What tactics are today's most innovative restoration companies using to build workforces that attract new staff, retain top employees, and get the most out of every worker? The team at KnowHow just decided to ask them!
In this podcast, we sit down with some of the top performers in the restoration industry and ask them how they built a world-class team culture in such a volatile industry. Like everything KnowHow does, we've geared it to be ridiculously actionable, so you can act on your learnings right away.
The restoration industry is too competitive to not be constantly learning. Stand on the shoulders of giants by borrowing the playbook of today's most successful companies. Head to tryknowhow.com to help your staff get ahead.
Steve Glozik - Building Leaders
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Steve Glozik: [00:00:00] It is hard to be successful. It's hard not to be successful and that's anything. And people get that confused. Like when people say it's really hard to follow these processes and systems. I agree.
It is not easy. It is very hard to fail. It is. So pick your hard which one do you want to do? Me, I opt for picking the hard of following the processes and standards.
Travis Martin: That's Steve Glozik, president of FP Property Restoration, and one of the best in the restoration business. 14 years ago, before FP had multiple locations across Florida, it was just one determined person with an idea and a conviction. That person was Steve, and his philosophy, what he calls picking your hard, would ultimately transform how his team handles everything from burst pipes to catastrophic hurricanes.
In those early days, there was no binder of best practices, no handy tech, just trial, error, and quickly learning from mistakes. Every water damage call meant a new lesson. Every mold remediation job revealed [00:01:00] another process that needed refinement. For 10 years that mindset took them pretty far, but in a place like Florida where storms can level entire neighborhoods Just winging it wasn't going to work forever.
And that truth hit home when Hurricane Ian tore through state swallowing entire neighborhoods and turning beachfront homes into driftwood. Teams like Steve's were the lifeline. Suddenly, everything they had been refining, every process and standard was tested on the biggest stage possible. As Steve puts it, without those systems in place, his company might not have survived.
Instead, they discovered that having real, documented processes can make the difference between barely surviving and truly thriving when disaster strikes. So how did FP Property Restoration go from ad hoc fixes to a meticulously [00:02:00] organized playbook? And what does picking your hard really look like day to day? My name is Travis Martin, and you're listening to the Restoration Playbook Podcast, where we break down how top restoration leaders build unstoppable teams. In this interview, Steve and I dove deep into how FP went from building the plane as they flew it to a scalable, repeatable, predictable playbook.
I asked Steve what this transition was like because there was no guarantee it was going to go according to plan. Becoming process driven meant rebuilding their company culture around a shared expectation of excellence and continuous learning. And as we'll hear, it also meant recognizing that pushing people to work harder isn't sustainable without also helping them work smarter.
Here's how Steve describes the evolution of FP's learning culture.
Steve Glozik: So that's something we have adapted more over the last couple years.
It [00:03:00] used to be everyone's a hard worker, everyone comes in, puts the hours in. We work long hours, we work hard. And that's great. until you burn people out, including myself. And we started having these conversations with people that had been there for a couple of years and saying, maybe it's a technician who takes down walls.
What do you think you're gonna take down the drywall faster? We're gonna take up the carpet faster. There's gotta be, you gotta take that next step. And to do that, you're going to have to learn over here, these items. And what was happening was people were connecting learning with accountability.
And accountability scared them, we found out, but they weren't connecting accountability with success and their goals. And by sitting there and talking about their goals and most goals, have some sort of income attachments to them, whether people want to admit or not. Okay. If you want to get to this level of income, we're going to have to increase accountability, but don't worry, we're going to train you how to do it.
And it's become second nature, just like taking down this wall is. And you could do that across admin, sales operations, and just getting people to understand It's okay not to know, but it's not okay not to try to know, right? And people say, I don't know. [00:04:00] All right, but did you do everything possible to know?
And, or as an organization, did we supply all the training and resources for you to know? And that's what we found a lot of times we weren't. So starting to put those options in front of people, like KnowHow, where it's okay, we're not going to go schedule a four day class where we have to fly everyone out and select who gets access to the knowledge.
Everyone's got access to the knowledge. Here it is. If you want to know it's here, go find it. We'll show you how to find it. We'll probably even sit there and review it with you, but there does get to a point you're responsible to know it, and if you show that you have the ability or the willingness to just grow, and there's people that shock us every day that we wouldn't think would do that we're gonna make sure that you're on an upward trajectory at the company.
