Most CEOs say people are their most important asset. Marcus Lemonis lives it.
The Camping World CEO, Beyond Executive Chairman, and host of “The Fixer” on Fox shares why HR and Talent Acquisition leaders play such critical decision-making roles at his companies – and what up-and-coming HR and TA pros must do to earn their CEO’s trust.
He also opens up about the biggest blind spots leaders have when it comes to recruiting, retaining, and empowering talent—and why the best companies treat talent acquisition as an “offensive move” rather than a “problem to be solved”.
Marcus also shares:
💼Connect with Marcus on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcus-lemonis/
🌐 Beyond Inc.: https://www.beyond.com
🌐 Camping World: https://campingworld.com
🌐 The Fixer on Fox: https://thefixer.com
Connect with us:
💻 All Episodes: TalentAllStars.com
💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ziprecruiter/
💼 Dave’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davetravers/
📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ziprecruiter
🎵TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ziprecruiter
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[00:00:00] Marcus Lemonis: Too often CEOs and leaders and owners think about the HR department, like, oh, it's over there. They think about talent recruitment as a solution to a problem, as opposed to an offensive move to move the ball down the field faster and crisper and stronger.
[00:00:18] Dave Tavers: So what does it really take for your business to attract world-class talent today? I'm Dave Travers, president of ZipRecruiter and on Talent All Stars, we shine a light on the people and the day-to-day processes behind recruitment and retention at some of the world's most influential businesses. Today, we have another view from the C-Suite, and this one is a treat. Our guest is Marcus Lemonis, CEO of Camping World, executive Chairman of Beyond, and Host of The Fixer on Fox.
Marcus clearly knows business, and he knows talent too. Anyone who's seen him on TV knows he has a gift for putting the right people in the right seats. He's fond of saying every successful company needs three things: people, process, and product, with people taking the top billing.
[00:01:05] Marcus Lemonis: I've lived this mantra my whole life, but I think it's important to really tell you that I landed on people being the most important thing after living a period of my life where it wasn't. And I noticed that my level of success as a human, forget about as a business person, my level of success as a human. And then, secondarily, as a business person was hampered by my lack of focus or my lack of understanding. And I'm talking about in my early twenties, mid twenties, where you think you know everything.
And the more that I have ingrained myself into really making people the center of everything, oddly enough, the businesses that I'm involved with is just too better. And the hardest thing, I think for leaders, I run two public companies today, which I think I'm the only person in America today to be a leader of two publicly traded companies at the same time, and the problems are always the same. And the solutions, I think more importantly, are always the same. And they revolve around. If you hire great people and you use good partners to help find those people, and it's technology-driven, you win. It's that simple. And you guys have been a huge part of our, my whole world. I say this with absolute sincerity.
ZipRecruiter has been a part of all the businesses that I've been a part of, big and small, and whether I have 14,000 people like I do at Camping World or a thousand people and it's another business or eight people in a small business, I have enjoyed the transformation that ZipRecruiter's gone through just as a power I consider myself a power user. It's a very different platform today than it was five years ago.
[00:02:47] Dave Tavers: I think that is exactly right. And it's so true of every business that wants to be successful that you have to constantly be thinking not just about how do we stay good, but how do we get even better? And what's so interesting about your approach of thinking about people and how that's at the center of everything you do.
Is that thinking about the breadth of businesses which you have encountered, run, advised, et cetera, for most people haven't had the exposure to one 100th the number of businesses you have to hear when you have such breadth across so many different vantage points that the problems in the solutions are always the same, maybe really counterintuitive to some people.
So I'd love to double click on that and think about what is it that if you are somebody who's been in the same business for 10 years, or you're only in your second job, that you might not realize that these problems you're uncovering are going to be the same throughout your career and the better you get at them now, just over and over again, being able to get better at dealing with people problems and setting people up for success is gonna just pay off over and over again.
[00:03:58] Marcus Lemonis: I think it starts with understanding where the gaps in talent are in the organization, and I think a lot of people struggle to really know how to find out what that assessment looks like. How do you figure out, before you go out and you spend time and energy recruiting new people, how do you make an honest assessment, a true, honest assessment that says this is what the business needs, 'cause this is where it wants to go.
