I made this mistake for years and it cost me MILLIONS!

Don't get mad at me for telling you to tie up your cleats and lace up correctly. I'm on the team. I want you to win.

Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes. I'm the founder of Augusta Lawn Care. We have almost 100 locations around North America. And today I'm going to be sharing something I've learned recently, and that is really challenging the belief that I had. And that is a common kind of thing that we say in entrepreneurial community. And that is, you know, you praise in public and that you should give someone critical feedback in private or you should criticize in private. And I've believed that for a long time, and for the most time, I actually do follow that logic. But recently, I'm gonna tell you kind of what's been going on with my company and what I'm. I've started to challenge that belief that it's not always the right thing to necessarily just do backyard criticisms and doing those things in private and then praising people publicly all the time instead. So this is the story, I guess, in Lawn Care, we have what we call Command Center. Command center does a lot of the office admin, phone calls, emails, et cetera, and getting customers started, setting up estimates, et cetera. And so the goal in that is to try to make take off the admin time for the franchisee, the owner. They can focus on growing the business through sales, hiring, and really growing their company and not taking phone calls and running back to their phone and answering the scam call for the 50th time. Like, we want to take that off their plate so they can focus on growing their business. That's what Command center is all about. Now, the thing with Command center, as I've talked about here on the channel before, is that it has to scale logarithmically with the franchisees, because as the franchisees grow and count number of locations, we have to obviously scale with that. But furthermore, as locations join, they're usually doubling or tripling in growth those first few years. You know, the first year they do 150,000. Well, the next year they 300,000. Next year, after they 600. The next year they did, you know, let's say they 900,000. Like that level of growth is on top of the fact that the location number is increasing. And so I've actually talked to venture capitalists and people that look at companies like mine like the worst thing you did was start Command center because it's not going to scale like software where you can just plug a thousand people in tomorrow and it'd be fine. Like, we're going to have to limit this year. You know, we're not taking any franchisees until next fall and winter. And when we do, we're going to have to limit it to 50 people. We're going to over subscribe, overbook that very quickly. But it's a matter of we're going to have to cap it at that. Not because we won't be able to sell more or because it's not working. It will be a matter of we will not be able to deal with the log rhythmic, the logarithmic growth that we are having a number of calls, leads, and the amount of work Command center has. And we can't like triple staff at Command center because you can, you have to train them. It takes months to train someone effectively at Command center before they're actually profitable and efficient enough to be on the phone. Because we charge the franchisees by the minute. So they have to be efficient. They can't just be thrown into the fire and be like, figure it out. Because they'll make mistakes and they'll be inefficient. And that cost the franchisees money. So it takes a good six to eight weeks to get someone really good and efficient at Command Center. And so, you know, we have this problem that is like our, our growth is going to mostly be stunted by this very unscalable thing, which is hiring really good office people. And the goal is that we take that burden off the franchisees. And so they don't have to do that. Because finding off these people and housing off people and finding rent for an office space and all the rest of it is an absolute nightmare. I don't want them to deal with it. But by taking that on, we have literally capped our growth rate by a massive amount. And so, you know, this, this has led to the problem of hiring lots of people. And then in this current labor market where so many people are leaving and we have this great resignation and, you know, now, because I'm not just competing with people locally, if I'm trying to hire people virtually, I'm now competing with every other company in the world that's trying to get virtual workers. And that includes the likes of Amazon and Apple and all the rest of it that are willing to immediately pay someone a base pay of 18 or $20 an hour to be virtual and answer the phone. Well, I'm not going to be able to afford that. The franchisees aren't going to be able to afford that. And so we're have to pay P4P. They get a percentage of labor revenue they earn for the business like we always talk about. And they can make 18, 20 plus an hour easily if they're really efficient, but their base is like 10, $12 an hour. All of that to say we've had to hire a lot of people and we had a lot of our employees leave in January and February, right before. And as the spring rush started in March, we had a ton of people leave. Part of it was because we hired a bunch of people in the winter getting ready for spring rush. And we were ready for it. And all of a sudden spring rush came and they were used to like the workload from the. And we had trained them, everyone was good and solid. We were staffed up, we'd actually overhied. We're like, man, this is gonna be, this is gonna be a breeze. We got a really good team in place. We've trained them all winter. We took massive losses at the franchise level to get ready for the spring rush. We were like ready to go. And then all the people that we trained were so used of that winter type of workload that when spring rush came and all of a sudden there's just thousands of emails and thousands of phone calls coming in and thousand that like, I'm not joking, I was in thousands, thousands of customers ready and like just