In this episode of the Huge Insider Podcast, host Sid Graef dives into the critical topic of onboarding and training new employees with insights from expert guest Liz Trotter. Liz breaks down the essential steps in creating a simple, effective training structure that’s built on clarity, consistent feedback, and hands-on experience. From setting clear success benchmarks for each training phase to offering “feed-forward” coaching instead of backward-looking critiques, Liz’s approach keeps your new hires confident, motivated, and ready to excel. These strategies help ensure new employees quickly become competent, enthusiastic contributors to your business, benefiting service-based professionals looking to streamline operations and bolster team performance.

Show Notes

• Guest:

  • Name: Liz Trotter

  • Background: Nearly 30 years of experience, owns a seven-figure house cleaning business, a training business, and a large real estate portfolio.

• Key Topics Covered:

  • Importance of clear benchmarks (day-by-day success criteria)

  • Hands-on training to build confidence and competence

  • Using “feed-forward” instead of focusing on past mistakes

  • Segmenting training into phases for measurable progress

  • Assigning a buddy or mentor for new hires

• Resources

  • The Huge Insider newsletter signup

  • The Huge Insider podcast downloadable action guide

  • The Foundations platform trial offer

  • The Huge Mastermind info page

  • Facebook

  • The Huge Convention

    • Live event in Nashville, TN (August 20–22)

  • Call in with questions or stories: (804) 600-HUGE (804-600-4843)

Transcript

Sid Graef (Host):
Welcome back to the Huge Insider Podcast. Hey, my friend, this is Sid Graef here. The Huge Insider is the show for home service professionals who are striving to break the million-dollar revenue mark. If that’s you, you’re in the right place, and if you’re already over a million dollars in revenue, you’re gonna get even more out of this show.

So why is this the show? Well, there are a lot of people online and around the world with big opinions and very little experience. There are even some fake gurus out there. We want to help you skip the BS and get real wisdom from real, experienced business builders. So we’ve gathered wisdom and insight directly from seven- and eight-figure business owners—people running companies doing anywhere from 2 million a year to 40 million a year, and some more—and we’re bringing you their best insights, distilled and focused on a single topic each month. And these are real owners, no armchair philosophers or fake gurus. These are the ones that are quietly building empires behind the scenes. They’re not on social media looking for attention; they’re in business making things happen.

So last month we focused on hiring A-players. The whole month was about hiring. And this month we answer the question: What do you do once you hire the right person? You’ve got onboarding, pay structure, training, and more. So today we’re diving into training. We have a very special guest contributor, and that is Liz Trotter. Liz has been in business for almost three decades and owns a seven-figure house cleaning business as well as a training business, plus a large real estate portfolio. She’s been in the game for a long time, and she’s one of the best when it comes to onboarding and training your employees. She demystifies and simplifies the training process.

But why is training for a new employee so important? Because the training establishes the foundation of how that person is going to operate and perform in your business, hopefully for a long, long time. So without further ado, let’s dive in. Meet Liz Trotter.

Liz Trotter (Guest):
Hey all. Liz here, and I have got some training tips for you. Now, I’m not going to tell you how to train your people—that’s up to you—but what I am going to talk to you about today is how to build some things into your training program so that you have more success, so that your people feel like they are very good at what they do. If people don’t feel like they’re good at what they’re doing, they’re not going to do good work, period.

So you need to make them feel like they are doing good work. You need to also make them feel like they can do it, and that they’re very confident about how to get the job done. Now, these things sound really obvious, I know, but they don’t just happen automatically. And they don’t only happen because the person gets good at what they’re doing and then builds their own confidence. You already know that, right? There are some people who, no matter how well they’re doing, they always knock themselves, they always find something wrong.

Your job is not to do that. Your job as the trainer—or to build a good training program—is to make sure that the training program is built so that it highlights what is going well and diminishes what is not going well. Now, it also has to be really clear how we are going to cut people, because with this idea of focusing heavily on what’s going well and not focusing much at all on what’s not going well, you have to have really clear-cut ways of knowing when it is time to let someone go.

