Building Technicians Rather than Finding Technicians

Building Technicians Rather than Finding Technicians

  - Lessons Learned, episode 60

 

Here’s an age-old question: Is it better to “build or buy” a technician? The reality is that almost all business owners do some of both. In talking with several dozen people in the Small Biz Thoughts Technology Community, I find the most common answers to “How did you find your best technicians?” to be:

• 
  
  Technical recruiters
• Job boards (e.g., Monster)
• College internships and placement offices
• Friends/family/acquaintances

Less common but also mentioned are:

• Referred by a current employee
• Someone who worked at one of our clients
• Someone who just walked in the door looking for a job

I put that list in order from Most to Least likely to have the most professional experience and certifications. I shouldn’t have to say it, but we all probably know that the correlation between experience/certification and quality employee is present but weak. The relationship between cost and experience/certification is stronger.

We started out with the friends and family option because it just sort of happened. When it came time to hire an administrative assistant, I put ads out and had very good luck collecting resumes. So, after that, we primarily hired by placing ads on job boards (and primarily Craigslist). On a couple of occasions we used a job recruiter. We got some good candidates but a lot of people who just weren’t a good fit. I suspect the recruiters needed to send those folks out on interviews in order to justify their existence.

I would say, overall, I had the most luck with paid internships promoted through local tech schools and community colleges, followed by Craigslist. And that brings us to the build vs. buy question.

Note: A large part of the following discussion is true for me because we were rigorous about having “our” processes and procedures. We had our way of doing things, so we were committed to training new employees on our processes no matter where they came from or how qualified they were.

As we settled into recruiting from tech schools and Craigslist, we also settled into training technicians to create great techs out of good techs. This meant that our hiring process focused primarily on finding people who had a good attitude, a good culture fit, and a focus on good service. You’ve probably heard it a thousand times, but you can train people on the technology, but it’s harder to train them to have a customer-focused attitude toward service.

Lessons Learned: First, if I were to start over again today, I would only rely on internships and Craigslist to find people who are motivated and have technical aptitude. We would “build our own” from the start. Only if there was an urgent need for a specific talent or high-level guru would I spend money on recruiters.

Second, I would develop a more formalized training process for our team. We really figured out and documented our hiring process. It is detailed and works great with our service-focused approach. Where we could improve is evaluating which skills are needed for which technicians and providing them with the training to learn what they need to learn.

 

How do you feel about buy vs. build?

Feedback always welcome.

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Episode 60

This Episode is part of the ongoing Lessons Learned series. For all the information, and an index of Lessons Learned episodes, go to the Lessons Learned Page. 

Leave comments and questions below. And join me next week, right here.

Subscribe to the blog so you don't miss a thing.

 

:-)

 

We Need a Real Data Center

We Need a Real Data Center

 - Lessons Learned, episode 59

 

In 2006 I bought a friend’s company. Well, essentially, I acquired his company in exchange for him coming on my staff at a very nice salary for a couple years. His company included a few regular consulting clients and a huge number of web sites set up in a rack full of crappy old “servers” and “network devices” that ran mostly on Unix.

I acquired all that so I could get his one big client. They became our largest client at the time. We also got a couple of smaller clients that I was happy to keep. The plan for all the micro clients (1-3 users) and all the hosted web sites was to pass them off to other consultants. First, we needed to move those web sites to the cloud so I didn’t have to stay awake at night worrying that the Frankenstein rack of junk hardware would fail.

At the time, I had a mostly-full equipment rack that housed three servers for us, switches, and a couple of servers that housed products we were test-driving for vendors. It was nice and clean and organized and beautiful. We used blue network cables on this rack and it was known as the blue rack.

Then we had the other rack full of junk, housing hundreds of web sites. We used green network cables on that one so, as you guessed by now, it was called the green rack.

All of this was in a room we’d built up to be our “server” room. It was about ten feet by four feet, had a dedicated through-the-wall air conditioner, lots of 30-amp electrical outlets, and a bunch of UPS backups.

This was a decent little server room, but hardly a data center in any sense of the word. In 2006 we were committed to moving all servers and services to the cloud, both for our clients and ourselves. So this little server room would do nicely until we could move things to a real data center. We’d already started planning that move. And then . ..

The owner of the building next to ours assumed that, since his parking lot had been there for decades, it would be okay to dig a hole in it for something. The back hoe went down about two feet before it cut through a major electrical cable and blew up a transformer, forcing a power outage for blocks around that lasted more than a week! The transformer was one of those 4-foot cubes you see from time to time. I guess you don’t replace those things quickly.

Anyway, we were instantly on battery backup, but that wasn’t going to last days. I ran down to Home Depot and bought a generator, then built a cable beefy enough and long enough to go from the parking lot to our server room. I didn’t know whether the UPSs were rated for generator usage, but it didn’t really matter. I plugged them in and ordered new UPSs to be delivered as soon as possible.

And then we signed the deal to set up our racks in the real data center. Our plan hadn’t changed, really. We were just forced to speed up the execution. Unfortunately, that experience cost a good deal of money. Aside from the UPSs, the generator, and the cable, we had to pay someone to sleep in the office because we couldn’t close the doors with the big cable running through the place.

Lessons learned. Well, this is a tough one. Aside from learning that the building owner next door is a moron, the rest was just poor timing. We had a plan to move everything. We just didn’t get to do it on our schedule.

We did not have a week-long power outage in our emergency planning, but our experience dealing with disasters made this one pretty low stress under the circumstances.

Looking back, my final assessment is that we should have been done two weeks earlier.

But for context, most of the rest of the industry didn’t gets servers out of the office for at least five or ten years after us!

 

Feedback always welcome.

-- -- --

 

Episode 59

This Episode is part of the ongoing Lessons Learned series. For all the information, and an index of Lessons Learned episodes, go to the Lessons Learned Page. https://blog.smallbizthoughts.com/p/lessons-learned-blog-series.html

Leave comments and questions below. And join me next week, right here.

Subscribe to the blog so you don't miss a thing.

 

:-)

Business of Tech Plus Content Now in the Small Biz Thoughts Community

For those who haven't noticed yet, Business of Tech Plus content has started appearing in the Small Biz Thoughts community resource library.

How It Works

Kara set up an automation that pulls Plus content directly into a new section at the bottom of the resource library. Once it's posted on the Plus side, it shows up here automatically—no extra steps needed.

What's Included

Here's a rundown of what you'll find:

Full-Length Interviews

Instead of the shorter public clips, you get access to the complete conversations. The recent interview with Mike Riggs and Wes Spencer, for instance, runs about 22 minutes in full versus the six-minute public version.

Monthly Briefs

A summary at the start of each month covering the key news from the previous month and why it matters.

Vendor Strategy Briefs

In-depth looks at various vendors—helpful if you're doing due diligence on potential technology partners. There are currently 12 briefs available covering: Rewst, Liongard, SuperOps, Auvik, Huntress, Pax8, N-able, ConnectWise, Kaseya, Acronis, Slide, and NinjaOne.

Each brief goes through a thorough process: vendors are given the opportunity to fact-check the content, and the briefs are also independently fact-checked to ensure accuracy. New ones come out regularly.  

Leadership Content

Additional pieces covering topics like the evolving role of channel chiefs and other industry trends.

A Few More Coming

This is the first batch of content to make its way over. There are still a few more pieces that will be added soon.

If you have any questions about finding this content, just head to the resource library and scroll down to the Plus section.