New City Fro-Yo Store Owner Prefers Hirees With No Experience

NEW CITY, NY — Lenny Spiegel never complains about the younger generation. In fact, he prefers to hire a high school teenager who has no prior work experience at his 16 Handles frozen yogurt shop in New City.

He is on a mission to shape the young employees into hard-working individuals who will go on to achieve great things. In the past 12 years, he has trained hundreds of eager teens entering the workforce.

Spiegel and Patch had a recent Q&A session about that.

Patch: Why did you pick frozen yogurt and why did you pick New City?

Spiegel: I did not exactly pick it, it picked me. My original partner looked into it and called me up one day and asked me if I'd want to partner with him. And it sounded like a good idea. We checked out a couple of the existing 16 Handle stores, liked what we saw, and then looked for a location. We were supposed to look at either the shopping mall, Palisades Center, or look for something nearby. We both decided that New City would be the right location since we both had other businesses in New City and also we both lived in New City and it was a viable market.

Patch: What inspired you to turn what many small business owners consider a chore into a mission?

Spiegel: Hiring inexperienced youth gives us the opportunity to mold these young people into responsible young adults and teach them exactly what responsibilities come with taking a job and that it's not just somewhere to kill some time and get some money. It has paid off for us over the years, not to mention all the thanks we get from parents, who sometimes tell us that these ideals have rubbed off on their kids in regards to helping more around the house too.

Patch: What are the work rules?

Spiegel: The biggest and most effective work rule we have introduced is that no one is allowed to have their cell phones on them during their shift. How many times have you walked into an establishment only to see their employees with their faces buried in their cell phones and ignoring the customers? Since our establishment is based on customer experience, we have made sure that our employees' attention is always on our clients from the moment they walk in the door. Everyone must make eye contact as soon as they come close to an entering customer and having no phones on them, assures a greater chance of that.

Patch: Did you revise the rules a couple of years after creating them? What was in, what was out?

Spiegel: We are always tweaking rules and procedures based on results and reactions. The most common rule or procedure that is constantly worked on, is how we interact with younger customers. And again, this is where having more responsible young employees pays off big. We constantly ask them for opinions on how to approach and interact with these younger people.

It seems that every 4 years or so, as a new crop of high schoolers or local college students arrive on the scene, the rules of socializing and communicating change. We want to have them be both comfortable AND respectful when visiting. So it's key to know their lingo and ways. Our staff is the bridge between us and them. We have also been successful in guiding our younger employees in handling our senior customers, how they need to be respectful and make them comfortable in our establishment too.

Patch: What's been the hardest thing about it?

Spiegel: Well, at first the hardest part was getting our name out to the public, advertising properly and then thinking out of the box and trying to get business outside of the store. For example, catering or parties, etc.. We managed to dig a niche into getting to do school functions and different organization functions, and then we learned different methods to make it simple to actually bring the store to someone's house and create on-site parties instead of people coming to us for parties. It allowed more people to participate and it allowed an easier delivery and a more wide variety and more entertainment.

Also, the other hard thing naturally to anybody who is going to run a business with some absentee management is to always find good management. While we will explain down the road, as you know, about having great success getting high school and young college kids to work, management is the most important. My current partner and I both have other businesses where we spend most of our time there and a little less time in this store. So we rely on shift leaders and managers to run most of the operation. Although we are on site quite often, we have had great success with keeping people for long periods of time.

But when the position opens up, it is very, very difficult to find somebody who will be able to properly manage the store train and be devoted to do that. We've been lucky in many senses and then there are times where it's very stressful because there is a gap in time of management, especially in the early part of the day when you don't have kids available, but only need adults. And that's been the hardest part. And as you know, in these days, getting anybody to do anything is even harder. So our plight is a lot harder to solve now than it's been before.

Patch: What's been the most rewarding thing?

Spiegel: We have had a boatload of past employees go on to successful careers and have succeeded as young adults. The rewarding part is having them always drop by and share stories of their new careers and successes. It's great to have them enjoy coming back to where "it all started" for them, workwise. It shows us that we have and are doing the right thing with our employees!

Patch: Who was the most unusual young person you hired? Why? How did it work out?

