Info from the other side: CEO's & managers get nervous, too.

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We recently put together a custom job offer to propose to a guy who works for a local competitor. The job & description, IMO, was amazing. The starting salary & benefits were Also super rock solid - and we nervously awaited his response for a day or two.. ultimately, he declined our job offer because it would be a ~lateral financial move for the first year And he's Super Happy working where he is, for who, and who with etc. IMO, if it's about income potential he made the wrong move.. my friend's company is already several times the size of the one he works for, and will be several times it's current size in a few years. But such is life.. he at least did offer to do contract work for us part time - and we may take him up on that; he's a solid dude with some talent. In the end, we may end up hiring someone equal or better for the same or less money - they just won't come with industry knowledge & connections.

Annnnd today, way more so.. a bit of nerves for CEO, and some for me, too.. we interviewed several candidates for a couple positions, hired one a week or so ago - a nice bright cheerful young woman that knows a bunch about what my friend's company does - we stole her away from Starbucks and I'm very sure her starting wage is about $5/hr more than she earned there. But that one wasn't nerve wracking at all.. it was the one I just hired about 2 hours ago.

This guy is a *UNICORN* and he doesn't even know it - good - it'll keep him humble lol. He has the Perfect mix of work experience, interests, personality, education & continuing education, professionalism & presentation, age & ambition - e v e r y t h i n g - we could not possibly custom design a better candidate for an entry level role w/ the potential to grow along with this company. His references were Also what I would call "Glowing." So, obvi we Want Him on Our Team.. CEO told me to handle it - last thing I wanted to do was make a starting wage offer that he didn't like, or one that was too low and might see him accept the job but keep his options open looking for something else. I asked his last employer how much he made there so I had an idea. Going into the phone convo I asked him where he saw himself in 5 years (same industry, higher than entry level role, responsibilities, and earnings potential - if that can be here, great - so I told him this company is poised for serious growth and all of those things are realistically attainable here.) and then I asked him how soon he could start and how much he wanted. "As early as tomorrow morning and good question," he says.. says he felt he was well paid at his last job for the work he did, but this is a different industry and entry level role, so he'd be ecstatic with $x/hr (which was $4/hr lower than his last job) - I told him I knew how much he made there because I asked his old boss, and that we'll match it & will have gain sharing bonus compensation plan that should see him earning more than he did there. I was authorized to offer more if I had to, but this is a win-win, and I think enough $ to retain him vs. risk him continuing to look for a higher starting wage somewhere else.

Logically, HE should have been the nervous one.. but in reality, it's a stressful position to be in on the other end of the conversation, too.. because if I say something wrong or make an offer that's unreasonable, our unicorn could trot off into the sunset never to be seen or heard from again. But noooo, not this time: He starts tmw morning.

Now we just have to stay one day ahead of him so it Looks Like we know what we're doing adding & training people into this business.. lol it's been a couple years since a new hire and we just added 2 and will be adding another 2-3 people in different departments over the next month or so, and more people in the mix who work remotely - some of them overseas.

Fun times, fun times.. just thought I'd share that it's not so easy on the other end of things, either. It's ALSO not easy letting other qualified candidates know that we won't be hiring them at this time. No one likes giving bad news to anyone. Annnd, I guess one more point to make is: Especially in a job that isn't minimum wage Or has a set wage schedule like a Union job, before you start is going to be The Best Time of your entire career there to negotiate your wage/salary. People often underestimate what they can command and then their employers keep their wages low. People can often get more than they think, and then go up from there. The trick is very tactfully negotiating that - which is difficult and a huge part of the reason why people don't do it and employers usually tend to win the negotiation by offering what they want vs. what you want.. but if You are wanted, like this guy, then within reason you can pretty much name your price.

Thank you for the insight! Congrats on the good hires! and sorry for the one miss. So it goes.

Well done. I am sure all will go well. It is always difficult to let the others down, but who knows. If things expand like your company predicts, maybe you will be able to hire them one day as well!

Np.

Thx!

And oh well.. we might find someone more talented at a lower price point. Hard to say, really. Chances are we'll find someone who's really good at Most of our wishlist criteria (not sure if anyone is truly good at All of it) & then simply have to contract out the other tasks as needed - possibly to the guy that declined our full time offer but said he'd do contract work if we wanted.

Trrrue, we may!

100% guaranteed without a doubt in 3-4 months we will have to expand again - either with more in house people in these roles, or with an option we have to bring a couple people on board with a remote team that would handle a specific geographic region.

