The link between employee engagement and profit is not theoretical — it is the most direct lever most small business owners never touch. In Episode 158 of The Profit Minds Podcast, Dr. Steven Kirch sits down with Ryan Englin, founder and CEO of Core Matters, bestselling author, and host of the Titans of the Trades podcast.
Ryan grew up watching his father run a blue-collar business despite having customers, and he spent years trying to help companies like his dad’s before he discovered the real problem. It was never revenue generation. It was people.
In this episode, Dr. Kirch and Ryan Englin break down the full system for building a team that drives profit. Here is what is covered:
Ryan Englin did not set out to build a hiring and retention company. He grew up in a blue-collar family — his father was an owner-operator with the same dream most entrepreneurs share: more money, more time, more freedom. Twenty years later, his father looked around and asked what happened. Ryan assumed the problem was customers. He went to college, tried the corporate route, then started his own business to help companies generate more leads and retain more clients. However, it turned out that was the wrong diagnosis entirely.
The real problem was people. Not finding them, exactly, but hiring the right ones, keeping them engaged, and building a team that ran the business the way it needed to run. Ryan built a system around that insight. Today, Core Matters helps field service and trades companies fix their people problems — from the first job posting to onboarding to performance reviews. He is also the host of the Titans of the Trades podcast and the founder of FieldCon.io, an AI-driven platform that makes performance reviews something managers will actually do.
The core argument Ryan makes in this episode is simple and uncomfortable: if your profitability is stuck, the answer is probably not more marketing. It is your people.
Your people drive your customer experience. Customer experience drives your revenue. Revenue drives your profit. As a result, if the people piece is broken wrong hires, low engagement, high turnover no amount of leads will fix what is happening at the customer level.
The mistake most owners make is to default to a victim mindset. They say nobody wants to work anymore. Post on Indeed and get flooded with garbage applications. Tire whoever shows up first because they are desperate. And the cycle repeats. However, Ryan pushes back on that framing hard. The problem is not the labor market. The problem is that the company has not given good people a compelling reason to choose them.
Ryan introduces the concept of becoming the employer of choice in your local area — not as a vague aspiration, but as a specific system with three components.
First, you have to identify what genuinely makes your company different as a place to work. Most business owners are blind to their own advantages because those advantages feel normal to them. An outside perspective often reveals the differentiator — no timesheets, flexible scheduling, a specific culture, a values-driven leadership team, something that sounds ordinary to the owner but looks extraordinary to the right candidate. Ryan shares the example of a CPA firm with no hourly billing, no timesheets, and all clients on retainer. The owner thought that was nothing special. It turned out to be the thing that made talented CPAs line up to work there.
Second, you market those differentiators the same way you would market to customers. A job posting is marketing. Your social media presence is marketing. Video testimonials from your current employees on your own website and YouTube channel, not on Glassdoor are marketing. Furthermore, Ryan warns specifically against what he calls digital sharecropping: putting your employer brand energy into platforms you do not own, where disgruntled employees leave reviews and you have no control over what shows up next to yours.
Third, some companies take this so far that their website focuses more on employee acquisition than customer acquisition, because they know that if they build the right team, the right customers will follow.
Ryan and Dr. Kirch discuss the eNPS (Employee Net Promoter Score), the internal version of the classic customer satisfaction metric. The question is: on a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend working here to a friend or family member?
Most companies stop there. That is the mistake.
The gold, as Ryan puts it, is in the why. A passive score of 7 tells you nothing about what would move that person to a 9 or a 10. However, when you sit down with your employees face-to-face — ideally over lunch, not a software form you get the real answer. For frontline and hourly workers especially, the written question gets a shrug. The conversation gets the truth.
Ryan also surfaces a surprising finding: companies with strong eNPS scores often still get zero referrals from their employees. In fact, the issue is not the incentive. The issue is that your frontline people are not salespeople or recruiters. They do not know how to ask a gainfully employed friend to leave their job and take a risk on yours. That is a major life event not a restaurant recommendation. They need to be equipped with the language, the tools, and even some role play before they can do it effectively.
One of the most important concepts Ryan introduces in this episode is one every business owner has experienced but rarely had language for: people quit twice.
The first quit happens in their heart. That is the moment the employee emotionally checks out — they stop caring about the outcome, stop watching attendance, stop worrying about the small losses. The second quit is when they tell you. And between those two moments, on average in the US, it takes 10 weeks to find a new job.
So the sequence looks like this. Your employee decides to quit. They start looking. Ten weeks later, they have secured another offer and hand you their notice. Meanwhile, for the past two and a half months, you have been paying full salary for someone whose head was somewhere else entirely. Not because they are a bad person — because they are planning for the next stage of their career, and it is not with you.
Additionally, Ryan notes that if you fire someone for performance issues, the cost starts even earlier — customer retention problems, rework, damage to the culture, and the impact on your best employees who are watching how you handle it.
One of the most practical ideas in this episode comes from a client of Ryan’s who stopped stressing about open positions years ago. His secret: he never stopped hiring.
Instead of waiting for someone to quit and then scrambling on Indeed, he built a pipeline of interested candidates who were not quite ready yet and when a position opened, someone was already warmed up. As Ryan describes it, the client had a bench of prospective employees just waiting, the same way a strong sales team keeps a pipeline of warm prospects.
The tool that makes this possible at scale is an Applicant Tracking System, or ATS. Ryan describes it simply: it is a CRM for recruiting. It connects to job boards, automates follow-up, runs candidate assessments, and uses AI to score resumes against the job description. For a small business owner drowning in 100 unqualified Indeed applications, an ATS filters the field before a human ever has to read a single resume. One option Ryan recommends is discover.ai, though he notes there are many at different price points.
Dr. Kirch also shares the story of a four-person company that used an AI bot to run 15-minute screening interviews simultaneously, around the clock, no scheduling required. The top 10 candidates surfaced by the AI included two people who would have been eliminated by a traditional resume screen — because they were poor writers but outstanding storytellers. AI screening revealed what the resume would have hidden.
Ryan’s position: AI is extraordinary at screening. But a human must always do the interview. His analogy for sending AI to conduct the interview is worth quoting directly: it is like sending AI on a first date and asking for a report afterward. The chemistry, the culture fit, the energy in the room — none of that gets captured in a transcript.
Dr. Steven Kirch is the creator of the Profit Minds™ Growth System, which helps entrepreneurs and professionals accelerate profits through productivity, scalable systems, and AI-powered business strategies.
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