Spiegel: We have not really had any unusual people working for us, but the situation I could bring up in what was unusual is we had a 15 year-old student come to us and just constantly get us to try to hire her. The policy for the store has always been to hire at 16 because you're not allowed to work in a kitchen under 16 and use knives to cut fruit. But this person was so, so persistent that we decided, “well, she'll be 16 in about five months, so let's go ahead and try it.” We hired her.

Probably within two weeks she could run the store better than anybody and knew everything. Long and short of the story is she started at 15 and she graduated college this June. She stayed with us all the way through high school and college and just got a degree and is finally now, after seven years of working with us, going out on her own to pursue her career. But the oddity and the most unusual part was that she just pushed herself in at 15 and turned out to be probably one of the top three employees we've had in the past 12 years.

Patch: Are you enjoying yourself?

Spiegel: My main day-to-day business is a very stressful business. It's in automotive repair and maintenance and it has got a lot of stuff going on, on a daily basis, including making sure you're fixing cars properly and nothing goes wrong, handling maybe 50 to 60 cars a day. That's stressful, making sure you get the parts on time so the car's not sitting around. All this is stressful.

So after that, when I go over to 16 Handles and what some consider the work I have to do, I consider therapy. I go there and everything I have to do is considered to me just relaxing work. It's of a whole different nature and at the same time, I am sitting in a place that just gives off happiness and good vibes. So all through my process of working, whether I'm doing payroll, whether I'm doing inventory, whether I'm recreating new screens, visual effects, or anything like that, I'm just having a great time.

Sometimes I miss meals. I don't go back for dinner because I get in there and I get involved doing my work and we'll meet customers and start talking. And again, this is part of my job. I just have a great time. So that's the best thing. I most definitely enjoy myself whenever I'm there.

Patch: Tell me about a few of your former employees. What are their stories?

Spiegel: It's hard for me to go back and remember individuals one at a time. But I could tell you basically the stories are that a lot a lot of times we have parents come back to us and just thank us for teaching their kids a good work ethic for the future, so that as they grow up, they remember how to be responsible and not just showing up for a job and just sitting back and relax.

So individual stories are just so many kids that have come in, maybe from households that are lower income and don't have much and have learned to take pride in what they do, to earn their paychecks and to learn how to be able to get things for themselves when they normally wouldn't because they've earned the money for themselves doing a great job. Other cases are just good cases or I would say where we get kids starting young - 15 or 16 years old - and they stay with us either through college. If they go to college, they always come back to work during the winter breaks or in the spring after school's over, they work here throughout the summer. We have two people that are teaching who have their masters in teaching and still come back and work three or four nights a week.

That being said, I think the story about that is that - especially these days - it's very, very hard to get good, devoted employees. So we found years ago that the best thing to do is get people without too much experience and not too much inside their heads as far as work experience.

They are fresh and ready to absorb more. So we teach them the responsibility of coming to your shifts, not calling in sick and actually being up and ready to do your job and to come in with excitement. They’re ready to perform instead of ready to just kind of lean back on the counters and do that. And because of that, so many kids have learned how to go on and perform well in their futures and are well commended or easily find jobs if their resume is coming from recommendations from us. Parents have sent us many, many letters and have called us so many times to thank us for the great job we did in teaching their kids a work ethic, getting them to do something that they themselves could not get them to do - to instill different things needed and to be proud of what you do, to concentrate on what you do and perform for the person you're working for.

Patch: How does the community feel about your work ethic?

Spiegel: Well, I've been in this community and in business for over 30 years. Everyone I'm happy to say - maybe not everybody - but most people know me from either my automotive business or from my coaching since I have coached basically every sport, recreational sport in the county, whether it be Little League, basketball, football, or adult softball. I have coached and still continue to coach myself in my softball league for 30-something years now. And my kids, who are now 38 and 32, were coached by their father through all their sports from the time they were 5 until they were 16, when recreational sports age basically cuts off.

So everybody in our community knows me and knows my work ethic. They see me in one place and suddenly in the next place and suddenly in the next place. And all their questions are, “how do you do this? How can you do this? You do this, you do that.” It's amazing. So I think I could truly say I set an example about what work ethics are all about and what hard work is and showing that it does pay off.

I'm definitely not one anybody considers to be a slacker or even sit back and watch other employees do the job for you. I'm most definitely hands-on. Possibly you can consider me a bit of a control freak and I'm okay with that because I still go by the old model. If you want something done right, you do it yourself. Although we do have great employees and I rely upon them, I just like doing things for myself.