The company described above needs a focused product to sell, smart business systems and competent people to make the company go.

As a hard working technician who wants to professionally develop on board a ship with a destination, how do you know whether or not your owner is capable? Or, if you are trying to hook up with a company to get you there, how will you be able to recognize a competent captain?

Read Built to Sell. This is an easy to read story about a business owner who desperately wants to sell his business and enjoy his family and life. To help envision what sort of shape his business is in think: 1973 Ford Pinto for sale. Proceeds to finance my daughter’s education at Harvard. What does Aerosmith say? Dream on, dream on, dream on.

While this is a work of fiction, it is an example of real life businesses and their often misguided owners. The business owner gets a family friend to help him turn his company around and make it into a desirable and sellable company.

The process in which this company turns around is the map you need to help identify a competent company to work for. The author, John Warrillow, weaves this process into eight steps. While some of the steps will not pertain directly to your quest, the ones that do are enough. Here are the first five:

1. Create a Standard Service Offering. This means selling a service that your company is really good at.
2. Create a Positive Cash Flow Cycle. You’ll hear it on the street if the owner doesn’t have positive cash flow. “Sorry Bob, XYZ Mechanical is three months behind payment. You’ll have to get a check if you want this item today.”
3. Hire a Sales Team. John recommends at least two salesmen. Competition upholds a healthy atmosphere. Consider it a humongous red flag if the owner is the company salesman.
4. Stop Accepting Other Projects. This one might be the key. Your company needs to do what it is wired to do. If you are trying to perform work you are incapable of, everyone suffers.
5. Launch a Long-Term Incentive Plan for Managers. This is a very cool one. You need your manager to be engaged and relatively happy at what he is doing (remember he is your career’s primary ally).

Items six, seven and eight are not really relative to your mission.

For the most part, owners are sincere people who want to do right by their family, self and you, their team member. To be brutally real however, many are not cut out for this role. This doesn’t mean that you disrespect them, make fun of them and talk about them behind their back. It simply means that you shouldn’t be working for them.

Pick up a copy of John’s book today and get yourself on a ship with a destination that helps your family, personal development and career.

Yesterday was twenty-five years ago and if Bill had kept in touch with Bob he’d have known Bob was on the way up and destined for positions of greater responsibility. If Bill had kept in touch with Bob maybe he wouldn’t still be working for PT Mechanical and climbing ladders with knees that belonged in a museum. If Bill had kept in touch with Bob maybe he’d be more aware of opportunities that other techs took advantage of.

Should you keep in touch with a guy like Bob in hopes of riding along on his coat tails to bigger and brighter things? No. You should keep in touch with Bob because Bob is the type of person who wants to make himself better. He wants to know all about the latest technology and he wants to become the best professional that he can be.

A general manager position would never be a fit for Bill nor would he ever want to be a manager of any kind. But Bill could have been a technical trainer…if he had wanted to be. And if he had pursued that path of professional development and stayed in touch with Bob, most likely Bob would have considered hiring him. Or could have hooked him up with a decent company.

The point is, if you want to make the most out of your career, hang out or at least stay in touch with guys like Bob. Have a cup of coffee with them every once in awhile. Send them a congratulations note when you hear of their promotions. Be a sponge when they offer advice and ask them for help when you need it.

“Not bad advice Dave. Now about that bit about lugging senior technician’s tool bags around…”

You recently met Bob at Ohm Supply. Bob works for Sparks Mechanical, an electrical contractor. Bob dresses like a Marine and drives a brand new truck. You figure Sparks Mechanical is a pretty decent company, you’d like to learn more about it. So you ask Bob and he agreed to meet you one morning next week for coffee. Bob is a senior technician and a polished professional, so you don’t want to waste his time. When you meet with him, be prepared and keep the meeting to under one half an hour.

Here are links to two lists of questions that you might consider asking Bob: Your Manager & Your Employer.

You can talk with people who are already in the position that you are interested in or you can talk with the company’s owner-managers.

People in same position – You will learn the most from this group. You should concentrate most of your efforts with them. There is a ton of useful information available from people who are already doing what you plan on doing. Or if it is a position that you are thinking about, you will get a much more clear picture of its day in and day out activities.

Where do you find people to talk to? A good place to start is a trade association. For instance, if you are a HVAC tech, you would contact RSES. The folks who work at trade associations will gladly provide information. After all, they would like you to join their organization. They should be able to hook you up with a technician in your town who would enjoy helping you out.

Once you’ve done one informational interview, ask that person if he knows anyone else who you could talk to. My daughter once spent six months doing informational interviews, talking with over forty people. Each new contact came from someone that she had interviewed. We’ll spend more time on this part in the future.

Owner-Managers – When you go to talk with these folks remember, you are a student, you’re there to learn. Although you know a lot of stuff and probably busting at the seams to tell people in positions like these, don’t. Learn don’t tell.

In the future, we’ll break down each group and provide you with suggested questions to ask.

The term informational interviewing is a mouthful. Don’t worry about that. I am only using it to make sure the search engines can find us, because technically that is what you call it. You can also call it asking questions.

