Greg: Welcome to the Tim Faller Show, where production is paramount and we discuss the tools, time and people involved with getting jobs done and making a profit. On today’s episode of The Tim Faller Show, we’ll be talking about firing family with Craig Deimler, former owner of Deimler Family Construction, current salesperson for Alco products, and a long time Ari facilitator alongside Tim Faller.

Greg: I’m your co-host, Greg Woleck. Here is the Tim Faller show.

Tim: Hey, everyone, Tim Faller here and welcome to another episode of The Tim Faller Show. Send us your ideas for topics. We’d love to get those on and it would sure help me out not having to think of everything. So give me a little break here. Send me some ideas. Even if maybe we’ve done it before. Maybe there is another little slant.

Tim: Or maybe there’s just. We need to talk about it again. So, Tim@remodelersadvantage.com. Also, for those of you who may have missed a couple of episodes, that was Greg Woleck, my new co-host. I’m sure you’re missing Steve, but Greg’s doing a great job as well. He will eventually be taking over my responsibilities with remodelers advantage when I retire.

Tim: I’ve been very impressed with Greg, and he brings knowledge to this position that I have small amounts of, but and as well as the things that I’ve been talking about for years and years and years. So if you want to know more about what he does, get in touch with him. Greg@remodelersadvantage.com. So in a previous episode we had our guests to Greg, Dime, Lauren, and we spent a good 30 minutes, 35 minutes talking about some of the challenges with hiring family members.

Tim: And if you haven’t heard that podcast, go back and listen to it. It has some dynamite information in there about watching out for various things. And then, Ned, how to how to make it really work. If you’re going to actually be hiring someone from your family. So today we’re talking with the same guest about what happens when it just ain’t working.

Tim: Okay. In other words, you thought it was going to work, but it ain’t working. And the interesting thing about this is he has some very personal experience with this, which I think you’ll share with us. At least we’re going to ask him and we’ll see how much he’s willing to give us. So there’s a lot of reasons why it doesn’t work.

Tim: And sometimes the person that we’re looking at just doesn’t have the skills We thought they could learn. We thought they could grow into it. We thought they could pick these skills up. They just don’t have them. Maybe started out good, but they just didn’t develop. We thought that this can can work, but it doesn’t. Maybe they’re okay at their job, but they’re just not pulling their weight.

Tim: In other words, they’re good, but they’re not good enough for the team that you have in place. And I think one of the reasons why this happens and it really has nothing to do with the individual. It just has to do with the company getting bigger as companies grow, people are outgrown, if you will. And one of the best examples would be, well, a couple of them would be marketing.

Tim: You know, at a certain point, your marketing has to shift. All right. Another one would be bookkeeping. I mean, if you’re bookkeeping for a $500,000 company, that’s one thing. When it becomes a $10 million company. It just ain’t the same. And so we can maybe the company outgrows the person and so whatever the reason is, something has to be done.

Tim: Now, it’s hard enough to fire somebody who isn’t family, but firing somebody who is family. That’s got to be tough. And so we’re going to talk today about that. So let’s get started, Greg.

Greg: In the next Tim, certainly could be an emotional topic, a challenging topic, but we are grateful to have Craig Deimler. We’re back with us today. Craig is the owner of Deimler Family Construction in Pennsylvania. Yet since 2020, he has served as the top performing salesperson for alco products. He’s also a long time facilitator here at Remodelers Advantage. Welcome back, Craig.

Craig: Thanks for having me.

Tim: Hey, this is going to be great. So, you know, I think everybody that listen to the show knows that I’m a classic conflict avoider. And so firing anybody is a is a real challenge for me, although I have thought that maybe I should rent, maybe after retirement, I should rent myself out like that George Clooney character that flies around the country firing people.

Tim: And you know, maybe I could be a little bit better with that since I don’t know these people. But anyway, so tell us what you do now, Craig, and would you share the story about why I have you on this particular podcast? Sure.

Craig: So right now, one of the designers and sales reps for Alco products, it fits my personality really well because it’s what I love to do and I don’t necessarily like all of the other things that go along with having a business. There’s a lot that goes along with hiring and firing and all the bookkeeping and everything else that is required in order to keep a business open.