Travis Martin: So what I hear you saying is, step one, make sure that the information employees need so they can grow is available to them. And then set the expectation. If you don't know something, the onus is on you to get that answer. Is that right? Yep. And then the other thing
Steve Glozik: is don't limit what they have [00:05:00] access to.
Travis Martin: Yeah.
Steve Glozik: I can have a technician and maybe he's not a great technician. I don't know. And he wants to be an estimator. Oh, he can't be an estimator. Who am I to say he can't be an estimator? Put that information in front of him, let it accessible to him. He might have this data or technical capability that other people don't have.
And we're finding that we're not always right about the career path they should be taking. But if you track what they're trying to learn, you get a better idea of where they want to be. And if you put people where they want to be, they're going to be more successful.
Travis Martin: That's so interesting because I think because in the restoration industry, the roles are so well defined, what a good water tech looks like, what a good estimator looks like.
It's easy to create these boxes for people's roles and say, what's the Venn diagram overlap between you and the perfect water tech. And that's basically the only way that I'm measuring you, but you guys have fought to break down the barriers
Steve Glozik: of that box. Is that correct? A hundred percent. And there's also the capability now people can work multiple positions.
Maybe you have these [00:06:00] people that they can come in and be as utility employees, which is great. And they they know mitigation and they know repairs, and oh, by the way, they're really good on their feet and they can sell an account and these people just, they wanna learn everything. Which maybe ends up being an operations manager down the road because they're good at everything.
Yeah, a hundred percent. And it's not. Just pigeon toeing someone to the position they're hired in. And I think that part also falls on management to be doing constant evaluations and not evaluating their performance, but listening to them. Like maybe it's not always what they're doing at work.
What are they trying to do? What are they trying to learn? Speak to their peers, speak to their PMs or technicians. Hey, do they ask questions? Are they talkative? Are they, what are they doing? How's their documentation? How are they, we go back and look at notes and sometimes you look at, I'll look at a note and a project, like who left this note?
And it'd be a technician. I'm like, that's a pretty damn good note, man. Spelling is good. It's like every punctuation is great. It's long. It's very descriptive. And you start to, your wheel start to turn out, okay, we have someone here. Let's not just keep them in this tech role or labor role.
Travis Martin: I've heard the framework of. [00:07:00] You've got employee skill, and you've got employee commitment, right? And sometimes when things aren't working out, maybe it's a skill issue, or maybe it's a commitment issue. What I hear you saying is managers are trained at FP not to only assess someone based on their skill, but also look for employees with outsized commitment because you can always skill them up.
Steve Glozik: 100 percent and commitment is tied to attitude.
Travis Martin: Yeah.
Steve Glozik: And we're in an industry that when you're called on, it's already a negative situation.
Travis Martin: Yeah.
Steve Glozik: And I think sometimes there's some negative clouds over the industry and you can get just negativity, every day you're coming in doing the same thing and you got a call.
So if you have someone that has this willingness to learn, they probably also have a damn good attitude as well. And people have a good attitude in a negative industry. People want to work with them. I've had people come through that have amazing skills. But the attitude and the drive is not there.
They become complacent. We don't want the complacent person. It's like the, the turtle and the hare. Once a person is going to [00:08:00] continue coming up, and while they're doing it, they have a good attitude. Cause that's also contagious to people around them.
Travis Martin: So walk me through that scenario where you have someone who is highly skilled, but the attitude is not there.
And frankly, they're complacent about it. They're, they just don't care. What, for whatever reason, they're naturally good, it seems, at what they do, but you can tell that overall, they are not living the value you have of learning and growing. What do you do in that
Steve Glozik: scenario? In the past, that was a difficult proposition.
Now, if you're constantly encouraging everyone to learn, over time, it starts to root itself out, because that same individual has this high skill set. No one can do what he or she can do. Now today someone can do that skill set or someone can do more of the skill set and they start looking around them and they realize they're a little bit complacent and usually that's that nudge they need to get back to learning or they're just not a good fit for the organization because maybe they just want to be that good person and not put the time in anymore.
The generation that we're hiring now [00:09:00] as technicians, they want to learn. They do not look like technicians that we would have hired. 4, 5, 6 years ago. I just worked with a group of 'em last week for the whole week and, but they were very, they wanna know why. They would just show 'em how, maybe explain it to 'em again, and then they're gonna do it.
And these are the guys that are maybe a little bit more quiet in the room, but give them a month, give 'em two, give 'em three months. And the person's complacent is gonna be like, oh man, these guys are doing the skills that I've taken for granted because I thought I was the only one that could do 'em.
