Hiring UNLOCKED! (15 Secrets I Wish I Knew Sooner)

I'm going to give you 15 secrets of how to find, hire and train up world class team members. My name is Mike Andes. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care. We have over 150 locations around the world. Over the past year, I've traveled to over 30 small businesses across the country. Every single one we try to turn around going from failing to being really profitable. And one of the biggest things they struggle with is hiring, training and retaining great team members. This video will give you the complete guide to hiring the best employees for your home service business.

The first thing we want to talk about is team meetings. Now every single business sort of finds their own cadence and how frequently they want to have team meetings. Just keep in mind team meetings. You're not producing any revenue and so especially if you're having pay for performance, the crew wants to get out and actually make money as quickly as possible. So being super organized, being quick with your team meetings, really important. Here's a couple of things that have worked well for us. We have team meetings twice a week using Mondays and Thursdays. And what we're going to do is start off with yellow slips, which is callbacks from the previous week. We'll talk more about that in the future. But the reason we do it in the morning and we have a standup meeting is because otherwise it can get dragged out really long. Just by standing up. You will cut the time it takes for meetings to go by in half simply because everyone is standing up. Also, for your frontline team members that are out in the field, a lot of times they're just tired in the morning, they just finished their coffee. They literally roll out of bed 20 minutes ago to have a sit down meeting. You are going to have much, much longer times so spent doing nothing in terms of labor revenue. So try to make it as tight as possible. Have an agenda for the meeting so you can quickly get to the items even if it's only five or ten minutes. One thing that can a lot of times you can fall into the trap of is being super negative and harping on the same three or four things. I've been to a lot of team meetings and usually the same five or six things are said almost every single meeting. Make sure you clock in and out of the jobs. Make sure you get the equipment on your truck so you're not coming back to the shop. It's the same four or five things. Remember to clock in and out. All of these things are said the same way every single time. And if you start to do that at every meeting, it just becomes white noise. So try to mix it up a little bit. Try to change kind of the cadence of your teams can be helpful. There's a couple of tricks to making that happen. Number one is get other people to say stuff instead of you as the owner. When I go to a team meeting and the owner or the primary manager is the one doing all of the talking, many times it shows that there is a weakness of communicating between the team members. So, for example, instead of you talking about how everyone needs to clock in and out, have someone else that clocked in really, really well give some of their tips and tricks to make sure they don't forget. So the rest of the team is hearing from one of their peers instead of their boss all the time. Another thing is, instead of harping on the bad, focus on the good. So the one person that did actually fuel up their truck before they got back to the shop, praise them instead of punishing everyone else by keeping them through a longer meeting and talking about how bad they're doing. So instead of always focusing on the punishment, focus on praising what's actually working well. One way to do this and kind of also achieve getting other people to talk is have what we call moments of appreciation. Usually you'll start being the one that actually gives out moments of appreciation at the end of each meeting. But eventually the goal is to get your team members to call up their peers for things that they're doing, where they go above and beyond. Maybe it's they really pushed extra long in finish up a project, or they worked crazy hard to get a certain part of the product done that was not fun, like going under the Accra space or underneath the deck. This went above and beyond. Or they help someone else at the end of the day clean out their truck. These types of moments of appreciation is a way to fortify the positive behavior instead of always being negative. And trust me, it's easy to fall in that trap because it usually is the same four or five things that the crew does that just really drives you up the wall, and it just feels like you're saying the exact same thing over and over. So try to get them to talk as much as possible instead of you always being the one that's doling out the criticisms.

Another aspect of creating a strong culture in your business is having what we call the yellow slip system. And yes, it is a yellow. And if you fold this up three times, it becomes a slip. We just cut them up and on. This is where we record our callbacks. Now, if you're first getting started, almost every single negative review, customer complaint, or callback to a job site, you're gonna react and you're gonna go and you're gonna freak out, you're probably not gonna sleep well, and you're gonna get a pit in the bottom of your stomach as time goes on, as you scale the business, if you constantly are the one taking the brunt of all of that negativity and customer callbacks and complaints, and you will not be able to grow the business and actually focus on the thing that will help grow the business, hiring and marketing. And so if we're not able to do that, we will not grow the business. I need my team to be accountable for their wins, where we pay them based upon performance, but also their losses. When they make mistakes, when they forget to do something on the customer's property, when they don't do a walkthrough, when they damage something on a customer's property, that is all institution of a yellow slip system. So what we do is one of these would be cut out. See if I can't do this really fast. Nope, pretty close to this. And what would happen is at the end of the day, on the whiteboard, these would be the yellow slips that would be put on the board. When they're coming back to put their keys. At the end of the day, they're going to see yellow slips. And the first thing you're going to do is like, is my name on it? Because on here it says team member responsible. And so if their name is attached to that, it is now their responsibility to go back to the customer's house and fix this mistake. Now, on pay for performance, they don't like having to go back to a customer's house where there's no more revenue being generated because they're not making any more money. But furthermore, the manager or the office isn't going to be the one going back to the job site and fixing all their mistakes. And if you feel like you're a glorified babysitter where all day long just have all these mistakes and callbacks pouring in and you're jumping from one job site and apologizing to this customer and running over here and trying to fix this mistake, if that's what you're currently doing, you're not going to be able to grow the business. Furthermore, the crew will never be accountable for their mistakes because they know you're just going to come behind them and clean things up. And so if you want someone to actually take accountability for their job, make sure that when there's losses, when they don't do a good job, they're the ones that go back. So how this works is there'd be a yellow slip. They get back at the end of the day when they're hanging up their keys, they see it and they know within 24 hours this needs to be addressed. So the next day they're going to be going back to this customer's house and it says the complaint. What the resolution is is what they've got to determine when they go back for the customer's property. Whether it be I left a skid mark on the lawn or I forgot the backyard if I'm mowing. Whatever the mistake was is going to be written down by the office or the manager, but they're not going to fix it. It's up to the frontline team member that was responsible and at the job site last. So even if it was something that was a mistake over the course of several visits, whoever was there last is responsible and they're going to see that and then they have to resolve it within 24 hours. Then what's going to happen is it's going to be given back to the general manager. The general manager is going to do a couple things. Number one, they're going to put it inside of the user's profile. We keep track of these yellow slips over the course of time. In the event that we do have to fire someone due to lack of performance, we have a clear record of all the callbacks that were associated with their account. Secondly is that yellow slip stays over here because then it's going to be taken up at the next team meeting and we're going to go over all of these yellow slips. So at those morning stand up meetings, we're going to have each team member collect the ones that they're responsible for. And then they went back to the customer's house and resolved. And now they're going to share with the rest of their team exactly what they did wrong and what they did to fix it. The hope is that this prevents you as the general manager owner from always having to bring down the negativity and the criticisms. And you guys should have done this better. And this was bad. And so, and so like now they're going to have to take ownership of it. And for some team members, the social pressure of having to talk about their mistake in front of the rest of the team is actually worse than on pay for performance where they go back for this job and they're not making a lot of money. It is actually the pressure of internally. People like I don't want to be the guy who's always making mistakes and everyone knows does a lousy job is always getting callbacks. That social pressures we want to create inside the company. So you're not the only one being the one that fixes mistakes is bearing the brunt of negativity and complaints from customers. Have accountability within the company by having frontline teamers that make mistakes have to take care of it and then tell the rest of the team exactly what went wrong. Also, if you have a recurring base of revenue, for example, like mowing or maintenance of any sort, where you're going back to a customer's property, the yellow slips are your ticket. They are your recipe to fixing churn. Churn is simply the number of customers on a recurring service that are leaving every week, every month, every year. And for a lot of home services, 50, 60, 70% of your customers that are on recurring service churn out every year, they leave over yellow slips. And so if you want to fix churn, if you want to make it where customers don't ever want to leave and they love your service, fix your yellow slips. And so if you're constantly seeing five, six yellow slips around the same exact thing, weeding or people forgetting the backyard or whatever, that specific problem constantly is happening, fix those and you'll fix the churn problem and you'll be able to increase the lifetime value of all your recurring customers.

