How to Deal with Complaints from Mowing Customers

Hey everyone, it's Mike Andes and you're listening to the landscape business course podcast you might be watching on YouTube or Facebook. I want to say a big thank you today for joining us here on the show. If you haven't Already, go to landscapebusinesscourse.com Check out the course and sign up for the conference we're having in January. It's going to be a great three day conference. We're going to have some of the greatest speakers there. I'll be there speaking and you'll be able to network with other landscapers. Ends in January, so it's not super busy but for most of the people doing lawn care landscaping. So it's going to be fantastic and I really look forward to it. So go today landscapedentistcourse.com conference and sign up for the early bird pricing which ends in just a few more weeks. Also, if you have a landscaping business or a lawn care business that has five or more employees and you would like me to come and be with you for 24 hours, walk through your business, see your guys, see the work you're doing, look over your financials, see how you can improve your marketing. I am giving away two to three of these to everyone out there listening. So if you have five or more employees and you would like to apply to be in that, there's already several people have asked me to do this because I mentioned on a webinar a few weeks ago. But if you have five or more employees and you would want me to come for 24 hours, I'm going to pay on my dime and I'm going to bring someone to do the video at all and we're gonna kind of I'll be able to come in, see your customers, see your staff and be able to look at your financials, marketing, see how we improve your business. I'll be there for like maybe a day or two and we'll pay for the hotel, flight, everything. And so basically I just need you to email me, tell me what kind of the problems you're kind of facing, what you would like me to kind of look over and improve and send me a picture of your team that proving you have five plus employees. And we're going to be doing that in a couple months. So probably August is when we'll be setting that up. And so we already have one person that we have got signed up for that. There's a couple more spots available. So if you have five plus employees, email me landscapebusinesscoursemail.com and we can get in touch and see if you would be a good fit for that video. Now, today we are going to be talking about something us as landscapers really don't like. And that is cool complaints, but yet it's something that we all deal with. And the reason I'm talking about it today is because we're in the middle of spring rush right now and everyone's super busy. We're booked out five, six, seven, eight plus weeks into the future. If you're doing landscaping, the mowing crews you're smashing busy guys are working 60 plus hours a week. And then all of a sudden this starts happening. You start getting complaints from customers and there's really two ways. Excuse me, there's really two ways you can deal with this. Number one, you can look at it as a sign that you're growing and this is just going to happen. Obviously you want to minimize it. Or two, and what too many people do is the second option, that is they retreat. So because there's complaints coming in and because the customer that you used to mow and know in person and when you were solo by yourself on the route and you would know all the customers and they would never, never ever complain and everything was always great and they always loved you and they always heaped their compliments on you, now their compliments have turned to complaints. And the employees that you have hired are not doing a satisfactory job. They're not pulling the weeds. They're not edging exactly the way that customer wanted. They're not removing the solar lights to weed whack. They are leaving clippings underneath their vehicles instead of blowing them out correctly. And all of a sudden you start getting complaints. And so what so many entrepreneurs will do in that time is they'll retreat. They'll say, you know what? I'm done with employees, I'm done with dealing with people. I'm done with manag. Just going to go back to going out in the field. I'm going to have my 40, 50 lawn mowing clients and I'm not going to hire anybody. I'm going to stop growth and I'm going to stop trying to hire office people and I'm going to stop marketing. I'm just going to deal with my set of customers and I'm going to stay small. And that's fine. For some people, that's fine. But for those of you out there that are entrepreneurs, that will never be like a long term solution for you. You will always want to get back into running the business side of things and not just pushing along more. And so how do you deal with complaints in a constructive manner? And how do you make a team, a culture that minimizes the amount of complaints that are coming in? And so, first off, let's talk about why you're getting so many complaints this time of year. So as I record this, we're in the middle of May. For most people around the U.S. this is spring rush. This is the eight to 10 weeks out of the year that you are slammed. You are super busy. You're booking out work for the rest of the year. You are hiring as many people as you can. You never can find enough of them. You're buying trucks, you're trying to market, yet you stop marketing because you're so busy. This is that season, that window of time, what I call the spring rush. And during that time is also if you're doing lawn mowing and you're doing landscaping as well, this is also the time you start questioning about what your business model is. Because your lawn mowing customers are taking twice as long to mow their lawns. Because right now we had the wet season, now we're coming into the dry season, and the grass is growing extremely fast. And it's taking your employees twice, if not three times as long as most of people's lawns. Because instead of three or four inches when they come and mow, it's like seven, eight inches, and they have to go over it two or three times. And when you start taking long grass and cutting