The limiting factors that will challenge business owners in 2022 are inflation, Covid, and the recruitment of good employees.

The bad news is that I can give you the solution to only 1 of these 3 problems.

The good news is that it’s the big one: the recruitment of good employees.

Ivan Pavlov won the Nobel prize for proving it’s not hard to sell a dog on the taste of meat.

Successful jewelers know it’s not hard to sell a man on the woman he loves.

Recruitment problems disappear when you know how easy it is to sell a parent on their child.

A couple of years ago, Dewey Jenkins and I had a series of conversations about opening a free, private day-care center as a benefit for the employees of Morris-Jenkins Air Conditioning and Plumbing. The thing that kept us from doing it was that the majority of his employees – the technicians – drove their trucks home every night and went straight to their first repair each morning. Consequently, they would have no opportunity to drop off their child.

But still, it was a great idea.

Do your employees report to a specific location each day? Have you noticed that space for lease just down the street from you?

1. Lease that space.
2. Get a daycare license.
3. Hire 2 or more people to run it.
4. Open your recruitment ads with the words “Free, Private Daycare.”
5. (And now you know why I was explaining the importance of “framing.” – Indy Beagle)
6. Prepare to be amazed at the quality and volume of job applicants.
7. Your employee problem has now been permanently solved.
8. You’re welcome.

What? What did you just say?

“I can’t afford it.”

Raise your prices. Inflation is happening whether you participate or not.

“It’s easier to pay a big signing bonus.”

Signing bonuses attract job-hoppers.

“It sounds like a lot of trouble.”

Paying big money for bad employees is another kind of trouble. Is that the kind you prefer?

“I’ll just wait it out. Things will go back to normal pretty soon.”

Here’s a fun fact I’ll bet you didn’t know: to maintain our population and our workforce, American women need to birth an average of 2.1 children each. The parents of today’s workforce produced only 1.8 births per woman and the birth rate today is at 1.64 and declining.

We are at least 10 percent short of having an adequate workforce because that 10 percent was never born. So if you’re waiting for the workforce to get larger, you’re going to need to convince women across America to have more kids and then wait 20 years for those kids to grow up.

Child-care is a huge, for-profit business that is crippling the buying power of single-parent (and two-parent) households across America. It is within your power to solve that problem for a small group of people, and in so doing, solve your own problem as well.

Give it some thought.

And may you have a Prosperous and Happy New Year.

Roy H. Williams