Building a Workforce through Training

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To address a growing need for skilled workers, West Shore Home launched a comprehensive training program to recruit, train, and grow its workforce. Chief Development Officer Josh Wood shares how the home remodeling company with more than 3,000 employees across 21 states develops and nurtures talent to serve their valued customers.

 

Show Notes: West Shore Home’s Josh Wood shares how the company’s training supports internal growth and development.

• Training and Development Initiatives: West Shore Home has significantly invested in training and development, starting with on-the-job training and expanding to a comprehensive program. This includes a dedicated training center which supports the company's growth and enhances employee skills.
   
• Addressing the Skills Gap in the Trades: Josh emphasized the challenge of finding skilled talent in the trades, particularly as the industry faces a "graying out" with more retirements than new entrants. West Shore Home's solution is to develop its own talent through robust training programs.
   
• Career Pathways and Employee Retention: The company offers clear career pathways, enabling employees to progress from entry-level positions to leadership roles. This approach has resulted in lower turnover rates, particularly among installers, and provides opportunities for employees to control their own career growth.
   
• Creating a Positive Learning Environment: West Shore Home places a strong emphasis on creating a compelling and positive learning environment. Their state-of-the-art training facilities, coupled with a culture of pride and excellence, motivate employees to engage in training and strive for personal and professional growth.
   

Powered by Learning earned Awards of Distinction in the Podcast/Audio and Business Podcast categories from The Communicator Awards and a Silver Davey Award for Educational Podcast. The podcast is also named to Feedspot's Top 40 L&D podcasts and Training Industry’s Ultimate L&D Podcast Guide.

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Transcript:

PoweredByLearning_Ep76

Susan Cort: [00:00:00] Training plays a great role in retaining a workforce, but it can also be critical to building a workforce. 

Josh Wood: So the, the competition for talent is, is high. And so I went to the CEO and I said, if we're going to grow like we want to grow, we cannot do it, uh, with the existing talent. We have to make our own talent.

Josh Wood: And he agreed with that and then immediately began investing in developing training programs. 

Susan Cort: That's Josh Wood, Chief Development Officer at West Shore Home. Listen to this company's training success story, and how they are building and growing their team to deliver on their promise to homeowners every day, next on Powered by Learning.

Announcer: Powered by Learning is brought to you by d'Vinci Interactive. d'Vinci's approach to learning is grounded in 30 years of innovation and expertise. We use proven strategies and leading technology to develop solutions that power learners to [00:01:00] improve quality and boost performance. Learn more at dvinci.com

Susan Cort: Joining me today are Angeline Evans, d'Vinci's Client Solutions Consultant, and our guest Josh Wood, Chief Development Officer at West Shore Home. West Shore Home, headquartered in Mechanicsburg, PA, is a leading technology enabled home remodeling services provider with an expanding national footprint.

Susan Cort: Founded in 2006, West Shore Home's national brand promise is bringing happiness to every home by delivering a fast, easy, and convenient home remodeling experience. We're going to learn more about the important role that training plays in their success with our guest. Welcome, Josh. Good to see you. 

Angeline Evans: Hi, Josh. Thanks for joining the podcast. 

Josh Wood: Thanks both for having me. I'm really excited to be here. Looking forward to the conversation. 

Susan Cort: Uh, we are too. Josh, start out by telling us a little bit about your background and your role currently at West Shore Home. 

Josh Wood: Sure. So I joined West Shore Home about almost eight years ago.

Josh Wood: Next week will be eight years, actually. I had been in [00:02:00] the recruiting space, been in, you know, operations and industry, was looking for a challenging opportunity, an opportunity where I could reach more of my potential, grow more, see more success. And West Shore Home provided that opportunity in spades for sure.

Josh Wood: I actually started at West Shore Home as a recruiter, making the phone calls, building the team. And it's actually from those experiences that our topic today becomes relevant because as I was trying to find talent, I realized how challenging it is to find talent. Especially in the trades, especially in the, in the current employment context.

Josh Wood: So started there, but again, looking for the chance to grow. Western Home is, I call it the land of opportunity for those willing to work, to, to become the best version of themselves at work, to really invest in the culture and the mission of the company, uh, the sky really is the limit. And so I was able to move up to the Director of Human Resources, ultimately to the Chief Human Resources Officer, and eventually, thankfully, the HR duties were transitioned to someone formal qualified, uh, and, and I got to the pleasure of [00:03:00] working with the training, the organizational development, leadership development.