These are the gaps. Whether that's understanding deficiencies of yourself, like I do a lot of that myself, and what I need to round myself out with, or what is the team missing? I think that's a typical fatal flaw that I think businesses make is they don't know how to do that gap assessment, and what am I missing, and what am I looking for?
I think the second thing that I continue to find big or small businesses is once I make that assessment, am I willing to invest the time and the money to hire people that are going to challenge the existing sort of culture, challenge the thinking. And are you looking to bring in people that just say yes, or are you looking to bring in people that are gonna advance the business in a way that it needs to? And it may not be today, and it may not be tomorrow, but as you build the infrastructure out and you build that culture for the future, are you bringing in the right people? And I think in doing all of that, what's really changed for me is the advancement of technology and really answering a bunch of questions honestly, and allowing technology to help you identify what you're missing or what you're not.
And coming out of the pandemic. Where labor was a very difficult thing to find in any realm, in any business, you could have a restaurant, you're looking for a server, and you could have a technology business and looking for a ner, it's been very difficult prior to the last 24 months to find the right people 'cause the labor market is tighter than I think the media would like to tell you that it,
[00:05:59] Dave Tavers: I think that a lot of people have gone through that, and I think a lot of people can identify with the notion of there being a gap. What to do about the gap and where people in technology play a role in filling that gap. How do you build up the pattern recognition or the confidence to say, how do I go from that pit in my stomach that I know I have a gap to? How do I fill that in with the right people in the right technology?
[00:06:25] Marcus Lemonis: This is a terrible analogy, so forgive me in advance, but you know when you're single as a human, like when you don't have a mate of whatever kind, you are always looking. You're always open to the idea, at least if you have a good head on your shoulders, you do. And I think about running a business the same way. There is never a beginning and an end to recruit in recruiting is something that every leader, every manager, every business owner should be doing every single day, even if he feels like he doesn't have any needs.
Because I think the willingness to acknowledge the necessity to upgrade or to advance or to try new things or to bring in new people isn't like you don't start the project on Tuesday. You hire somebody because AI matching sets you up on Wednesday, and then you do interviews on Thursday, and then you hire on Frida,y and then it's resolved. I think that it really, like I spend a lot of my time trying to find people that can help any part of the business that I feel isn't at, at where it should be. And then once I reach that point I say to myself, well, is any part of the business really exactly where it should be? No. Every part of the business, any business and any part of the business needs to advance, needs to grow, needs to learn, and I think that recruiting and even if I was an HR specialist or I was a generalist, or I was in the recruiting organization.
My job should never stop as a business owner, my job should never stop. And I always tell people that I spend 20% of my day, and that's not a hard and fast number, but a good chunk of my day thinking about where do I find more talent and how do I look for them? And it's a lot easier when you have a tool and a partner to help you do that than it is to try to like get out your Rolodex. It's not the same as it used to be.
[00:08:05] Dave Tavers: I think that is exactly right. The interesting thing as a talent leader sometimes. Is when you're partnering with the business leader, who's the hiring manager, whether it be the CEO or someone else in the organization, oftentimes the natural instinct of that business partner you have as a talent leader, the business person wants to think of themselves as getting back to running their business so they don't have to do recruiting.
[00:08:28] Marcus Lemonis: I think I'm out of all the gifts that you have, I could be a unique victim because I'm the guy that 10 years ago would tell my HR department, stop coming to me with all this talent development, talent, nonsense. I would call it that, and I'm embarrassed to admit that, but I did maybe 15 years ago. I'm 50 now. When I was in my thirties. I really think it's important for talent management and acquisition, talent management to have a seat at the table and understanding what's actually happening in the business. I think too often CEOs and leaders and owners think about the HR department, like, oh, it's over there, like the accounting department.
They're over there. I encourage people, bring them to the table, have them understand where the KPIs are not being met, have them understand where retention is falling off. Or quite frankly, attrition is kicking up. Have them do succession planning with people, but not as a defense mechanism, and not in an emergency situation. And I think one of the things that I, that frustrates me about executives is they think about talent recruitment as a solution to a problem as opposed to a offensive move to move the ball down the field faster and crisper and stronger. And when I meet knuckleheads who lead businesses or own businesses, even Fortune 100 businesses, who said, oh, I don't deal with recruiting.
