A guy quits in May. Another guy quits in July. You're looking at two resignations. Two conversations. Two sets of reasons. It's one event. The second one left because of the first one. And nothing about how you're handling it is going to stop the third.
Today we're talking about what actually takes your second guy. It isn't his reasons. It's the load you handed him the day the first guy left.
Let's start on the ground.
You've got a three-man crew. One of them quits. Let's call this former employee Guy A. Maybe he gave you two weeks, maybe he didn't. You post the ad that afternoon, you make a couple of calls, and you tell yourself you'll have somebody in a few weeks.
The work doesn't shrink while you look. Nobody calls the customer to tell them the route got shorter. So the three-man crew runs as a two-man crew, and everything that guy used to carry gets split between the two who stayed.
Now look at one of the two who stayed. Call him Guy B.
Guy B was fine. Not thrilled. Not looking. Fine. He liked the crew, he liked the work well enough, and he figured he'd be there next spring.
Then his weeks got longer. Then Saturdays started showing up. Not every Saturday. Just enough of them. He tells his wife it's temporary, because you told him it was temporary, and you meant it when you said it.
Eight weeks later, Guy B quits.
And here's what you do with that. You sit there and you run through Guy B's reasons. The commute. The new baby. The offer he couldn't pass up. You file it as a separate problem with a separate cause, because that's how it arrived — separately, eight weeks apart, in two different conversations.
It's the same event. Guy A leaving is what took Guy B. The reasons Guy B gave you are just the shape it had taken by the time it got to him.
Back up, because the first one didn't happen to you out of the blue either.
He was gone in his head long before he was gone off the crew. I say this all the time. People quit before they leave. That happens over months. He quit putting his hand up for the extra work. He quit complaining about the things he used to complain about, and that's the one that gets missed, because it looks like things got better. He answered questions and stopped asking any.
You probably saw some of it. You read it as a mood. A rough patch at home. A guy going quiet in the middle of the season. It wasn't any of those. It was a decision getting made in slow motion, and by the time he said it out loud, he'd been done for a while.
So you had months on Guy A. You had eight weeks on Guy B. Both of them looked like something else at the time.
Here's where an owner pushes back on me, and I understand why. "If Guy B was that unhappy, he'd have told me."
He wouldn't have. Let me tell you how I know.
People say things to a recruiter they've never said at work. Not because they're lying to you. Because there's no cost to saying it to us. Here's what that sounds like.
"I'm not necessarily unhappy, I just want to see what's out there."
"I have kids, and the schedule is just completely incompatible with my family life."
"I want more of a normal work-life balance."
Not one of them said the company was bad. Not one of them said the money was bad. Every one of them said the same thing a different way — the job stopped fitting their life. And every one of them said it to a recruiter before they said it to their boss.
So no. He wasn't going to tell you. He was going to tell somebody who wouldn't make him defend it.
That's also why I'm not going to hand you the raise answer here. You could have given Guy B a dollar an hour and he still loses his Saturdays. A raise doesn't put a third man on that truck. And no. A lot of overtime is not a benefit, no matter how many job ads list it like one. You cannot buy a Saturday back.
If you're in snow and ice management, this same thing runs faster and cuts deeper.
Nobody plans a 20-hour shift. Nobody writes it on the schedule. It happens because you're short, and you're short because somebody left, and the guy eating that shift is the guy who stayed. If you've worked a winter of it, you've seen this.
Now, some of you are hearing that and thinking, well, that's what it takes. That's the business. That's loyalty.
People will step up. I've watched crews carry a company through a season nobody thought they'd get through, and they did it because they cared about the place and about each other. That's real, and I'm not taking it away from anybody.
But loyalty runs both ways. Being short-staffed is not the crew's problem to solve by working more. That's an ownership problem getting paid for out of somebody else's Saturdays. And everybody has a limit. You don't get to know where his is. You just find out.
I'm not giving you the other one either — that nobody wants to work anymore. A 60-hour week isn't a generational problem. It's a leadership problem, and it started with a decision that got made, or didn't get made, the week the first guy quit.
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So now you're down two.
Take a second and look at who you have left. Your best remaining guy is the one every competitor in your market would take tomorrow. Some of them already know his name. And right now, today, he is working the hardest he's worked all year, covering for two people who are gone, while you interview strangers.
That's the part that should sit in your chest. He's probably not even mad. He's tired, he's carrying it, and he is the easiest person in your company for somebody else to hire.
So here's the one thing to do this week. It isn't a policy and it isn't a program. It's a conversation, and it takes twenty minutes.
Find the person who has absorbed the most since your last departure. You know who it is. You can name him right now without looking anything up.
Then ask him what it's cost him. Not "how you holding up." Not "you good?" Those get you "yeah, I'm good," and you both walk away relieved. Ask him what he's given up since the day that guy left. Ask him what he's missed. Ask him what he's had to tell his wife. Then stop talking, and let it stay quiet long enough for him to answer.
You might not like what you hear. That's the point. It's the only version of this you get before it's a resignation letter.
Because everything you're doing to replace him — the ads, the interviews, the training weeks, the customer on his third crew this summer — is retention work. You're just doing it in the wrong order, at the worst time of year, for a worse result.
If that's where you are right now, down a guy and covering it with the people who stayed, that's the moment we're built for at BR1. We help owners reach the good people who aren't answering ads, and build the kind of place the ones they already have don't go looking to leave. Contact us to get started.
Until next time, keep building your stronger team!