Josh Wood: Uh, really developing the people of the company, um, and so that's, that's, that's where I'm at today and it's, it's probably the greatest job I could ever have, so. 

Susan Cort: Well, that's a great journey. Happy anniversary too and, uh, and probably great that you have that HR background because it helps you understand, uh, the importance of the people at your company even more.

Josh Wood: Yes Ma'am. 

Angeline Evans: Absolutely. So, I'd love to hear more about the origin story of training at West Shore Home. Can you tell me how, how it got started? I know you talked about, you saw that need to develop people. Was there any training prior to you, you know, moving up the chain and taking on those responsibilities?

Josh Wood: Sure. So, as with most trades type companies, the training was on the job. You hire a guy, most likely you had to hire someone with a certain level of industry experience. It was not really an opportunity to take someone from aspiration to job site proficient. And so it, it limited the talent. That's what I noticed in recruiting, finding people that had [00:04:00] enough skill or enough transferable skill or enough experience to fuel the growth, the company wanted to have was really challenging.

Josh Wood: Even when I joined the company, we had 85 employees, we're at 3000 today. So we've grown a lot, but even then the desire to grow was there. We had just opened a second office in Pittsburgh, trying to grow out there. And just, I realized a couple of things. One, the trades are graying out. Everyone kind of acknowledges this.

Josh Wood: Decades ago, the emphasis shifted from working with your hands to going to college, and kids are just directed in that general pathway most of their academic career. And there's not the same emphasis put on vocational technology, trade schools, the trades, things like that. So you see a lot more people retiring from the trades than entering into the trades.

Josh Wood: And it's also a really explosive industry. I don't know if, uh, this is common knowledge, but this is a, that's a half a trillion dollar total adjustable market in, in remodeling in general. I mean, it's a massive market. There are roughly 600, 000 remodeling companies in the United States a couple of years ago.

Josh Wood: So the, the competition for talent is, is high. [00:05:00] And so I went to the CEO and I said, if we're going to grow, like we want to grow, we cannot do it with the existing talent, but we have to make our own talent. And he agreed with that and then immediately began investing in developing training programs here.

Josh Wood: So we started a pilot to make sure we could actually take someone who had a desire and no skill and without harming our customers in any way, because obviously you never, never experiment on the customer's home, right? So can we create the scenarios outside of the customer's home? To train them to a level of skill where they can perform and bring happiness to every home as our brand, uh, as our brand promise indicates.

Josh Wood: We saw some initial success, and so we tried to continue to roll that up. In 2019, we hired our first full time trainer and occupied some space in our Raleigh branch and actually opened the training center for the first time in 2019 in Raleigh. We've since moved that training to its own 20, 000 square foot building in Dallas, Texas.

Josh Wood: The training team now has grown from one person to, I think, probably 25 people at this point. Training a variety of skills across the business. [00:06:00] So it's, um, it's been a really exciting four or five years of, uh, developing the training program, but it's helped us to focus our regional operations activities on making happy customers and the training team then supports on the back end by delivering exceptional teammates with the right level of skill and experience to, uh, to support that mission.

Angeline Evans: Wow. I know. That is a phenomenal growth story. Holy cow. And just what a, What a way to upskill your own workforce. So tell me more about some of the positions that you provide training to 3000 employees. I mean, that's, that's a large footprint. And I know you're all across the country. 

Josh Wood: So, yeah, so our primary focus has been those positions, which have more than one or two people in them, you know, the bulk positions, there are 800 installers in the company.

Josh Wood: 500 sales reps in the company, 200 people in our inside sales division, 50 to 75 in our inside operations center. Those are the bread and butter. Those are the ones that we spend the most time on because that's where the training is the highest volume, where we can make the [00:07:00] greatest impact, where we can take the most work off of local management.

Josh Wood: And department management, but we also are getting into it and seeing some success training new managers, training for smaller positions, not niche positions. My team's not equipped to train accounting, for example. There's a certain sense where we're still hiring for demonstrating, you know, technical skill in those areas.