I have a gal or a guy that does that. My first comment to them is, so you're not involved in understanding the culture that you're trying to create, and you're not involved in understanding what risk you have every single day that you wake up, that somebody could leave, and that you're just gonna solve and fill that gap. After they leave, I like to put the HR team at the table just because I feel like they can advance the business faster. Could be wrong, but it's worked for me.
[00:10:18] Dave Tavers: No, I think that's exactly right, but I think some HR leaders and some talent leaders feel like they have to push to get that. And so you said you spoke of knuckleheads, you're lucky you have one right here to coach right now. So if I'm an up-and-coming talent leader and HR leader, and I go to my boss, I'll go to my business partner and say, you gotta put me at the table. I gotta hear the KPIs, I gotta understand the culture. Put me there so I can pay off. How do I make that as a talent leader, an instant payoff for that boss who says, okay,
[00:10:45] Marcus Lemonis: There's a step that's missing. My advice to people that are in those positions that work with me or call me for advice is you better learn the business and go learn the business. And if you're in the retail business, go work the store one day a month, two days a month, work the floor, work the stock room, work the register, work the call center, work the reception desk, whatever it may be.
Understand what the plight of the employee is. As leaders of organizations, we all believe that our business is fine, but when we go work. Actually, on the front lines, we learn a lot more. And my advice to talent management is the more you know about the business and the more you study it and you understand what the ethos is and you understand what that quarter or that month or that year's results need to be, and you start speaking in that language, like, look, I'll make this up as an example, Dave.
If I was a talent manager at a pharmaceutical company, maybe be understanding what are the initiatives of the company for that year. Listen to the quarterly and annual calls. If you're a public company, ask to sit in the back of the room, like a fly on the wall. Talk to the department managers in the hallway, ask them questions. Become a student of the history of the business, the current status of the business, and the future goals of the business, and become a student of the leaders that are driving that business so that when they say, Hey, we're doing X, Y, and Z, you can say, yes ma'am. And yes, sir, and I have some ideas and I'll give them to you when you want, but I'm studying the business.
I do have one question. What is the reason that we manufacture here? Verse here? And show them that you care about what the actual underlying businesses that pays your salary and puts the lights on at night. I think too often in the past, I had HR team members that would stay in their office and come when called, as opposed to going out on the floor and saying, Hello, Hey, I want to be a part of the company. Let me go work the event on Saturday. Let me take calls in the call center just so I could understand like. What I'm recruiting for.
[00:12:52] Dave Tavers: I love that. So I think the instinct sometimes of anyone in any role is to do what is comfortable. And sometimes staying in your office and waiting to be called is the comfortable thing. And you're putting yourself in the deep end of the pool and you don't know how to swim yet by saying, throw me into the meeting where I don't really understand what's going on, but I'm gonna learn as fast as possible. And I think building up the. Confidence and the intuition that being uncomfortable and being at the steep end of the learning curve, even if you don't understand every single thing that's happening, is right where you want to be, as opposed to being safely in your own office waiting to be called.
[00:13:29] Marcus Lemonis: If I worked for you, which I would love to if I worked for you, I would say to you, sir, is there, are there any meetings that you have with the staff or it would be permissible for me to sit in the back of the room? I won't say anything. I won't discuss anything where I could just learn and understand how we're doing and how I can be helpful.
And there may be moments where you say, No, I'm sorry. That's not possible. And there may be moments where you're like, Hey, yeah, that seems fine. I would say, is it permissible for me to dial into our earnings call? You know, the answer is yes. We have the phone number. I just wanna make sure that what I'm telling potential hires or any existing employee that has any issues, I want to be able to know more about the business.
So when someone comes in my office and complains about something, I could say to them, Hey, don't be tone deaf. The world is a weird place and we're having to do certain things because it's good for the company. I think the more you can know, the more you can defend and the more you can endorse. And that's really what a talent manager's job is to endorse and support the messaging and the ethos of the leadership. Now obviously if there's things that aren't kosher, that's fine, but you're not there to have your own agenda. You're there to support the leadership's agenda and be part of their administration. I hate to bring it to politics, but they're the administration.
It's an office. Your job is to support the administration and the administration's policies, administration's CEO. It's the saying it's interchangeable.
