Can't Find the Right Employees? Create Them.

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1:33There's no safe like SimpliSafe. From Entrepreneur Media, this is Problem Solvers, a show in which entrepreneurs do what entrepreneurs do best, solve unexpected problems in their business. We were completely wrong. And I'm just like, it's not selling. It was like, we have to start from scratch. I'm Jason Pfeiffer, the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine.

1:59Have you ever wondered what the most popular tattoos are to remove? Like the tattoos that people most get removed from their bodies. I admit I had not wondered this until I talked to someone who is in the business of removing tattoos from bodies. And then, of course, I had to know. Yeah, names of X's are really popular. some star signs, particularly the indecisive ones, are quite popular to remove. Also, there are tattoo fashion trends that come and go. Hadn't really thought about that. But fine line tattoos, for example, really popular a while ago. Not so much anymore. People are getting them removed.

2:37Anyway, that's not the reason we're here to talk today. It's not to talk about why people get tattoos removed. Rather, it's to talk about who removes the tattoos, because that is a very interesting business story. And to start, why don't I introduce you to the person you just heard a moment ago? Her name is Jo. I'm Jo Kelton. I'm the CEO of Removeri, a tattoo removal company. And yet Removeri is more than just a tattoo removal company. Removeri is actually the only global pure play tattoo removal company, which is to say they're the only ones doing it at scale and only focusing on removals. They have 150 locations across the U.S., Canada, and Australia.

3:23Their nearest competitor has like eight locations, which means that removery isn't just serving this market. It's actually defining this market. There's around 100 million Americans have a tattoo and around a third of those people want to remove or change one of their tattoos. And so it's hard to believe that we are the largest and really the only pure play company. And you might think that's very smart. That's excellent. You expand into that space and you get to own this huge market with this huge demand. But there was an interesting problem that Jo and her team ran into as they really slammed the gas on expansion.

4:06And that is, if you are going to define a market, then you don't actually get to just pull from an existing marketplace of talent, which is maybe a more complicated way of saying, who do you hire to remove all those tattoos? If there isn't a huge market of people who are doing tattoo removal and you need to expand rapidly, who do you hire? Where do you find those people? That isn't easy. If you're going to define a market, then you actually also have to create the talent for that market. So as we started, we really sought to define or understand the client, but also understand the business. And so we partnered with three existing businesses that we ended up doing a complete acquisition of.

5:02And the number one problem they told us at the time was recruitment. And so quite happily trying to solve their problem, I hired a recruiter and so gradually realized that actually wasn't their problem. The problem wasn't recruiting because we could put up the world's best job ads, but there was no one out there with the qualification or really the intent to become a tattoo removal specialist. So it was very quick that we realized that we had to do a little bit more than recruiting and it was actually the entire talent life cycle that was the problem. So we had to create our tattoo removal specialists.

5:33And how do you do that? That is what we're going to be talking about today on Problem Solvers. And this isn't just relevant if you want to be creating a market the way that Remover-E does, but rather this is important if you want to hire at all. Because the solution that Remover-E came to isn't some magic crazy solution. It was creating an incredibly intentional way of identifying and shaping talent. And what does that require? It requires understanding who you're looking for and what culture you're bringing them into. Coming up after the break. If you own a business, then you need so many things.

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8:08Selling things on eBay was already easy. Now it's even easier than easy. Start using eBay labels today. For more information, visit ebay.com slash labels. All right, we're back. I am talking with Joe Kelton of Removery about how this company not only defined a market, but then had to figure out how to create the employees that would fill this market. And to start, I asked her this. I said, look, you guys may be the only global pure play tattoo removal company, but you didn't invent tattoo removal. It existed already. So what was the situation? Like, why was it so hard to find people who do tattoo removals?

8:52Why was it so hard to hire people when the skill is out there? So if you bought a laser and decided that you were going to remove tattoos, usually you would get the manufacturer training. And so that's when people could open a shop as a single operator because they bought the laser, they did the laser manufacturing training, and then all of a sudden they're a tattoo removal specialist. but those people were not going to come and apply for our jobs. Those people were already in business. And so there are a few laser colleges that taught primarily laser hair removal because there are a lot of laser hair removal jobs.