One last thing, when it comes to yellow slips, and that is if you're going to have them being presented at a team meeting, try not to make it a big negative. Because especially like when it's wet and everyone's tired and the days have been long and everyone's working crazy hard, if they come back and there's 10 yellow slips here every single day, it can get super demoralizing. So try to pitch it to your team as, hey, the reason we do the yellow slips, the reason we have you talk about it with the rest of the team, is so it prevents the rest of the team from making the exact same mistake. Try to keep it positive, otherwise it can feel like more of like a beating. You're giving everyone a spanking every single time you give them a yellow slip.

Another thing that's been really helpful for us to keep really good team members is just off site meetings. We've already talked about having on site meetings a couple times a week in the mornings at your shop, but this is actually Bob's Burger and Brew, where we've done a lot of our off site team meetings. And there's a separate little room in the back, we're able to have privacy. And at these team meetings there's a few things you want to do. Number one, just make it a nice time where you can kind of appreciate everything that the team's done for you. A lot of times a really nice dinner can go a long way just to saying thank you to everyone. And then usually I'll spend 15 to 20 minutes and just go over where the business is at. We usually do two off site meetings per year. One in the spring and then one and towards the end of the fall. Now for us we do at the beginning of spring when we have all the new hires have joined. And so the goal is like looking forward to the upcoming year. What the goals, the projection of the business, what's going to be new on the upcoming horizon for the team members and getting those new hires kind of integrated in the culture and really speaking about why Augusta exists and our goals for the company. And then in the fall we also have another offsite meeting. Again, off site is simply like just away from your shop in a nice spot. And yeah, you're going to spend some money on it. You're probably going to spend 30, 40 bucks per person, but trust me, the return is huge. In the fall, what we're going to do is do another offsite meeting and we're going to look back, we're going to look at, okay, did we hit our goals? What were the profits? We're going to look over the profit and loss statement. We're going to see what can we improve. What are we going to do next year that's different, to make sure that next year is better than this past year. And we're also going to look forward to the winter and say, okay, what, what is going to be in the future? Like do some people need to get laid off or some people are going to get some part time jobs or do we slow down? Do we want to actually like accelerate into the winter? And also I usually do my off site meeting in the fall about five to six weeks before the end of the season. That way it's like, hey, it's end of the season, but let's not let off the gas. Like, let's go full board, let's do upsells, let's really try to finish the year strong. And that's usually when I position my second off site meeting. But a place like this is great. Look for a spot. Ideally we can get a separate room. I don't think you need a conference center, I don't think you need to do catering. I've tried those in the past. They get a little expensive and it's obviously more headache just to manage the event. Whereas at a restaurant a back room is all you need, somewhere you can close the door and talk business. Now don't get all motivated and revelated for an hour and a half about your business. They don't care as much as you about the numbers, they don't care as much as you about where the business is going. Make it short to the point and most of all make it about them and what it's going to do for the company. But more importantly, their paycheck, their future, their compensation, their benefits, make it all about them. That's why you have the off site meeting, is to get them motivated and keep them on the team.

One of the biggest changes to our culture and our ability to be able to hire better team members came when we started to use pay for performance instead of paying people just by the hour. To break down P4P very simply, pay for performance. The harder you work, the more money you make. And essentially you get a percentage of all the labor revenue that you earn for the business. So if you make a lot more money for the company, you get paid more. The traditional hourly model, you pay someone by their time, makes no real sense for the employee or for the employer. Think about it, if someone's getting paid by the hour, the longer the job takes, the more money they make. Yet if the job takes longer and you're getting a fixed dollar amount per job, say for example, it's $50 per cut for a lawn mowing service, the longer that takes the employee to do the job, they'll make more money if they're getting paid by the hour. And yet at the same time, if they go faster, the employer, the boss, they'll make more money if they go faster. And that's why there's this constant tension of the employer trying to everybody needs to go faster. And you start implementing rules and regulations and tracking people's trucks and you gotta have video cams on everyone's dashes like it's crazy because the employee is incent to do something completely opposite of what makes the business money. Instead, just like get everyone going in the same direction, which is like we want the jobs to be done as efficiently as possible and as quickly as possible. And in order to make sure that people don't do bad quality, that's why we have the yellow slip system that's going to make sure that if they're going so fast and they're making damage cases and breaking things, it's going to come off of their paycheck. And the rest of their team, the rest of their crew won't even want to work with them if they're not pulling their weight, if they're slow, if they're lazy, and if they're breaking things. Pay for performance is a way to be able to get all the team members thinking like owners, which is, I want to get the jobs done as quickly as possible, as efficiently as possible, without a bunch of waste throughout the day. Most of your labor is being wasted on drive time. People stopping at gas stations, loading up in the morning, unloading in the evening, all of the garbage that happens besides actually producing revenue for the business and so create an incentive that the harder they work, the more money they make. This serves as a great quality assurance inside the business because now team members are looking at other people's work and if it's not up to standard, they're going to let you know because it takes them longer to fix the problem. So like quality assurance, I don't have someone driving around doing quality assurance. The team internally is the quality assurance. But also from a quality assurance perspective, in the past, and you're probably used to it now, if you pay by the hour, you fire someone and all of a sudden all the stories come about about how they did bad jobs here and they slacked off here and they took 58 smoke breaks and would take a three hour snooze every day. All of a sudden those come out. Whereas when you pay by performance and now the crew that's working together, they actually all are sharing the labor revenue for the day, they're going to to smoke that sort of behavior out as fast as possible. They're not going to want to work with that person because it affects their paycheck. And if they're making a bunch of damage cases and it's affecting the profitability of the business, everyone will be against that person and those people will get removed from the organization very quickly. If you're tired of losing employees that are great and they're leaving for a dollar or $2 more per hour to your competition institute, Pay for performance. Give them the chance to be able to remove the ceiling from their pay and make more money. P4P is going to repel your lowest performers. They're not going to want to work for you. And it's Going to and keep around your top performers that can make 5, 10, $15 more per hour simply doing the work because they are so good at it and they won't leave to someone else. It's not fair. It's honestly not fair that someone making $15 an hour is slacking off, doesn't care about the job, doesn't go the extra mile, does not put in any effort whatsoever, and they're going to pay 15 bucks an hour. And then someone right next to them in the same truck doing the same work, gets paid 18 bucks an hour, but does 90% of the work, is hustling all day long, is constantly trying to look for ways to reduce their drive time and stops they have in the day, and they literally getting paid $3 more per hour. Pay for performance would allow that person that's kicking butt and working hard to make substantially more money. And furthermore, they'd probably make up for all the lost work of getting rid of that $15 per hour person.

