Lumber is sexy, and other industry ideas
Colorado Springs -- One of the more unskippable moments of the ProDealer Industry Summit occurred during the CEO Panel Discussion on Labor Challenges Facing the LBM Industry.
Concerns over changing healthcare regulations and a shortage of young people in the LBM labor force were two major cornerstones of a wide range of concerns troubling lumber dealers today. Fortunately, the diverse panel wasn't short on smart things to say. Here are some of the more memorable quotes from the discussion.
On dealing with compliance checkups from the Department of Labor and other government bodies: "Document everything. I make sure I have every piece of paper. Nine times out of 10, when I bring out my stack of documents, they don't even look at it. They're just impressed that I have it." -- Linda Nussbaum, CFO of Kleet Lumber
On the acquisition process: "One of the first things we look at is job titles and salary ranges to make sure they meet the duties test. We make the changes right out of the gate, and one of the most common things we see is inside salespeople listed as non-exempt." -- Wendy Whiteash, VP culture at US LBM
On why hourly pay isn't always the best approach: "You want the employee to take ownership, but then you're sending the message that, 'Well, here's how we value your time.' " -- Steve Swinney, CEO of Kodiak Building Partners
On onboarding younger employees: "For a lot of us in this industry, [training is] totally on the job. But the difficulty or difference would be if I go back 20 years or more, we didn't support that young person coming in. Some of them were shamed into learning the business and ridiculed when they didn't know what they were talking about." -- Brian McCoy, President of McCoy's Building Supply
On why it makes sense to engage new hires with training that focuses on real-life problems: "The things that you read that millennials want -- they want constant communication, they want feedback, they want to be hands on and involved in projects. Those are not bad things; we just need to know how to channel that in the right way. We've offered training to everyone so they can go back into their organizations and kill bottlenecks and give them the tools to fix it." -- Wendy Whiteash
On perception: "It's a very dynamic and complex business. When I started eight or nine years ago, I didn't realize how complex it was. Another thing about millennials is they really want to be challenged. So what a great environment to bring them into -- they should love it. It's project-based, working on teams, solving problems. Those are things that should be really attractive to that younger workforce. But from the outside looking in, it looks like we're just throwing some wood on a truck and sending it out to a job site." -- Steve Swinney
On self-fulfilling prophecies: "We have to change our language, because it almost becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we say that, what do we expect everyone else to think who we're trying to recruit? Can we all raise our right hands and pledge that we'll never say 'lumberyards are not sexy' ever again?" -- Wendy Whiteash
On lumber's mobile revolution: "This industry hasn't changed much in the past 50 years, but now's the time that we want to be disruptive rather than the disrupted." -- Wendy Whiteash
On being proactive: "We need to be proud of the fact that when that young man comes to work at our lumberyard and is only going to be there for a few years, we kind of want them to move on, but we want to qualify them. We have 18 interns right now in our offices this week, and we're dong that each semester. So we're taking a proactive approach to bringing people in at a very early age." -- Brian McCoy
On diversity, and diversifying your approach: "We'll bring together classes of 36 people and it's super diverse -- we have millennials, we have presidents, and at the same time, a CDL driver. It's about mixing them together. It's about bringing the best of those together. The richness of conversation that comes out when you have a diverse group of folks like that is phenomenal. You don't want to put al your eggs in the millennial basket at the risk of alienating some of your senior people." -- Wendy Whiteash
On community among younger hires: "A bunch of them have young lumber groups. Once they find that it is fun, that these are real down to earth people ... there's a lot of beer drinking and partying, but there's also a lot of camaraderie. A lot of industries don't have that [ability to pick up the phone and have someone you can call.]" -- Linda Nussbaum
On recruiting outside the box: "We once found someone at a restaurant. He just took care of us over and over again ... and now he's risen through the ranks." -- Steve Swinney
On indispensable traits: "We can teach people our industry. What we can't teach them is how to treat other people." -- Linda Nussbaum