Travis Martin: The research that we've done totally backs up what you're saying, which is young people, Gen Z, they are interested in learning and growing. However, I mean You're a restoration company, you're not a university, right? There's a job to do, ultimately. So how do you balance Hey, we're not in the business of self fulfillment here, and, you just patent your resume.
Ultimately, we've got customers to make happy. How do you guys balance those two, that learning [00:10:00] and development, while just executing on the day to day? A
Steve Glozik: couple things we've done we've staffed up more than we normally would, and what that does is gives us the ability to still get the work done. But give people enough time to learn.
Maybe a two person job has three people on it that day. Just have to accept those changes, things to the margin for the long term victory. It's a short term issue that you're going to overcome long term. The other thing is when we're interviewing, don't misrepresent what we're doing. I just talked to a group of new hires Monday before I came up here to Lindo and I said, Hey, this is training.
You need to soak it in. You have two weeks in here, take it and ask questions because when we get out there, it's hard. And it's fast and we don't get these frequent breaks and tell them like, so just take your time and do it. And then also just constantly delivering the same messages to people of communication and learning in the morning meetings.
And when it's busy or super busy, make sure that our team, our leadership team slows things down for a minute. Don't push, stop for a minute. If we have to stop for 15 to 60 minutes in a 24 hour day [00:11:00] to go over a topic or a process we're having a hard time with, it's going to save us.
Days, weeks, months, on the backend. So I think it's a, it's that 30,000 foot view down of the organization and understanding it's great to go, but we don't wanna lose people along the way because they feel like they didn't know what they were doing, or they're rushed or they're uncomfortable at the pace because they didn't know why we were doing something.
So there's a lot of moving pieces to it. Getting everyone to buy into that idea of, hey, just stop for a minute. If we tell them why they're doing something and show them why they're doing something, they're going to do it a hundred times over again, right? Without you having to tell them again.
And that time, if you add it up, you're going to save tenfold of what this lesson is going to cost.
Travis Martin: I think it would be pretty easy to determine if the day to day aspect of just doing restoration work if You guys started to slip, right? Your revenue would go down, maybe customer complaints go up. What are some of the ways that you measure whether you're hitting [00:12:00] your.
What are your goals for training and development and creating that learning culture? First
Steve Glozik: of all, the customer service is a big aspect. Are our employees able to communicate with the customer what we're doing and why? Or does it all defer back to one person? That's an issue, and that happens.
That's those knowledge silos that you guys talk about. We don't want that. Also, these individuals, maybe their project managers that are those knowledge silos, are they stuck? Are they stuck because they are the knowledge center, or are they able to move up? Because, ideally, we want to take off responsibility from some people, so they can start their upward growth again.
We don't want them complacent either, so it's seeing people fill in behind, maybe take a task or two at a time, maybe suddenly a technician is taking documentation on that a PM would do. Maybe they're sending out a 24 hour communication. Maybe they're taking a phone call or giving a phone call to an adjuster.
I think just paying attention around you to even those mid level, those B level guys and seeing, are they super stressed as you add pieces or is it taking off? Even at the admin level, as we add [00:13:00] coordinators, does our claims manager still stress running around or does she have more capacity now to look at data?
and talk about trends. So it's many different levels analyzing people's performance and making sure that everyone has the ability to move up and not be that complacent person in the company.
Travis Martin: On that note of moving up, how do you guys turn an employee in a role into a career path?
Like how do you make that path known to the employee and help them understand this is where I'm at today, and this is where I could be.
Steve Glozik: So that's, we're in this right now, as a company,
Steve Glozik: we looked at a couple different areas, admin was one of them, and actually reconstruction was one of them, and we said, man, if I work in one of these functions, where do I go?
And we didn't see the path. So we actually had to go back in and look at where we had bottlenecks and create positions that worked. Maybe you aren't present today, but will be present in the future. Then we went back and you create the standard [00:14:00] for every one of the positions, the skill set, the standard for all these positions of, Hey, you can't be a senior reconstruction PM.
If you can't do this and this is a standard you have to do. And now we're in the process of putting some infographics together, something simple to say, okay, you're here. This is this right here in your division. And here's how you get there. And here's the skills you have to know along the way.
What you do is you get a lot of questions along the way of. how long till I get there? It's hold on no, this is a skill set, that you determine that,
You can come in tomorrow and you can say, on a technician level, we have technician level one, two, and lead technician.
