A short YouTube interview with Mike Andes offering practical advice on building a strong lawncare team. Andes emphasizes hiring self-reliant, go-getter employees early (they often either "have it or they don't") because founders lack bandwidth for intensive onboarding; as the business matures, systems, procedures, and an established culture enable training and turning B players into A players.
How do you build that strong team? Is it all about the input, who you hire? Or is it more training as you bring them on board? And what can you as a business owner do to encourage team building?
I think at the beginning a lot of it has to do with. Honestly, they either have or they don't. We don't have the time to be able to manage them and make sure all the processes are just right and the onboarding process and the training is just right. At the beginning, they've got to be a go getter, they've got to be independent, self reliant, they've got to be able to figure things out on their own. And as time goes on, as the business matures, as your culture gets stronger, you can take a B player and pull them up to being an A player because you have the systems in place, because you have the culture, because you have great team members that have been with you for a while and can pull those people up. But at the beginning, when you're first getting started, you're really trying to scale things out. You're growing really fast. A lot of times they either have it or they don't. They either buy into the vision of what you're doing or they don't. And as time goes on, you mature, then it becomes much more about, hey, what procedures and systems we have for training and implementation and quality assurance and things like that.
