Hiring is Your #1 Priority! (Lawn & Landscape Industry)

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What's up, everyone? It's Mike Andes, landscape businesscourse.com I'm coming to you live pretty late at night. Not going to be taking any questions tonight, but today I'm going to be talking about you. To you. One of the most important things, if you have a lawn care landscaping business, and that is hiring, okay, this is literally the biggest issue right now at 90% of landscapers that have employees now, if you are solo operator, you don't have many, very many employees. This is probably not a big issue for you, but consistently, like, I literally posted a kind of a funny picture just a couple minutes ago on our Instagram, on my Instagram. And it had a picture of like the unemployment line getting checks. And then he had Max, our mascot, being like hiring now and was lined up for him. And so that's what's happening right now. Literally the fact that unemployment checks are literally giving people 5, 4, 5, $600 a week to sit at home, it's a $300 per week boost. But then on top of that, they got their regular state funding, which could be two, three hundred dollars easily a week. So someone can literally sit at home and do nothing for five, six hundred dollars a week. Or they can come work there, you know, work crazily hard, out in the sun, out in the rain, working, mowing lawns, doing landscape, digging ditches. Do you really think they're going to do that if they're lazy? Not really. If they're smart in terms of trying to build their credit, want to buy a house, want to build their career, want to get the next spot in their employment, that's a different situation. But for most people, if they're lazy, they're not doing that. And so it's very, very difficult. This is the hardest it's ever been. And this is the thing, though. I expected this. I talked about this at Landscape Summit back in January. We did it virtually on zoom. I talked about then. I've said it all winter long, especially after the pandemic and everything. I said 2021 is going to. The people that can hire and retain the best employees are going to be the people who win the game, and that is going to be who takes massive market share in 2021. Because this is an opportunity. All really bad situations are an opportunity. And the fact that it's going to be more difficult than ever to find and hire good people means that there's going to be people either downsize and go to solo, it's going to happen to a bunch of People, or it's going to go to the people who are the most lean, most efficient. Create a great culture, have great systems in place. And that needs to be you. And we're already in the middle of it. We're hitting it. We're already in the middle of spring rush. For many of us, we're going into April. For a lot of you, that's when you start mowing grass. And we're feeling at Augusta, some of our best franchisees right now are being capped by the fact they can't find employees. The gen our general managers that just started new locations this past spring. One literally just got two today following some of the methods we're going to talk about just in here in a couple minutes. But it's not easy. It's not standard. It's not like the average. Like, oh, just put something up on your Facebook page and you'll get people line up to hire. Like, that's not happening anymore. So it's the worst ever. That's the first thing I want to say. It's the worst ever and it's not going to get much better. Especially I don't see it happening. People are not going to wake up one day. Like, I want to work really hard. I would much rather work outside, you know, working all day long out in the hot sun or the drenching cold rain. That's not. Not going to happen case. That's not happening. There's a really good chance that government support is going to continue, only get more taxes are going to get more, et cetera. So I have a couple of proposals thing that might help. These are not things that are like groundbreaking, but hopefully it jogs your thought process a little bit and you come up with something that maybe can get you a good hire. Okay, so full disclosure. Locally, we are not dying for laborers, but we're more established and we have a lot of our employees that have been with us since last year. So we're not dying locally. But I feel a lot of pressure right now because we have 39 locations of Augusta and most of them are hurting. They're either just starting out and they're not even looking for employees yet. They literally are just getting started right now or finding employees is the barrier for us for massive growth. And so I should say like the cap to our growth. So it's the worst thing ever. Okay, number two, what can you actually do about this craziness? What can you actually do to get employees right now? You're like, this is great that you, Michael, that you Told us back in January is going to be really bad. But guess what? I need employees, like, right now, so what can you do? First of all, let me say it's not easy, all right? I'm not gonna. I'm saying these things. I'm not claiming to, like, know how to get hires tomorrow because we are struggling with our corporate locations around the country, as well as our franchisees, trying to help them get employees right now. And it's not easy. So, like, anyone's like, oh, just follow these steps. It's so easy. Like, they have not been in every market in the United States. I'm dealing with literally 39 locations right now. And, yeah, the occasional one. They get great employees. It's no problem. They post a couple things. But for someone to go on. On right now, Facebook and bash anyone, because they can't find employees, like, oh, you're just doing horrible. You got to raise your. That's like, okay. There's different markets around the country, and there are some very, very difficult markets right now to