Josh Wood: But anything where I can take someone from desire to proficiency, we work to train for the company and provide those resources. Like I said, we're upskilling now. We've developed a lot of employee career pathing programs, and so we're training to those different levels in the company. So we're helping to build the assessments and the tools to help employees take control of their own careers.

Josh Wood: As hard as it is to find people, it's as hard to keep them unless you're offering them some ability to control their destiny, to grow, to challenge themselves, and to see some upside. So we're building those pathways and then we're providing the training and resources to get there. So we're kind of all over the place.

Josh Wood: And the goal really is to make it easier for the people doing the work to do the work effectively and make happy [00:08:00] customers. 

Susan Cort: So that training's really had an impact, not just in your ability to attract new people to your company, but also help them grow in their careers and retain them throughout their career.

Josh Wood: Yes, ma'am. A couple of, uh, I'm going to give you ballpark statistics cause I didn't, I didn't have the numbers at the top of my head, but our installer turnover is our lowest category of turnover in the business for the bulk positions, which was not always the case. When I first started recruiting in Pittsburgh, we had an install team of about five or six people, and we turned over three or four a week.

Josh Wood: It's rough to, to attract it and retain trades talent because the competition is so fierce. You know, if I'm paying X dollars that the guy across the street is going to pay X plus two just to take my guys. So to have our installer retention be our lowest retention category is amazing, and it really is a testament to our ability to show people a pathway from working with their hands into leadership positions and specialty positions and trainer positions.

Josh Wood: And to give them something beyond just, I'm going to be, you know, wearing out my back and my [00:09:00] knees for the rest of my life. You know, we, as part of our growth, we acquired a lot of companies. And we would meet individuals who would be like, I've been an installer here for 20 years and that's all I'm ever going to be here because the owner had it, then his son was next up, and his son was going to be next up, and I was never going to grow here.

Josh Wood: And those people are now, you know, in senior regional operational management with us because of the opportunities we provide. So, there really is something special about the opportunities provided by West Shore Home. I love what training has been able to do to be part of that. 

Susan Cort: Well, you're investing in them and their future, and that has to mean a lot.

Susan Cort: Plus, you're providing a good environment for them to work in. 

Josh Wood: And the goal with that is, is also making it very transparent. Every new employee sees their, this is your career path, and this is how you get there. So, you come in as a Level 1 installer, we tell you how to become a Level 2 installer. Here are the 10 things you need to master to become a Level 3 installer.

Josh Wood: Here's what the assessment looks like. So, these individuals can take control of their destiny from day one. They see the path, they understand the path, they can sort of self direct that, as we also [00:10:00] try to help and encourage them to grow. 

Angeline Evans: That's incredible, and you answered my next question, because I was curious when you present those career pathways to them, like, when they see it, how they know what they are, um, since a lot of the training, I believe, just from how you're talking, is typically hands on and instructor led, face to face.

Angeline Evans: Do you offer any, like, online or asynchronous experiences, or no, just based on the nature of the job? 

Josh Wood: So, a little bit of both. Um, we try to match the style of training with the work being trained. Our frontline positions consist of work that is best trained hands on. It's very difficult to demonstrate plumbing fixtures, for example, via Zoom call.

Josh Wood: And actually have someone feel what a tight connection feels like and feel when a, you know, one piece seats properly into another and to hear the satisfying click of two pieces coming together. So there's also lots of safety components. We want our, we want our teammates to go home safe every night. And so we want to have them in person so we can show them this is how you safely handle these very sharp tools.

Josh Wood: This is how you go home to your family in the same condition you showed up in. So, most of our frontline training [00:11:00] is done in person for that reason. But as you begin to sort of upskill training, as you begin to add nuance or modify SOPs, you can leverage that experience, uh, that they have and then begin to show that in a more, you know, asynchronous or virtual context.

Josh Wood: We tend to find that once we start getting into frontline manager positions, supervisor positions, our virtual trainings become more effective at those levels because that, that's the kind of work that tends to be learned through best practices, SOPs, the shared experiences of others versus a hands on learning experience.

Josh Wood: So. We're trying everything we can to get the message out to as many people as possible, but we don't want to lose the impact just to achieve scale. 

Angeline Evans: Absolutely. So because you do a lot of that in person training to set folks up for success in the field, how do you combat the forgetting curve and support them then when they are with the customer without having to bring them back to that in person place?

