From 0 employees to more than a hundred, that’s a lot of hard work.
You’ve certainly walked the walk, as they say.
Something I haven’t seen addressed is the use of staffing companies.
While I was truck driving, I noticed distribution centers changing to staffing companies for their dock workers.
Usually all Hispanic workers.
Usually 10 to 20 with 1 or 2 who spoke English.
I know smaller construction companies rely heavily on staffing companies for job to job workers.
Again, mostly Hispanic and most non English speaking.
A man I know, with over 20 years experience finishing concrete, lost his job because the company started using Hispanics they hired through a staffing company.
I don’t believe this to be a good long term strategy for the employer.
If it were me, I would rather pay more for a qualified long time employee with known skills and ability.
I would be interested in your thoughts and observations on the subject.
I used to work for a franchising company, so I spent a lot of time training new franchisees and supporting existing ones.
Most of them simply could not comprehend that the cost of an employee is not just the amount of wages plus burden.
Among the factors that figure into how much an employee’s actual cost is: production rate, cost of mistakes and accidents which eat up management time in addition to the cost of redoing the work, the extent to which employees are self-supervising so you don’t have to hire more supervisors, the cost of poor work pissing off customers.
And the list is much longer than that. But most of the idiot franchisees persisted in believing that the cost = what they paid in wages plus burden. Probably because that was a number they could readily compare.
So they paid minimum wage or as little above it as they could get away with, and they got work proportionate in quality. A lot of them are out of business now.
The strategy I always proposed was to pay $2 or more per hour above “the going rate.” Keep the good employees and lay the crummy ones off. The franchisees who followed this advice are mostly still in business and profitable.
No employer thinks it’s a good long term solution....but business owners often can’t afford to look long term all the time - in the contracting field often have to get this weeks jobs done or they’re out of business next week.
I am in commercial construction. Some overload for subcontractor work forces are filled by staffing companies on jobs that are not exclusively union. The are skilled trade staffing companies that furnish legal workers that have proper paperwork and SSNs.
Companies in residential or light commercial sometimes do not use properly vetted staffing sources, but not on major construction.
Even residential builders are very careful now, compared to a decade ago, due to the penalties.
That being said, I have found illegals with real SSN and valid state driver’s license cards as many have been here for decades. They are gone when discovered as a sub’s employee.