9:25And in fact, we would aim to be as commonplace as laser hair removal in the future. And so tattoo removal is just something that you don't grow up and go to school and decide that you want to remove tattoos or at least not yet. So what do you do? What is the starting point for solving this problem? How do you create an entire workforce? Yeah, initially, we were very proactive in our job ads and we're going out to LinkedIn and going out through job boards and really trying to recruit people. We had 33 locations when we started. And because of that, we really knew who the high performers were in those locations.

10:02And so we developed our defined roles and we developed our KPIs for those roles. And then we worked with a company to define, it was a predictive talent assessment company, to really define custom profiles that we wanted to recruit against. Which is to say, sorry, let me just translate a little bit of what you said, or at least make sure that I'm following it. You've got 33 locations. It's staffed by tattoo removal specialists or people who had become tattoo removal specialists. and some of them were very high performers. So perhaps the first thing that would make sense to do is to take a look at who were those people and where did they come from?

10:39What are their backgrounds? And then you're using that information to create a profile of the kind of people that you might be able to target as you go forward. Is that a good understanding? Yeah, that's exactly right. Okay, and what was the profile? Who were those people? So the people, often they came from a laser hair removal background or they came from another aesthetic background. And at that point, we were operating in states that estheticians could perform tattoo removal services. And so we wanted to take that real cookie cutter or repeatable process and define who were the high performers, what were the behavioral characteristics that defined their high performance?

11:17And how did we find people more like them to staff the rest of our business? That makes sense because there hadn't been this established brand like you have built for this particular space and therefore there weren't the same amount of jobs available for it. But in an adjacent space like laser hair removal, there were. There's all sorts of salons where that happens and that has to be staffed by somebody. So those people were perhaps the most natural to say, hey, I see a job opening for this tattoo removal thing. And I don't know exactly how to do that, but I do know how to remove hair. It can't be that different.

11:54And that's probably where they came from. That's where a lot of them came from in the beginning. And that's when we were really reaching out to them and trying to poach them or trying to bring them across to the other side. I think people that work in hair removal generally really enjoy the laser side of the business. and we have a really cool laser. It always helps to have a cool laser. We were enticing them across. Tattoo removal is an amazing industry because you hear stories of people's tattoos, you hear stories of why people want to remove tattoos, and so it's something different every day where hair removal is like you're repeating the same thing over and over again, and while you might have different clients, The technique is probably not as cool or not as exciting as tattoo removal.

12:43And the people that we have as clients are amazing. Okay, you work with an agency. You've got a profile now. You work with an agency. So what happens next? So the next problem was we had to train them. And so we created from scratch a proprietary training program. and that's onboarding in culture, in our clinical processes, in our operational processes and in our client experience. And so in order to train those things, we actually had to define them first. And so that goes back to we did an immersive research program to try and codify breast practice in the industry. And we found that in the original locations that we acquired, they were all doing things quite differently, even though they're all doing things to the same end of removing tattoos.

13:34We had one team that was operating in dermatology offices, one that was operating in tattoo shops and one that had office condos. And so while they were all the same, they felt quite different. And so we wanted to codify what we believed was the leading practice in the industry or to create the industry. And then we wanted to create a training program that could bring people from the starting point where they knew nothing about tattoo removal into operating independently in their own studio within around 160 hours training or four weeks. Okay, how do you do that? And I realize that we could probably spend a full week talking about that, but here's what I'd love for you to focus on.

14:18Imagine someone listening right now who is saying, I am at a place in my business, I'm not building a 150 location tattoo removal business, but I am in my own business where I'm scaling up and I need to figure out how to train people to do things. And I've never actually done that before because I know how to do the things because I started the business and I just had to figure it out. And I had some people who were with me and they figured it out with me. And now we all know how to do these things, but we don't really know why we know how to do these things or how to teach anybody else how to do these things.