find employees. Okay? So number one thing you can do, though, is pick up the phone, talk to pastors of local churches, talk to youth organizers, talk to your local Rotary Club, your. What's it called? Toastmasters. Talk to people that are connected. Go to the local chamber of commerce. Not to try to get business, just to connect and ask if anyone needs work and if they know of anyone that needs work, because those people, a lot of times are connected to a lot of other people that could potentially need work. Talk to them. Pastors, great opportunity, especially if you're connected in local community. They know a lot of people. They know a lot of people who are in need of jobs. And yes, there are actually still people who have lost a job, want a job, and have been displaced from COVID A lot of them are not. I agree. I agree. I'm not going to get into the whole debate about whether or not the government should be doing this. In terms of paying people to sit at home, I don't really care. My job is to try to play within the confines the current rules of the game. The current rules of the game require me to get creative, and that means picking up the phone. Like, talk to your pastor, Talk to other pastors. Talk to your local mayor. If you're in a really small city, go to your local chamber of commerce. Talk to people. Hey, we're just looking to hire people. I'm not trying to sell anything today at this chamber of Commerce. I just need great employees, and I'm willing to Pay for them. I don't care if you got stand on the side of the road with a sign that says how much you're going to pay per hour, whatever you got to do, yard signs, whatever. All right, number three, though, and this is something that's a little bit different. Raise your wages. And this is something that I can't afford to raise our wages. Think about it like this. Inflation is happening. We talked to us a few weeks ago. Everything's getting more expensive, okay? And right now, even though inflation from a. What the Fed is going to give us, the percentages might be like 3, 4% maybe you look at the cost of lumber that has literally controlled and quadrupled over the past year. You look at the cost of so many different commodities that are just going through the roof in price, price labor, in my opinion, like if we want to call a commodity, it's not commodity. But if we're going to look at it like that, it's like a good, It's a service being traded. The price of that labor has gone up dramatically. The cost of us doing construction right now on reset, the building that we're about to break ground on, and then our, our headquarters has gone up literally almost 2x in the past 12 months. The cost to build it because of all the materials, the cost of labor, finding good subs, all the rest of it. You need to raise your wages, and in order to do that, you need to raise your prices. Okay, so what, this, this is the metric you want to use if you're going to raise your. You know what if I could raise my prices or raise my hourly rate, that could offer an employee by, say, $2 per hour, I need you to increase your prices by three times that number. So if I'm going to go raise my prices by $3 per hour, let's say, for example, I'm going to go from 16, $15 per hour to $18 per hour. Okay? That means that if I'm charging $50 to the customer, I now need to be charging $59 to the customer. So I raised my hourly employee wage by $3. I then raised the hourly rate to the customer by $9. So 3X. So raise your rate so you can charge. You can get better employees by offering more and then raise your prices. Like if you've been wondering, oh man, should I raise my prices? I don't know if I should raise my prices. Okay, if you can't find employees, this is your golden ticket. This is your golden ticket to go ahead and raise prices and Raise the rate so you can actually go get employees. If getting employees right now is the limit to your growth, you need to go pony up and pay more and raise the, raise your prices, pass that cost along to the customer. Because guess what, that's what every other industry does is pass that cost along to the customer. You say, well, there's other competition out there and they're doing it for much cheaper and they're a bunch of illegal doing it under the table. You're not competing against them in this, in this scenario, you're not competing against the guy doing lawns for $15. You're competing against professionals who are also in the same hunt for labor as you. And their costs are going up as well. And that's the upward pressure called inflation. Prices will go up, okay, so raise your prices by 3x the amount that you're raising to the employee. We had to do this to our, one of our corporately owned locations on the other side of the country. I had to say, you know what, we're going to raise our base pay on P4P and we're going to have to, you know, raise our rates in terms of, to the customer knowing that we're charging premium. That's just the part of the game. Like yes, in that market it's very difficult to find people. Yes, there's a lot of illegals working. Yes, there's a lot of undercutting prices, all the rest of it. But we're got tons of work. We got tons of work. I just need people to work. I just need people to go actually do the work. And I want them to be able to stay around for a little bit of time. Some crazy stories of people like day two, day three, just walking off the job and all the rest of it. Hey, it's not so bad when you go play Xbox and make 5, 600 bucks a week to do so. All right, last thing, the traditional medias of obviously Craigslist, indeed, Facebook, you gotta start advertising those platforms as if you were advertising for customers. You gotta literally think about what you used to pay for. Facebook ads and YouTube ads and Google Ads and Nextdoor and all this stuff for customers. If you're really busy right now, you need to