that money and they won’t show up to work potentially. They’re quitting or whatever. I just had a guy that he did that. He was in a kind of a bad situation. The state of New York was taking a lot of his pay. He was behind on rent. He was a good worker and a good guy. He’s slightly older for junk removal worker. He’s about 40 years old. He was from Brooklyn. He came to me and said “I am not going to make rent.” A little bit or slower seasons or the hours are down.
What I did is I loaned him $415. I gave him a $415 pay advance. We’re going to take it out over the next 4 or 5 checks. What I was going to do is make sure that we worked him enough that if at any point he quit, we could withdraw that from his money and from his pay. He doesn’t know yet. That $415 is bound to be withdrawn for his pay because he doesn’t show us yesterday. No call and no show unless something was going on and he’s laid up in hospital. Then he’s done with us and that $415 is coming out of his check. I highly recommend, don’t loan. Work with team members on getting off. If they want to be off on a certain day, have a procedure set up where they give you a week or 2 weeks’ notice. As long as they follow that procedure if it’s all possible, get them off that day. If you get a bunch of team members and they’re trying to switch shifts. A day before or 2 days before they’re trying to get off that kind of deal. If the guy has been with you for a while and has never done it before. You work with him once. If it starts becoming a habit 2 to 3 times, you need to crack down and say “This is the procedure. You’ve got to plan ahead to get off.” Just wasting too much of your time to try and coordinate that. If you’re dealing with a team member coordination and whoever is coordinating them. You’ve got to be firm in your procedures because if you’re not when you start easing off your procedures then people realize it and they start taking advantage of you. Work with your team members as you can, but again I strongly discourage you from loaning out money.