And we always how long do I have to wait to be a lead technician? I go, no one said you had to wait. But we also know there's a lot of time that comes into getting that skill set. So there is a learning curve. But that learning curve is dependent on you. If you want to be, if you want to come in and get a raise in six months, you can come get a raise, learn all the stuff right here, and we're going to give you the ability to get access to it.
No one's going to hold back on any information.
Travis Martin: That's so smart because what I hear is you're giving your staff agency to [00:15:00] determine their own career growth. You're not, this is not some union that says, hey, after seven years you get a pay bump and this, that. It's, hey, it's actually you determine
Steve Glozik: the ceiling.
We were having people come into reviews and saying I'm looking for a raise. And there are these difficult conversations because you're asking, okay, great, what skill set do you have today you didn't have last time we spoke? And they'd look at you and they couldn't identify it. So we determined, okay, maybe that's on us.
So we started putting these skill sets together and as people saw and said, okay, wait, if I can get here, I get a dollar or 2 an hour raise. Great. And then you get individuals that are eager to get there and you're telling them, it's not going to put you there. You're going to have to show us, we'll show you how to do it.
We'll show, we'll teach you how to do it. We'll show you how to do it. Then you're going to show us multiple times and we're going to verify you do it. We're not around. And we saw people really speed up their knowledge base based on the ability to just go out and get a, actually self promote themselves.
That's awesome.
Travis Martin: What advice would you have for [00:16:00] an owner or a leader that really wants to, I'm not sure how to create these learning and promotion paths, but they just they just feel like they get sucked into day to day. And they just employee development always seems to lose out to whatever fire is raging at the moment.
Steve Glozik: You just have to schedule it. You have to budget to time. It's like anything. And then you have to hold to that schedule. So We had this vision for a while, even after we got KnowHow, and then we just kept seeing this missed step vision. It wasn't due to lack of effort, it was what you just said, lack of time.
Then we created the time. And if it was the fact that we were scheduled at the end of the other day, we were scheduled at the beginning of the day. And then we held, we put key people from different parts of the company in these groups, so they'd hold each other accountable. And we're still doing that to this day.
And then also, it's I think, Rewarding and highlighting people that put the effort in. If I have a manager who's going into KnowHow, he's creating processes, he's pushing all the speaking to KnowHow, make that guy famous at the company, or woman, make that famous at the company and make them [00:17:00] popular and congratulate them and all these different things.
And people are going to go, okay, this is important. And it's just getting people to buy in. And once it gains momentum, don't stop, if something comes out that you think is important, get it in KnowHow. Push it through KnowHow, too. That's our big thing is, hey, Don't use a different medium.
Push it through the process. If you're going to email it and push the process, the chances are they're going to read the email. So we just stop, said, everything goes through here. Make sure they can track it back to here.
Travis Martin: We're on this topic of knowledge sharing and making sure information is easily accessible to your staff.
How have you guys taken some of those measures to make sure that employees have access to all the information they need, including what they need for their role now and what they need to grow into their next role at their fingertips?
Steve Glozik: So we're blessed. We have a great HR person in Heather Harbin, and when someone comes aboard they get onboarded board, she has these amazing checklists and she tries to get everything on there.
And that checklist is always evolving. [00:18:00] And there's this, okay, we're going to check it. And then part of their onboarding is we're verifying with them. You can get access, you can log in, you can get here. And then there's these spot checks along the way. We'll go to a market and do a checklist of say, okay, here's the things that are critically important to your market.
And one of them might be the whole entire MIT team can show me, they can log into KnowHow, and then show me and you'll have people that say I lost my password. I lost my iPad and stuff like that, but you have to do these spot checks. And then as a company you constantly have to verify everyone has access.
You have to get away from that very archaic. We have to limit access because of this. If you're limiting access to something for an employee, you have to question if that employee should be there, right? Because these people are going into your team's going into people's homes and businesses. So it's fair to say they should be able to get access to simple things like carrier guidelines, core values or various policies that exist in the company.
Travis Martin: Ste ve you brought up something which is, it's an old school mentality to [00:19:00] say, I don't want to give too much access. I think also you've got certain people in organizations. that enjoy being the linchpin, right? They want to be the keeper of all the knowledge but obviously that is just antithetical to a knowledge sharing learning organization.
So when you were establishing this culture, how did you deal with people who have that proclivity of wanting to be the linchpin? That was a lot of fun. But I imagine there's people listening that are like,
Steve Glozik: I don't think I could roll out. Yeah, it's not easy. You're going to have your key people. Your most experienced people are going to be the ones that you might have to butt heads with a little bit.