Angeline Evans: What job aids, support, training? ongoing training, I guess that you could say, do you provide? 

Josh Wood: [00:12:00] I, uh, I like the phrase, forgetting curve. I'm going to use that. So thank you. Thank you for that learning today. We do, we do a number of things. One of the things my team does is we actually train the field trainers.

Josh Wood: So every branch has one, two, or three trainers for each of these bulk positions. They're regional operations employees. They're part of the headcount, but they're also tasked with staying in touch with the training team, staying current with SOPs. You know, getting some basic training on training methods.

Josh Wood: So we, we influence a lot through those employees. We have traveling trainer positions, uh, that will go out to the branches when there's a need that pops up, let's say, you know, several people on one branch forgot a certain skill and it's showing up in the numbers, we could parachute a team in there and run workshops and run hands on experience.

Josh Wood: We can go to job sites. Uh, so we have, we have a series of people that travel and do these things. We also do some actual refresher training in person. Uh, we're not afraid to say this is an area where the company is demonstrating it needs to upskill or we've learned something new. So we'll circle back with that, but we have a, we have a [00:13:00] pretty good network of people devoted to maintaining and upskilling the, uh, the skill level.

Angeline Evans: Just to take a little bit of a step back, you have a large audience and everybody has their unique needs and motivations. How do you motivate them to want to take training? Cause not everybody wants to take training, right? I know it's required to a degree, but still, you know what I'm saying. 

Josh Wood: You can make them show up.

Josh Wood: You can't, you can't get them excited about it necessarily, right? 

Angeline Evans: Exactly. 

Josh Wood: We start our culture induction in during the interview in the recruiting process. The culture is the difference maker at West Shore Home. That's why there's 600, 000 home improvement companies and very few West Shore Homes out there.

Josh Wood: One or two. It's, it's a cultural distinction. It's between the years. That's where I say we win, you know, we win the game between the years. And so we start that process right at our, even our recruitment advertising demonstrates our culture before it demonstrates the job. This is who West Shore Home is.

Josh Wood: This is how the company's perspective and personality is. Our interviews are designed to inform us if the person understands and is [00:14:00] excited about the opportunity to work with these types of people in addition to in this type of work. And so we're looking to build teams out of the gate where that's just, they bring that with them.

Josh Wood: You know, someone asked the CEO of Southwest one sometime, how do you get your flight attendants to smile all the time? He's like, I hire people that smile. So part of it is just building the right team right out of the gate. And so we spend a lot of time and emphasis on that. But then once you get to our training center, you see something that you don't see very often in the trades, which is.

Josh Wood: A true brand that takes pride in itself. Our training center is fantastic. It's a beautiful building. I was built just for this purpose. It's not just a warehouse and it's not dirty and dingy. It's bright and there's the walls are testaments to our success stories and our, and our values. The training area is spotless.

Josh Wood: The instructors are spectacular. So, we've created a, an environment that just, you walk in and you're just sort of, okay, this environment compels me to be my best. The environment sort of elicits that response or very quickly tells us if someone is just along for the ride and allows us to sort of intervene quickly, talk to them, coach them, work with [00:15:00] them to see where the disconnect is.

Josh Wood: So, some of it's environmental, that's been very important to me is to create an environment that makes learning exciting and it's compelling without being compulsory, if that makes sense. Uh, that's the goal. But at the same time, you know, when you have 500 installers or 800 installers or 500 sales reps, you are going to have people who don't see it right out of the gate.

Josh Wood: And so that's why we talk about the career path. And that's why we talk about the opportunities. That's why we showcase stories of people that have started as literally, I worked at a local gas station last year, and now I'm on the course to being an installation manager at West Shore Home. And I have a career.

Josh Wood: We tell those stories. Our director of PR, Kirsten Page, has led the company to receive dozens of best work, top workplaces awards, and so we showcase those, so everything we're doing to teach skills is accompanied by something to show and demonstrate the culture and the pride we have in the culture. And if we've done our job right up front and hired the right people, that immediately connects and hits.

Josh Wood: And it also lets us see how we can continue to improve at our team building skills from those times that we do miss. You know, [00:16:00] where do we miss on this particular relationship? And you never want to do that, right? And this is an aside, but you know, we take that seriously. Someone probably left a job to come work at West Shore Home.