So the first thing is, before you ever begin training, know what training success looks like at every stage of the game. Day one—what does success in training on day one look like? Because the sooner you can cut someone, the more hassle you save yourself and the more hassle you save the person as well. You know, they had better things to do than to just waste their time trying to learn something that you can tell on day one they’re never going to be able to master. All right, so what does day one training success look like? What does day two look like? What does day three look like? And then maybe skip to day five, day 10. But make sure that those are set in advance. What are five things that they have to do well, or that you have to see in evidence?

All right, that’s the first thing. Now, as far as the training: you bring the trainee in, and you’re telling them about what training is going to be. Just like I have said about other things in the past, before you ever begin training, you’ve got work to do because you have to make sure that you are setting them up for success, and you have to make sure you’re setting yourself up for success. So make sure that you know what the KPIs are, like I said, but also make it so that everyone understands clearly: what’s the end goal? What’s the timeframe that we are expecting to be done with training, and what does that look like? How will the person be performing at that point in time? Make sure that that is really clear before you ever start the training process, and you’ll have much better success. People know what they’re shooting for, so they have a lot better chance of hitting that target.

All right. Your training program needs to include a few different things. I think that most people know that you have to have them do some stuff, you have to demonstrate, you have to watch—you have all of these different things that you have to do. But did you know that one of the reasons why you want to get someone doing something with their hands as quickly as possible is because neural pathways are built through hands-on experience? Did you know that? A lot of people don’t. So we, a lot of times, will have that trainee watching for that first day. You are actually hurting your training process by doing that. If you need them to watch, let them work alongside you if at all possible. Maybe they have to watch for safety’s sake or something along those lines for a few minutes, but then get them touching the thing—whatever it is—as soon as possible, and have them doing real-life work, not examples of things, not role-playing.

Now, I’m not saying don’t role-play because I do love me some good role-play, and role-playing is very effective—just not in the very, very first stages. In the very beginning, you need to get their hands in there and let them touch things. All right. You have probably heard about people talking about VAK styles, right? Are you visual, are you an auditory learner, or are you a tactile (kinesthetic) learner? And a lot of times people are thinking that they’re one or the other. Guess what? That whole idea was debunked many, many years ago. What we know now is that people learn best when they have a combination of things happening. So when they’re touching things, when they’re hearing about it, and when they’re seeing it at the same time. So we want the whole thing going on when we’re in training: have them listening to something, watching, and doing.

This is one of the reasons why videos in the very beginning are not your best bet. Now, do I say don’t use videos? Absolutely not. We do love some video. But let’s get some video either before they come in on that first day, to give them a sense of clarity and that feeling of calm, again. But then, as soon as you have them in your space, get them using their hands, and then you can have them watching video again afterward. Then it works really well.

All right. Here are a couple more things to keep in mind with your training. Break your training up into clear phases so that everyone knows exactly what’s happening in a phase—maybe phase one, phase two, phase three, phase four. I don’t know what those phases might be. You can call them whatever you want. It could just be days: day one, this is what you’re going to learn on day one, this is who’s going to train you, this is what we expect from you at the end of day one. This is different than what I said earlier when I said you have your internal checklist of how you determine whether or not this person stays or they go. This is a list that they get, and that everyone sees, that tells the whole company where we are in the process. So we’re in phase one, and we’re learning whatever the thing is—I don’t even know what it is, right? It just depends on what it is—and what is the deliverable at each checkpoint. So phase one checkpoint is end of the day, end of day one at such and such, and what should they have learned at that time? You might have a little mini quiz, but set them up for success by telling them exactly what the answer is before you have them work through the day. Well, that makes sense. You want them to be successful in what they’re doing.

You might remember in the very beginning I said you need to be setting them up for feelings of success. You want them to feel like they can be successful, that they know how to do this, and that they are confident in being able to do the thing. So you have to continually point out what they’re doing well. So tell them what “well” looks like, get them training to do it, and then at the end, ask them, “How are you doing? Show me how you do well,” whatever the “well” is.

