Ask a Dealer: Seasonal Employees

Tom Henry of Landry’s Bicycles

Landry’s Tom Henry tells us how he finds, hires and trains quality seasonal employees

It’s the heart of summer and, if you’re in a seasonal locale, your shop has probably been slammed for weeks. The door keeps swinging, the sales floor buzzes with customers, and your mechanics are working through a week-long backlog of service orders. This is, after all, the money-making season, when you make up for all those grueling winter months of losing money to rent and utilities. But to make the most of it, you need good seasonal employees.

That’s easier said than done, especially when you consider the challenges our industry presents: relatively low wages for positions that require either 1) a specific and well-developed mechanical skill set or 2) deep knowledge of a wide range of technically complex products, and the ability to communicate their purpose and value in clear and simple terms. With that in mind, we spoke to Tom Henry of Landry’s Bicycles, who’s been developing talent across the highly successful seasonal New England retail chain for decades. He had a lot to say about how best to find high-quality seasonal employees, how to train them quickly and efficiently, and the best way to keep them sharp for summers to come.

How do you find quality seasonal employees?

We have a website that’s always advertising, but really we tend to hire our customers and their kids. I’ve always preached to the staff that they need to be on the lookout for good people. There wasn’t a day when I saw somebody with promise who I didn’t want to meet, who I didn’t want to have lunch with and get to know better. I was always interested in learning about the kids in the area because we have to in order to make the economics of this thing work. With a seasonal business, you depend on having some lower-paid seasonal employees.

In exchange, the kids are getting a great education along the way. We always wanted it to be a vital part of the parents’ mission to see their kids develop and grow and be mature and develop a good value system and work ethic. I always believed that Landry’s is among the finest educational institutions for a young person to be in. It sounds like I’m overreaching, perhaps, but it’s always been my attitude that we’ll be second to none in terms of education. There’s the technical stuff you’re learning, of course, but also social skills and life skills. That was always a big part of our mission, and I think we were really good at delivering, and the parents were extremely grateful for Landry’s. That’s always been the spirit of it. In the past six years since becoming an ESOP, we’ve had very little turnover, and I suppose that has something to do with having an ownership stake in the company. It felt to me like we were starting to become older as a company, but with the Baby Boomers aging out, we have a whole new generation coming in. One of the goals we’ve had more recently is to reinvigorate our outreach to young people—the 16-year-olds and 17-year-olds—in our communities. We want the best and the brightest kids to come in here and believe it’s a really awesome job to have.

How do you advertise?

Every store manager has been taught to always be looking, so you hire your customers. We start there, through word-of-mouth. That’s the key thing. We’re also very active in youth mountain bike leagues here; we’ve been working on that for years now. But it’s really word-of-mouth, it’s talking to our customers, it’s talking to their parents because you meet them when they buy a bike. That’s the simplest answer.

We also have a website, with a video about why it’s great to work at Landry’s. We’re not actively hiring right now, but when we are, we move that to the homepage, so we tend to get a lot more calls. And we’ll put signs up in the doors, and at the cash registers of all seven stores.

Do you tend to hire young people—high school or college kids—or adults?

The key is to hire the right people. We do very careful interviews, we explore very deeply who you are, what your own core values are, and whether they match up with Landry’s. We’re looking for people who have a real passion for this, who have a passion for people. Most of the hiring we do with young people is for sales, by the way, because mechanics have a longer development curve.

That said, we love it when we can find kids at the high school level; we’re hoping for a couple of years in high school. If you get people young, you can mold them and grow together. Ideally, we can get them for four years in college; we don’t expect we’ll be keeping everybody after college, but we do get some. But if you can get 4, 5, 6 seasons out of the young people, that’s usually fabulous. We’ve got some incredible young people, who are paid pretty low—usually minimum wage, which is $11/hour—but that’s decent money for a high schooler, especially if you love the work. If you hire the right young people, who are super high-energy, really bright, really good at talking with people, it can be an incredible win, because you only have them from June through the end of August/early September, and that’s when all of our business is done. We make all our money from the end of April through mid-September, so to be able to have seasonal, part-time people is enormously beneficial. To keep full-time people year-round is part of our problem financially, in terms of profitability. You can’t be keeping people in the offseason who aren’t going to be part of the rapid development of the seasonal help. So the people who stay year-round have to be good at developing people. (continued below)