One of the best ways I've found to be able to retain great, great team members that have a great culture is using open book management, essentially where you're going to share all the numbers of the business with your team. Here's the thing, if you want people to work hard for you, it's probably a good thing that they like you. If they don't like you, they're probably going to constantly be playing for the downfall of your business. They're going to drive your trucks really hard. They're going to not care about your trucks or equipment, they're not going to care about your customers. They're going to constantly just be trying to look for ways to waste your money and bring the downfall of the business. Siphoning off gas from equipment and trucks. That happens when someone doesn't like you. Well, what's the number one way for someone to not like you? Is for you to hide things from them and not share information with them. And so if you're not going to share the information of your estimates and how much your hourly rate is and how much things cost in the business, they're not going to trust you. And if they don't trust you, they're not going to like you. In my opinion, it's the best thing to just share all the numbers with the team. And that can be a scary proposition. Ultimately, they're usually going to find these things out regardless. For example, they'll see an invoice laying out on the desk when they get back to the office or they'll Talk to a customer and the customer will have printed off the estimate and then you're going over with the crew members. So these things happen. And if you're hiding things from them and then they find out about them later, it's not going to lead to trust. And if you don't have any trust, they're not going to like you. And if they don't like you, they're going to start planning your downfall. Open book management can be scary if you are making a lot of money or if you're not making any money at all and you're actually losing money. So let me look at both angles. First off, if we're making a ton of money and you're like, well, I don't want to share how much money the business is making because we're making a lot of cash and I don't really work there very often, I know what the feeling is. Like, I remember when I first stopped working at the Bellingham shop, my very first Augusta lawn care location. And at the time we were making more money than we ever had before. And yet I was only working at the office for maybe an hour a week. And now I don't work, I don't go to the office at all. And so it can be intimidating almost to have open book management where they see you're making all this money and all this profit and they're making, you know, 20, 30 bucks an hour. Now here's the thing. When you're making a lot of money, give profit sharing. So when there is a lot of profit in the business, have a profit sharing program that they get a piece of the pie so that you can still share the numbers. And by sharing the numbers, they still want the business to do well and increase the bottom line because they get a piece of the action. On the flip side, if you're not making any money or you're losing money, it's still a good idea to share the numbers with the team because you can kind of get the underdog mentality and rallying the team around the fact that, like, we've got to make these changes and we've got to make these cuts and we've got to improve the bottom line or else we are going to be in a bad spot. And that can usually get like the entire team rallying around, kind of coming out from the as and really trying to turn the business around. This is the thing most team members are going to look for. Proof and evidence of you making money hand over fist on their dollar, on their dime, on their time. And so you getting a couple more trucks that are new. They're thinking, oh my word, the boss is making all this money. In your mind, you're like, there's no way for us to be able to get all this work done this week unless we have a couple extra trucks. I'm going to go get debt. I'm going to really extend myself here to be able to get these trucks so we can deliver on the promises to customers. Customers. But to your employees, if you don't share the numbers, they just assume because you got two new trucks that you're making money hand over fist. So if you're not making money hand over fist, prove it. Just share the numbers with them. Now, a lot of times when you open up the books for your team, they're not going to want to see a profit and loss statement or Excel spreadsheet. They don't like math, they don't like numbers, and all of it just seems like a bunch of Chinese to them. So what we did when we first opened up the books was to make it really, really simple is we took all of the revenues of the business, which at the time was about 1.1 million, and we took $1 bill is real money for every $10,000. So it was 110 $1 bills that we brought to the team meeting. And then we went started going through the actual profit and loss statements. I just started going through line by line. So trucks and equipment, okay, $50,000. Bobby, okay, fuel, $40,000. Okay, well, because $10,000 is for every $1, I'm gonna get four $1 bills to Bob. Okay? And I would just go through every single lineup. Of course, when I got to wages, it was all of a sudden like, okay, half the stack of cash, there's wages. And so everyone got a different line item on the profit and loss statement. At the very end, there wasn't a lot left over. I said, hey, this is the profit and this is how we grow the business from. This is how we actually are able to afford raises, more benefits, etc. And I want to be able to do more of that. But what we need to figure out is how to get more of this money from all of these different line items on our profit and loss statement, these expenses back into the profit pile. And so everyone had their specific line item on the expense side of things. And the very next team meeting, they had to come back to the team meeting with an idea of how to reduce the expenses in that category. So for example, the person with Wages, they would come up with ideas like, hey, instead of having us all wash the trucks at the end of each day, we should have a high schooler come in the evening or on the weekend and do that for us because they're not going to be on overtime and they're less skilled. Good idea. There's a whole bunch of ideas. The trucks and equipment people, they had ideas of, okay, we should have a rag and a spray bottle in every single truck truck that we wipe down at the end of each day. And then we don't have to actually clean out the truck ever because it's just wiped out at the end of every single day. Then what we did is every single person put forward their idea to save money. And we voted on which was the best idea. We implement like four or five things, everything from how to sharpen the blades faster, how to do oil changes faster. They came up with all these ideas. We voted on the best one and it ended up being the estimator, which was me at the time, should not be driving a truck and said they should be driving a car to have better fuel economy. And from that day on I was relegated to a Honda Civic. But then what I did is because everyone voted on that one, I took all 110 $1 bills and gave it to that person that brought that idea forward. By doing that and having the actual tangible cash, it just made it a little bit more real world for all of them. Instead of having a big chart of numbers as I recommend, if you're going to open up your books, if you're going to show the numbers, try to make it meaningful with a demonstration like that. Or at the very least, make sure your profit and loss Statement fits on one page. Don't have like a five page. Everything categorized, 50,000 different expense items. Make it really simple so that you could literally show them a pie graph. Here's our revenue. Okay. This much was wages, this much was equipment. This much was insurance, this much was fuel. Just cover the basics. They understand and see the math of how the business is operating. And a lot of them will start to be like, oh my word, we pay $50,000 in fuel, maybe $30,000 here just for insurance on the trucks, they start to actually understand where the money's going. Instead of thinking, oh, I work for $20 an hour and the boss makes $100 per hour and I'm getting ripped off. That's not how it works. Most of us are really making 10 to 20% profit margin. Prove it to them. And furthermore, by them understanding These numbers on open book management, it'll improve their skills and get them to the next level of their career so they can take those skills and make more money. And a final note, share everything. Don't try to hide one single aspect. So for example, some people, like, I don't want them to know my hourly rate. Why? Like just show everything in the business and if you're trying to hide something, yes, it will be exposed. Well, in that case you probably shouldn't do open book management. In that case you'll get all the benefits that come with having trust and people actions at your organization, understanding why the business is doing what it's doing.