All right. Another idea is, you’re going to have them in training, but you might consider giving them a buddy or a mentor—whatever you want to call that person—just somebody that they can chat with about stuff that is maybe not directly related to training but clearly related, so that they can begin to fit into the culture of the business.

All right, here’s a big one that people get wrong a lot. Remember how I said focus on the good and make sure that you’re focusing on not focusing on what’s bad? That’s not to say that you shouldn’t give immediate feedback, but what you want to do is you want to couch your feedback in the form of feed-forward, but you want to do it fast and often. The faster and more frequent you can give feed-forward information—so “Next time, let’s try it this way,” “Next time, you’re gonna have more success if you do this thing next time”—everything is in the future. People feel like they have a lot of power in the future, and they don’t feel like they have a lot of power in the past, and they don’t build confidence in the past. You build confidence in the future. Also, the faster you can give feed-forward, the shorter you have that feedback loop going on, the faster your learning speed will be. So don’t hold back on the information. Give as much as you can up front.

All right, my last big tip here is make sure that you are tracking their progress the entire time. Make sure that everything has a measurement and that they can see their own measurement as they’re going. And then, bottom line is, enjoy that person. Okay, that’s it for training. Talk to y’all soon. Bye.

Sid Graef (Host):
Okay, my friend, that was Liz. What did you learn about training today, and more importantly, what are you going to do with that? Because I love the way Liz broke it down—it doesn’t have to be complicated. It needs to be simple, it needs to be actionable, and you need to have your people do so that they can learn and become confident, competent employees and a big contributor to your team.

So here’s the question, as always: What are you going to do with it? The strategy is simple, but it’s powerful. So here’s your next step—take action. Everything we covered today is in the show notes, but the most important thing is download the action guide. We put together a four-page action guide for this episode to help you execute this week’s strategy. Grab it at thehugeinsider.com.

Here are a few more ways to level up your business now. This podcast is just one way that we help you grow. See, we are committed to helping our blue-collar brothers and sisters build a better business—a business that gives you time and financial freedom—because we want you to win and prosper in the marketplace. So we publish this free podcast. We also publish a free newsletter every week of the same name: The Huge Insider. We have a Facebook group and community that is for The Huge Insider that’s vibrant, and it’s a place where people help one another to answer questions, get answers, get solutions—the works. All of that can be found at thehugeinsider.com.

And every summer we host our big event: The Huge Convention. This is the ultimate event for home service business owners, and this year we’re back in Nashville, Tennessee, August 20th through 22nd. The tickets are still dirt-cheap right now, so grab yours at thehugeconvention.com before the prices go up on May 1st. This event is where real breakthroughs happen. It’s the place for networking, for world-class education, and the biggest trade show in the home services industry—specifically for most of the exterior cleaning categories of home service, power washing, soft washing, window cleaning, and also holiday lighting installation, and a whole lot more.

So the next thing I wanna tell you about is The Huge Mastermind. That’s for if your business is over a million dollars in revenue and you’ve got five or more employees already. This is the fast track to a freedom business. What do I mean by freedom business? We teach you, and you will implement, the Freedom Operating System to get to time and money freedom predictably and quickly. It’s just following a step-by-step proven formula to install an operating system in your business that allows you to be the owner, not the operator. So check out The Huge Mastermind by going to thehugeconvention.com. Scroll down, you’ll see Mastermind. That’s the best way to get to it.

And the last thing before we go—thank you so much for listening. Once again, if you enjoy the show, if you gain value from it, please like and share. Post us a review. And then, if you have a topic that you really want to hear about, that you really want to know more about, give us a call and leave a message at (804) 600-HUGE. That’s (804) 600-4843. Leave your question. Leave a topic. If you have a win and a victory that you would like to share, do so. If you have had a failure in business that led to a bigger success, we want to hear your story so we can feature you on an upcoming episode.

So that’s it for this week. Don’t just listen—take action. I’m Sid Graef. This is the Huge Insider Podcast, and we want to help you win and prosper in the marketplace. We’ll see you next time.