Yigal Adato: 00:00 Hey pawn family, welcome back to another episode of the Pawn Leaders Podcast. I’m so happy to have you here. For those of you who have left me a five star review on Itunes, I really appreciate it. It helps other pawnbrokers in the industry to find the podcast and for them to learn as well and to just better the whole pawnbroking industry as a whole. So thank you so much for that. One thing I do want to talk to you guys about is a post I made on the podcast community. If you’re not on the Pawn Leaders Podcast Community, go to Facebook and just putting Pawn Leaders Podcasts Community, it pops up, asked to join. It’s an incredible community with over 300 pawnbrokers where we answer questions, we talk about pawn, we talk about leadership, marketing and strategy and any question you have, we really, really do answer there. So, what I posted was if you want to build your pawnshop you first have to be honest with what isn’t working. So many times I speak with pawnbrokers and they essentially hold the truth. They’re kind of lying to me about what’s going on, about what’s wrong, about who they need to fire, about what they’re not doing in their business, that they need to do, the truth of the numbers. And so in order to build your pawn business, you have to be 100% honest with yourself about what’s not working. Because if you’re not honest with yourself, you can’t ask for help. If you’re not honest with yourself, you won’t make a change for the better in your business. So you can live that epic life that we always talk about on the show. So I urge you, I implore you, be honest with what’s not working. And if you haven’t taken advantage of the free strategy call with me. It’s a 30 minute call where we just talk about what’s happening in your pawn shop and give you ideas of ways to improve it. Go to pawnleaders.com today, right now, and book a call with me. I promise you, all I want to do is help you make more stress less and live that epic life. And my guest today, Robert Moutal, we talk about employee engagement. And for those of you who have employees, you know how you know it’s not that easy to keep an employee engaged they could be on their cell phones, just not really giving you their all and making you money. There’s some incredible statistics that Robert talks about how employees today are not engaged and how much it’s costing companies. See, Robert Moutal, he works for Univision and Telemundo and as a production manager he won 16 Emmy awards for his work, both behind the scenes and in front of the camera. Robert was then promoted to general manager of the Telemundo station and later to vice president. And so he knew exactly what it needed to be done to keep these employees engaged. So in 2013 while I still working full-time, Robert and his brother Alex founded clarity wave and launched epic, their employee engagement software. So listen to this episode, we talk about employee engagement, what employees want, what you need to do as a business owner and as a pawnshop owner to keep them more engaged and to have them produce more for you. So, thanks for being here once again. And this is my episode with Robert Moutal from Clarity Wave.

Yigal Adato: 03:27 Hey everyone, my name is Yigal Adato and this is the Pawn Leaders Podcast, a podcast that help you make more money, stress less and live an epic life all while working at the pawnshop.

Yigal Adato: 03:50 Robert, welcome to the show brother.

Robert Moutal: 03:52 Thank you very much Yigal. Nice to see you.

Yigal Adato: 03:54 No, it’s my pleasure. So I’ve known you for a long, long time. How many

years has it been?

Robert Moutal: 04:01 Wow. At least 18, 19?

Yigal Adato: 04:04 18, 19 yes since we moved here at the San Diego. And I brought you on because you have this incredible new software platform that deals with employee engagement, employee happiness, and on the Pawn Leaders Podcast we talk about leadership, we talk about culture and how to really create that within the pawn industry. So thank you for being on and let’s talk about what you do and how you do it. So first of all, I want to just touch up on, they heard your bio before, but how did you go just quickly from, you know, being in TV and radio to going into dealing with company culture and employee

engagement?