And IF we do add more people in house in 4 months, we'll probably still post a job ad again and going fishing to see what local talent applies.. never know, we might find someone else, Again, who was built for this job.

We currently have another active job posting (accounting) & are creating another one to post probably next week (marketing) etc etc.. 100% hands down guaranteed without a doubt this is The Single Biggest time of rapid change for this business since it's inception. There have been a lot of changes & growth over the last 16 years since it began, but these past couple months or so? Me = change catalyst; let's change/improve absolutely everything we can as fast as humanly possible! So far so good.. and it's a nice reminder to myself just typing this post out that a LOT has changed in a couple months and a whole lot more IS changing over the months ahead. It's frustrating some days that it seems like we're not improving Fast enough.. but then when I take inventory of the changes we have made already and have set into motion - it's actually a lot & we're doing fine. I just wish we could snap our fingers and make All The Things happen right meow!

Is like surfing the crest of a wave!

Sometimes things can go like that. I remember when I was employed as the head of a department in a fairly sizable sports store and for months I dis not sell a single bicycle. Only a few accessories. Even my manager was concerned. We had started the store from scratch and it was still being built when we were first employed. Many people came to look but no one came to buy.
But it was like raindrops. First there is the one falling, and then two, and then a few more and a few months later it poured! The bicycle sales were like that and I soon faced a dilema which I kept trying to alert the store manager to. I had to reserve bikes for Christmas BUT, they were filling up my displays and I had no where to put them, and my manager did not wake up to the dilemma until out of all the bikes we had, we only had a few I could actually sell to customers and no room to order any new ones! (They had to get additional storage space which solved the issue so I could keep selling bikes).

But what I am saying that it took about a year before I was fully competent because I was learning the ropes and so were all the others round the country, and somehow word had got round that I knew what I was doing (As even head office did not know a lot and was learning the ropes because they had started new as well and they were phoning me!)
The reason why word got round is one single store out of all the new stores in the country used to be under a differen name doing a similar thing so that one store was taken over, and the stock we had was very similar, so they already had all the contacts, and knew what to do. (I had not done ordering or spoken directly to bicycle companies in the previous job I was in but I had covered everything else as a bicycle mechanic/sales asistant, so it was the "Office and ordering" side of things that I needed to learn and things like that.
Any questions I phoned the store that knew what they were doing. When I had other stores ask me things, I simply phoned this other store and asked and got back to the first stores... So I quickly has stores from places I did not even know existed ring me asking for advice... It reached a point where I was constantly on the phone! (I don't really like phoning but it was amusing, especially as they thought I knew a lot more then I did!)

Oh the stories I can tell! Like the time I first used a fax machine...

I do happen to like BC, you know, in case a hacker would be useful to you guys in a few years perhaps.

We.. don't have a problem getting sales started. My friend started this business 16 years ago and it's his reputation + word of mouth that drive sales. For the staff he has, they're overwhelmed with people lined up with their wallets open ready to buy.. hence adding people. He does have a Dealer network of hundreds of shops that sell his products, but almost zero advertising/marketing efforts. Once we actually begin making an effort some of these guys are a bit worried about what might happen in terms of work volume lol - me too, really. Especially when that marketing effort is amplified by his hundreds strong Dealer network. He's in a very VERY unique position to iron out a few (dozen) wrinkles and then grow much larger very rapidly.

He did buy a bigger building a year ago, but the majority of his products are digital, so there's no need to physically store much. And many of the additional people required to scale things up will work remotely, so no need to have them in the building, either.

We are similar to what you described in the sense that other "stores," rely on us for info - we're the headquarters, they're our "stores" (Dealers) & so we Are the source of info on what to do to sell stuff. But verbal phone conversations are avoided like the plague because they're a waste of time when quick concise text will do - this has been the way here for 16 years & going because the CEO is deaf. We try not to have any Dealers phoning here if we can - we encourage text inquiries through a proprietary system. Phone calls are almost exclusively outbound as needed.

He's done very well so far. But now with a handful of new people in the mix refining plans and taking action.. well, much bigger better things are about to happen.

Hackers are potentially useful to us right now. Can you hack ECU's? That's sort of how this whole industry works.. new cars come out, companies hack them, overwrite the software, make cars go faster. There are other things that could be hacked, too.. like the port flashing connectivity tools & some other stuff. And then there are engineers in this business intercepting engine signals and figuring out what they do and how to mod them via tuning box hardware instead of overwriting ECU software. etc. No idea if hackers could be useful for things like encryption and decoding tools - cloning them, running copies on servers - stuff that some of those tool suppliers don't/won't offer.

