For many boat dealerships, it’s hiring season.

As a seasonal business, you want to be sure you have enough of the right team members in the right seats to take care of your customers in the front of the house – and support your team in the back of the house – during the busy season ahead.

Sounds straight-forward enough, but we know it’s rarely easy.

So, how do you know if you’re ready? Here are some questions to ask yourself, as well as some tips and resources that may help you answer them:

How many people do you need to hire and in which roles?

With the changes in consumer shopping behavior and expectations, the limited availability of new boat inventory, and the potential for a surge in service business related to the boats you sold last year, consider how 2021 may place different demands on your team than 2020 or 2019.

Do you have job descriptions for each of those roles?

If not, we have samples that can help. MRAA Members, check out the nearly 50 sample job descriptions in our database.

Do you have a compensation range in mind for each of those roles that is competitive in today’s market?

If you’re not sure, look at job ads for similar positions in your local area. You also can review the results of MRAA’s 2017 Compensation Study, available here.

Have the job descriptions been updated for changes in your dealership?
That might include changes in your organizational chart, changes in your processes or changes in the results you expect this person to deliver. Learn about including key result areas (KRAs) in your job descriptions and other ways to improve them in our free guide, Job Descriptions that Amp Up Productivity. Download it here.

Have you created an advertisement to promote the job opening?
Experts in recruitment often encourage companies to stay away from copying the job description and using it as their job advertisement. Rather, they recommend telling a story about the opportunity to work for your dealership.

Is the ad written to appeal to the candidate you aim to hire?
When you advertise a job, you’re trying to sell your ideal candidate on coming to work for your dealership. Imagine who that candidate is and what they may be seeking. In your ad, be honest and sincere about the key benefits of the job and your culture – and about the qualities and experience you’re looking for in an employee.

Where do you plan to post the ad?
Be sure to share it internally and externally. Your employees will often know people with similar interests and values. In fact, some dealerships even encourage those referrals with a cash reward if they’re hired and stay for a certain amount of time.

What interview questions will you ask candidates?
At MRAA, we develop a hiring team for each position, each of whom uses a different group of questions during the interview process. Many of those questions were influenced by books like: “Topgrading,” “Up Your Business,” and “The Ideal Team Player” and then customized for the position.

How will you make a final decision about who to hire?
In the MRAA course, “Attract and Retain Techs,” by Valerie Ziebron, she recommends you know the answers you want to hear from the interview questions you ask. That way, you’ll be more likely to make decisions based on the candidate’s fit with dealership goals and expectations for the position rather than the candidate’s interview skills. The best candidates aren’t always the best at being interviewed. MRAA Silver and Gold Members can access this course — part of the recently launched Training ‘N’ Tactics (TNT) Series — and its resource-packed workbook for free when they log into MRAATraining.com.

What will you do if you don’t find a qualified candidate for the role?
One alternative to filling an open position through a traditional job posting is apprenticeship. It is a strategy with proven results for many dealers and their apprentices. To learn more about success with this strategy, check out our free Guide to Apprenticeship here.

If you do find a qualified candidate who accepts your offer, how will you prepare them for success?
Some dealerships have onboarding schedules that last several months, others only the first day or week. Regardless of where your business falls on that spectrum, a few fundamentals you may want to put into place include:

• An Employee Handbook: If you don’t have one or want to improve yours, MRAA Members can check out our sample handbook for ideas, which includes more than 100 dealership policy templates. Learn more here. 
• An Onboarding Plan: During a Dealer Case Study at Dealer Week 2020, Alpin Haus shared several workforce best practices, including a handout with a Sample Boat Product Specialist Hiring Process, Training Process and Schedule. MRAA Silver and Gold Members can access the course by logging into MRAATraining.com.

o A Training Plan and Template: For ideas on how to develop your team, including onboarding tips and a training template, download our free Guide to Dealership Improvement.

Ultimately, one of the most important elements in a dealership’s hiring process – or any of its human resources policies and practices – is consistency.

“In most cases, when a good employee quits or an HR issue turns into a legal issue, it happens because of inconsistency,” wrote Valerie Ziebron in her workbook. “Having solid HR practices in place, that you run by your local legal counsel, keep files on and document, will help to keep smiling, customer-focused employees on staff and pulling for our dealership’s goals.”

5 Resources to Help Dealers Combat Bad Habits

It’s often been said in business that good habits are created during the tough times and bad habits emerge during the good times. What happens, though, when the good times are so good that we grow comfortable or unwittingly lazy? 

In today’s boating marketplace, there are very few repercussions for bad habits like mismanaging leads, skipping steps in the sales process, short-changing the pre-delivery inspection, failing to follow up with customers or botching the service cycle. 