say, start thinking about that in terms like, oh, I gotta go spend money on advertising for employees. That's what you gotta do. You gotta go make a crazy video, get in front of the, you know, the 18 to 28 year old crowd, for example, and market against them on Facebook. And you gotta, you gotta really go after you gotta spend some money. That's the traditional methods, the unusual methods. Okay, I do not like poaching. I hate poaching. I'm not a big fan of poaching. But Home Depot and Lowe's, if I can pay their employees more and they're competent and they have a good attitude and I go in there and they're in the rental department or the nursery and they're just great customer service, great eye contact and I know they're making $10 an hour and I can offer them 15 or 20. I'm going to go ahead and offer them a job. Guess what? Home Depot and Lowe's is on the stock market and publicly traded and they have hundreds of thousands of employees. They're not going to miss one of them. I feel like I do not feel bad taking with their employees. If I can offer them 50% more money, I'm offering them better prospects of going up in the company, etc. So poaching is definitely something I'm willing to do of like hardware companies. Retail, like when you're going to a retail, like if you're going to McDonald's, what if that general manager at a McDonald's is making $14 an hour, your base pay is 18. They've been there for five, 10 years and they need to make a few dollars more power to provide for their family. And they've been there, they've been steady, they've been good at training people like that could be a per higher for you. This is when simplification of services so important but you actually draw on the retail market, on the food industry and draw people into your industry. Lawn care, landscaping, hard labor or work. If you've simplified your services, if you have excavators rolling around, a bunch of, you know, ditch witches and blocks entertaining holes and all the rest of it, good luck right now trying to find employees that are wanting to work really, really hard and do those things and have those skills. Very difficult, very difficult to find 20 of those people tomorrow. But if I've simplified services a lot, if I have systems in place, I be able to go to a retailer that's gone out of business, go to a food service company that is struggling and laying off people and be able to hire their employees and look more for the level of their, their, their, their character, looking for their personality instead of their skills. And how many years of experience do you have in lawn care landscaping? That's not coming around right now. If you have it, you know, if you've been living under a Rock. There's not people walking around looking for landscaping and lawn care jobs that have five years of experience doing. So you're going to go out and have to find them and fight for them and pay more money for them if they have experience. So I'd really recommend. This is again, an absolute thesis that I've had for a couple years. And I will continue to be laughed at from the people that do hardscaping because it's like, oh, we can still make money. And we, yeah, there's plenty of money in the system. There's stimulus money all going around. But can you scale it? Can you get it to the point where you're not working in the business, you're not running materials around and there's people that can actually run the business for you. Just like a McDonald's, they have systems in place, they have people in place, they have processes in place. Because it doesn't require a whole lot of skill to flip fries and burgers. Can you simplify your business down to that level and actually make the business work without you? That's what's interesting. It's really interesting that when an employee drops out, out of the, out of something, like they leave, they go on unemployment, whatever they do, you're able to go, no problem. I'm able to find another low level, low, low skilled level employee and pop them into that position. Cause I know my, my skill level is not super high. It doesn't require a whole bunch of labor experience. So that is some of the tips I would be talking about raising your prices so that you can afford the higher wages to the employees. Pick up the phone, call your pastors, call youth organized, call people in the local area. You got to start getting desperate. Like, trust me, if the only thing to limit your growth is finding employees, you got to get desperate. I don't care. You got yard signs. If you got to start going through drive throughs and seeing good employees go through a retail store, just walk the aisles of Home Depot, do whatever you got to do. Big shout to one of our general managers that did this exact same thing, went out and got two employees like, hey, we got to do this. We have a time like next week. We got so much work booked out, we got two more employees. He got, he got serious, he's like, all right, I'm gonna take my car and introduce myself to employees I see working around town. Let's do it. All right. I'm not gonna answer questions tonight. It's a little bit late. I got some more stuff I have to do. But thank you so much, everyone for coming on live. Thank you so much for watching. I am going to be not this weekend, but next weekend I'm going to be putting up module up in landscapebusinesscourse.com specifically on hiring, interviewing, the whole process and putting it together in a nice bigger package. Instead of just spending, you know, 15 minutes, spend a few hours going over several things, interview process, interview questions, a whole bunch of stuff that's going to help a little more detail that's not going to do super hot on a on a live video at 11 o' clock at night. So anyways, thanks so much, everyone. Thank you for watching. Supporting LandscapeBusinessCourse.com we'll see now on the next video. Sam.