Robert Moutal: 04:48 Yeah, sure. I’ve always been very interested in how the cultures work. When I was a general manager from one of our stations I used to create the employee of the month program and we had another program called caught doing the right thing where people would nominate people because they did something great and then we post little notes on the Whiteboard, and then the person with the most notes would earn some surprises and the person who got the nomination would earn some prizes as well. So I’ve always liked that to see how companies would better cultures perform a lot better, especially when you see the state of the workforce today and how much employee disengagement can cost you, there was a study that says that this engagement in the U.S Costs about $550 billion a year. So not having your employees engaged means that they’re, you know, they’re looking, for either they’re thinking of another job or they’re just looking at their Facebook page all day, or they’re trying to do the least amount of work possible and they’re not really feeling like they’re part of the company and whatever they do to improve the company’s going to reflect back on them. So that’s how [Incomprehensible].

Yigal Adato: 05:58 Awesome. So let’s go back to that. I want to repeat that really quickly. When you talk about engagement, what you said was, you know, that the employee is looking at their Facebook page or waking up everyday looking for another job they might be on Indeed, they might be on craigslist, just not focusing on making the business more money. They’re focused on trying to get out or just do the least amount of possible.

Robert Moutal: 06:21 Exactly. I mean there was a study that says one out of five employees is actively dissatisfied and looking for a job and 75% of the people who quit because of their boss and they don’t even know about it. I mean, the boss doesn’t even know that it was because of them. They feel that it was something else that created that decision. But most people quit because they’re not happy with the way their managers are managing them. And that is really, really hard through truth.

Yigal Adato: 06:54 Yeah. So you created a software Clarity Wave and tell the listeners what are some things that you’re seeing when it comes to obviously, first give an intro to Clarity Wave. What is Clarity Wave and how does it work? And then we’ll talk about what are the findings that you’re finding on the back end when it comes to engagement.

Robert Moutal: 07:12 Sure. So, in the past some companies use the annual survey and they survey all their employees and there’s companies like great place to work that are really famous because once a year they published the greatest places to work. And I believe this in Fortune magazine or Forbes magazine. And the problem with those surveys is they’re really long about 80 questions, very little participation, they’re very expensive and there’s no real value for the employee. We actually had in my job, we did it once and you don’t really hear anything. All of a sudden we’re a great place to work, but there’s no real value back to me. Maybe the company got some value. So a lot of new companies are coming up with false surveys. We do the surveys instead of once a year, we would once a week. So you can imagine that it’s like if you want to lose a hundred pounds and you weigh yourself today and then you weigh yourself in 20 years, that’s not very good. You want to keep weighing yourself and tracking your progress. So there’s quite a few applications that do those [Incomprehensible] surveys. However, we wanted to take it one step further and not only give a lot of value to the company, but also look, you’ve a lot of value to the employee. The way we do this is that some of the questions are focused on the company. For example, like, you think, your, let’s say your pawnshop. Do you think your pawnshop has good values and communicates them well to the employees? That’s a company question. Do you think your pawnshop is a psychologically good place to work in? That’s another company question. But then you also have questions about the people you work with. So how do you think these people are in terms of honesty? And then it’ll show you Yigal Adato, we’ll show you this, and Mary and John and you get to score every single person anonymously, they don’t get to see who score them. But now when you log into the application, you get to see your own scores, the way the other people perceive you. So what this does is for an employee the first time they see their score and they see for example, they score of five in credibility, they go like, what am I doing that’s giving me that five? Everyone thinks I’m not a very credible person. So they started taking steps and trying to improve upon that particular dimension. Well let’s say respect, we have a lot of cases where people are found to be believed or perceived as being very disrespectful. And after a few months they start improving those scores because they start figuring out, okay, maybe I’m snapping of people, maybe I’m being rude, maybe I’m telling some off color jokes that people are not appreciating and when it comes down to rating me, that’s when they’re giving me that score. It’s kind of like your Uber driver, you know if the cars smells like a body odor, you’re going to get them a bad score. It’s exactly the same thing. Now we’re rating everything. You have Yelp, you have Amazon, everything’s about rating. So that’s the real value that we provide.

