Your First Hire Will Ruin Your Reviews. Unless You Do This.
Your standard lives in your body. Here's how to put it into words.
I’ve sat across from a plumber, an electrician, and a carpet cleaner in the last few weeks, all telling me the same story.
“We tried hiring someone, but they got me my first one-star review.” “I hired a friend from my old job, but they were ruining our reputation.” “I just can’t find anyone that’ll do it right.”
You know exactly what a great job looks and feels like. But until you hire someone, you haven’t had to put it into words. They don’t know what you want from them. Not yet. Handing them a truck key because you trust their skill isn’t enough. A few days of ride-alongs isn’t enough.
On top of that, it’s not their business. It’s not their insurance. It’s not their reputation on the line when a customer picks up their phone and writes a review. They will never be you. Accepting that truth isn’t giving up. It’s the starting point.
None of those owners made a bad first hire. This is not a personality or skills problem. It’s a communication problem.
Since we aren’t living in the kind of future where you can clone yourself, you have to get over the frustration and do something.
Show Them the Way.
Your hire wants to do a good job. They show up ready to work. But “good job” in their head might look meaningfully different from what it looks like in yours. The way you greet a customer, what you do when something goes sideways, the way you leave the job site: you have done all of it so many times it feels automatic. Chances are you never consciously decided how to handle any of it. It’s what felt right for you.
But it may not come naturally to them.
My mantra for training and customer service is the same: if you aren’t over-communicating, you’re under-communicating. Don’t assume anything. Lay out expectations plainly.
Start by asking yourself: what does doing a great job look like at my company?
What does a perfect arrival look like from the moment your employee pulls up?
What do they need to tell the customer before they start working?
What do they do if they find something unexpected?
When do they talk about price with the customer, if ever?
What are the steps to complete each service type thoroughly?
How does a job site get wrapped up? What gets checked, cleaned, and communicated before they leave?
How do they handle a customer who seems unhappy?
What do they say when a customer asks them to do something outside the original scope of work?
If your answer to any of those is “they have experience, they should know that,” I’ve got to push back. Remember that you started your business (probably) because you think the other guys kind of suck. But the people you hired have only experienced the culture and expectations of these kind-of-sucky companies. Not yours. That is the gap. And that gap is where five-star reviews become three-star reviews.
This is where you need what I call a Field Guide.
What I’m describing is what the business world calls a Standard Operating Procedure, or SOP. That term probably conjures a thick corporate binder gathering dust on a shelf. That’s fair. Most of them do. A Field Guide is the same idea, built differently. Short, specific, written in the plain language of the actual job, and meant to be a training guide and a resource a real person can actually pick up and use.
A Field Guide is not a list of everything that can go wrong. It is a picture of what right looks like, detailed enough that your employee can hold it up against their own work and know whether they’re hitting it. When something does go sideways, a person who has a clear picture of success can make a judgment call about how to get back there. A person who doesn’t is just guessing.
A Field Guide covers the touchpoints your employee will face every single day. How to greet a customer. How to wrap a job. What to say in the five most common conversations with customers. The stuff no job listing or first-day orientation ever gets to.
When I work with a service business getting ready to hire, the Field Guide is always where we start. Not systems, not scheduling software. This.
This document is what protects your reputation when you’re not in the truck with them.
Start small. Write down the five situations that make your stomach turn when you imagine them going wrong. What does handling each of those situations well actually look like? That’s your first draft.
Now here is the part most business owners skip. A Field Guide on its own is just a document. It does not train anyone. It does not hold anyone accountable. Left on its own, it becomes exactly what it was supposed to replace. The binder no one reads.
The Field Guide works when it’s taught, practiced, and returned to. That’s not a one-time conversation. It’s a system. We’ll get into what that looks like next.
Train Again. And Again.
Showing someone once is not training. It’s an introduction.
A century of research backs this up. German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus called it the “forgetting curve” way back in the 1880s. Basically, people forget a lot of information really fast, unless you reinforce the training. And when I say a lot, I mean 80% of it is gone within 30 days.
That training session you ran on day one is mostly gone by week three.
That’s not laziness or stupidity. That’s just how human memory works.
What actually sticks is something called spaced repetition. Instead of cramming it into their brain at one time, space it out and repeat it. Employees who receive training spread out over time significantly outperform those who received the same content all at once, specifically when it comes to on-the-job training.
A little bit, often, is better than a lot all at once.
The sequence matters too. It is actually the oldest training model in the trades. The master-apprentice system has worked this way for centuries. The sequence has stuck around because it works.
Here is what that looks like in practice:
The first week. Ride with them. Do the work the way it should be done and let them watch. Then let them do it while you watch. Watch me, do it with me, do it while I watch, do it on your own.
The first month. This is where the reinforcement starts. With the businesses I work with, this looks like a 15-minute debrief at the end of the day for the first week of solo jobs. After that, an end of week recap. These aren’t formal reviews. Just: what came up that we didn’t cover? What did you feel unsure about? Those conversations are where the real learning happens. And they’re where you find out which parts of your own system need work.
Ongoing. Bring the Field Guide back out at your regular training meetings and review each section. More reinforcement. Update it when something comes up that isn’t in there yet. Training is not a one-time event. It’s a habit.
The moment you stop revisiting it, it fades. That’s not the employee’s fault. That’s the system failing to hold itself up.
Do as You Say AND as You Do.
In a recent training seminar, the speaker asked everyone to stand up and put their arms straight up in the air. Simple enough. But while he was saying that, what he was doing was holding his arms out to his sides.
I’m not embarrassed to admit it took him saying it four times before I finally got it right. (Honestly, I only got there because I watched the people around me correct themselves.)
I was learning by watching what someone did. Not by hearing what they said.
Psychologist Albert Bandura called it observational learning, the idea that we absorb and replicate behavior we witness, often before we’ve consciously registered we’re doing it. We model what we see. We copy what we watch, even when it contradicts what we hear.
Which means if you are going to set a standard, you have to hold that standard yourself. Every single time. In front of your team.
The minute you take a shortcut, you have given everyone watching permission to take that shortcut too. They will. Because they were watching you, not listening to you.
Your standard is not what you say. Your standard is what you do when you’re tired, running behind, and you assume no one’s paying attention.
As your company grows, the reality is that your reputation is what your team does in the field when you aren’t watching. Not your intention. Not your idealized version.
None of this is glamorous work. But neither is reading a one-star review you could have prevented.
Want a head start? I built a Field Guide template for exactly this. Download it below.