Craig: So I get to do what I really love to do. And but I believe the reason that you had me on here is because I am actually fired many people over the years, including family members.

Tim: Yeah. So anyone in particular or you don’t want to go there?

Craig: I will say that my brother used to work with us. It was a mutual separation at that point in time and I, of course, worked with my parents. I had to fire my mom.

Tim: There it is. That’s what I wanted. Had to fire is. Mom. I just want to say one other thing, too. I mean, Craig didn’t run away from a business that was failing and go do what he really wanted to do. Craig ran a great, great business and and kept it really functioning well. It just chose and I think it’s kind of interesting, just chose to do what he loves rather than sort of what he what he was doing.

Tim: And I think that’s that’s admirable in itself. So we’re talking about family. So let’s kind of refresh everybody’s memory. They may not have heard the other podcast that we started with, but what do we need to watch out for? Or maybe a little bit about the hiring side of this. When we’re talking about family members and then maybe why would you want to stay away from hiring?

Tim: And that, of course, keeps us from firing as well. But give us a little bit about that that we covered in the previous podcast.

Craig: One of the challenges is what does the business need? And many times a a family member will be I think we talked about this last time they will get clocked into a position just because they might just need a job, right? They either couldn’t find a job outside of it or something that really fit for them and they wanted a job.

Craig: And the family member is like, Hey, we could just use your help. And they just get plopped into a position, whether they’re qualified for it or not. And with the assumption they’ll just learn, they’ll get to know what it is and they’ll be great. And there aren’t really good expectations set up for that position. Sometimes there’s not even a job position written for it, which is a big, big mistake.

Craig: And therefore, what do you judge them against? How do you know if they’re doing a good job or not? Is it just because I feel that they’re doing a good job or is there actually a performance indicators that are being met or exceeded, which is what we really want to look at? And conversely, we have to look at it.

Craig: Are they not reading those performance indicators? Because that’s where we get into what do we do with that person? You know, in some cases, maybe they get moved into a totally different position. In other cases, maybe they are, you know, maybe they just weren’t put into the right position to begin. And so it does make sense to move them into a different area, because now that you’ve worked with them, you realize that their strengths are actually in a different area.

Craig: And I use myself as a prime example. Can I build stuff? Absolutely. Do I want to build stuff? No, I don’t. But you really want to have a good craftsman putting this stuff together. I can do it. I know how, but it’s not what I love to do. And I found my love because I’ve been put into a different position.

Craig: And that’s what I fell in love with. Sales. So it can work and be advantageous for the company to move them to a different area. But it could also be that they’re just avoiding the inevitable, which is they’re not really a good fit for the company, and that can be for a lot of different reasons.

Tim: So let’s kind of explore it a little more specific on some of those reasons why I have this family work family member working for me. And I’m I’m it’s it doesn’t feel right. Something’s not quite right. What might be some of the things behind that. What are some of those specifics that might fit into that reason for letting them go.

Craig: On terms that can be a bias. There can be biases from a number of different sources. It could be the other team members that have an issue with them. You know, they may not respect them because they are a family member and they feel that somebody else would have been a better fit for that particular position and what that person was put there.

Craig: There can be other reasons that are they might have a bad personality and not everybody’s got a great personality and they just don’t jive with the rest of the team members. And every company has a feel about right. It’s why some people are sick and other people don’t. They just don’t fit well with their coworkers. So they’re very driven and they they only want people that are really, really driven, right?

Craig: Occasionally I’ll see companies and facilitation side where if you look at their org chart and the personality profiles there, there’s like a whole bunch of IDs that are just real drive and they get stuff done and then you’ll get one person that comes in there that’s got a lot of soft skills that the D’s don’t care about, right?

Craig: They just want to get it done. And that person with the softer side doesn’t last as long because they don’t feel welcomed in that particular environment. Or conversely, it could be you have a really strong personality and or this family member has a strong personality and everybody else is kind of a little bit more laid back. They’re more on the soft side and soft skills side.