One thing that really helped our business as we grew past five to 10 employees was anonymous peer reviews where essentially they're able to share with everyone that they work with what they're really good at and then also what they can improve at. And this is a really basic way of doing it, but you can literally just put all, all the names of your employees and like, what are they amazing at and what could they improve at? You give one of these to all of your team, they fill it out and then you can just compile all of these to create slips for each person, their name, and then just compile everything that people said they're amazing at and everything they said that they could improve at. I would recommend jumbling up the answer so there's not like any rhyme or reason to it, but super, super valuable information. Think about it. Who else can you go to that people that want to see you win, they're not criticizing you in the way that they want to make you look bad, they want you to do well, but they're willing to give you constructive feedback and constructive criticism. Most of us don't even get that from our family. And so the ability to be able to get that from team members and do it in a really constructive manner is important. And so one way that I would make sure it was constructive and really fostered this mentality, like let's actually give criticisms instead of just a bunch of flowery words, is I would read off my personal negative things of what I could improve at from the year previous. And it really helped. And I'd be like, okay guys, so like, look, I understand it's a little weird to talk about other people. I explained the positive benefits of it and like how when you get your feedback, you're going to really want to know what people thought. So spend some time on this. But then I would say, hey, look, the whole goal here is to get better. And the only way to get better is we'll get feedback from others. And who else better to get feedback from the people you work with? Every day I say, okay, here's all the things that were written about me last year that I can improve it and I just read them all off publicly. That kind of just disarm everyone and then make it realize everyone realize that like getting that feedback was super valuable. And a lot of times if I read last year's they would actually see things that I had changed in the business from the year previous because of that feedback. This will normalize the criticisms aspect of the peer reviews and make sure that when they they get the negative feedback, they'll also be more receptive to it, to actually making changes. Another really cool thing about peer reviews is that all of the team members will share things that you are thinking and wish you could say, but you can't say. As the employer, we would have people say something like, hey, this person stinks all the time. They need to wash their uniform and shower more often. Hallelujah, someone said it and I didn't have to make it awkward as the employer. So they'll be able to give feedback like that that you want to say, but you can' and hopefully it leads to positive change.

Another thing I found super helpful when it comes to building a great team culture is profit sharing. Now, when it comes to profit sharing, a lot of people say, well, I'm not going to share the profits because I built the business, I took the risk and none of my employees deserve any of the profits that the business is now making. I get where you're coming from, Trust me, I do. However, I happen to believe that if you give a piece of the action, a piece of the pie, to your team members that they will look to improve the business even when you're not there. And a lot of times when you're growing the business and it's become profitable and now you might be trying to get out of daily operations, you need to make sure that when you leave there are still people looking out for the best interest of the business and the bottom line and looking out for waste and areas of improvement and improving sales. So I have a couple different ways of doing profit sharing sharing. One is for the team. Now, the team typically is making most of their compensation based upon pay for performance. They make a percentage of the labor revenue that they earn and that's where most of their pay is going to come from. However, I also want to incentivize team members that stay on with us a long time. Team members that show up on time, that don't call out and are loyal to the business. And so what I do is I give 10% of profits on a quarterly basis to my team members out in the field. They have to earn this, they have to be there for the entire quarter. So like, let's just say it's January, February, March is Q1. They have to be there for the whole quarter in order to be eligible for the program. They can't just join the last week of the quarter and then get a couple thousand dollars in profit sharing. That's not how it works. 10% is going to go to them. They have to be there the whole quarter. And then how I do it is they lose half of their profit sharing if they're late one time or if they call out one time like so last minute is like, oh, I'm sick today. And it's like 10 minutes before they're supposed to show up, that's a call out. So they lose half of their profit sharing for the quarter. If they do it again, then they lose the other half. So it basically gives you two times before you lose all your profit sharing. And yes, there have been times where someone's in late like a minute or two and unfortunately they lose half their profit sharing again. What that does is create the standard that you show up on time. And if you do, you just need to show up on time and not call out and you'll literally get a big check at the end of each quarter for profit sharing. So that's the team out in the field. Now the thing with a manager is the fact that they aren't going to have pay for performance. A manager isn't producing revenue out in the field as often. They also have to be doing non revenue producing tasks like sales and admin, equipment maintenance. And so this manager, I'm going to give a bigger piece of the pie when it comes to profit sharing. Anywhere from 5 to 35% of all my profits are going to go to my general manager. The reason I do this is because I know that if I'm not there and I'm not making any decision in the business in terms of buying decisions, hiring decisions, firing decisions. If I'm not making those decisions, I need someone else that is guarding the profit, the bottom line. And a large chunk of their profit of their paycheck comes from the bottom line, the profits. And so you're like, well how does it determine by 5 to 35%? This actually comes from the fact of when did they first start joining the business? If they start to join the business when it first got started and there's not a lot of revenue, not a lot of profits, I'm going to give them a much higher percentage of profit because it's going to take a while, like a year or two years before they really actually start to see the fruit of their labor. So if they're willing to hold their breath, if they're willing to actually stay on with me and take a little more risk with the business, I'm willing to give them up to 35% of all the profits. That's more than a third of all the profits on top of the regular salary and any other commissions that might give around sales. If I've already started growing the business, it's already super profitable. I might only give them 5 or 10% of profit share sharing because the business is already profitable, it's already gone through a lot of the pains of growth and it's profitable from day one. It's already producing steady profits right out the gate. Their first quarter of being a general manager, there's already profits being shared. If they join earlier, I'm going to give them a bigger piece in terms of percentage. But it might take them a while to actually realize those massive gains because the first year or two of starting a new location isn't super profitable. Now the thing you want to be careful of when it comes to managers incentives and bonus structures is making sure you don't give them what I call perverse incentives, which essentially don't give them an incentive that if they actually hit the incentive, it'll ruin the culture of the business and ruin the profitability of the company. For example, if I just said, hey, you're not getting a percentage of the profits, instead I'm just going to give you a percentage of the revenue. I want to give you like 2 or 3% of the top line revenue. Well, guess what's going to grow. I incentivize growth. I incentivize more revenue. But it's perverse. In other words, if they just, just increase revenue, I as the owner am not going to make any more profit. Also to get that extra revenue and grow top line, what they might do is underbid jobs just to get more jobs closed. And that comes at the cost of the team making more money on pay for performance and having accurately bid jobs. So I don't want to give perverse incentive. I want to incentivize the thing that I actually care about, which as a Owner that's not there. As an absentee owner, I only care about the bottom line, and I want to give a big chunk of it to my general manager.

