Swiss Army Trades (SAT) was born from my frustration in finding good quality office staff to support my families trades based business.1
I grew up in a family of Tradies and their strength was never sitting in the office, rather it was getting out and about and using their hands to fix things.
As our family business grew, I was put in charge of hiring as we knew that a solid back office was essential to running our family business. Roles such as outbound calling, inbound calling, scheduling and compliance, operations, accounts, marketing all required the support of experienced office based staff. In a highly competitive world, without these functions being fulfilled it would be tough to build a competitive trades based business.
Far to often my frustrations included
- Lack of quality candidates
- Turnover of staff
- Attitude from staff, sense of entitlement vs sense of gratitude
- Expense of staff and always trying to maintain an optimal ratio between field and office based staff.
Trying to solve this problem I engaged a Virtual Assistant Company. The gentleman in-charge spoke a good game and charged a large upfront fee to find someone, but my experience was subpar and I ended firing the person that was recommended to me due to incompetence and even lying about their working hours!.
The VA company took no responsibly and simply said we will find another one! What I realised was that the VA company did not train the candidate and took no responsibility for their performance. They were in essence, just a middle man.
