A good man is hard to find

In the time I've been here so far, every day M has complained about the difficulty of finding good help.

Here's the larger picture: if KingFisher is driven to offer more services (organic food, trekking activities, etc.), and can't find vendors to supply this, it does it itself and thus becomes vertically integrated. But this can be a tall order for a 14 person operation that depends on its owner for almost all of its decisions, operational and strategic. He's not in the business of managing trekking guides but rather in building and running a lodge. Managing trekking guides, though necessary, is outside of his core competence. Wouldn't it be better if he could subcontract this out to a vendor?

This seems pie-in-the-sky, but imagine if he could help build or invest in or advise a vocational trekking guide training institute. Or a school of hotelling. Often the schools may not impart a great deal of knowledge, but they serve as a filter to sort out the people who're interested in this line of work; and graduates of a training program in turn will do a lot of the real learning on the job.

M's problem is that he ends up doing the filtering himself. He goes to the village, he looks for employees, he finds a couple candidates (people aren't clamoring for jobs in this village it seems; if they are, they head for Thailand.) They start working, and much more often than not, they don't work out: they don't like the work; they don't see the value of the room and board he provides them (if they're from the village, they won't know the value of free room and board); they're not used to a manager-employee relationship; they don't have a sense of time or accountability. This is M's perspective- and I'm sure there are many reasons to explain why he observes this behavior, but it's been very consistent in his experience.

Maybe the villagers he meets lack perspective. M tells the story of one of his better workers. Last year, he came here, and, after repeated problems (not showing up, taking off more time than granted), he was let go. Apparently he went elsewhere for work; and within a year, he was calling M back for a job. Kept asking, kept asking, and finally M relented. And he's been pretty reliable since. Apparently he'd seen how good the work is here after all.

So this is an example where a certain kind of filtering happened, however M had to be a big part of it, at some expense. A school or training institute will do that for him; its graduates are more likely to be interested and really stick around. That's the kind of human capital infrastructure he needs.

So... is there a better way for him to filter? Where can he find reliable people from the village? Where do they go? Where do they hang out? I think the answer lies somewhere in partnering with teachers, perhaps creating an after-school program. Yah, kinda like Future Farmers of America, or other vo-tech programs in high school.

M already makes donations to the local school; he might augment them with investments that lead to more direct benefit.