Josh Wood: And so we don't want to be in the business of harming people by, by being sloppy about your team building practices. So there's constant emphasis on as leaders. Building good teams and then getting them excited about the opportunity. 

Susan Cort: I would think too, those installers probably appreciate the training, not only for their own personal professional development, but because they hopefully understand that they are ambassadors, brand ambassadors for your company and that they're the first line to the customer.

Susan Cort: And really, I would think, you know, in part responsible for its future success as happy customers tell. Their neighbors that they had a good experience that stems from that well trained team member that you've kind of instilled that sense of pride in. 

Josh Wood: Yeah, a hundred percent true. We have an internal communications channel and our favorite pictures are the ones where installers at the end of the day have their arm around the homeowner, taking a picture in front of the new product and everyone's smiling.

Josh Wood: That's why we do it. And [00:17:00] the ability to show someone that your work is more than just a task. It's got a meaning behind it. You know, we have countless stories of. Remodeling homes for bathrooms for disabled veterans. We love those stories or senior citizens who had to choose between replacing their bathroom or going into assisted care because they can't step into their tub anymore without, without risking a fall and a serious injury.

Josh Wood: And so we're allowing people to stay in their homes. We're providing security and energy efficiency. And so there's real meaning to our work. It's actually a really compelling story to tell yourself when you're trying to motivate yourself on a rainy hot day or whatever, you're actually making people's lives better.

Josh Wood: And when you connect people with, okay, this is the task that you're doing, but here's what it means. And when you can tell that story, you know, with conviction, you have a pretty strong recipe there. 

Angeline Evans: Absolutely. There's no better motivation than knowing what your purpose is, especially with those types of compelling stories.

Angeline Evans: So you had mentioned, so with this career pathing, ultimately, you know, folks can slowly grow into leadership roles. And prior to this podcast, you had mentioned that you're developing a [00:18:00] leadership competency model. I'd love to hear more about it. 

Josh Wood: This is the thing I think I'll be most proud of when it's all said and done.

Angeline Evans: Yeah. 

Josh Wood: Just the ability to literally map what it means to develop from a contributor, an individual contributor to a, to a leader, a successful leader in the company. So fast growth companies tend to run into a similar problem, which is Eventually you'd run out of people who are qualified to be leaders at the next level and you desire and want to support your homegrown talent and your, your, your company grown talent.

Josh Wood: And so two things that are happened. One you Peter Principle people, you push them into roles are not yet ready for yet because the business is growing so fast and demands that, or you risk turning the culture a little bit by bringing in a whole lot of outside hires, you know, at once because the business just leveled up and you need that level filled and you don't have the talent.

Josh Wood: And then suddenly Hey, you have people who've been working hard, who are disenchanted now. Plus you have a whole new layer of leadership with a different cultural understanding. Cause they're not fully in. So every business that's growing fast runs into that. We ran into that. And so we're looking out now and we're like, okay, [00:19:00] we've got great leaders in this company.

Josh Wood: We need to make sure that we are preparing the next generation now that we can look out and say, okay, we have a general manager opening in pick a city, right? Des Moines, Iowa, who's the leader for that within the company and giving ourselves the ability to answer that question with confidence that not only is it someone who's Really good at their current job, but they've also been prepared and ready for the next step.

Josh Wood: So we've laid out four competency categories that we believe are universal across all roles in the company. Individual roles may have additional competencies related to technical stuff, but from a leadership perspective, there are four competency categories we're looking at. And then, then as we get deeper, we're looking at how those things overlap.

Josh Wood: So if you have your business acumen and your talent optimization, when those two overlap, what is the additional competency requirement in that level there? And then you get to another layer deeper and you got multiple factors overlapping. And so, you know, we're defining that now and building out the way to really look at someone's performance and evaluate and say, okay, you're definitely demonstrating where these two things overlap, or you're demonstrating that they're bumping up against each other.

Josh Wood: Now, [00:20:00] how do we train the skill to process those two things working together and overlapping? How do we develop that? This is going to result in a course catalog, hundreds and hundreds deep. Once it's all said and done, we're talking, you know, three, four, five years to, to get to a place where. We have a solid version one or two, but it's going to consist of everything from our Management 101 course, which is an in person two day event where prospective managers come and hear from the executive leadership of the company, learn the company's mindset on leadership and core values and, and what it means to be effective as a leader at the company, all the way through, you know, our 210 course, which is button pushing.