Let’s say that you’ve been driving 1969 Chargers all your life. Or at least in the summer time. But over a period of time, the 1970 Cutlass 422 has caught your fancy. Before you buy one however, you want to know more about it. It’s highly unlikely that you would just go out and buy one before you did some research. Even if you give yourself a thumbs up after performing general research into the 442, you still need to research out specific cars. You know this. I don’t have to tell you. Hell would freeze over before you buy the 442 without doing the research.

If you perform that much leg work prior to buying a car, don’t you think you should log some time to investigate the career, line of work and company that will provide satisfaction and food and rent and bills and vacations and, well, that 442? Sure you do!

A few cool things about informational interviewing:

• You are not interviewing for a job
• You are learning a ton of stuff
• A lot of people are getting to know you
• You are building a network of connections

Stay tuned and look for future posts beginning with Landing a New Job: Informational Interviewing…

With today’s post I’ll be starting a new category titled: Landing a New Job. I hope to provide tidbits of useful information and advice in order to market yourself in an appealing way to prospective employers. After sitting in the technician hiring chair for over twenty years, I have seen folks present themselves in all types of manners and have a pretty good idea of what works and doesn’t. I’ve had people sit in front of me while applying for a job wearing more metal that pierced their skin than goes into some ductwork systems. I’ve had two different people bring their translators to the interview. And I’ve had more people than you could imagine who should have brought their translators to the interview – and they spoke English.

I am not interested in you just landing a new job. Instead, I would like you to connect with a manager who cares about his coworker’s personal development, education, career and family. There are companies out there that are worth working for. We’ll help you find them. And if you work for one, please don’t hesitate to let us know about them.

The idea for The Technician Shop first came to me in 2004 when I began to question, who out there was trying to help technicians with their work, career and education? I ran my idea by a person of whom I had tremendous respect for. This gentleman was a warrior. He crusaded for a professionally, improved contractor world. While he loved contractors, he knew they were a stubborn lot and slow to make changes for the better. So he battled them toe to toe, hammering home his you-need-to-change-viewpoint and the reasons that you did. As a ballplayer, I never hit that many home runs, but my hero was Babe Ruth. As a professional, I didn’t have (and still don’t) what it took to battle contractors, but this guy did and he was my hero. So when he spoke, you can best believe I listened.

He said, “I caution you about asking contractors what they are looking for in Techs, they don’t really know yet. Better to ask Techs what would make being a tech job a proud job to have.”

So, why are you proud to be a technician?

We suggest that you take your one or two sentence career plan and, in addition to writing it in your notebook, paste it into your invoice book and display it somewhere within your truck. You can also tape it inside your tool box.

How you gonna get there? One small step at a time. Lets say you recently graduated from vo-tech school and your plan is to be the top technician in your company. We’ll use the air conditioning business as an example. From a technical standpoint, you need to start with the basics, the refrigeration circuit. In addition to what you learned in school and in the books, you need to know exactly what is going on within a piece of equipment’s refrigeration circuit and how it effects and is effected by all other components.

No matter what industry you are in, you need to start with the basics. Ask your service manager or a senior technician to help you. Always feel free to contact me as well for any type of help.

After research, you’ve found an online, interactive refrigeration circuit class. You can pick up and leave off with this class at anytime. Start off spending five minutes per day in this class. Do this for two weeks. You’ll probably want to spend more time per day, but DO NOT. You are slowly building up a study process that is going to last your lifetime. Don’t worry, you’ll move on from the refrigeration circuit. After two weeks, increase your study time to ten minutes. From there use your own discretion. Within the first six months, do not spend more than one-half hour per day in study. Remember, this is on your own time. You might have company education responsibilities as well and we do not want to overdo it.

If you don’t have the bucks for that online class, get out your textbook and mosey up to an A/C unit. Read a little, hook up your gauges and take temperature readings. Understand how things change in relation to the indoor temperature and outdoor temperature. Make notes and then bounce what you learned off your service manager or senior technician the next day.

Begin with five minutes every day. You are beginning to lay the most solid career foundation known to man. Five minutes each day. You can do this.

Some technicians are in a position to write out a formal career plan that might include some of the above. If so, great. For the rest of us, lets take a small step towards creating a career plan.

For those of you who know or have a pretty good idea of where you want to go and what you want to do:

• Write the statement in your notebook – I want to be ______  or  I want to do________

For those of you who are not sure, choose one role or job in your company and plan to specialize in it. You’re not deciding what you want to do the rest of your life. You’re just choosing one role and you’re choosing to specialize in it. The cool thing about this direction is that once you make the effort to specialize and begin to do things to accomplish it, you’ll most certainly get a better feel for what you’d like to do more long term.

• Write the statement in your notebook – I want to______

If you write out one of the two statements suggested above, you’ll have started to design a career plan, and be further along than ninety-five percent of all the other technicians in your industry.

So what if the information you find out there appears to be geared for office workers.  You can still use a lot of it in your search.  The way you dress, research a company, write a resume and cover letter, negotiate for salary – most can be molded and designed for your own needs.

I am going to send you to a site that is loaded with resources.  The authors present sensible advice backed by a ton of experience.

One quick note before I do.  As someone who hired technicians for over twenty-years, I can tell you that I would recognize, in a New York second, someone who took the time to prepare in an intelligent manner.  This person always would have a leg up on the others.  Sadly to say however, not many did and not many do.  Do you feel like getting a job or do you feel like grazing out in the pasture with the herd?

Excellent site for job seekers: Quintessential Careers