How to Hire and Manage Employees For a Handyman Business – Interview with Rick McFadden

Hiring employees for your handyman business can be scary, especially if you’ve never managed employees before.

That’s why I’m excited to share this interview with Rick McFadden.

Rick has managed roughly 300 employees during his corporate career and owns a handyman business in Colorado with nine full-time employees.

Rick has a wealth of knowledge about growing a handyman business, but in this episode, we focus primarily on hiring and managing handymen.

Here’s a sample of what we discussed…

• The systems you need before hiring employees for a handyman business.
• Where to find good employees in the trades.
• Essential mindset shifts for going from a one-person show to hiring your first employee.
• The biggest challenges of hiring employees.
• How to keep employees motivated
• How to get rid of employees who aren’t a good fit.
• How to get more online reviews.

HS041 – Interview with Rick McFadden – How to Hire and Manage Employees and scale your handyman business to the $1 Million per year level.

About Rick McFadden

After being laid off from his corporate job in the mortgage industry and discovering that other companies weren’t interested in hiring him, Rick decided to turn his side gig as a handyman into a full-time business.

That’s when he found the online courses from Handyman Startup. He devoured the content, took notes, and worked hard.

He launched Enhance Property Maintenance in January 2018, generating $108,000 in revenue in his first year. In his second year, he and his two part-time employees generated $178,000 in revenue. By the end of his third year, Rick had three full-time employees. At the time of this interview, Rick’s business employs nine full-time employees and one part-time office manager and is on track to generate over $1 Million in revenue in 2023. Not bad for only six years in business!

Rick served as an artillery officer in the Marine Corps and has his MBA from the University of Illinois.

Rick’s business, Enhance Property Maintenance, provides handyman, maintenance, and remodeling services in Castle Rock, Colorado (South Denver Area). They focus on showing up on time, doing great work, and leaving their customer’s homes cleaner than when they arrived.

Resources Mentioned in the Podcast

• My ebooks and online courses Rick used to start his business
• EnhancePM.com (Rick’s website)
• ZipRecruiter (to post jobs)
• ADP (payroll software)
• No Bull Financial (Bookkeeper)
• Sunshine Admin Services (phone answering service)
• Randy Stanbury (one of Rick’s mentors)

Notes and Takeaways from This Episode

• Expect employees to take longer on projects than you think.
• Rick uses Craigslist, ZipRecruiter, and networking to find employees.
• Hire slow and fire fast. For every three people you hire, you will find one good employee.
• Nobody is as good as you. Get used to it.
• Employees can hurt you financially and emotionally. They can hurt you financially by taking longer than you estimated and emotionally by hurting your feelings.
• Laying off employees can increase your unemployment rates. Provide a verbal warning, then a written warning, and then terminate if they continue not to meet expectations. Document all this and their resignation letter to avoid paying unnecessary unemployment rates.
• Charge enough to afford to outsource services (bookkeeping, phone answering service, payroll, etc.)
• Get the following systems in place before hiring (marketing, payroll, workers comp, CRM, Insurance, written procedures, phone answering services).
• Simply asking for reviews is the #1 most effective way to get more reviews.
• We talked about much more than I’ve listed here. To get more context, I recommend listening to the entire interview.