How Can You Get Your Employees to Think and Act Like Owners in Your Business?

Culture and finances are the ball and chain for most landscape business owners. When it comes down to it, those are the two things that really tie everyone up. Why someone can't grow their business, why they can't get more employees.

Whatever it might be. I found these are the two things in our industry that really tie one up. Now, what are the fix for these? For culture, it's open book management and for finances, it's P for P. Alright, so everyone's like, I want my people to act like owners. Why can't they work as fast as me? Guess what? Culturally and the financial aspects have not been given to them to quantify Acting like an owner. Alright, so the fix for culture is open book management, which we're going to talk about in a second. The fix for the financial aspect is going to be P4P, which we'll talk about later today. Next slide. So if you want your employees to think like an owner, that's what everyone wants. I want them to just like see the issues and take care of them. I don't want them to be callbacks, I want them to upsell people. I want them to do a better job, faster, more efficiently. I don't want to do a stop at gas station, tired of smoke breaks, whatever it might be. If you want them to think like an owner, where you are doing three things at the same time because you want to be more efficient, you're hopping out of the truck while you're making notes, while you're getting the string trimmer, while you're filling up something with your gas to your foot, like you're doing that, all these things at once. Do you want them to think like that? You have to give them, you have to compensate them and inform them like an owner. The reason you act like an owner, I've said this before on the podcast, this is not new but like the reason you act like an owner are so efficient and you kill the crew's time and when you go out mowing crew, you do it in three and a half hours. It takes them six and a half hours. The reason that happens is because you're compensated like an owner and you're informed like an owner. These are the two things you have to give your people and in order to compensate them like an owner. That's what P4P does. And to be informed as an owner is what open book management is all about. This is again, last year is one of the biggest reasons why we franchised Augusta. Last year is because after last year's conference where we talked an entire day about open book management. One company implemented it. But like, these are the two things you have to do if you want your people to think like an owner. They have to be calm to say, like you, because you, as an owner, you're either, you know, you make a bunch of money or make nothing based upon your performance. It's all based upon are your customers happy, are they paying enough, are you efficient enough, do you not break enough things Compensated like an owner, right? You can make as much as you. There's unlimited potential, but then there's downside as well as an employee. Talk about P4P later today, they're an employee for a reason, all right? They want security, they want reliability. You can't make their base rate 0 because if they wanted that type of risk, they would become an owner. All right? So if you have employees, remember, they're employees for a reason. They need stability. They don't want to think about work all day and all night. They want to clock out and go home and call it good. So don't think like they're going to necessarily think like an owner outside of the workplace. And but when they're at work and they are mowing lawns or they are installing molds, you can get them to think like that by giving them the upside potential of P for P. Okay? So just as we talk about P for date and this compensation aspect of getting them think like an owner, remember, they're not owners until they have equity in the business. So there's always that part that you cannot give to them. I do not recommend giving them a piece of it. But when it comes to the compensation aspect, there's a reason they're an employee, okay? And that's what base rate will be calculating what your base rate should be later today, that's what you got to remember is like there's a reason they need stability. If they didn't, if they just wanted the upside, they would just go become owners.