In last month's column, I shared some of the tools and techniques Rob Gagliano has used to build and maintain the talent pool needed at his businesses. Gagliano was part of the leadership team that built Collex Collision Experts into a 16-shop chain before selling it in 2014 for about $45 million. More recently, Rob and two of his siblings have acquired three dealerships in the Detroit metro area, needing sales personnel, parts staff, service advisors and technicians in addition to staffing the company’s stand-alone body shop, which has sales of about $400,000 a month.
I asked Rob to walk me through what he’s seen work well over the years in terms of recruiting, hiring and hanging onto a talented workforce. His No. 1 strategy, he said, is to hire for entry-level positions. He’ll always talk to a veteran salesperson or journeyman technician who is looking for work, he said, but his recruitment efforts generally focus on those with less experience.
“We’ve started more of a ‘grow-them-from-within’ mentality, the exact playbook we used at Collex,” Rob told me. “We stopped hiring career people for entry-level jobs. When we hire a detailer, we’re not looking for the guy who is just going to be content doing that. We typically want to see a young person coming into that spot. We want good attitude, not necessarily a ton of experience, just people who enjoy cars. We’ll start them out in a lot porter or prep department position. After six months — definitely not more than two years — if they are reliable and have a good attitude and desire, we’ll move them into a sales role or as a lube tech in the service department, or a painter’s helper in the body shop. We create a career path for them.”
Rob knows body shop and dealership owners who just want to keep those entry-level positions reliably filled, bragging, for example, about a porter who retired after decades in the job.
“That’s looking too short-sighted, solving a problem so you don’t have to hire for that job anymore,” Rob told me. “But that closes that door for new talent to move into your business.”
The next time you need a service advisor or salesperson or body tech, he said, you have to find an unknown someone from outside your business. Rob’s system allows him to fill that position with someone who’s been in his business for some time — leaving him just with their entry-level job opening, which is much easier to fill.
Rob said that doesn’t mean there’s never a place for someone who wants to be in an entry-level position long-term. If your company is large enough that it has three or four detailers, for example, he said you might want to have one who wants to stay there, but still leaving you two or three positions to use as a pipeline to bring in new people to grow within your company.
The other upside to growing talent from within is that it helps you build the culture you want in the business, Rob said.
“If you have someone who has been around the business and knows the expectations and the pace of the company and where things go and how they all fit together, you’re going to have a whole lot more success,” he said.
What does Rob look for in those entry-level employees that tells him they are the right people to take on new skills and roles within the company?
“I like the guys who are oozing with good attitude, and a hunger, a passion for cars,” Rob said. “Someone who wants to make this his career, who is chasing me down to get the interview. That’s someone you want on your team and to invest in. Even if we don’t have a spot, when we see someone like that, we’re going to try to find somewhere to plug them in.”
Attitude and reliability are great, but it requires more in order for them to succeed moving into a new position within the company. I’ll share Rob’s advice on how to make that happen in my next column.