When it comes to building a great team and a great culture, the number one thing that actually sets that standard is not fun to talk about, and that's firing. No one enjoys firing. It's. It's never fun. It's always a lot of tension inside the team, potentially even you, emotionally. It's just. It's just pathetic. It's bad for everybody. However, it's extremely important you, as a leader, take it very seriously as to who you fire and when to fire. Firing is ultimately the thing that will create the standards inside your business. You can tell everyone to show up on time, you can tell everyone to work hard, you can tell everyone they have to wear a uniform. But until you actually fire someone, because they're not abiding by those rules, it is simply a suggestion. So until you fire someone over, it's just a suggestion. If you want to make it a standard, you'll have to fire someone over it. One of the things that Augusta Lawn Care, we really believed in is having where you don't talk negatively about people and you don't have drama going on. I remember the very first time when we hired someone, had a ton of experience, and they actually allowed us to get into paver, patios, retaining walls, excavation, because they had a lot of experience and they're older. They had probably about 20 years of management of, like a crew and all sorts of hardscaping projects. It was great. They trained our team. I still remember the first day that I made that change and Lee was the estimator and. And having to sort of give direction to the crews. And that included this individual that had a lot of experience and felt entitled to be able to tell everyone else what to do. And he did not take it well. He kept giving an attitude as to why he should be the boss and that Lee should not be the one that was sort of leading the team. And although he didn't say it directly, it was kind of baked into the way his attitude. And then some comments. He kept underhandedly saying, like, you don't need to tell me that. Like, I know that, and like. Like you don't need to be telling me what to do. Immediately I fired him. And the reason for that was because I was not going to have the decision of leadership of Lee, that being passed off to Lee, being undermined by the person that was the most experienced, having some sort of Grudge or wanting some sort of position inside the company. And so if you're gonna set a standard that, like, that's not the way we're gonna operate, you're gonna have to fire up based upon it. It's not gonna be fun. But if you don't want people, you know, if you want them to stop showing up 15, 20 minutes later late, fire someone over it. And then in the team meeting be like, oh, the reason Bobby got fired is because he kept showing up late. Now all of a sudden, it is the standard to show up on time.

Most states are what's called at will, which means you can fire someone for no reason whatsoever and you don't have to give them a reason to let them go. In most scenarios, it's honestly better just to fire that way instead of giving a reason. Otherwise the person can contrive all sorts of craziness and potentially see you. The very first person I fired literally made up a story about getting hurt on the job and then sued me for a lot of money. And I settled with them outside of court. It left a really bad taste in my mouth. But it taught me the lesson that if you're going to fire someone, you don't need to give them a reason because if you make up a reason, they'll use it against you and they'll say it's discrimination. They just go off the rails. So sometimes it's just the best to not give a reason. And if you're going to give a reason, make sure that that whatever that reason is was in the employee handbook that was signed. So if you have your rules and regulations inside your employee handbook and they sign on that, then you can fire based upon the fact that they didn't uphold that standard. But you, if you're gonna fire someone just because they're not really a good fit or they're not really pulling their weight or they're not doing a job or you don't like them or something like that. Make sure you just fire them and you don't say anything as to why, which stinks and don't like it.

As with all relationships, communication is super important if you're going to have a strong team culture. I recommend using an app, kind of like WhatsApp. Some people use imessage, but the problem is then you could potentially have someone use an Android phone and it's a different experience for them. I really recommend using WhatsApp. It allows you to share voice notes, photos, videos, and it compresses the file size of videos really Fast. We use it a lot for estimate videos where when the estimator goes to the property, they're going to take a video of everything that do on the job site and then put it on WhatsApp. That way, when the job actually comes around to getting done, the crew has exactly what's supposed to be done and the estimator doesn't have to go back to the property to show them through the project. So we use it for estimate videos, but we use it for a lot of other things. And we have group chats for the entire team. Then we have chats for, say, the sales side of things things. Then the office and admin, the equipment. The guys who work on the equipment, they'll have their own WhatsApp chat. Or the WhatsApp group highly recommend WhatsApp. Some people will use slack as well. The main objective is to communicate throughout the entire day. There's a few periods in time when you want to communicate. Number one, at the beginning of a day when you. Everyone knows it's going to be brutal weather. A lot of times, communicating with the team and motivating them is a great option throughout the day. It's almost like a safety thing to be able to know where everyone's at and within one message know immediately get everyone communicating. Especially if someone goes down, someone gets in an accident, someone gets hurt. These are important reasons to have great communication flowing within the organization. At the end of the day, typically, what we will do is we will send a picture of our dispatch board and we'll be able to actually see, okay, here's all the crew members for the next day. Here's what truck, which trailer they're using and who you're working with. Once that's sent out to our crew on our WhatsApp group for our entire team, they then know that the dispatcher has finished all the jobs for the following day. And they could actually look at their copilot app and see exactly what's on their schedule or their route for the following day. All throughout the day. Right from the beginning of the day, throughout the day. When you're tracking them. Yes, you can track them and their trucks on copilot. You can, you know, keep track of their trucks with a truck tracker. But the ability to be able to keep them all communicating together is really important. It's also really good for morale when times are tough, like when it's raining, when it's super hot. The ability for them to share pictures, the ability to share some memes, some funny stuff, keep everyone motivated. And like, keep morale high is super important. Any culture where people are, there is no group chat. I see an immediate reduction in just overall team camaraderie. And then there starts to become fractions and divisions within the company of the people who are communicating. And usually those are the people you don't want communicating. They're the ones that are sharing all the negative things and how brutal the day and how bad everything is. You want to be able to kind of monitor as well as, you know, add to the communication in a positive light and make sure that everyone is moving in the right direction throughout the entire day from the beginning all the way to the end when you send them dispatch videos and estimate videos.