Craig: And I’ve often described the hides and the dis personality is the tornadoes that leave through the room and leave the carnage in their wake.

Tim: Right.

Craig: And that doesn’t always mesh well with certain corporate cultures.

Tim: Right. So in the previous podcast, we talked about the idea of, you know, interviewing and having a system for interviewing when we’re going to hire, whether it’s a family member or anybody else. So let’s kind of slip over to this idea of evaluating so it probably the same rules apply for evaluating Bill, the non-family member to Joe, the family member.

Tim: But what are your thoughts on how do you accurately evaluate a family member employee in a way that doesn’t show your bias?

Craig: I personally believe the best way to do that is to have the other team members evaluate them, and that way I used to do it even for myself. I would have a 3060 evaluation because how do you how do you rate yourself doing a great job. Right. But in reality, they’re going to see things very differently. And so I used to do anonymous surveys for them to evaluate me on these key and key items.

Craig: And I think that can be a really good tool for evaluating a family member that is not by the business owner so that you can really hear what they’re saying. And some people will not do it. Some people are more than happy to give you their feedback, right. And they don’t care. You know, I said it and I’ll honest and other people don’t feel that way and they need to feel that they can voice that opinion.

Craig: And this really comes from the top as well. Does the person at the top is the business owner really want to hear this information or do they cut it off?

Tim: Well, that was my my next question. But go ahead.

Craig: Next from business owners don’t want to hear they don’t want to hear bad things about them. They don’t hear bad things about family member. They don’t even want to hear necessarily bad things about any of their teammates and they’ll just ignore it. So it really depends upon the personality of the owner and what they want to do with that information.

Craig: I mentioned before and in the last podcast that we did about keeping things very separate, and I love the key performance indicators so that if this is where you’re supposed to be here or above and you’re performing here and below, it’s a very easy metric to look at. It takes all the personality out of it and it focuses on what the needs of the business are versus anything personal.

Craig: And the more you can take out attacking a person what you didn’t do this and say things such as the things that need to get done aren’t getting the right focus on the actual activities rather than on the person. It makes it a whole lot less personal and you don’t feel like you’re firing a person, but you’re actually opening up another opportunity for somebody else.

Craig: That would be a better.

Tim: Do you have any thoughts on on how a business owner differentiates between two employees that just don’t like each other and getting an A value? In other words, if someone were to evaluate me and one of my teammates just didn’t like me for whatever reason would give me a bad review. How do you separate that out? I mean, this is a I know this is a very challenging thing, but do you have any thoughts on how you would I mean, if I really wanted the information, but I felt like some of the team was already negatively biased.

Tim: How would I separate that information out?

Craig: Well, if you already know that there should have been a conversation long before this to say, why aren’t we working well together? What’s going on? And maybe it’s just a personality conflict. Maybe it is that that person truly isn’t performing to the level of expectation. Maybe the other person has such a high expectation that nobody’s ever going to be able to meet.

Craig: I’ve met people like that where it doesn’t matter who they’re working with, it is always everybody’s subpar. Now their stuff is always perfect, but everybody else is subpar. And it doesn’t matter if they’re family or non-family and you’re going to know that about a personality or about a person. And that might just be one that doesn’t fit with the corporate culture.

Craig: There are times, though, that those really high performers are kept in a company because they perform so well, but they’re actually very toxic. Right. And they need not be there. There are companies out there that they would fit perfectly in. But for your personal company, this is incumbent upon the management team and the owner to say, we have to talk about this.

Craig: Your personality is not wearing well with others. How can we work around this? It’s one of the reasons that I love the desk profiling, because it tells me when I when you really study it, how do I communicate better with these types of individuals? I know about myself that I can be a very demanding person. So as a result, I have to soften some of that and become more like a chameleon When I’m talking to, say, admin staff, they don’t move at the same pace that I do.

Craig: They’re very good at what they do, but I can’t communicate with them the same way that I would communicate with, say, another person that has a very strong personality. We can be very short to the point and move on. We hit it, we go, and then other people are going to want to have more conversation about that. And when you recognize that’s how they are, it’s a whole lot easier to deal with them and communicate with them.