14:51So you had to do this. you have to come up with like a whole system and a whole philosophy from scratch. Where do you even begin on doing that? Hiring good people to do it. It was exactly as you say, we had from the clinical side of the business, it was all in someone's head and the training previously had just been on the job training. So we wanted to systematize that into a program. And to do that, we brought on a director of learning and development who had done it before with another similar size company, similar multi-location company. And so she created a program for each of our roles in our studios.

15:29So a consulting role and a clinical role with the key factors that were already in our playbooks that we thought that were the most important things that people graduated. We called it our Removerry Academy. So they graduated Removerry Academy with the skills that they needed to begin their journey as a tattoo removal specialist. So what does that, like if you were to, and I realized that you weren't the person doing that, this is the reason you hire people who do that. But if you could take me down to the ground level of structuring something like that, what's your advice to folks on where to begin building out a training program for future talent?

16:10Yeah, I think what we did at the start was to define the basic knowledge and skills that people would need in order to operate solo. And then breaking those down into modules of how to train someone from zero to hero, if you like, within that four-week time. And then creating guides for them. We had participant guides. We had knowledge checks. And we were just really creating things. A lot of the time on the fly, we presented it one week, and then we would sit back and review how did that go, what was good, what worked, what didn't work. And then it's a constant evolution. And even now we're evolving our training program to maintain ourselves as the best in the industry.

16:52And so I would say every quarter it goes through a review process so that we know that we're training the right things. But from scratch, it was hard. It's not easy to build something from nothing. And I think that's the skills that the people in our business, that they all have. that answer. No, you know, what's so helpful, actually, what was I think was most helpful about that answer was allowing people to hear that the answer isn't you come up with this perfect thing and then you run everybody through it. Because I think that's what people are worried about is if you don't know exactly how to train everybody, then you have it.

17:29It feels in a way like whatever you do is going to be set in stone and will now be the way in which everybody operates. So you got to get it right the first time because you only have one time. And you're saying that's not true at all. We would try something and we would use it in some training and we would watch it. We would say if it works or doesn't. And if not, we would adjust. I would imagine if I was in a position of having to train a whole lot of people and I was listening to this, the first thing I would wonder is, okay, but in those early stages where you're updating the training all the time, what is happening with the people that you're training?

18:03Are they saying, come on guys, you don't seem to know how to train me to do this job or are they just aware this is a growing company, we're developing the processes with you, you're an early part of the team and welcome to the journey. What was that early relationship like with those first employees? With the first employees, they were all super excited to be part of something new and part of something exciting and a lot of those people are still with us today. They know that the training evolves and we also have ongoing development plans and ongoing development programs for them so it's not like they get left behind because they trained in the early days.

18:40I think to survive and to thrive in a company like this, you have to be really comfortable with ambiguity and be working in the grey rather than the black and white and we always come from a lens of 80 % right is better than 100 % right and waiting another year to do it. So whatever we do, that's the constant philosophy and the constant lens that we're looking through. And whether that's implementing a software program or implementing a training program, it's just got to be 80 % right. And we just keep continuing to evolve and get better every day. I also love your focus on reviewing and updating because it made me think of this thing.

19:19It's a bit different, but I'll just share it with you and see what your reaction is. I heard a little while ago, a couple months ago, from a guy who was a customer experience executive at an international company. And he told me that he had left that company because of a disagreement over the direction and then decided, crazily, to just take a bunch of frontline customer service jobs at like a hardware store, at an airline, because he wanted to see what it was actually like to work these jobs that he had directed from an extremely high level. And what he found was a giant mess, like a just giant mess.

20:05And one of the first things that really stuck out to me, I had him write a feature about this in Entrepreneur Magazine, which we published recently. One of the fascinating things I found was he was stunned by the amount of, so let's say he would take a job at a national hardware brand and like a Home Depot or a Lowe's or something like that, he would spend weeks watching videos, watching these training videos. And then he would be thrown out on the floor as if he knew exactly what to do. And he said the thing that he didn't understand as an executive, but now understands once he was a frontline worker, is that having somebody watch a whole bunch of videos does not actually train them to do a job.