All right, let's talk about actually getting applicants to show up for interviews. These are people that want to work for you. Where do you find them? And then how do you get them them from random joblo to in your office doing an in person interview. Now, first off, you want to make sure in your website you have a really good careers page place where they can apply, a place where you can show employee testimonials. And we literally have dozens of videos of employees working in Augusta that are just talking about their experience. That's going to separate you from everyone else that has absolutely nothing on their website when it comes to careers. Also have a place on your website, ideally where they can apply, but also see things about your culture. A day in the life of yes, you're going to hire someone to come in for video for a day or two. You're going to pay them some money, but I promise you, any dollar you spend towards Indeed or Facebook or any job posting, you're going to have much better return. If when they get to your website, it shows off everything about your culture, about your employees, about your team. Now, after they've applied from your website, or potentially a website like Indeed, where they submit their resume directly to you and they apply there, I need to communicate with them quickly. I really recommend using whatever platform you possibly can. I would email them. I would contact them through Indeed. I would also then text them. I would call them as fast as possible. The same way that you're trying to jump on the phone when a customer calls, we should immediately, if we're looking for hires and an application comes, we should immediately be jumping on the phone, texting them, emailing them, and messaging them through Indeed. You're like, well, what if they get overwhelmed? Well, then they might actually show up for an interview. And in a really tough labor market, we need to be as Fast as possible jumping on these applicants when they're applying. So I'm going to be touching them at all potential aspects of communication, text, phone, email and through. Indeed, I'm also going to have a process that's going to keep them warm up into the time when they actually show up for the interview. Because my goal is to get them to the interview, not just like to set up the interview. Because you might only have 10 or 20% of people actually end up showing up even once they've applied. Like, well, I think they want the job so they'll show up. Not true. They have a bunch of other applications they sent out too, and they might just get distracted and forget about the appointment they set up with you. And so I'm going to have a sequence of text messages, phone calls and emails that go out to this potential applicant and keep them warm. I'm going to tell them about our Audible program. I'm going to call, tell them about their career progression and the way that they can move up inside the organization. I'm going to tell them about pay for Performance. I'm going to send them a link over to the video in the careers tab of our website where they can watch videos about A Day in the Life and hear from other employees. I'm going to spread that out. Just like I would be warming up a client to accept an estimate, I'm going to warm up an employee. So by the time they show up for the interview, they already know about Pay for Performance. They already know about our profit sharing program. They already know about Audible and all the team meetings and what we do for safety and A Day in the Life. This is what makes you different than everyone else they're applying for is having this sequence to make sure that you they actually show up for the interview and they're excited for it. Speed ultimately wins. The faster you get back to an individual and an applicant, the better chance they're going to actually show up for interview. Once you've got an application, you do not have a hire. You simply need to now follow up the same way you would on an estimate to make sure they convert into someone that in person you can actually conduct the interview. Where do we actually go to find these applicants? The number one place right now in terms of job boards is indeed it's the number one place. And that will change probably over the next few years. Things come and go. There used to be monster, used to be a place on Craigslist and get good applicants, used to be able to post on Facebook, jobs and be able to get good applicants right now, Indeed is really the big boy. Now. The problem I have with Indeed is they don't allow for a lot of videos and pictures and creative. It's mostly text driven. And so I need to be able to have links that will go to my careers tab, that will go to my YouTube page and share more creative ways of highlighting my company and separating me from the path. So Indeed is just someone you got to pay. And yes, you're going to pay a daily rate usually, or you're going to pay a per fee for each applicant that comes in. I've seen a blend. I don't necessarily have one that works or doesn't. Just know that if you're not responding back to applicants and you're not denying them, you could potentially be paying more. Now, one thing that can work, and this is actually an example from our Facebook group inside of Augusta Nation, and that is one of the owners did this and that is is you simply make a Facebook post, but then you boost that post to your local area for the age demographic you're targeting. So if you're like, well, I want to target between people between 20 and 40 years old, you can target that demographic in your local area and then just make a regular post as if it was a job ad and then boost it to those individuals. This is him over on the right hand side over the course of several hours just getting tons of applications and he was driving all the traffic from the Facebook boosted post over to his careers page inside of Augusta Lawn Care, where people were just submitting applications. Those applications are of the highest value because they've seen our testimonial videos. They've seen the day in the life. They've seen what pay for performance is instead of just randomly someone Indeed even submitting 20 applications to any labor position that they can possibly see. Now, even once they've applied and you got the application, as I've said, speed to get them in the door for an interview is very important. I recommend having a template that you copy and paste just like this one we have for Augusta. Send this text to an applicant when you want to set up an interview. Boom. You would copy and paste this. It has links to why Augusta Lawn Care exists. And send this text to an applicant when you have decided to hire them. These are the type of templates you want to create throughout the entire hiring process. So you're not always typing these up. You're usually busy. And that's why things fall through the cracks. And that's why we don't have a system for hiring or getting people to an interview is because we simply don't have the time to type out these messages. We all don't. So copy and paste from a template exactly what you want to say at every single stage in order to be able to get them to the interview.

