Tips On Motivating Your Staff

Every RV Park’s success is contingent on the quality of its manager and supporting staff and their desire to hit certain targets. And, as the owner, it is imperative that you understand the psychology and techniques required to make your team put out a superlative performance. In this RV Park Mastery podcast we’re going to review those lessons learned.

What is The RV Park Mastery Podcast?

Welcome to the RV Park Mastery Podcast, where you will learn the correct way to identify, evaluate, negotiate, perform due diligence on, renegotiate, finance, turn-around and operate RV parks. Your host is the 5th largest owner of RV and mobile home parks in the United States, Frank Rolfe.

RV parks don't typically have a whole lot of employees. It's not like a McDonald's fast food franchise where the typical McDonald's has around 60 full-time and part-time employees. You would never see that in your average RV park. But even if you have just one employee, it's very important you learn how to motivate them properly. This is Frank Rolfe with the RV Park Mastery Podcast. We're gonna talk about how to motivate your manager, how to motivate your employees. And let's first start off by thinking of the old analogy of trying to motivate a mule to move forward down a path, carrying maybe a big old heavy load on its back. There's two ways to make that mule move. One is what they call the carrot, two is known as the stick.

Now, the carrot is typically a carrot hanging on a string on a pole, and the person trying to move the mule dangles that carrot in front of the mule, and the mule walks forward because it wants to get the carrot. But every time it walks forward, you push the carrot a little farther out, and it steps forward again. So how do you motivate a manager with a carrot? How do you give them something that they want so bad that they're willing to really put out an exemplary effort? Well, typically that's gonna work with what we call commissions and bonuses, these types of things. These are monetary ways to influence your manager's decisions on what they do with their time.

So, if you give a manager a bonus for hitting a certain level of revenue, well, then they have skin in the game to get that done. They really, really, really want to make that happen because they want that financial incentive. So the carrot is a great way. We see that in society all the time. We see people using the carrot to get managers to move forward. I was at a Domino's Pizza franchise recently, and I saw in the back of this thing, the pizza wasn't ready yet. I was kind of bored just looking around. I saw a screen that had a whole bunch of numbers on it that was constantly changing. But I couldn't tell what it was. So I asked the manager, "Hey, what's that board back there?" And he said, "Oh, that board, well, what that is, is that every time someone calls in a Domino's pizza order, a computer tracks how long it takes us for when the order is placed to when the pizza is ready. And all those numbers you see on that screen, that's every Domino's pizza in our market."

This was up in St. Louis. So this was every Domino's in St. Louis is on that computer tracker. And apparently the timing it takes at Domino's from when the order comes in to when the pizza is ready is a big deal to them, because that's the only real stat they're tracking. But if your restaurant wins that contest each day, then they send everyone in the entire restaurant a bonus. It's not a huge amount of money, but it's not insignificant. I think it's like $50 or something. So, Domino's uses this system to really motivate all the workers to try and get really fast, ever faster, because they're in direct competition with all those other Domino's. That's the carrot. That's how they're getting them to do it. They're influencing their behavior by giving them a financial reward.

Now, the other part of the equation, though, to motivate things is not the carrot, it's called the stick. Now, in the stick, what you're doing is you're threatening people. If they don't hit certain goals, there's punishment. And typically in most businesses, the punishment is simply you get fired. So you have the positive, the carrot, and then you have the negative in the form of the stick. Now, there was a thing once done on PBS. They took two basketball coaches, one super, super positive, super nice, super friendly, the other super negative. And they gave them each 10 college basketball players, the same 10, just to make just to make it fair, and they had them each shoot 10 free throws.

And the question is, who would do a better job of motivating those players to do well? The carrot or the stick? The carrot being the happy coach, the stick being the bad coach. So when you shot for the happy coach, he would say if you missed, "Well, nice try. Try again. I know you can do it." But the other coach, the tough coach, would say things like, "You'll never be able to get in the NBA if you can't do better than that. You'll never be able to do anything in college if you can't do better than that." So they would shoot their free throws, and then at the end of it, they would add up how many they made. And they found that resoundingly, the tough coach, the stick coach, won. Then they rescrambled the players and did it all over again. Who won on the second round? The tough coach again. Then they did it again. Still the tough coach. And the tough coach's score was overwhelmingly ahead of the nice, friendly coach.

So the general assumption was that in the battle of the carrot and the stick, the stick actually wins. Apparently, people fear failure more than they lust for that little token of affection carrot. But yet we can sometimes influence how that even operates. On the carrot side, not everyone wants a financial incentive. That's one of the big problems. So you may think that money cures all evil, that money is what everyone wants the most, but studies have found that's not necessarily true. Some of your managers, they don't want money. They want other things. And we call this their currency, because this is the thing that they value more than money.

What would that be, you might say? Well, it might be that they just want some additional vacation time. That's what they want if they hit their goals. They just want to have a little extra more free time. Or maybe what they want is something that's not exactly money, something money can buy, but they won't buy it for themselves because they'll feel bad. They'll feel like it was just too much of a luxury. Let's say your manager really is into baseball. If you gave him the money to buy the baseball tickets, he wouldn't do it. He'd think he can't do it, he has to do this or pay that. But if you give them the baseball tickets, they don't have an ability to not do what they really want to do. So if you really want to motivate with a carrot, you really need to understand the currency.

Now, if you want to motivate with a stick, though, at the same time, we have to be 100% fair. Nothing will turn off your employees more than when they are unfairly judged and unfairly punished. So you have to be able to devise a system with complete accountability. You can't just say, "Oh, I don't think you're doing a very good job." You have to explain what the job is and what you have to hit, and then you have to keep measure of that. Can you imagine a football coach that let the great players go without any explanation? It wouldn't be very good for team morale. Can you imagine Andy Reid walking in and firing Patrick Mahomes and saying, "Yeah, Patrick, yeah, I think you're washed up. You're not good anymore"? No. In the world of football, they keep every possible stat. How many yards you ran, how many yards you threw, you name it, they track it all. You have to do the same thing. If you want to use the stick methodology, you have to judge people fairly, and you have to build some kind of basis of how you evaluate them.

Now, too many RV park owners, what they'll do is they'll simply throw a person in to see if they sink or swim. They won't give them a lot of training. They won't even give them the carrot or the stick. They'll just throw them in. That never works. Anyone who wants to get exemplary performance from the employee has to actually think through the process, has to devote a little time to it, or it's never going to work. And one final point to consider, and this has always been true in the RV park industry, is the old adage. It was a quote told to me by an old-timer, which is, it's easier to change people than to change people. And that's true. Sometimes, better than trying to come up with the carrot or coming up with the stick, is simply getting somebody new in that role.

We've had many cases where the manager has flailed, told us they can't do any better, nobody wants to come into the RV park, oh, there's just no demand. And rather than trying to redeem them or retrain them or threaten them or cajole them, we've simply replaced them. And the new person comes in, they do a wonderful job. Suddenly all the numbers change. So sometimes when you try to motivate people, if the carrot isn't working and the stick isn't working, rather than trying to come up with a new carrot or new stick, just come up with a new employee. This is Frank Rolfe with the RV Park Mastery podcast. Hope you enjoyed this. Talk to you again soon.