1. Cloning Your Best Employee
By: Bryan Vaughan, BCE
Loyal Termite & Pest Control Co., Inc.

2. A Little About Me Loyal Termite & Pest Control BCE
6 years in the Pest Management Industry
Oversee about 32 technicians

3. Who are you? Owners Managers
Started as a technician and started your own business
Born into the industry
Anyone else?
Disclaimer: What I'm going to talk about is what we found that works for us, training is not a one size fits all for every company. I’m going to try and give you the foundation for you to be able to customize your own orientation and training programs.

4. Objectives: Discuss Loyal’s findings
Determine our end destination and when we want to be there
Deconstruct end destination
Lay out our road map
Measure your results

5. Objective #1: Loyal’s Findings
Techs not meeting expectations
New hires would ride with older/more experienced technicians
De Webbing
Bad Habits
Field training only, subject to time of year + problems
What’s wrong with us?
We used to have new hires ride with older/more experienced techs and we found that our new employees ended up being really really really good at de-webbing. Not that there's anything wrong with that but there is just so much more technical information to the job. The new hires ended up dewebbing b/c that's the part of the job that training techs hated the most.
We wanted techs to know more. we were restricted to what we found when in the field. So if we never got to see rats then we really never got to train on rats and etc…
We all have this idea of what we want our employees to be. Then we ask ourselves, what the heck is wrong with that person when they don't perform the way we want. We started asking ourselves, what’s wrong with us, where did we go wrong, what could we have done differently? We treated this process as an investigation into an application error of sorts. We looked into our shortcomings/limitations. What we found was that we never really told our employees exactly what we expected of them or explicitly told them that we expected them to take the initiative to learn what they didn't know just like we did. Typically you will never have another opportunity to mold your employees into what you want after the initial training process. If they walk in the first day and you/your manager is running around and disorganized, the expectation has already been set in their mind of what this job is going to be like.
Don’t expect your employees to be you, because if they were you then they’d be in your position, there is a reason you're in your position and they’re in there’s.

6. Objective #2: End Destination + Timeline
When we started training this way i was the one that was actually out in the field training the technician in every aspect of the job and it took forever. I thought to myself, there has to be a better way of doing this. I want you to think of this just like you would your trip here to this conference. You knew you were coming to Nashville and you had certain checkpoints along the way (layovers, rest stops, ubers, etc…)
So we sat down and asked ourselves, 1st: Where do we want our technicians to end at; so what do we want them be be able to DO when they leave our direct supervision and we wrote it down. 2nd: How long should it take for them to go through the training, pass all the tests (registered tech exam, quality pro exams, and our own in house exams) and we layed out a calendar. We had an end destination in mind and then we filled in the gaps.
Wide variety of services = longer training period
Simplified Services = shorter training period

7. Objective #3: Deconstruct End Destination
When you’re training you have to break everything down into individual parts. You can think of each training component as an individual ingredient to your final masterpiece. Must start at the most basic. If you haven’t read back to basics, e myth revisited and build, I would highly recommend it.

8. Objective #3: Deconstruct End Destination
Multi-Family Technician:
Pests:
Cockroaches
Fleas
Ants vs. Termites
Rodents
Protocols
Safety
Multi-Family
Reading Labels
Filling out WO’s
Documentation
Equipment
B&G
Aerosols
Gotcha Sprayer
etc...

9. Objective #4: Lay Out Your Roadmap

10. Objective #4: Lay Out Your Roadmap
Spell out objectives daily
Accountability of trainer and trainee
No more than 4-5 daily objectives
Be specific
Spell out weekly objectives
More broad
Overview of trainer + trainee’s daily to do
Requires organization + dedication
Spelling out daily/weekly objectives allows you to stay organized, grade both the technician and the person training, allows you not to continue to waste your time on a dud. Everyone is on the same page. I’ve never seen a book written about “How to Communicate Less”. Communication is one of the hardest parts of daily life. Especially in a management position.
Don't forget to reinforce what you’ve taught. You explain and demonstrate, then they explain and you demonstrate, then they explain and they demonstrate. Allows you to truly know if they understand. How many times have you explained something to someone and you said, do you have any questions or do you understand? The answer is normally yup! Then they go and do it and you go, WTF are you doing?! This makes sure sure you are 100% sure they actually know what they’re doing.
We have 2 review periods for our new hires. Typically both are on a monday.

11. Objective #5: Measure Results
Quality Control, Quality Control, Quality Control
KPI’s (how are you going to measure success?)
Ask for feedback from trainees and trainers
Update and change over time
Training programs are never stagnant

12. Questions? Bryan Vaughan, BCE Loyal Termite & Pest Control
(804) (office)
(757) (cell)