Building a Team in a Small Business: The Hiring and Culture Lessons Franchise Owners Learn the Hard Way

Staffing is one of those topics I hear about constantly. From owners in small markets and large ones. From people in their first year and people who have been running their locations for fifteen years.

The problems are the same. They just get bigger as the business grows.

I’ve watched franchise owners build teams that stay with them for ten, fifteen years. I’ve also watched others burn through people every few months and wonder why nothing is sticking. The difference is rarely about pay or the market they’re in. It’s almost always about how the owner thinks about people.

The two staffing traps I see most often

When a franchise owner is struggling, I can usually trace a meaningful part of it back to one of two staffing extremes.

The first is the control freak. This owner either doesn’t trust their staff to do things the right way, or they have quietly accepted that nobody is going to work as hard as they do, so they stop investing in people altogether. And that second part is true, by the way. No employee is going to work as hard as you do; they don’t have their life savings on the line like you do, and you can’t hold that against them. But if you use it as a reason to stop training, stop developing, and stop giving people the chance to grow into something, you will keep pushing people out of your business. And then you wonder why you are always short-staffed.

The other extreme is the owner who gets held hostage. This happens most often on the production side, where someone on the team knows how to run a machine or produce a product that the owner does not fully understand. And so rather than addressing a performance problem or investing in cross-training, the owner walks on eggshells. They do not push. They don’t correct them. They live in fear of that person quitting.

Here is the reality: if that person is the problem, you need to either address it, outsource it, or find someone different. Your growth cannot be held hostage by one bad employee. In our business, there are good options for outsourcing production if you need a bridge while you find the right person. You will make a little less money on the job, but you will get it done and buy yourself time. Not every business has that flexibility, but in a sign business, you do.

“Your growth cannot be held hostage by a bad employee. You need to address it, outsource around it, or find someone different.”

The most common hiring mistake

The first is holding on to the wrong person for too long. You know something isn’t right. You are going home and asking yourself whether you should let this person go. Jim Tatum and my dad have always said to me: if you are asking that question, you already have your answer. And they’re right. Most of the time, if you are genuinely wondering whether to fire someone, the wondering itself is the signal. A good employee in the wrong seat is a different conversation. But if you are asking, should I fire this person, the answer is probably yes.

The second mistake is the opposite: panic hiring. Someone leaves, or things get busy, and you hire the first person who can fog a mirror. You put a body in the seat because you need someone now. And then you end up with someone who makes everything worse, and you’re back to square one in three months.

The sweet spot is somewhere in between. Move fast enough that you are not leaving yourself short for months, but take enough time to actually go through a process. You want to move quickly, but you do not want to be reckless. There is a difference.

Values over skills, and what that looks like in practice

I would rather have someone with a good work ethic, who cares, and who is coachable, than someone with a perfect resume who does not have those things. Every time.

The resume trap is real. I see it play out at our regional meetings all the time. Owners will joke about an employee they all hired at some point, someone who had exactly the experience you were looking for, who looked like the perfect fit on paper, and then you start working with them and you realize quickly why they have moved around so many times. The resume looked great because the skills were there. But the values were not, and that is why five different owners have let this person go.

When you are hiring for a role that requires specific technical skills, like running production equipment or selling, it is tempting to chase experience. But a person with the right values who does not know how to make signs can learn how to make signs. A person who knows how to make signs but does not care, does not show up, and does not take direction, is going to cost you more than the training would have.

The owners who understand this also understand something else: if you have the foundational skills in the business yourself, you are not dependent on finding someone with technical experience. You can hire for values and bring someone along. That is a much better starting point.

“I’d rather have someone with a good work ethic who cares and is coachable than someone with a perfect resume who doesn’t have those things.”

What the owners with the strongest teams do

The franchise owners who show up to our meetings with their whole team in tow, who have people who have been with them for a decade or more, build a culture that people want to be part of.

It is not just about pay. You have to pay people fairly based on their market and their role. But once the pay is close, what makes someone stay is whether they enjoy coming to work. Do they have fun with the people around them? Does the owner actually care about them as people? Does the owner sit down and ask what would make this job better? What is one thing I could invest in that would make it easier for you to do more?

People want to be pushed in the right way. They want to be coached. Most people do not want to clock in, collect a paycheck, and feel like nothing they do matters. They want a purpose. They want to feel like they are part of something. They want to make a difference in their community and feel like the work they are doing is building toward something. That is what great franchise owners give their teams. And you can feel it when you walk into those shops.

Culture at three people versus twenty-five people

The problems are the same. They are just bigger.

In a three-person shop, you can talk to everyone every day. You know what is going on. You can read the room in five minutes. When you have twenty-five people, there are employees making decisions you never heard about, and people you pass in the hallway whose names you are still learning. I deal with a version of this at the corporate level too. We have a couple hundred people, and there are team members being hired that I’ve never interviewed, never spoken to. And then I see them in the hallway, and I am like, what team are you on?

The scale changes. The principles don’t. You still have to build a place where people want to show up. You still have to sell. You still have to develop your people and connect with your customers. The job description looks the same at three people as it does at twenty-five. It just takes more structure to execute as you grow.

I hear from owners on both ends that our systems work better for the other size. Small owners say it is built for big shops. Big owners say it is built for small ones. And the reality is that most of the time, it is not a size problem. It is just hard work and they do not want to change. I understand that. Change is friction. But the grass is not always greener on the other side.

When to hire in year one

Hire behind the curve, not ahead of it.

What I mean by that: I would rather see you get to the point where you are staying late, working weekends, genuinely overwhelmed, and then hire, than see our owners make that decisions based on where they think they’re going to be and staff up ahead of the reality. When you hire too early, you end up with people who aren’t fully tasked and costs you cannot justify. When you hire behind the curve, you hire because you have to, and that urgency usually means you make a better decision.

The other trap in year one is stopping your marketing and sales activity because you are busy. I see this all the time. The owner gets slammed and thinks: I cannot add more orders right now, so I am going to pause the pay-per-click and stop going to networking events. And then a month later they are slow and wondering what happened.

You are not marketing for this month. You are marketing for next month. The pipeline does not fill instantly. If you stop feeding it when you are busy, you will pay for it thirty days later. Keep selling. Keep marketing. Find a way to fulfill, even if you have to outsource something temporarily. That is not a failure. That is how you build a business that does not boom and bust every quarter.

And do not be afraid to make hiring mistakes. You are not going to bat a thousand. Nobody does. The goal is to make mistakes fast and fix them faster. Hire slow enough to be deliberate. Fire fast when you know it is wrong. Keep moving.

“Hire slow enough to be deliberate. Fire fast when you know it is wrong. Keep moving.”

Key Takeaways

• The two most common staffing traps are the control freak who stops developing people, and the owner who lets a bad employee hold them hostage. Both limit growth.
• If you are genuinely asking yourself whether you should fire someone, you probably already have your answer.
• Don’t panic hire. Move with urgency but take enough time to go through a process. A wrong hire costs more than a short delay.
• Values and work ethic beat a perfect resume. Skills can be trained. A bad attitude, poor work ethic, or values mismatch usually cannot be fixed.
• The best franchise operators build cultures where people want to show up. That means caring about your people, asking good questions, and giving them purpose, not just a paycheck.
• Hire behind the curve, not ahead of it. And never stop marketing just because you are busy. You are selling for next month, not this one.