A short guidance segment by Mike Andes on hiring project managers in landscaping. He advises a flat organizational structure, simplifying services to reduce required manager skill level and pay, and outlines trade-offs between hiring highly skilled (and expensive) managers vs. simplifying operations and paying less. Recommends incentive pay tied to project profitability or budgeted vs. actual hours.
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Next question. What is the best way to go about hiring a project manager so that I can get out of the field? How much should they, how much should their starting pay be? So at Augusta Lawn Care we try to have a very flat hierarchical approach. We don't really have like okay, you are a mowing person, then a mowing manager and then a crew leader and then a project manager and then an opera. Like we don't have a whole lot of of different layers like that. We have it pretty flat and then we have designated project manager for jobs. That being said, the simpler you can make your operations, the less you have to pay someone that is a project manager. If you are expecting a project manager, have excavation and know how to build walls and patios and all the rest of it, you're going to need to be able to fork over a big chunk of cash because they probably have five other offers that they can make in the oil industry, in the construction industry, and you're competing with all of those fol. So you're going to have to pay them a lot of money. That being said, if you can simplify all your services, simplify. So you don't have 50 services, you have two or three that you focus on and they're simple services and they're repeatable and they're scalable. Those people, you don't have to pay as much. So I recommend using that type of a model and then having your managers being more or less the people who are people people. In other words, they manage the people. They don't manage projects as much as the people that are out working. And so that's one way to look at it. Another way is go pay someone a significant amount of money to be a project manager and then be able to offer those other big services. The question is, do you want to be trying to find laborers that are willing to work in those type of environments carrying 70 pound blocks or is it hard to find people that can actually operate excavators in your market? These are things you gotta think about. And a lot of times if you want a project manager that is going to kind of manage all of your projects, they need to be pretty skilled. They are going to be expensive. You got to be willing to pay them something. And if I was you, I would pay them based upon profitability on those projects or even just budget hours versus actual hours for them to be incentivized to get them done quickly and efficiently.