it down short, complaints are happening because there's more clippings going everywhere. The grass doesn't look as good when it's done being cut because it looks like it's been pushed over. So obviously there's so many ways around these things and there's solutions. And you can give me in the comments below what your solution is. But there's everything from forcing people to go on weekly visits during the spring rush so they don't have super long grass. There is ways to make sure that you only take weekly customers instead of allowing them to go bi weekly or monthly. A monthly mowing customer in May, you're going to be spending so much time because their grass is going to be so long. And so a lot of times during this season of the year, people start questioning our business model, saying, should I even be mowing lawns? Should I just focus on landscaping? Should I just focus on the hardscaping side of things? Because they get discouraged with the amount of time that it takes to mow these lawns and they're not making any money. So for our company, we're not making any money. The past couple weeks for mowing. There were some days we actually lost money on our mowing routes because the grass is growing so long. The guys are going over the lawn two or three times. The weeding jobs are taking like three times as long as. Because here in the Pacific Northwest, we had a very, very wet April, Very wet April. Like, we were getting track loaders stuck and excavators stuck, and jobs were getting mudded out and just swamps. And then all of a sudden, you come into May, and we had just beautiful weather. We haven't had rain in weeks. And so the grass just took off and the weeds took off. And so all of the maintenance, customers, mowing, weeding, trimming, all of those jobs have been taking so much longer to. To maintain. So a lot of people get discouraged with that, and they start realizing, okay, I'm not even making money, and yet I'm so busy, and I'm working so many hours, working 60, 70, 80 hours a week as the business owner, and yet I'm not even making money. That can be really discouraging when you're not making money because the mowing takes so long and the weeding takes so long. So first of all, let me encourage you by saying, come June, July, things dry out. August. And if you can keep people on the same recurring schedule, now all of a sudden your guys are making 60, 70, 80 bucks an hour when they go to that job because they don't have to hardly bag any clippings. There's not very many weeds. And so there's ways to work around that. Obviously, an easy solution, this is what everyone comes back to, is to charge by the hour so that when you do mow for a long time in the spring rush, that you are actually getting paid per hour, per man. Hour. I see the benefit of that. However, the problem with that is when it takes you five minutes to mow that lawn in the middle of August, you. You'll only make $5. Yes, you make 50 when it takes you 50 minutes in the middle of spring. But the amount of cash flow, your cash flow is just incredibly, the swings involved. If you only charge by the hour is not something I like when it comes to mowing. So back to what can you do? What can you do? What are the solutions? Now? This is not what I'm talking about today. I'm not talking necessarily about the spring rush and how much money you make versus you don't. When it comes to mowing and weeding and services like that. So spike in growth during the spring. It's just so hard because during the spring rush is also when you're getting all your customers, all your leads are coming, the phone's ringing off the hook. Customers want more jobs being done, but at the same time, it's also the time when it takes the longest to mow some of your people's lawns. And so now you're stuck trying to move people around, trying to hire more people. And then you're questioning, well, should I even hire people? Because the mowing is going to slow down and it's going to be. My mowing route will catch up eventually in June, July, once things dry out. So try to even hire more people. I'm not really talking about that. I'm talking about the fact that on top of all that, right when you aren't making money on the mowing, you aren't making money on weeding and maintenance, you are working crazy hours trying to get all these jobs done. Your crew is as well. And at that same period of time, when all of these things are happening and you're not making the money, complaints start to roll in. Like I said, the mowing customer that you used to take care of, the people you knew personally, are now calling to complain because Joe didn't blow off the lawn, or they got clippings on their Mercedes, or they left the gate open and the dog got out. And they need to make sure that's never done before. They're mad and they're livid and they're angry and they threaten to put bad online reviews or whatever some people do. And so how do you mitigate this? How do you have a team that minimizes complaints? Number one is culture. You have to make sure you inbreed within your people, that customer service is important and that the customer is not our enemy. I find so many times in people's team meetings or in their culture in general, it seems like it's us versus them. It's us versus the customers. It's us versus Sally, who we mow their lawn. And when Sally comes out and gets angry at us because they think we didn't do a job, a good job, it's us against Sally. It's our company, our landscaping company, and our employees against them. And this is the wrong mentality. You have to think that your customers are very. They are vital to the growth of your company. They are vital to the guys on your crews. Have to know that with all those customers, they're not getting paid. And so realizing that customer service is the basis of your business and the basis of your future growth is super important for your team. So just that in general, however, let's say a complaint has come in. How do you deal with the complaint? So I'll just share how we deal with a complaint within our company. So what happens when a complaint comes in? And number one, it's going to go to the office.