20:49And the retention for these videos is minuscule. You barely remember anything. And it seemed like the system had been designed to fulfill needs that were not the actual frontline workers' needs. They were the needs of, for example, the executive who just needed to be able to check a bunch of boxes and say, we'll get this information across, We'll get that information across. I tell you all that to ask you, as you guys built this program and you built it with this specific goal in mind of training within a fixed amount of time, and then you're watching and you're reviewing, what failure signs are you watching for?

21:28What are you trying to guard against? And maybe what did you see happen that maybe you didn't expect to happen that you fixed? The most important thing to us is that when people graduate from their onboarding, they really feel like they're part of the culture of removerry. And so a lot of what we do in the first four weeks is immersion into our culture to understand who we are, what we do, our purpose, why we do it. And we feel that if people understand the culture and the values, then the technical side of the training will be fine. And so we bring everybody into HQ and we definitely question that at the start because it's a very expensive way to train people rather than give them a whole bunch of videos to watch and let them learn by themselves.

22:17Which is to say bringing people into HQ means you're flying them to wherever your headquarters are. Your headquarters are where? In Austin, in Texas. In Austin, Texas. So wherever they are, one of these 150 locations, you're flying everybody to Austin, Texas? Apart from the Australians. We leave them in Australia. That's probably financially wise. Yeah, but we fly everybody in for week two of training. So week one, they sit in their studios. Week two, they come into Austin and they develop relationships with other people and that becomes their support network. And then they understand the culture.

22:51They meet all of the HQ support team. We want them to feel like as a headquarters, we're here to support them. And we're not here to do anything else but to make their lives easier and better out in the field. And then they go out into studios and train with peers and they train with trainers in our studios. And the technical part of it, that's just it's going to come to be a consultant or to be a laser specialist. But the cultural part of it and the side that we have a six steps to success program for our client experience, that's the part that we think is really valuable to be done together, to be done in person.

23:28And in terms of failure, what we're looking for is when someone's out in the studio, do they feel confident and comfortable to be treating clients by themselves? And we come, most of the leadership team come from a medical background or a medical adjacent background. And our training is always in that sort of field is see one, do one, train one. And so we're taking people through those same steps as a tattoo removal specialist to see how it's done, to actually practice and learn how to do it hands-on, and then to be able to talk back or to train back to your trainer in how to do it. So using the same as any sort of medical nursing allied health field and bringing it into tattoo removal.

24:08And we hadn't quite double-clicked on this yet, but I suppose we should. Your answer there was a lot about culture. You were inventing the culture at the same time, weren't you? Because like you said, you had acquired a bunch of different tattoo removal companies. They were operating in different ways. They had their own systems and feelings and philosophies probably. So at the same time that you're developing a system to train people, you're developing a unified vision for them all to be a part of. Am I right? And what's the starting point for that? That was harder than creating the systems and the processes really, because you're right in that we had the three platform investment businesses that we bought on board and all of them were very different.

24:56And so we started off and did an immersive research project with all of those businesses with prospective clients to understand if we had the breadth of value proposition so that we could merge under a single brand or a single banner. And so by working with them and co-creating the culture, the best practice, the customer experience playbook, by agreeing and aligning on our values, not only with the leaders of those businesses, but with the people that worked in the studios. I think using that philosophy of designing the service together and co-creating who we are together and allowed us to align on our culture and then really to be able to distribute that at scale.

25:36Do you think that flying people to Austin scales or at 300 stores, does that scale? At 700 stores, does that scale? Or is the idea that you do the classic startup thinking, you do the thing that doesn't scale at the beginning, because in the beginning, it's so important to establish that culture. And then once you have a team of people who are deeply embedded in every store who carry that culture that there is no longer the reason to bring them to one central location. I think we'll have centers of excellence, but we'll always try and bring people together. Our studios are staffed by between two and four or five people.

26:21And so it's quite isolating to work in that distributed network. And so we always want them to have great relationships with other people and be connected with the whole team. And so bringing them into a center of excellence, be that Austin, New York, Chicago, or Sydney, it really doesn't matter as long as everybody is exposed to a similar program. And I think really being absorbed and immersed in the cultural side helps. So where are we now in this story, right? We started here with there was no workforce to be had. You had to invent it, which meant that you had to identify who were the people who are most likely to become part of this workforce.