These shortcuts often feel necessitated and are even sometimes rewarded in a high-demand environment, especially when the outcome means capturing business now vs. prolonging an inevitable sale. The reality, though, is today’s bad habits cause tomorrow’s problems— leads are lost, mistakes are made, unnecessary expenses creep into our P&Ls, the customer experience suffers, CSI scores drop, and repeat and referral business dry up quickly. What’s worse: Those bad habits become an accepted part of our culture.

While it’s safe to assume the incredible demand of 2020 will continue through this boating season, and possibly longer, it WILL come to an end. Unchecked, these lazy habits will lead to a rude awakening once the pandemic is over. Dealership leaders should be thinking about what that reality would mean for their business, and start preparing for it now.

 

Here are five ways MRAA can help dealers combat those bad habits and strengthen their business for the post-pandemic market.

1. Tried-and-true methods of running a dealership have been crafted over many decades and work well in most any market place. Dealers can tap into many of those opportunities, by way of how-to guides and useable tools such as job descriptions, marketing assets, and budgeting templates in the MRAA Resource Center. This free compilation offers the lowest hanging fruit for someone who wants to go grab a resource and shore up something that’s not working in their business.
2. Strong, adaptable dealers need a deeper understanding of the most critical challenges and opportunities, along with the solutions that can help attack them head-on. That’s where Dealer Week, MRAA’s annual conference and expo, comes into play. By way of 30-plus educational sessions on the day’s most important topics, this in-person and online event offers dealerships the insights and inspiration and tactics to stay on top of their game and adjust their business for current realities. It also keeps them on their toes for whatever tomorrow may throw at them.
3. Dealers face challenges and opportunities in all market conditions and at all times of the year, so MRAA created MRAATraining.com to offer dealerships on-demand access to the leading solutions on the topics that most impact their success. Featuring the top courses from the last seven years of MRAA’s annual conference, the platform also offers a turnkey, monthly solution for training and strengthening dealership teams: MRAA’s Training and Tactics, featuring expert-recommended courses.
4. The root of most bad habits in business stem from the lack of sound processes. MRAA compiles the best resources and training opportunities together into one efficient program to help dealers establish systems and processes that lead to consistency, team unity and customer loyalty — Dealership Certification. Through this program, dealers gain access to templates, best practices, consultants, exclusive continuing education, employee satisfaction surveys and more, all of which work together via a proven template and roadmap for running a world-class operation.
5. Having entered the pandemic understaffed, the truth is some dealers just didn’t have the choice but to cut corners. The opportunities above are all designed to help with the realities of running a small business. MRAA also recognized that dealers were dropping the ball with the No. 1 most critical need in the customer experience cycle — post-sale follow-up. So, we created the MRAA Virtual Business Development Center, a resource where MRAA and its partner Customer Service Intelligence will take the follow-up load off of dealers’ plates and do it for them, complete with great reporting and immediate transfer for hot issues.

In the midst of this high-demand environment, it’s easy to view sales, profits and other results through rose-colored glasses. But there’s a negative impact lurking in the shadows, and it amounts to the bad habits we’ve created while business has boomed. 

2021 should be the year that we focus on fixing those bad habits and developing the strengths necessary to help us capture repeat business once demand subsides. We better start preparing for that now. 

If you are an employer in the boating business, chances are several of your employees are facing mental health challenges right now. And you’re not alone.

A month ago, I received an email from a dealer friend who shared how worried he was about the well-being of his team.

He wrote: “We have had multiple staff develop addiction and mental health problems from being at home for so long. We are providing help but often too late as they do not want to talk about it as they are embarrassed.”

We have heard from many other members with similar concerns, and frankly, we share them. MRAA is among the employers around the world and throughout the industry attempting to care for our team’s mental health at the same time as managing our own and our family’s well-being.

While there is a lot to be optimistic about with spring around the corner and vaccinations becoming increasing accessible to those at highest risk, many of us are experiencing what the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) called “COVID-19 Fatigue” in a late February article.

Add to that the continued increase in demand for our industry’s products, and the workforce shortages that so many are facing, and you get the evolution of the burnout that was common place toward the end of last year (one study quoted by SHRM suggested about 75 percent of workers reported being burned out in December) into what a recent Harvard Business Review article called, “beyond burned out.”

Here’s the good news. In my quest to research what MRAA and our members can do to support our employees’ mental health, everywhere I turned last month, I found articles, studies and reports attempting to understand and help employers and employees navigate the mental health challenges being experienced by so many right now.

Then, I had some enlightening phone and email conversations with Randall Lyons, executive director of the Massachusetts Marine Trades Association, where we brainstormed ideas for how to help the industry and shared some of our personal struggles with mental health. For me, that has included waves of anxiety and insomnia on and off throughout the last year. Afterward, Randall wrote a powerful blog on this topic.

My conclusion, based on everything I’ve read and experienced? There has never been a better, more important time to take action for ourselves, our team and our businesses.