Tim: Yeah. So I think this gets back to me too, the idea of KPIs and making them realistic. So that anybody can hit the KPI if they if they really apply themselves. So getting them getting KPIs realistic is a critical part of this because they can be so high that nobody is going to hit them and then it doesn’t matter whether they’re family or not.

Tim: It’s sort of like an unreachable goal. And so getting those KPIs or those activities, I like that whole idea of focusing on activities and not people. So let’s got to get right to the nut of it here. So let’s just say that family member, whatever relationship you want to put in there, then you’ve evaluated, you realize it’s just now work.

Tim: And how do you do that? How do you let them go?

Craig: And I think you do it the exact same way that you would with anybody else. With one little exception, there has to be a reassurance that the family unit is still some it’s still intact. This has nothing to do with them as a person and them as an involved in the family. This has to do with what the business needs.

Craig: And if you keep putting it back to this is what the business needs. But even before you get to that point, you’re letting them go just like you would with anyone else. There should be conversations leading up to this. There should never be a surprise that you’re not going to be there after a certain period of time. Right.

Craig: Has all those all of a sudden one day they walk is a ten year out. Right? Right. You’re out and have never had a conversation with you to say, Tim, Greg, these are the things that I’m noticing. This is what the business needs in order to move forward. How do you think we can get there? Again, it has nothing to do with them as a person.

Craig: It’s about what the business needs. All right. Now, how as a person can I support you to get there? Do I need to get you training? Yeah. There’s a whole reason that remodelers advantage exists. Business owners need that support the production managers, roundtables are that exact same thing. They need the support of other production manager so they can see that it’s not just them.

Craig: And what are some of the other really good tools that people are using so I can do my job better? Do they need to take other classes that are specific for those things? You know, if they’re not a really great technology person, doesn’t mean that they can’t learn it. They might just need to take classes on it. So finding out what support can I give you to get you to be able to do your job, that not everybody is going to take that information and want to grow.

Craig: And you’d mentioned at the very beginning of the show that what it takes to run a $500,000 business versus a $10 million business is very, very different. There are bumps along the way when companies are growing that you can do a lot and you can get by a lot because in a small company, everything’s all kept up in your head and you are the chief cook and bottle.

Craig: You are selling it. So therefore you knew everything about what was being sold. You didn’t have to write anything down because it was all up in your head. You had the conversation. So now when you’re running the production side, you can easily tell them what that was. Well, then once you’ve got to bring on a production person, now you’ve got to get that information out of the sales and designs head on the paper so that it can then be given to productions, it can be executed properly.

Craig: Those bumps typically happen like that 2 to 3 million range, right? And then another bump happens. Somewhere in that 5 to 7 million is another bump happens in that 10 to 12 leverage. That is every time a company grows to that next level, things happen. And one of the nice things about a larger company is that you can actually have more specialty things so that you don’t have to do five different people’s types of activities.

Craig: You can do one or two very defined things, and that might fit really well for certain individuals. Yeah, it’s a hard thing to get to those points, but once you get there, it can be really advantageous, especially for family members that have really great skills in one particular or two particular areas that they don’t have to worry about.

Craig: The other things not do those well, they can just focus on that.

Tim: So you’re talking about, you know, the family relationship staying intact and it’s about the business that it made me think of this phrase like somebody I’ll start a comment. They’ll say, don’t take this personally. And then I go, Stop right there, because I’m going to take this personally. Whatever you say, I’m going to take it personally because you’ve already set me up.

Tim: And so do you have some ideas about how to separate that business from family? Is there any any notion like, like two days after you fire somebody, you have the family over for a cookout and datum, you know, fancy steaks or something like that, just to say we still love you? Is there? I’m kind of exaggerating. I think.

Tim: But any any way that you any little tip you can give us on how to separate those things.

Craig: That’s very much going to depend upon the person’s personality. Some people will just it’ll be water off a duck’s back, right? No problem. And then other people, they will need some time to grieve because it is a loss. It is a big loss. Yeah, but you can’t exclude them from family functions. Then after it’s done, you have to.