Yigal Adato: 10:18 Awesome. So tell me some of the biggest findings you guys are getting when it comes to employee engagement. Company culture on the back end. I want to know the secrets, right? Like the deep down secret of how a pawn shop owner, what they should look out for when it comes to engagement. [Incomprehensible] some of the signs, that somebody is disengaged and what they can do to better engage their employees so that they don’t have that turnover because the turnover costs a lot of money.

Robert Moutal: 10:47 Sure. So one of the things that you have to look out for is when people stop collaborating, stop participating in meetings. So for example, the big problem about this engagement, first of all, it yields a high turn over. My brother for example, he’s part owner of a chain of hugging the stores in Mexico, about 24 stores. And he has a turnover rate of 100% over a 100%. This means that everybody leaves within a year or multiple times. So every time he has to replace a person in cost him about, I believe it’s around $1,200 per person, and that’s in the ice cream industry. And that’s pretty much, you know, people who just scoop ice cream. That is not a high, you know, high training, high-skilled job. Now imagine what it costs when you’re VP resigned because doesn’t feel at home in their company. People become more productive. As I said, they’re looking at their Facebook page are trying to do the least amount of work. Their disengagement is very contagious. The collaboration suffers. There’s four customer service. They start treating your customers, you know, poorly because they don’t feel like why you should they like my company. It affects the whole company culture, it affects growth in the company and they’re really expensive. Replacing an employee can be around, there are some studies about 213% of their annual salary to replace that person especially the higher up you go.

Yigal Adato: 12:18 That’s a lot of money.

Robert Moutal: 12:19 Oh yeah.

Yigal Adato: 12:20 So, tell me some of the things that you think from doing this that you know, management or ownership, the mistakes they make to create a disengaged employee. What’s happening in the companies that’s creating disengaged employees?

Robert Moutal: 12:35 Yes, and actually you touched on a really good point because we like to say that you shouldn’t ask what you’re doing to motivate employees. You should ask what you’re doing to demotivate them because every person you hire doesn’t come demotivated, they come really motivated. Everybody, you know, it’s a new job. It’s like buying a new car. Smells new. Same thing with the job. It smells like new. You’re really excited and then boom, you start getting hit with this and then boom, you’re going to get this other thing. Then communication is not good. Then you start having some respect issues. Then your manager is not really appraising your work. It’s not really recognizing every time you’re doing something good. And those things started like, you know, hitting you, hitting you, hitting you until you become really disengaged and deflated. So those are some of the things that they do. Very important when the manager is not involved, when the manager is not recognizing the employees. That’s one of the biggest or lowest scoring questions we get when the manager is not involved in my own growth. When I feel like I’m not growing anymore. And we actually, one of the measurements we haven’t in our software is what we call the engaged the pyramid of need, which is pretty much like the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. They go from very basic needs to the highest needs. So we have very basic individual needs, managerial support. We have collaboration with that. We have the need belonging and that the very top, we have the need to grow. So when you have all those needs met, you don’t leave the company. My basic needs are being met. I’m getting a good salary. I can take care of my family. I can feel like I’m contributing to society. I can feel like my manager is taking care of me and not just as a job, but almost as a person as well and I feel like I belonged to a team and then I feel like I have a growth path in that team and I can grow wherever I want even if it’s not professionally, but I could still grow as a person, then you’re going to stay in that company forever. When we feel a lot of companies where the managers are not involved, especially when the owner is not involved and they just kind of pawn off the surveys to the lower, you know HR people and they answer the surveys. Those companies usually reflect really poor scores. Whereas when you have the CEO who answers every single week the questions, those are companies with eight and nine scores throughout the board.

Yigal Adato: 15:04 I like that you said when you pawn off the questions [Incomprehensible] let me talk about something, you talked about like personal development, like personal growth. And I also believe that, I feel like when you’re an owner of a pawnshop, when you’re owner of any business or a manager, if you’re not involved in the personal growth of the employee, then the employee kind of doesn’t appreciate working there as much. I remember when we own the stores and we did, you know, GIA courses, we paid for them as long as they finished it. We did self improvement courses as long as they finished it. So they had agreements with us where we said, we will pay for the course, but you have to finish it. If you don’t finish it, you end up paying for it.