Take Action
As a marine business owner or manager, you likely don’t have special skills or expertise when it comes to mental health. Neither do I. But the experts have some great insight into what you can do to care for your team and your business.

Here is what I’ve learned about the actions we can take, which may make a real difference in our employees’ lives, improve their work performance and boost their loyalty to your business:

1. Talk about mental health at work. At least 60 percent of employees will experience symptoms of a mental health condition this year, according to non-profit Mindshare Partners.

These symptoms will inevitably impact workforce performance. For example, a Workforce Attitudes report by online mental health services provider Ginger in the first half of 2020 shared that 2 out of 3 employees reported missing at least an hour per day of work due to COVID-19 stress.

As leaders who care about our people and our businesses, we have a responsibility to talk about mental health.

If you can create a space where your team feels comfortable talking about their challenges, that alone can help reduce the isolation and embarrassment often experienced by those going through difficult times and increase the likelihood they will ask for help, if they need it.

Acknowledge that it is normal for a pandemic to impact our mental health, and use a variety of words to describe that impact so that you include as many people as possible. For example, Mind Share Partners suggests in addition to stress, wellness, and mindfulness, you also mention depression, anxiety, and other common mental health challenges.

2. Check-in with your employees regularly. If your team member shares with you that they are struggling with a mental health condition, here are some recommended steps, according to Harvard Business Review author Amy Gallo:

• Thank them for telling you.
• Listen.
• Tell them you want to support them, but don’t overpromise.
• Don’t make it about you.
• Maintain confidentiality.
• Ask for help from experts, when possible.
• Refer them to resources.
• Make yourself “tell-able.”

3. Be a role model. By being honest about your own challenges, how you’re coping and what healthy behaviors you’re working toward, you can set an example for your team, which is especially important as a leader.

4. Be flexible. Consider what you can do as an employer to make it easier for your team to care for themselves and their families without sacrificing their performance at work. Some steps you can take may even improve workplace results.

As an example, at MRAA, we offered our employees several opportunities. First, our normal “summer hours” approach requires an extra hour of office hours each day, Monday through Thursday, to allow for afternoons off on Fridays; in 2020, we waived the need to log those extra hours each day but still gave Friday afternoons off. Additionally, that summer hours program typically extends from Memorial Day through Labor Day, and instead, we started it in March last year to acknowledge the stress and anxiety and hard work of the team. We also allowed employees to take a day off, no questions asked, whenever they felt like they needed it, without the need for filing paperwork.

5. Direct employees to mental health resources. If you offer company health insurance, be sure to check with your provider about what mental health services and coverage is available. Then, share that information with your team multiple times in multiple ways to increase the likelihood it gets on their radar and stays there, in case they need it.

Virtual mental health services, for example, have become widely adopted. Many are covered by health insurance plans. If your plan doesn’t cover them, your company can consider adding these services.

In addition, be sure to post information on the free resources available. Here is the list Randall Lyons offered in his blog.

• CDC Mental Health Guidance: Mental Health Tools and Resources 

• National Alliance on Mental Illness 

• American Psychiatry Association

• Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration or call SAMHSA’s National Helpline – 1-800-662-HELP (4357)

• National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 800-273-8255

6. Educate yourself and your team. During this unprecedented time, there is a lot of opportunity for most of us to learn new ways to care for ourselves and our team.

The strain and the burnout that was popping up in many dealerships last summer and fall was the focus of our conversation with David Spader of Spader Business Management when we were developing the education for Dealer Week 2020.

As a result, David agreed to provide our attendees with a session, Move Beyond Burnout: The Search for Sustained Motivation for Yourself and Your Team, which was one of the most highly rated education sessions of the event.

This session addressed the fact that, despite the record-breaking results of the 2020 boating season – or perhaps because of them – many owners, managers and employees found themselves struggling to stay motivated by their work. The long hours, the unrelenting pace of business, and the challenge to deliver to high standards may have led to burnout from which dealership teams are struggling to recover.

David led attendees through a process to rediscover what motivates them personally and professionally (and help their employees do the same), and then learn how to use that insight to plan for a 2021 that will deliver the satisfaction and success you and your team seek.

Dealer Week 2020 registrants can access that course in the online event platform through the end of March, and MRAA’s Silver and Gold Members will soon be able to take it for free at MRAATraining.com.

In addition, MRAA is opening up free registration to David’s post-Dealer Week webinar on burnout March 18 to everyone in the marine industry. Register here.

As Randall so eloquently expressed in his blog, none of us are alone in fighting for mental health, whether we’re battling it ourselves, working to support our team and loved ones, or a little of both. We can often face challenges better when we come together as a community to listen, learn and share strategies and resources that work.

With that in mind, we have used the resources Randall assembled to create a one-page mental health resource sheet you can download and distribute in your dealership.