And. It's showing them the positives. There was someone had a post on LinkedIn recently had to do with processes and they said, if people aren't following a processor standard, it's either A, because it's not being enforced or B, they don't understand the benefit to them. So it's the B, it's showing the benefit [00:20:00] and ensuring they're not just someone trying to withhold information.
And if they are, find out why. Some people do that. It's it's not job security. Your job is here. Your position is important to us. Yeah, but you'll have individuals that will come in and say, talk about work life balance. Okay, work life balance. So if you want work life balance, all these skill sets, someone else has to be able to do them and we need to have you know, your first string, your second string, your third string.
You wouldn't go to the Super Bowl with one quarterback. You're going to have a backup quarterback and a third string quarterback. And we have things that come up sometimes and there's individuals playing that can't do something. They don't have a login. And it's we write it down. Hey, why does this person not have a login?
Or where's the next person that has a login? I think it's not always intentional, but when it is, there needs to be some counseling that happens with the individual and saying, we have a vision for you and the vision is not for you to be the sole holder of this information. That if you're only holding that information, you're pigeon toeing yourself to that position.
Travis Martin: So what I hear you saying is you're, you motivate, you find out what [00:21:00] motivates that person who's withholding the knowledge, maybe it's job security, maybe it's the ego boost of being the smart one, and you help them see the vision of how they could grow and develop
Steve Glozik: by getting on board with it.
Absolutely. And the other thing is when they're sharing the information finally. Be there, be present with that training. What does that training look like? If person A is going to give the keys to this to person B, be there and make for sure it's a hundred percent what you want and reinforce why we're doing it.
So everyone in the room is on the same page. Everyone's got the same narrative as to why we're doing this. Hey, you're still in charge of this, but when you want to go on a nice family vacation, who's going to step in and handle it. And then, and everything will be up to your standard and how you like it.
So it's just really clearing that air of uncertainty as why something's happening.
Travis Martin: Yeah, that's speaking to that. Why it makes a lot of sense Last questions I have for you Steve. These are just some rapid fire questions first one. I'm curious if you have [00:22:00] any Timeless truths sayings like things that you've globbed on to that have been really helpful for you with the stormy waters, most metaphorical.
And
Steve Glozik: so there's a couple, one, I'm not sure who told me this a long time ago, but you can't care more about someone's job than they do. And it was just something, there's these individuals that you go through business and you just want them to succeed so much. And sometimes you have to step back and let them decide if they want to succeed.
Another ones from a podcast, I just heard it repeated up in candidates, pick your hard, it is hard to be successful. It's hard not to be successful and that's anything. And people get that confused. Like when people say it's really hard to do follow these processes and systems. I agree.
It is not easy. It is very hard to fail. It is. So pick your hard Which one do you want to do? Me, I opt for picking the hard of following the processes and standards.
Travis Martin: Along the same line, I'm curious is you have, you're now a leader in your organization. You've been led before, right?
And you've had leaders and coaches and mentors help nurture and grow you. So is there [00:23:00] anything that you have? received from a leader that has really stuck with you.
Steve Glozik: A lot of the key people in my life that are influential are, they get up early, they get after it, they get things done. And, why save for tomorrow what you can do today, within reason, and get things done.
Don't be the ever procrastinator. I'm a person that likes to work in real time. But then as I grew into my role, I also realized Not everything can be rush sometimes, and you have to pay attention to what's going on around you. You can be going in real time and everyone's still trying to catch up, and if you get too far out, you're going to lose your organization.
So it's circling back around, reaffirming, maybe even if it's repeating yourself, and in a positive way over and over again what we're doing and what that message is, and making sure people know the message every day. Not everyone can be rowing in the same direction if they don't have the same instructions.
Travis Martin: That's great. Steve, I appreciate you taking the time to chat this afternoon. This is really valuable stuff.
All right, that's [00:24:00] a wrap. Big thanks to Steve for sharing his insights and thanks to you, the listener, for tuning in. I hope this conversation gave you something valuable to take back to your team. If you want more conversations like this, make sure you hit subscribe wherever you're listening so you don't miss the next episode.
And if you're looking for practical ways to improve your training and onboarding, again, join me for a live discussion on March 13th at 1 p. m. Eastern. We'll be diving into the real strategies to set your team up for success from day one and beyond. Check out the show notes for the link or head over to tryknowhow.
com slash resources for more tools built for restoration leaders like yourself. See you in the next episode.