Robert Moutal: 15:47 End up paying it, exactly.

Yigal Adato: 15:48 So we wanted them to grow personally because we knew that if their family life got better, if their personal life got better, they’ll work much better in the store.

Robert Moutal: 15:56 But not only that, when the manager is disengaged, then it’s contagious. It rolls down. So why am I not getting a room to grow because my manager doesn’t care. He’s already looking for the next opportunity to jump. So, it always comes back to, you know, from high to low.

Yigal Adato: 16:17 Yeah. And also sometimes managers keep the employees down because they’re afraid that a great employee might take their job. So they disengage on purpose, they sabotage on purpose.

Robert Moutal: 16:29 Absolutely, but sometimes they don’t feel like they want to be like a grooming place for their competitors. Some companies, you know, a lot of people with no experience come in, they learn, learn, learn, learn, learn, and then they go to a better, higher paying job because you kind of prepare them for the next opportunity. And that’s something that scares people as well.

Yigal Adato: 16:50 So do you think, and this is my opinion and I think, I’ll ask you yours. I believe management should essentially be a coach.

Robert Moutal: 16:59 Absolutely.

Yigal Adato: 17:00 Be able to coach employees to become better employees and better people and to grow. So if there’s a pawn shop owner listening to this, if you’re just going to promote a great salesperson into management, it’s a bad idea. They have to be great coaches as well. Do you agree with that comment?

Robert Moutal: 17:19 Absolutely, I agree. One of the biggest problems you have is when you take a salesperson that’s just killing it out there and they’re really, really good at selling and you turn them into a manager, usually they suck because they are really poor time manager, you know, they’re really bad at time management. They’re really bad at goal setting and they’re good at their own goals, but they’re not really good at and they’re really bad at coaching and just as you said, every single manager that succeeds is a manager that mentors and that really looked for the best in others. We have a case, for example, in a law firm in Las Vegas that are using my presentations. She had a really, really bad scores. Her respect score was like four point or 3.75 out of 10 and you look at our scores now three years later, which means they didn’t just fire her and she has like eight, you know, 8.2, 8.3 and she’s still in the company. And when I asked the CEO, because he’s a buddy of mine, what did you do to get her there? Why didn’t you just get rid of her? It turns out that she was working for a team of lawyers that would really, really high, you know, very, very strong personalities, very type A personalities, very aggressive and she just wasn’t, she was snapping back at them. They were yelling at each other and she was not taking it from them. And what they did is instead of getting rid of her, they moved her to the front desk. Very, very gutsy move. You’re moving someone with a low respect score to be the face, the first face they’ll see when you’re [Incomrpehensible] going their company. And now she’s thriving because she’s in a place where she gets to meet other people. She gets to really represent the brand. She’s not dealing with all the office politics and everyone likes her and the scores reflect what everyone else perceives about her. And you didn’t have to get rid of a good employee. Sometimes you may have like a really good salesperson that has the worst identity. They have the worst respect. Why are you keeping them in your company? Is making money a lot better than having a good culture? It depends. Some companies will say, yeah, I’d rather keep my stockholders happy than to have my employees happy.

Yigal Adato: 19:39 We had something like that happened where we have the number one sales guy who essentially was a bully. He was a big, big bully and it took us three weeks. Me and Morris kind of like fighting back and forth. What are we going to do and we let this person go and you can just see like everybody like took a deep breath like, ah, finally these guys out. And what happened was everybody else picked up the slack [Incomrpehesnible] what he was selling.