So usually.

A complaint is going to come in via phone or email to the office. The office is going to then take what we call a yellow slip.

So on this yellow slip, we have a few different lines, basically the date, the customer's name, and the problem. We have the problem and they have to fill this out. So the office fills out. What is the problem? What went wrong on the job? Did they not edge something correctly? Did they not mow a certain part of the lawn? Did they break a sprinkler? What happened? This is the complaint. Yellow slip on that. They have a problem, and then there's a blank spot.

And this is the solution. So what we do is we have another line that says owned by.

Owned by. So someone calls, they have a complaint. The office gets the problem. They write down that problem along with the date and the customer's name. We have a place where we put that, where we call it the 48 hour yellow slip. That's what it is labeled, 48 hour yellow slip. So my yellow slip gets in this bright yellow paper and the office has to write it up with the customer's name, what went wrong? And it goes in what we call a 48 hour yellow slip area.

When mowing employees and the crews come back in for the end of the day, they always, you know, when they're going towards the refrigerator or where they put up their keys, they will see where we have the yellow slip area. And they know that if they see a yellow slip there, they need to check it. And on it it's gonna say their name. If they were at that customer's job last. So let's say Sally, good old Sally calls.

With a complaint. The office is going to get Sally's name, write down the problem, and then they're going to see who was at Sally's job last, who was at her property, they're going to write that person's name down. So let's just say it's Mike.

Going to say owned by Mike. Then what happens is that slip. Then the office puts that in the 48 hour yellow slip area. All the people see all the Employees see that yellow slip and they're going to check is their name right here. And if it is. So if Mike comes in the office and there's a yellow slip with his name on it, he is responsible within 40 hours to make sure that he has found the resolution to the complaint. So on that yellow slip, you have the problem, the solution owned by. And then what's the resolution? The solution or the resolution? Same thing.