Craig: And there might have to be some rules put in place if they were let go, like we had mentioned in the last one, like when you were at a family function, you don’t talk about business. Business gets talked about it there unless it’s going to prohibit the person from actually being engaged in that event at the time. Right then you might give them 5 minutes just to get it, get it out there and then say, okay, I’ve got my notes, we’ll talk about this tomorrow and now let’s go enjoy this birthday party or whatever or whatever we’re doing.

Craig: But everybody’s going to be different in how they react to being let go, being let go no matter what is a very difficult thing because we all want to do a good job. There might be some people out there that purposely think that they’re owed that or they deserve to have something, and that’s a totally different story and conversation.

Craig: But in general, if they have any pride in what they wanted to do and they cared about the business, they don’t want this to happen any more than you.

Tim: Right.

Craig: And hopefully anybody that’s having to consider firing a family member is having those conversations long before about their work performance. Right. And what can we do to correct it? And that would be for any them.

Tim: Yeah, I think it’s a real shame when people just get you know, they show up for work on a Thursday and somebody says, pack your stuff, you’re out of here. And and that’s totally out of the blue. And I don’t think that should ever happen to anybody, regardless of family or not. So one of the phrases that we like to use in remodelers advantage and I’m just sitting here thinking about it, is free up their future.

Tim: And and when we say that, I’m just thinking about how it’s always in my mind, I hate to even say this to a national audience, but it’s always in my mind when I get out of here, just free up your future. But it really ought to be. We’re literally providing an opportunity for them to do something that they are good at or that they can excel at.

Tim: And I think that’s maybe another part of this thing is how can I help you get into a job or a role or a place where you’re going to love being there as opposed to the stress that obviously happens when you come to work. So maybe that free up your future term needs to be much more positive in our heads than you know, Hey, I’m or free up your future, which is unfortunately kind of been the way I’ve seen it for years now.

Craig: So I’ve also seen it where family members feel trapped. Right. They can’t go outside of the family business because what are mom and dad going to do? What is, you know, what’s my sister or brother going to do if I’m not here, you know, and they feel like they have to stay even where they are absolutely miserable. Right.

Craig: And then it leads to all kinds of other problems because then it typically shows up in work performance or whatever else. And then there’s tensions within the family. Yeah. Having there are actually family business psychologists that will work with you to help you keep that business side and that family side strong because they know the strength, the stresses that come from being in a family business.

Craig: Yeah. And for those people that are willing to talk to a counselor about those things, I think it’s a great idea. I’ve recommended it to several family businesses over the years as a facilitator that they they get that outside perspective, whether it’s a coach or a psychologist or a therapist or whatever you want to use. Having a third party help you navigate some of those weird things can actually help you avoid needing to fire some.

Tim: Yeah. So any we’re going to wrap up here, but I’m thinking like I think in our communication before we got doing the recording here, you just ask the question like, are there any ramifications or are there any other sort of things that happen that we haven’t talked about that we should mention here as a result of letting a family member go.

Craig: Or sometimes people can get vindictive and it may sever ties when a family member has to be fired that they no longer talk. They literally go and do their own thing and nurture other paths. Cross again. Yeah, and that’s a personality issue and what they want to do with it, they can also rally around and get other family members because, you know, they fired me and they were the victim.

Craig: And so not everybody’s going to go out and say, What’s your side of the story? Right? You see just that surface side and they can actually get a whole lot of people in the family on their side, Right. To cut you out. And it happens.

Tim: Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Now, I want to say don’t ever hire a family member. All right. So, Craig, any last little bit of final advice for the audience out there on this? Again, the Golden Nugget, if you will.

Craig: If you’re going to fire family members, make sure you put rules in place. How are you going to deal with one another and what’s it going to look like? I think even addressing what would it look like if ultimately this doesn’t work out. It’s a conversation that you would normally never have with an employee when you’re hiring somebody from outside of the family.

Craig: But I think it’s a really important thing to have with a family member. All right. We’re going to give this a try. We think that this would be good, but if it doesn’t work out, how are we going to come to a mutual agreement that it doesn’t hurt the family unit in?