Robert Moutal: 20:07 One thing we have is because the whole system is a gamified. Every time you answer a survey, you earn points and then those points you can trade them off for, you know, some goodies. Whatever the company wants, they manage their own store. We just give them like a shell of a store and they can manage it with you know, a lot of free prizes or cheap prizes or more expensive prices or whatever, however much they want to spend. But one of the attributes of the system is that every single day you can go in and you can answer two questions. How do you feel today? And how do you perceive the climate every single day, and you get 20 points each time. It’s not a lot of points, but some people really do it every day. What this does is it allows you to do exactly what you were saying. You can see a trend especially when you move one manager, let’s say you have 15 pawnshops, you can move one manager from one place to another and track exactly that movement, change the overall mood of the company of that location and the overall perception of the climate. So you can see, oh, for example, they happens a lot in, in accounting departments, in finance departments. You can see that every quarter the tension goes down. Like the tension actually goes up. The overall climate goes down because it’s the quarter end close. And every time they feel like they’re being overworked, they still have to do the daily stuff, when they have to close the quarter and at the end of the year it really goes down. So, if you’re seeing those cyclical things, bringing some temps, you know, invest a little bit in helping those people so they’re not overwhelmed every three months and you can see those trends how they go up or down.

Yigal Adato: 21:54 Well, you reminded me of something, there’s times in the pawnshop where it’s Valentine’s Day, big sales, big amount of stress, you know, Christmas, back to school. And what we would do is we would pay for people’s lunches. [Incomprehensible] lunch the next few days, we’ll get pizza, we’ll get Chinese food or we would say, hey, you know, whoever wants to go to this concert on Saturday night, we’ll pay for the ticket, or we’re going bowling on Tuesday. And what that created for us was that release of tension and it increased the good climate within the company. So they could have said like, man, we’re working like crazy. You know, the pawn counter is super busy, sales are going insane. I mean, I got free lunch. And so that put a smile on people’s face. So just doing those stuff like that as well helps, you know, and just thinking about your employees, how can I help them to make today better, even though it’s a little bit stressful.

Robert Moutal: 22:47 Exactly. Another very important thing is when you make people part of the solution and not just, you know, ram it down their throats, it’s a lot, a lot better. People like to implement their own ideas. We have a whole section where people can make public suggestions and pretty much like a suggestion box, except without all the chewing gum from everyone. Just throw it thinking it’s like a [Incomprehensible] Yeah, this one. When when you suggest something and it gets approved to be published, people going to start voting on the suggestion. So some people will say stuff like, you know, we want an espresso machine. Okay. Some others, will come up with a process that they can improve upon in a certain way and people will start voting on them. And then the ones with the most votes of course go to the top and then management can decide, okay, this is a very viable suggestion. Let’s take it, let’s turn it into a reality and you can change its status from being open to being approved. So imagine when you see that something Yigal Adato suggested now is approved. Everyone sees that it was your suggestions. You get the credit, you get to feel good about that. And the whole company benefited from that. So everyone being part of that growth is like everyone is rowing in the same direction. The boat is going really fast because everyone knows exactly where they’re going.

Yigal Adato: 24:07 And I want to say something to the people listening. A lot of times as pawnbrokers, we think, ah, you know, $100 in a espresso machine or $500, whatever it costs, I’m going to pay $100 in coffee a month or water or you think negative, you think I don’t want to spend the money. But if you’re sitting on a hundred thousand or $200,000 of inventory and your employees see that and they say, man, I just want some coffee in the morning. Or I remember when Morris and I we put in a water machine so people didn’t have to keep on bringing bottles of water or we put, we actually did this once and it was very, very cool. We just bought granola bars from Costco and we put them out and we would say free if you need a granola bar, take one. So what that caused was if somebody was starving, you know, if they forgot, they got out of bed late and they flew to the store and they didn’t have breakfast and their lunch time that you scheduled for them is that one and they started for nine. All they’re going to think about Robert is food. So we put out some fruit and we put out some granola bars and they were super happy about that.

Robert Moutal: 25:12 Yeah. When you have people that are hangry, you know, hungry and angry, that’s the worst. You know, when they’re tired or when they’re hungry, that’s when people are the grouches. Yeah, for sure.