[00:15:01] Dave Tavers: And the way you phrased that, as you hypothetically came into my office to ask me to sit in a meetin,g is so great because you didn't make it just about, it would be a favor to me or this is what I want for my talent development. You explained I'm gonna be better at my job, and here's how. By having this context that if you offer me a seat at the back bench so I can sit in and learn that, then all of a sudden, you're clearly making it about the company. This isn't just about, Hey, I am a junior person, but I wanna sit in the big room just because I think that would be cool.
[00:15:31] Marcus Lemonis: Yeah. And I wanna learn and I wanna see ultimately how I could better support the organization achieving. I would say to you, sir, I just want to help you achieve your goals, and so the more I understand about what you want done, when people ask me or I'm recruiting somebody and I can tell them what the opportunity is, I could say to them, Hey, I sat in a meeting.
They're very focused on growth, and we're hiring people because growth is on our roadmap and it's in these areas, and I think you would be great for this job. And while you may not get the opportunity tomorrow that you want. I could tell you, I know I hear the leadership, they're talking about this, that, and the other thing. I'm not making it up myself. It's real.
[00:16:10] Dave Tavers: So one of the things that I. people and talent leaders are often looked to is to be experts at the hiring process and how to select a good person. You've assessed lots of different people, both as a hire yourself across running two different public companies, and all the other different businesses you've had consulting and other arrangements with.
How do you assess whether someone is good at that? Like is you've seen it in so many different ways you've done it yourself. And you've gotten to witness people build teams of different types and different calibers. How do you assess whether someone is good at hiring
[00:16:48] Marcus Lemonis: For me, whether it's hiring or managing? 'Cause they're kind of the same. You've gotta be able to really understand this is, are you willing to be vulnerable in your own life and with other people so that people trust you? Hiring is really built on trust. And do I believe what you're saying to me? And are you fronting and trying to be somebody different than you are, or am I getting the real version of you?
And I think the more vulnerable you can be as a human, and I tend to be overly vulnerable. Like if I'm trying to communicate with somebody, look, the reason I'm hiring you or the reason I'm looking to hire you is I'm in trouble and I thought I understood this area and people are bull crapping me all the time. And I feel very vulnerable. And I go to my meetings that I don't have answers to questions or I, the bank calls me and I don't have what I need, or whatever it may be. And I like acknowledging to people that I need them. And when you can't be vulnerable yourself as a hiring manager or as a recruiter to say to people, we need you at our company.
We have gaps, and we think that you could really fill. Something that would make us much better. And we also think that there's things that you could learn that I'm sure you wanna learn that you never thought you could learn. And I'll say to people all the time, if you come work with me, I know it's a gamble and I know things are gonna change constantly, but I'm gonna learn from you and you're gonna learn from me.
If we're not, you're gonna be so much smarter when you go somewhere else, and so am I. So in the interim, we can help each other. You have to be able to acknowledge that you need that person. That's the key for recruiting in me is that you have to be able to say like, I need you.
Well, what do you need me for? Do you need me to bus tables? Actually, yes, I do because my survey, my Yelp reviews have not been great. My family is relying on this business. It's a second generation. I feed my kids, and I do all these things and I haven't found somebody that can make the customer experience better yet.
And I'm hoping that leads to better results on Yelp or whatever review it could be. And I'm hoping that leads to more customers and that leads you to more tips. And then you could become a shift manager. So I could take you through that process, but it still required me to say, I have a problem, and you are the solution. People want to be wanted. People that are looking for a job, want to be wanted, even if they, this is maybe the most important thing, even if you know they don't have a job, even if you know they're in trouble financially and need that job, you should never, as a hiring manager, ever exploit that situation, but rather make yourself vulnerable.
Make them feel wanted and loved because the loyalty that you'll get from that person for giving them a chance, but nobody else would. When things aren't so good, they'll do anything for you. Anything.
[00:19:42] Dave Tavers: Amazing, Marcus. We always end these episodes by doing a rapid-fire round, and usually the scenario is you imagine you're grabbing a cup of coffee, and all of a sudden the CEO walks up.
ou are the CEO. So I want you to imagine instead exactly right, that you're at an investor conference and you're grabbing a cup of coffee, which is something you and I have both done. And an investor comes up to you who's a shareholder of Camping World or Beyond, or some other business of yours, and says, Marcus, I struggle with how to evaluate the talent of companies as I go and visit companies as I go and see the operations and go to like, look and feel what it's like to be in the store or whatever, the operational, how do I get better at assessing what the talent is like and what the talent matches to that company strategy?