Tim: I really, really like that. Yeah. That that is so good. And having that conversation right up front. Yeah, I love that. I think I cut you off. Craig. I’m sorry. I just was had just had, like, I just had to say I like that so. Well, Craig, thank you very much. This another great episode for us. And like I said before, the first one out, we’ll get you back on for some other other topics that may be a little more happy.

Craig: And anytime you want to, you know where to find me.

Tim: Sounds great.

Greg: Tim. I mean, business is hard enough, but family business. Wow. What do you think?

Tim: Well, I just if if you haven’t listened to the podcast about about how kind of hiring family, listen to that one as well, because there’s a lot of crossover commonality that goes on with this. But there’s just so much in here. I really like the idea of if you have to deal with an individual, particularly family, but it would be true across the board is to deal with both with the lack of activity or the lack of performance, not the person.

Tim: And instead of saying, you’re not doing this, it’s more like this role. This task is not getting done. It takes a little bit of that sting out of it, I think. And I’ve heard that before, But it was really good, you know, to have that reinforced. I really like the idea of evaluating team members, evaluating not the family member evaluating.

Tim: Again, I challenged Craig on it a little bit because I’ve seen so many dynamics where it might not be getting a fair evaluation from the team for lots of different reasons. And so I don’t I really like it, but I’m cautious about it as well. So I’m kind of torn with that. But I think that’s a really key thing, that it not be just the family member that says, yeah, they’re doing a good job, but what other people within the business see?

Greg: Yeah, I like just the fact that, you know, Craig is he kept it is professional right. It’s the same rules for for the employee as it is for the family. I mean the family is the employee just as much. And I think that’s another way to keep keep in your lane or keep, you know, keep things crystal clear.

Tim: Yeah. So right there at the end, I think, you know, again, we asked for the Golden Nugget and I think Craig hit it out of the park with have the conversation about what’s going to happen if this doesn’t work. What what? Well, it’s almost like I keep telling people, like in a pre-construction meeting, talk to the client about change orders, because if you don’t talk about it before you’re in the middle of it, it’s so much harder to say, that’s going to cost you a lot more money.

Tim: If you talk about that, you know, two weeks before it happens, it’s easier to talk about it. I see the same thing here. If we talk about this, write up, maybe even write something up and not sign like legal documents, but just some kind of thing that says, you know, we’re going to measure performance this way. If this doesn’t work, this is how we’re going to handle it.

Tim: We’re going to have this conversation. We’re going to have three conversations before there is a termination or whatever it is, and get that understanding going. And then maybe a little bit of conversation about how will this impact family life. You know, once we go on from there, I think that’s probably one of the big things. And then the other thing that he said that I just wrote down real quickly, and that is that this person’s going to grieve and it’s going to grieving is different for everybody.

Tim: And it doesn’t matter whether it’s, you know, the death of a family member or the death of a pet, you know, divorce, all kinds of things. People grieve differently about different things. And so in some cases, people are just going to go like, hey, okay, didn’t work, I’m off. Yeah, I’ll go find another job and I’ll see you at Thanksgiving.

Tim: Right? Or but other people, it’s going to be brooding and, and you know, holding it in and not being able to deal with it. And so we have to give them some time. But we don’t but we don’t let it go on forever until we make sure that we rebuild that family connection, if at all possible. So there’s just so many huge things in here about life in general.

Tim: This is not just about firing a family member. This is about relationships across the board. So absolutely fantastic episode.

Greg: Yes. It’s such a big part of what we do. So once again, we’d like to thank Craig Deimler for joining us today. And thank you for listening to another episode of The Tim Faller Show.

Tim: And remember, it’s Tim Faller show. We’re working hard to eliminate. It is what it is from your vocabulary.

Greg: This has been another episode of the Tim Faller show. Would you like to hire Tim or myself to help fast track your growth? Please send me an email. Greg Remodelers advantage dot com. For more information about our production manager and design manager roundtables to get more information about consulting for your team or if you’ve ideas for the podcast, please subscribe to the show.

Greg: A comment on iTunes, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. Thank you so much for listening. I don’t.