Yigal Adato: 25:21 I love it man. So, this has been incredible. I think that for me as doing the podcast, one of the biggest things I want to put out into the industry is for pawn shops to create a better culture. And I believe that culture is created when you find out what your people need, not what you assume they need. And I think that clarity wave is an incredible way of finding out what they need. Not just that, but the other hand is where people can self assess others in the company to say, Hey, my manager’s acting like, you know, he’s a, I don’t want to say the word in case he’s listening, he’s mean, yeah, or you know, this guy, you know, Joe Schmoe is really, he’s being a bully and we at self assessing, if you’re being a bully in the pawnshop and you get all this self assessment and you get a score of three out of 10, you might go home that I didn’t say, man, yes, I want to continue being this way. And so you know, that guy’s got to go, or that person’s going to walk into your office and say, Hey, I’ve got a score three boss, what do I need to do? Like what am I doing wrong? So I think that’s brilliant. And I do think that pawnshops need to check you out. Where do they go to find you and the software?

Robert Moutal: 26:38 Yeah. So they go to Clarity Wave, so it’s C L A R I T Y and wave like an ocean wave because every week you get the waves of clarity. So claritywave.com we actually have an ROI calculator that you input your numbers, how many employees you have, how much turnover you have, et cetera. It gives you a real number of how much it’s costing you to have this engaged employees. And the number is, I’m going to venture a guess, but at least 10 times more than you think. Yeah. And sometimes you see hundreds of thousands of dollars for small companies just what it costs in absenteeism, what it costs in lower productivity, what it costs in all those things. And it’s a really, if we can just improve 1% each of those metrics, you’re saving so much money and the system pays for itself immediately and the system is actually very affordable.

Yigal Adato: 27:35 Yeah, no, I saw the pricing and if you go to claritywave.com you can see the pricing. It’s actually very affordable, per user. I recommend it and I think I know who you are and I know what you do, your amount of integrity and know that the software systems is going to be incredible on the back end. If not, you wouldn’t put it out.

Robert Moutal: 27:51 Exactly.

New Speaker: 27:52 Awesome. Robert, thank you so much for being on the show. I

appreciate you for those listening. Thank you for listening. And if you want to talk more about what’s going on in the pawn industry, go to the Pawn Leaders Podcast Community on Facebook, or if you want to have a conversation with me, it’s a free conversation just to see how you’re doing in the industry, in the business go to pawnleaders.com and I can’t wait to see you guys in the next episode.

Highlights

I want to talk to you guys about one of the biggest mistakes that I see in the pawn industry. It’s not just the pawn industry it’s also in retail. Let me tell you what it is, it’s promoting a pawn broker to become a manager.

For some reason, and I made this mistake when I owned my shops, we feel like the person who’s on the counter is doing the most pawn loans, the most sales, the most layaway’s, we should pull them out and make them management. Make them lead a team of people, make them orchestrate our business, make them organize what needs to happen on a daily basis but the truth is that not every one’s cut out to lead, not every one’s cut out to manage. Some people honestly don’t want to do that, they enjoy pawn broking so much or sales so much that they don’t want to sit there behind a desk orchestrating, looking at reports, making sure that everything’s going well.

Now, one job isn’t more important then the other, don’t get me wrong, you need an incredible manager. You need an incredible pawn broker, SLA or sales person, whatever you call them in your shops, but don’t for one second believe that because you have an incredible pawn broker they will an incredible leader or manager, especially with no training. That’s not training coming from you, that’s specialized training. Specialized training in communication in organization, in HR, in how to lead teams, reading books about management skills and leadership, and people and psychology so that they get to the point that they know how people work, how teams work and what they need to do to make your store successful.

Now on the other hand, if you’re a manager listening to this and you think just because you were a great pawn broker you’re a great manager, you are wrong.