That resolution. What we have to do within 48 hours, whoever's name is here has to go back to that customer's problem. They have to talk to the customer, and they have to fix it. So if they forgot an area for lawn mowing, or forgot to edge or forgot to blow something off, they have to fix it. Number one, they have to talk to the customer and they have to create a resolution that they write down. And then in our next team meeting, they will actually pull up that yellow slip because we have two areas, the 48 hour yellow slip and then the resolved yellow slip. And so we take this. If there's a stack of yellow resolved, a stack of resolved yellow slips, we take those at our next team meeting and we give them out to all the people who owned them, and they have to explain what happened, what went wrong, what they did wrong, or if there's any notes that need to add to that customer's profile so that all the other mowing routes and the mowing crews who go to that property know exactly what to do. So that's how we take care of complaints. And the reason we did this is because so many of you and. And so many landscapers, they try to take care of the complaints themselves instead of allowing their guys, the people who actually made the mistakes, to fix it. And we make them talk to the customer, which is super embarrassing. No one wants to do that. But they have to. If they make a mistake and they own it, that's the kind of culture we've created, and they own it. They have to go back to that job, talk to the customer, knock on the door, apologize. It's very embarrassing. What that does is it creates a culture where when they're leaving a job site, they will take one more look and see if everything looks okay. That one more look will save us a lot of complaints because they are now personally invested in making sure they don't have to come back to that place and embarrass themselves and apologize and do the work over again. So how do you align your personal interest and your business interest with the interest of your employees? They don't want to go back. They don't want to go back and have to apologize and redo work. And that's embarrassing. And so align that interest with the interest that you don't want those complaints to come in in the first place. And you'll get your culture on track to reduce the amount of complaints that you have. And what a beautiful thing is, when guys see their name on one of these yellow slips, you can see it, they are unhappy, they are distressed, they are not distressed. They are really annoyed with themselves that they made this mistake. A lot of times the office will have additional pictures or something that client might have emailed. So they're kind of ashamed. Everyone sees the yellow slip and sees they have to bring it up at the team meeting. But it's vital. And what's an amazing thing is you start seeing where because they have 48 hours, they gotta resolve it and it's up to them to resolve it. So whether or not they go back or not isn't necessarily super important to us. So sometimes you'll actually see guys volunteer to go back to someone's job even if their name isn't on the owned by area of the yellow slip. And the reason for that is it's just the culture we have. And people say, you know what, I was at the job the time before and it was really my mistake. I didn't weed there either. And so when you got there, yeah, there were a ton of weeds. And I know your name is on the owned by because you were there last, but I'll go do it. And seeing the camaraderie of the guys talking about these yellow slips, even if their name isn't on it, and trying to discuss how we can improve the customer service, how we can improve the service for that customer, whether it be adding new job notes or maybe a senior employee knows something more about that property or that client or what they like and can share it with that person who now has their name on this yellow slip. So that's how we do it. That's how we take care of complaints. It's not perfect. It's not perfect. But I guarantee you, by making your people take ownership of their mistakes and making them add to your culture, this can be. Complaints can be massively good for you if you take care of them and you go back to a customer's house and you really show that you care and you do it. Fast forward 48 hours, usually within 24, we're getting back and we are talking to the customer in person, meeting them the guys are taking notes and the customers see that we really do care about them. So a lot of your complaints turn to your raving. Reviews online turn into customers that are with you for a lifetime. And I guarantee by implementing something along these lines, you'll reduce your complaints by half at least. Because your people will take ownership. They will take ownership of their job. And so they will look at the job one more time. They will make sure it looks that one strip of grass, they forget, they'll catch it. The edge they forgot, the little bit of clippings that they forgot to blow off, they will catch those things and it will help you as the business owner focus on growing the business during this spring rush when there's so much going on and it's easy to get in this contract mode because stuff starts falling to the cracks, complaints start coming in. You're getting new hires and new people that you aren't really familiar with. And now you're getting an onslaught of new customers. The existing customers are taking longer to service because everything's growing so fast. And then you have people problems because complaints are running in because of new hires that aren't trained and all the other stuff that goes along with that. So I encourage you, get through the spring rush. I know you can do it. Capitalize on this time of year, don't retreat now because the next four or five more weeks of the spring rush is what's going to set you up for the rest of the year, keep you the long term contracts. It's going to give you the big jobs during August, September once it gets dry and get you through the summer strong until you get to fall and you start doing fall cleanup. So I encourage you, get through the spring cleanup, finish strong and if you have complaints, use a system like this to reduce those and keep your customer service and your team culture at high standards. Thanks so much for listening to Landscape Business course podcast. You might be watching here on on YouTube or Facebook, but I encourage you go to landscapebusinesscourse.com conference and sign up today. I can't wait to see you in person.