Josh Wood: You just got promoted. You know, here's which buttons to push. Here's how to do pay adjustments, time card adjustments, HR investigations, accident claims. Learn All that sort of stuff, along with the leadership principles, all the way through, we have, we have these massive events every couple of years where every people leader comes together for several days of just, you know, uh, fellowship, uh, networking, learning, enthusiasm, excitement.

Josh Wood: So it runs the gamut today and we're, and we're constantly driving more focus into that. And like I said, this is the thing that when I [00:21:00] look back, I'm going to be, this is what I write my book about if I write a book. 

Susan Cort: Well, when you write the book, you have to come back and tell us about it. 

Angeline Evans: You do. This is so exciting.

Angeline Evans: So, is your vision to benchmark or somehow gather data around where your arising leaders are at? 

Josh Wood: Yeah, I want it to serve two purposes. For the individual contributor or the frontline manager, I I want it to be, to them, an honest way to assess their current state, their current readiness, right? 

Angeline Evans: I 

Josh Wood: haven't met a manager here that doesn't want to be a director here.

Josh Wood: Everyone has aspirations to grow. Wanting it is not the same thing as being prepared for it yet. Everyone has a growth curve. And so I want that manager to be able to look into this program and say, It's okay. I see where I'm strongest. I see where I have the most opportunity to grow. I'm now going to devote myself and request help from a manager to devote myself to growing in those areas so that I can continue to raise my level.

Josh Wood: So I want it to be something that allows the employee to take control of their destiny and to develop themselves while also creating a little bit of patience, right? [00:22:00] I want them to understand the context around why you didn't get that promotion. It's not because we don't like you, not because we've given up on you.

Josh Wood: It's because objectively speaking, this role requires X at these four levels. And in two of them, you were there and two of them, there was enough Delta between current and future state that, you know, we need to go a different direction. I also wanted to give senior management and upper management the ability to look down and say, okay, this is my bench and this is how they rank.

Josh Wood: And I don't want to reduce people and I don't want to reduce leadership to just simple numbers on a page. So we're building this to acknowledge the art of leadership, I call it. You know, someone who's, let's say we're rating on a 10 scale. Let's say you got a person who's an absolute 10 in terms of their intellectual grasp of the competencies, their ability to create a project plan, etc. and so on. But if you know them and you work with them and you've seen them, they're actually not very good at organizing their team for an objective, right? They kind of lack on the interpersonal skills. On paper, they score great, but knowing them, talking to them. So you may hire someone who's an eight on the preparatory scale, but there are 10 on the team building scale because that's what the team needs better at the moment.[00:23:00] 

Josh Wood: And so we're basically want to provide a resource so that the organization can make the best decisions for. Each individual, as well as for the organization and give them enough information to be confident that they're making the best choices. And also to help us see, okay, nobody in the company has any business acumen.

Josh Wood: That's a hypothetical. That's not true, but that gives us the ability to just, okay, for the next six months, we're focused on this, this, this, go after the courses, curriculum, in person coaching, whatever we got to do, we see a need here. Let's go, let's go get it. 

Angeline Evans: Yeah, being a good leader really is multifaceted.

Angeline Evans: So I love that phrase, the art of leadership. I think that's that's a perfect way to term that. So before we wrap up, I do want to ask, are you dipping your toes in anything innovative related to training? I mean, AI is everywhere. So anytime we've been talking to folks, we've just Love to hear if you're, if you're trying anything new, obviously you have a lot on your plate with this leadership competency model, which may take precedence.

Josh Wood: So our company is heavily focused on AI. Our owner is almost exclusively focused on [00:24:00] AI. He's leaning on us to, to make sure the quality of the business continues to excel, but he's thinking, how do we transform this business through artificial intelligence? And so that's certainly trickling down. One of the first ways we're looking at this, two, two ways we're looking at this right now in the short term, until we get good at this and build the muscle, One is, you mentioned job aids and things like that, to build learning models so that if I'm a sales rep and I came out of a house and I couldn't get them to say yes to the financing options or whatever, all right, you know, pull up the, the chatbot here or whatever we're going to build and say, okay, roleplay this scenario with me.