Now there’s some exceptions to the rule always. If you’re not reading books on management and leadership, and organizing business and marketing and sales, if you’re not reading books on influence and psychology, if you’re not taking a course, and there’s so many courses, Udemy has courses and I think even Harvard Business School has free courses online, to freshen up your skills on management, on leading people, then you’re not doing a good job. You think you might be but you’re not.

I think as store owners we get nervous to hire somebody on the outside who doesn’t know the business, that our business is so special but there’s some incredible managers out there in retail who if you just bring them in and train them a little bit on what pawn broking is and how to become a pawn broker there would be incredible managers in your store.

So stop. If you keep promoting from within, people who don’t deserve to become management or who just shouldn’t be managers, who aren’t fit for that, right? I mean, I had … I remember one of our employees, we made her assistant manager. I’ll never forget this.

We made her assistant manager and things weren’t working out well, it was okay, until one day she came to us and said, “You know what guys, I quit.” We’re like, “Wait a second. You’ve been with the company for eight years. Why would you quit?” She told us, she said that this isn’t what she wants to do. So we asked her, “Well, what if we just brought you back down to doing pawn and sales?” Her answer, “I’ll stay with pleasure because that’s what I love to do.” She’s like, “I don’t want the extra responsibility. I don’t want the extra management. I just don’t want it.”

But if you believe that somebody deserves it, then spend the money. I’m going to say this again. Pawn brokers, spend the money to train your people. Spend the money to sign them up for a group like The Pawn Leaders Alliance. Spend the money to get them a program like EntreLeadership Leadership or any management course in your city because for some reason pawn brokers believe that it’s not worth the investment. Yet, they’re hoarding jewelry and merchandise that sits there and they’re wondering why, you are wondering why, your stores aren’t doing as well as you think they could.

It’s your fault. It’s your fault because you’re not spending the money to train your people. You’re not spending the money to give them what they need, right? The right tools, the right weapons, to manage your store and create an incredible culture, and make sales and marketing, and all these things work together because all you keep on saying is, “Aw, it’s too expensive. Aw, it’s too much money,” or you don’t believe in it.

If you’re going to bring up a manager from your store and you haven’t sent them on some type of training, stop. If you’re going to promote somebody from within to run your stores and you haven’t given them a, just a, like a disc test or a personality test, stop. It’s not fair to them to have that expectation. It’s not fair to you to think that they’re going to be incredible if they haven’t been trained.

So with that I’ll leave you this weekend and I hope you listen to this a couple of times because one … This is one of the most important Five Minute Fridays I’ve done it, I’ve gone over my five minutes and that’s okay with me.

We are not growing the pawn industry because we’re throwing people into these positions thinking that they know what to do but we don’t even know what we want them to do. We can’t even give them the skills to run our shops. We’re just saying to, “Manage my store. Run my store. Why isn’t my pawn increasing? Why aren’t my sale increasing?” But we’re not giving them the tools that they need so they can do the work.

If you have a manager that’s with you right now, five years, six years, seven years, eight years, I don’t care if its been six months, let’s have a conversation about how to train them so that they can become better. Let’s have a conversation about what you can find in your city, how they can join the Pawn Leaders to become better managers or just taking a course online that can help them out just that much more. If you aren’t making the lives of your employees better, you have no right to ask them to make your store better.

I’ll say this again. If you aren’t helping to make the lives of your team better, you have no right to ask them to make your store better.

With that I’ll leave you. Let’s have a conversation about this in the Pawn Leaders podcast community on Facebook. If you’re not part of it jump in, it’s free. We have incredible conversation’s in there. If you want to have a conversation with me, a strategy call, a complimentary strategy call, I charge nothing for this I just want to help you out with where you are. Go to PawnLeaders.com and schedule a call with me.

But please stop making this mistake, I beg you.

We keep on wondering why the pawn industry doesn’t have good talent, it’s because we are not training and we’re not giving people the method to become incredible talent so that they can stay in a business for a long time.