Once you've got an applicant to an interview, the game is not over. We still need to interview them correctly and make sure they're a good candidate it for your business. So the interview process is very important. Now if you're just getting started, it can be intimidating to have to interview people to work for you if you've never done it before. What I recommend is printing off an actual process and system for your hiring questions. Literally what we have @ Augusta is 17 questions that you're going to ask one right after the other. For example, what do you know about Augusta lawn care number two, have you checked us out online? And I'm going to go through 17 questions. And the reason it makes it a little bit easier if you have the questions printed off is when you're asking the questions, they know that you're simply reading off the paper and they just assume like, well, this is part of the process, I will answer the questions. And if you get nervous or you start to forget what you're supposed to talk about next, you just go to the next question. So having a great interview, questions that are pre planned, I would recommend doing this for your first few hundred interviews. Until you've done a few hundred, it's very difficult just to have someone walk in. You're complete stranger, they're nervous, you're nervous and trying to strike up a dialogue that's actually going to lead to a good business decision when it comes to hiring or not a new applicant. So first off, have great interview questions, have a system around that. So we have a little hiring and onboarding process. Like before the interview, during the interview, here's the questions, here's the things we're going to observe. These are the type of things that once they leave, I'm actually going to kind of grade them on. Like for example, did they have fidgety body language? Did they have eye contact? Did they have good questions for you? These are things to actually have in writing so that when once you finish an interview, you can accurately judge them the same way every time. Because guess what, you're going to have good days, you're going to have bad days and you don't want that to affect your interviewing decision or whether or not you Hire them. So get the questions printed off. Make a system out of it. Next thing is, don't sit behind a desk. Honestly, a lot of people, they're just super nervous coming for an interview and you sitting behind a desk, you're hiding half of your body and it puts you in a weird power dynamic. I've found it's usually helpful to just pull your chair around and sit like at a 45 degree angle from them. I'm not gonna do knee to knee. All right, mister, let's talk like shoulder to shoulder. Against them, you're immediately confrontational. Give them a 45. Give me a 45. Open things up and make it a little more conversational. Why? It's easy to break eye contact and look away for a second and then address them and then look back at your paper instead of it being so confrontational where you're shoulder, shoulder, or worse yet, there's a desk between you, creating separation already where you can't see half of their body language and they can't see the other half of yours. So keep it nice and relaxed, allow them to breathe, and realize that people get really nervous. Before I do an interview, the first thing I'm trying to do is getting them to relax. Some people don't interview well, not because they're bad applicants, not because they don't have the experience, not because they wouldn't be a good hire, but simply they don't answer questions well. When they're stressed out or when they're nervous, sometimes it's helpful to walk them around the office real quick, give them a quick joke, you know, give them some water, get them to chill out a little bit. Is a lot of times the way to break down some of those stress barriers and there's their nerves and actually get to know them as to whether or not they'll be a good fit for your culture. When it comes to reference checks, I would love to have reference checks after every single interview. And I actually do ask for them in the interview process because it can tell a lot as to whether or not someone's actually. Actually a good fit is who are they giving for references and what do they say when I tell them that? Like, hey, yes, your last manager. Fantastic. What are they going to say about your performance? When I call them, it's not if I call them, but when I call them starts to like, their brain starts turning and now all of a sudden you hear, oh, actually, I got fired. And last, it wasn't a layoff or whatever it might be. But furthermore, when it Comes to actually doing reference checks, I would love to do them. And in the past, my best hires have usually been when I do call two or three of the references references. That being said, if you're in a really tough labor market, there are times that a really good candidate will have four or five job offers within 24 hours. And I don't have the time to wait around collecting reference checks. So a lot of times, if I have a really good candidate in front of me and I really think they're going to be a good fit, based upon our interview question, everything, just nailing it, there's a good chance they're going to have a job offer by the end of the day. And a lot of times, just like your leads out in the field, when it comes to customers, the person that gets the estimate to them first wins. And in this case, they might go, leave and go for another job simply because someone else offered them the job first. If someone's really good in front of you, I don't mind you locking them down right away, offering the job and trying to get commitment that gets them to stop going to more interviews and sending out more resumes. And all of a sudden you lose a really good candidate simply because you didn't have the systems in place to actually pull the trigger. And you don't have sometimes three, four, five days to hear back from all these reference checks. And yes, that's the more methodical way of doing it. But for laborers out in the field, especially entry level laborers, that is in a really tough labor market, sometimes they will have a good candidate will get three to four job offers in one day. And if you're not the one that's first, you don't even got a shot.

One of the things I think is really important when it comes to culture and having a great team is I, I expect the leader of the organization, whether you're a general manager or the owner, to be the first one to show up and the last one to leave. Now, I understand there's gonna be one off times where a project goes super late and you're just not able to stick around to the very end. Before I lock this door, I don't want anyone else still on the field if at all possible. What I did when I was actually in daily operations is I would make sure if I had any admin work, paperwork, follow up, phone calls, any sort of office stuff, I just push it all to the end of the day to make sure that when the crew got back, I was here. And I expect the Same thing of my general managers. The reason for that is because if you have a crew that works till 8 o' clock at night and they know they're two, three hours after, after everyone has left the shop and they get back here, a lot of disillusionment can happen. Like they're tired, they're stressed, it's been a long day and to come back to no one being here can be pretty tough. And so just from a cultural perspective, from a morale perspective, I want to be the one that when they drive at 8 o', clock, I'm out helping them unload their truck, getting their equipment off, making sure that they're positively renting, reinforced for going the extra mile that day. Now in the event that you do need to leave early from the shop or you have a family gathering to go to or something like that, I really recommend having a communication channel with your entire team and you tell everyone publicly what you're doing. Otherwise they're just going to assume that you're always chilling out on the beach. And for all they know you could be going home and doing your follow up calls or like on your route to go take someone to the hospital, you're trying to finish up, you know, collecting invoices. They don't know that. So if they don't see you ever, they're going to assume the worst. So I like to be there in the morning when they first get started. I'm making sure they're getting their keys, I'm giving them high fives and get water. I'm making sure they're set up for their day for success when they get back. I'm making sure there's positivity, I'm making sure, I'm trying to help them if they're late after getting the project finished. That is one of the biggest things I've seen in great leaders when it comes to general managers and owners where their team actually has buy in and the morale of the team is high despite having long days, projects that go over budgeted hours, hours, it happens all the time. But being there when they show up in the morning and being there when they get back to the shop in the evening is a huge morale boost for the crew.

Okay, so let's assume that you got a new team member, they're hired, they got their first day on the job scheduled and you're rocking and rolling the first day is super important. I recommend that being an orientation day for the employee, even if it's only a half day. I'm not a huge fan of like, here's your uniform, there's the truck, hop in, good luck. That sort of preparation and commitment to the employee is what you can expect in return. Like if you're not going to trust them, if you're not going to commit to them, if you're not going to train and invest into them, why in the world would they do that to you and your business on the first day? What I like to do is actually sit down with the new team member and go over their orientation packet. In the orientation packet we have a few page document. In fact this one is four pages long. But it's going to go over like what they actually want to know. The things that usually take a couple weeks, weeks for them to figure out. For example, the franchise fee forgiveness program. It's a big program, but we boil it down to one paragraph. Pay for performance. One paragraph. What are yellow slips? One paragraph. But more importantly, things like what does late mean? Because in their last job, being on time, as long as you figured out like somewhere within the hour of a certain time frame they were okay, well let me read you what being late means. At Augusta Lawn Care, being late means one minute. If start time is 7:30 and you show up at 7:31am you are considered late. All right, so like, like defining that might be important. Team meetings, when are they, how to ask for time off, how does paid time off work? What about the healthcare benefits? Is there any work in the winter? These are questions that usually kind of get shared between the crew members on their first couple days on the job. But if you can just iron these things out, it'll make them feel much more established and have a foundation at the company instead of having to like pick up on all this stuff over the course of a few weeks. Uniform policy, other ways to make money, how to get promoted, how to make, make more money, how to get ahead in your career, the profit sharing program. These are like the things that they need to understand right from the get go. And there's a signature for them as well as a signature for their manager. And if that's you, that's fine. But ultimately I need them to understand this because even though they sign their employee handbook, that employee handbook is like 25 or 30 pages long and covers just about everything under the sun. I need them to actually read and understand these four pages and I'm going to read over it line by line, word by word. And yes, it might take me 20 or 30 minutes and ask any questions they might have to me and I can get those Answered. I'm going to sign off on it and put it in their employee profile. I'm also going to go over the training checklist at Augusta. We've made this nice checklist that is going to be a little bit, you know, looks really nice. And it goes over. Hey, day one through three, you are line trimming, edging and blowing. Day four and five, you're gonna do hand weeding and pushbacking. Day six and eight, day nine to 10, etc. I'm not going to throw them in the truck. I'm like, go figure everything out. Even if they're just milling grass, I don't want them backing up the trucks day one. I don't want them on a zero turn on day one. And I don't want the trainer having to train them on everything in day one. I want them to get efficient and profitable on one task. Line trimming, edging and blowing, that's all I want them to do for the first three days. And this walks through the different ramifications and expectations of every single aspect of their job of those first two weeks. Ten days of working days. Ten days, that's two weeks. We expect all of our team to be trained up and be able to do all the tasks within two weeks. If it's going to take way longer than two weeks, either A, the services are too complicated or B, they don't have the skills or the desire to be able to learn the skills to do the job correctly. And then we're going to have a trainer assigned to every single trainee and they're going to actually rank them either as productive, needs improvement, or not productive on every single one of the tasks that they're supposed to learn in those first two weeks. Weeks, this is going to be filled out every single day by their trainer. And then we give a bonus to the trainer, assuming this gets filled out every single day. The first 10 days of them working with us, in other words, the first two weeks. So this sort of training process and this sort of training system right from not only when you first got their application, but then once they got hired, actually having an onboarding day, an onboarding system for them. I would used to take out every single employee their first day of work, work out for lunch. Too many employees do that now. However, having some sort of orientation is really, really important. And then secondly, what's their first week or two going to look like in terms of training and then having a way for them to be able to know whether or not they're meeting requirements and if they're not. You should have a standard as to what happens if they don't hit requirements after two weeks. Do they go on a performance improvement plan? Do they get a grace period of a week? Do they get fired immediately? Like, if they're not going to be able to learn the skills? There's no reason to keep the business going through unproductive labor and people making mistakes if they're constantly not able to do the skills required to do the job by themselves. And so having a system in place is what's going to keep the culture high. It's going to allow for new trainees to feel welcome, have orientation to the culture, and then be able to be successful inside of the team.