No idea what kind of Full Time demand there might be for a hacker, though. Typically it's very well established ECU tuners that do the hacking of new ECU's to figure out how they can mod them. Many of these people live in Europe - but not all - they're all over the world.. it's just that quite a few of the most talented ones live in Europe.

The in house software development team doesn't develop ECU tunes here, though. The CEO is a Tuner, but the softdev team works full tilt on the proprietary software suite that runs this entire business - it's not flawless but it's really cool stuff that gets better every week/month and truly does some super cool powerful business management things serving headquarters staff, dealers, customers, other employees/remote contractors, putting stuff out on websites for end users etc etc -> it's the technology platform that enables a bunch of automation And scalability for significant growth.

I'm sure I'd enjoy finding a niche there if it worked out, I'm more into mechanical tuning despite my tech background but I have a pretty decent understanding of what's up.

Never tried out ECU modding but I've been focused on firmware & loaders for quite some time in mobile software.

Last edited by cberg on 18 Mar 2021, 2:13 am, edited 1 time in total.

Mechanical things happen here, too.. just not as much as at our Dealers that are performance shops all over the place.

The vast majority of the market is in ecu tuning & light mechanical mods, but the more serious Stage 3 & Stage 4 tunes get done as well. I saw a couple of monster turbo prototypes today that were spec'd out by a Super Serious builder. One or both will be bolted up to some of the shop cars and run on the dyno to see what kind of power they put to the wheels. It's not ALL ECU stuff here.. there are a handful of seriously modified project cars here - one or two of them May end up being sub 10 second cars. But no tuning company sells mass quantities of mega $$ Stage 4 tuning packages. The cars only get built because they catch eyeballs, and then those eyeballs buy lower tier tuning packages/ECU tunes for stock or lightly modified cars.

I have Noooo idea what those software/firmware thingies are tbh. I don't even know what Most of the stuff is these guys work with. Some of the lingo I'm learning, other stuff I'll never need to know - it's all just specialized knowledge and widget processing to me. That's why we have people here that know that stuff and can do it - neither of which is my role.

Heh... I'm a weird tuner by any standards, my ridiculous parents forbid me getting under machines but I wound up under laptops anyway. I've owned one stock & one modified Saab, although when I was 16 I had a twin spark Nissan wagon. Now I'm considering something new/else to drive while modifying my little Volvo & strongly leaning towards something German. Lexus V8s are great & all but they're all automatic.

Regardless of where I'm working I'd love some help with a Golf R32 sometime.

Zee German cars w/ turbos = far more tune-able than most other vehicles.. hence the huge tuning market for them. Good ol' physics - air pressure counts for a lot in making gofast explosions inside engines.

We definitely have the in house & contract expertise to tune a Golf R32. By the time you get into an R32 we may even have entire packages put together for them and details on websites.

One of the shop cars is a black Golf R w/ 2.0T. It was taken in partial trade for a BMW diesel we were finished with, so, it's being used alongside an Audi S3 to test ECU tunes and is about to be used to test a prototype turbo or two in 1.5-2 weeks. The parts & physics are new to me - I've never owned a turbo'd car; but I can grasp the basics.. and basically, these turbo's are MONSTERS & built from Rock Solid components co-spec'd out by a rather famous car builder that has a shop a couple km's away. They're from somewhere else in Canada and if testing goes well May become part of tuning packages our company offers.

There's another much more famous VW builder several blocks away, too - we tune way more cars, but they build a lot more cars, and have had a couple of them immortalized in video games & won some SEMA award etc. A lot of that sort of talent here.

Not that I want to drive anything automatic but 335D bimmers have been in the back of my mind too lately. I also just learned they can run biodiesel with some quicker oil changes in case of sludge.

I basically already drive a slower R32 minus a cylinder anyway but I'm a sucker for the VR6.

More than either of those cars however, if money were no object I would build an HPA all wheel drive converted 2.5s with a big turbo. I know where the tuning potential is in Volkswagen FWIW, I almost also owned two 20vt audis & a 16v GTI MKII.

VW Rabbits secretly smoke Gallardos with the right stuff in them.

...Also my roommate wants a diesel Audi TT someday if we can whip up an ALH swap that retains Haldex AWD.

There is a market in Britain but the problem with Britain is most people do not tune up their cars as they get heavily hit with excessive car insurance bills if they do. As it is, car insurance can sometimes cost more then the value of ones car.