Josh Wood: And we've demoed that a couple of times and we've, we've got proof of concept that we can build that out. So we're working on that for people in position to continue to be able to roleplay and train and hone their skills. I'm also, as it relates to the leadership competency model, I'm thinking about this as, as one of the tools we use to actually level set where individuals are, uh, is a way I want to create as an objective, a measure as possible so that we're treating everyone fairly.

Josh Wood: And so if we can train a learning model to understand the concepts and the, and the content very effectively, how they overlap, [00:25:00] we believe we can create sort of interactive model for assessment. And just create prompts. Okay. In a learning model, ask them about talent optimization, ask them about team building, ask them about their interview process.

Josh Wood: And have it weigh against the things we've taught it to, to value and then provide it an objective assessment. So that's how we're currently today using it down the line. I don't think I even fully understand enough about AI to really get into all the implications, but I'm learning in real time too, but every time I grasp something new, I try to find a way to, uh, to consider how it would impact us.

Josh Wood: We're looking at AI. I don't want to get too down into things that we're not talking about publicly yet, but we are going to use AI to transform the installation process and the details are still kind of hush hush, but it is in the mix. We are thinking aggressively about that. We know there's a pathway to, to leveraging AI to revolutionize not only our business, but the way consumers think about this industry.

Josh Wood: And so, uh, excited to be on the forefront of that. 

Susan Cort: Josh, as we, uh, end our conversation today, certainly this has been an incredible journey and I want you just to look back in the five year time from when you really [00:26:00] started to put this emphasis on training to where you are today, and then just look ahead for us for five years and what you hope to accomplish with training being such an important part of West Shore Home. 

Josh Wood: So when I first joined the company, BJ Wurzen, our founder and CEO, laid out what he calls our big, hairy, audacious goal to, uh, that's to become America's most admired home remodeling brand. That had four components to how we know we've gotten there.

Josh Wood: One of those was to become a destination employer. And I'm the recruiter sitting here at a company with two locations in central Pennsylvania in the home remodeling space. 85 people in the company. And I said to myself, okay, that's my, that's my mission. How in the world can I accomplish that mission? But as I said, it's not hard to buy into the culture around here because it's so energizing and so exciting.

Josh Wood: So, uh, very quickly bought into that and we're starting to see that, uh, our training programs, our culture just spreading generally, our success. We're starting to see that. I think that our training programs looking forward can become a pillar of our [00:27:00] destination employer strategy, the ability for individuals to say, I want to do something different with my life.

Josh Wood: I want job security. I want meaningful employment. I want work that matters to people. I want to be able to provide for myself and my family and accomplish these financial objectives. I want something that's gonna allow me to grow. I want something that's gonna require me to be the best version of myself.

Josh Wood: There are people out there who want that type of work. There's a lot of people out there who want that type of work and who want to be a part of that type of culture. And our training arm empowers those people to take that mindset and those beliefs and those attitudes and add the skill to that and give them access to that.

Josh Wood: So we're going to achieve our objective of becoming America's most admired home remodeling brand. And our, and our training operations are going to enable us to reach that destination employer piece by creating those opportunities for people that really, really want them.

Susan Cort: Well, thank you so much for sharing your story.

Susan Cort: It's inspirational, and I'm sure our listeners will have many takeaways that they can bring into their, their own businesses following your lead. 

Josh Wood: Thank you. Thank you for having me. I had a great time. 

Angeline Evans: Yeah, thank you so much. I [00:28:00] really enjoyed our conversation. Yeah, 

Josh Wood: thank you.

Susan Cort: Angeline, what a great success story of the impact of learning on a business. 

Angeline Evans: You are telling me what an incredible culture he described. I mean, when you have a company that goes through such tremendous growth, training is such a critical piece to maintaining your brand and your reputation. Absolutely. I love the focus he placed on empowering and motivating employees just by making sure they really understand how meaningful their work is.

Susan Cort: And I love how he outlined the pathways for growth for all employees as well. 

Angeline Evans: Yes, that is such a huge, uh, motivational factor for employees. 

Susan Cort: Well, thanks, Angeline. And special thanks to our guest, Josh Wood of West Shore Home. If you have an idea for a topic or a guest, please reach out to us at poweredbylearningatd'Vinci.

Susan Cort: com. And don't forget to subscribe to Powered by Learning wherever you listen to your podcasts.