[00:20:34] Marcus Lemonis: Well, the first is tenure. Tenure matters. No matter what anybody tells you, tenure matters, but the journey that team member had during their tenure also matters. 'Cause it tells me if the company understands succession planning. Are people self-motivated to do that? And so if you visit one of my stores or you call my call center, I would encourage you to ask the team member how they feel about the company, and I would ask that if I'm gonna give you this information that I only ask, that you follow back up with me and make sure that you definitely follow back up with me if the information was bad.
And I wanna understand from you because here are my eyes and ears on the ground. I can't, not everybody's gonna tell me the truth. We have people here that have been with here 20 years. We have people that have been here 20 days, and we're not a perfect company. And you should assess talent by understanding how does that location do? How long has that person been there? What's their journey like, and what hopes do they have for themselves? Do they see themselves at the company? Five years from now, you can take average talent and make them superstars, and you could take superstars and they never make it in your company. So the culture matters, Mr. Investor.
The culture matters that we create and in our HR organization. I've tasked them with doing more than just discipline and more than just recruiting. They're responsible for succession planning. They're responsible for training. They're responsible for career development. They're responsible to deal with people, and they have a personal crisis.
They're responsible for all of that. So ask people how they feel, but you have to promise me that if they tell you they don't feel good, you come back to me so that I understand how to deal with that. Because that's me getting fired. If an employee quits, I got fired by them. I wanna share one story with you if I could, as a public company.
I struggled when we first went public 'cause I was like, what are people gonna ask? How's it gonna work? And I had one analyst that used to cover the company all the time, and he would go into stores, and he would write up reports and take pictures and write things about what employees said. And you would get a handful of very excellent reports, and then you would get that one.
That crush your stock by 4% that day because they said that this is bad and this is bad and this is bad. And a lot of CEOs and a lot of hiring managers and a lot of HR executives wanna shelter investors, wanna shelter people from the bad news. The bad news, truthfully, can get you terminated if it's really bad. Bad news not resolved is far worse than bad news known. And so if you are in the HR world and you know things are going on in the organization that culturally don't match, or hiring managers are circumventing you, that happens in my own businesses where they think they could get cute and go around and hire somebody and not follow the marks.
You have an obligation to ensure that everybody knows about it, not because you're a tattletale, not because you're trying to get somebody in trouble, because you're trying to execute what the CEO asked you to do or what the owner asked you to do, and your job is to protect the other employees, protect the customer, and protect the owners. That is your job, by the way. It's in that order. If you really love doing your job as a hiring manager, every single business that's out there doesn't matter what it is. From ZipRecruiter to Pfizer, from Target to beyond, whatever it may be, our job is to have our people serve the customer. I've said this on many occasions, and we will end with on this question with this answer.
The employee is the most important person in the company, and it's more important than the customer. And I've been scolded many times, but you can't say that the customer's the most important, and my response is the employee's the most important because they determine what happens with the customer. And if the employees are unhappy, but the customers are happy, you probably aren't making any money, and you have high turnover if the employees are happy. By definition, for the most part, the customers will be happy as well.
[00:24:39] Dave Tavers: Marcus Lemonis, CEO of Camping World, Executive Chairman of Beyond, and Host of The Fixer on Fox. It is very clear why you're a talent all-star. Thank you so much for being on the show today.
[00:24:53] Marcus Lemonis: And thank you to ZipRecruiter for all the work that you guys do to democratize hiring, and you've leveled the playing field for that one person given. The unknown hero. A chance for an interview that otherwise would not get a chance. And I told my wife, 'cause I married's mom, married, I have no kids. I wanna end my life knowing that I gave somebody a shot when nobody else would. And my relationship with ZipRecruiter that has existed for years is what it is because you guys provide a platform to give somebody a shot when nobody else would.
[00:25:31] Dave Tavers: That's Marcus Lemonis. He's the CEO of Camping World, the Executive Chairman of Beyond, and Host of the Fixer on Fox. We'll put links to as many companies and projects in the show description. And just a reminder, we put the video versions of these conversations on YouTube, also on the official ZipRecruiter channel. I'm Dave Travers. Thanks for listening to Talent All-Stars. We'll see you next week.