One of the best ways to be able to retain your best talent, the employees that go above and beyond that are always kicking butt is having an upward trajectory for their career and actually having a place for them to move into. Whether it be to go from a field worker to a team leader, to an estimate or a general manager, having that sort of upper mobility can actually allow you to get someone for a lot cheaper that otherwise wouldn't work for you, or potentially someone that has a lot more experience, but they're willing to start at your level because they know that they can grow with the company. In my opinion, one of the the biggest reasons to grow your business, whether it be multiple locations or just in terms of revenue, is to be able to create positions that your best talent can move into. Otherwise you'll lose them. If you have a great worker that's out in the field, if you don't create other positions, if you don't create other services, if you don't create opportunities for them to become a team leader or an estimate or learn sales or learn management, if you don't create those opportunities, they're going to move on to someplace else. The entire reason I actually went from Augusta Lawn Care being one location to then franchising and having 150 locations, is I realized that I had a couple of really, really good team members that if I didn't grow and expand and push their limits, they were just going to leave onto something else that was more challenging. And so creating that upper mobility inside your company is super important. It's obviously important to be a great talent magnet and attract great people. But if you can become a talent developer and cultivate what is currently there and make it better, you'll be start to be known as an employer that people want to work for as not a place just to start their career, but also be able to grow it and get to the next level of their career. That is like the foundational perspective for my field crew members that I employ is like, look, you don't want to be mowing grass forever. And I'll say that I don't want you working for 10 years pushing a lawnmower. I want you to be able to take those skills. I want you to learn pay for performance. I want you to learn about open book management. I want you to come to optional meetings that we have for the team where we explain business, we explain credit, we explain credit scores and loans and how to get your first car and how to get your first mortgage. These are the type of skills that we try to teach our team members because we want them to move on. I don't want them to be entry level forever. And if they, if you actually want that for them and you actually want them to get the next stage of their career, that might mean leaving your place of work and being happy for them because you ultimately didn't have the position for them to move into. And so either a, you're going to grow your business so they can grow with you, or realize that if they grow their skills, they might have to leave your organization simply because they need to be able to make more money, gain more skills, want to have a bigger challenge. And it's important, in my opinion, to be happy for the person that does have to move on to something else that is better for them because the rest of your team is watching to see if you actually mean it when you say you want to see them get to the next stage of their career. At Augusta Lawn Care, we specifically have something called a 3F program, franchise fee forgiveness. And it's essentially where if someone works at an Augusta Lawn Care location for two years, they'll actually be able to join the franchise for free. So it saves them like $25,000 and that's cool. What that allows people to be able to do is hire frontline team members or managers that otherwise would never work for them because they're overqualified or they need more money, but they're doing it for the upward mobility, the chance to learn and grow on someone else's dime and then go start their own franchise by themselves and own their own business. And you might not have that, but creating some sort of chain, some sort of ladder, they can grow their career is super important. And if you don't have the intention of growing the business really big and creating those more management type positions or other opportunities for them, you can also give them something simple like an audible program or books and incentivize and create a program around them learning and educating themselves, which ultimately will get them to a place where they can make more money.

One of the most impactful ways to be able to improve your culture and be able to retain great employees is to have one on one meet meetings. Especially if you have less than 15 or 20 people. You as a manager and the owner. Being able to spend time, even 15 to 30 minutes with your crew can be the difference between them leaving for another job or staying with you for much, much longer. And just the overall cohesiveness of the culture will be much, much greater. What I recommend during the one on one meetings is stay focused on what can be better for them. You know, what parts of their job they like, what parts do they prefer not doing or could be improved, what things they think could be improved in the business, who do they like working with and then really focusing on them and their future and their career. So giving them critical feedback about like, hey, here's the things you can do to be able to make more money. Here's the things you can do to be able to get a promotion. These are the type of things that focusing on them and them only on a one on one meeting is super valuable. If you get like 30 or 40 people, it can be very difficult to do one on ones. And I've had managers have like 60 to 71 on ones that they have to do each month and that can be tough. I usually recommend having a one on one meeting between the manager and the frontline team member at least once a month. If you were going into a business that was failing and the culture was really, really bad, the first thing I would be recommending is doing one on one meetings. Getting a pulse on where every team member's at. Creating a benchmark of like what is good supposed to look like. And as, as you do them each month, you're able to look back and and see the goals that were set on the previous one on one and see if those were met. You can also tie incentives to around it. It's like, hey, what do you want to improve before our next one on one meeting? These are the areas of improvement. All right, let's see if we actually made progress towards that goal. We zeroed in specifically today on hiring, but if you want a step by step guide of starting a lawn care business specifically from zero to past $100,000 in annual revenue, watch this video right here.

Sam.