phone call after phone call, like it's just like a river of phone calls coming in. They're not ready for it. They were not ready for it. They were trained, they knew what they were doing, but they weren't ready for that level of stress. When you have customers freaking out at you, when you have 10 people in the queue that you're supposed to be answering on the phone, like that craziness and that can shift from like 30 minutes, there's like nothing happening to 30 minutes, just that later being just completely overwhelmed. And they started leaving and it was a very stressful time because of the work and people started to leave and not just the new people, it started to become the people that were the most experienced and been with us for a long time and were really good at their job. But the problem is because now it's a self fulfilling prophecy. You know, you get a few people to leave that were potentially just not ready for that workload or couldn't handle that stress and then that puts more stress on the people that stay. The trainers, the people have been there a long time. It creates, creating even more stress for them. So then they leave and when they Leave now we're talking like, this is a high level position, is a training, this is a management position. Now we're trying to find replacements for them and we're having to pull people out of frontline towards to be more manager style. Like, it became a lot and we really had to re, regroup, restructure. It was a whole nine yards. And I'll talk about that at conference probably next year. But in doing so, you have a lot of new people that you're training up and that are answering the phones that are on the front lines that have to interact with customers. And we started to have quality control issues. And part of that is because there was. We can't listen to every single phone call, we can't watch every single actions being taken because it would be extremely inefficient. We'd have to raise our prices. And we're like literally 50, 40 to 50% cheaper than most calling services compared to like Call Boss or Jill's Office or those other services. Like, we're considerably cheaper. And we can only do that if we're efficient. So we can't, like, we can't watch and listen to every single phone call. So this is what we decided to do. I'm like, look, we're not, we can't. We got to stop doing one off. Hey, you're doing this wrong. Hey, you can do this better. Like, we will never be able to make this work. We have to do this at scale and to do that we have to reprimand and criticize people in public. And so what we started doing is we created something called game footage where we literally listened to phone calls from our frontline command center staff and we give open criticism to it. We tell them what they did wrong, what they could have done better. They should have said this word. They should have used their phrasing slightly different here. They paused here too long, really critiquing every little part of their phone call. And it scales better. And furthermore, I realized that the culture actually embraced it. At first we had some pushback and at first I had to push it through and I said, look, I told my managers, I said, look, if anyone says that this is bad and really comes against me giving open criticism and feedback to the team, I want them fired immediately, without any question. That was the standard I held because I knew it needed to happen and we had to do it immediately. Otherwise we would start, we'd continue this bleeding. We started literally live. Liz and I would listen to phone calls and then we would give critical feedback on the performance of the individual. And at first there was a little like, oh my goodness, is this going to be considered bad? Is this even legal? Are people going to have their feelings hurt? And I was like, look, if people get their feelings hurt, we're going to immediately let them go. There's no question they will get fired on the spot. And we had to let go several people. I want to get, I want to say there's like maybe six, five, six, seven people that we had to fire and let go of the team just because, like they were not going to fit inside the culture of just open dialogue about people's work ethic. Open, open dialogue about people's performance. And it was very nerve wracking for me. Like, how is this going to go over? This is what's happened. I really believe that when you open up and start talking about things, there's opening up lines of communication. You let the, let the organization move at a faster rate because there's no longer silos of like, oh, you need to talk to your manager, you need to wait for a one on one, or you need to have an evaluation, or you can talk to your trainer or like wait for the weekly meeting. Like all of that is out the door. When it's like, look, we're gonna address issues and if I see you have a problem, I'm gonna help you and fix it. And by the way, there's nothing against you and I love you and I want you to do better and I want you to make more money. And that's why I'm giving you this critical feedback. And the reason why I call it game footage is because I thought about like a professional athletics team, whether it be football or baseball or basketball, they watch the game and they go through it and they're always critiquing what they did. And there's no shame when an entire team of football players is in a room and the coach is pointing out a play and telling that so and so did this wrong and they should have moved around here. It's like, look, we're a team and the ultimate goal is to get the football and the touchdown and win this thinking game and move the playoffs and win the super bowl, like that's the goal. And so if we all got to sit here and give feedback to each other and take it when it hurts because it's us that the coach is pointing out that did something wrong, then we have to realize that the common goal of the team is to win. And as long as we're on the same team and believe that everyone on that team has our backs and has the same common interest of winning the game, then we should all be on the same page. That if I am a weak link, if I need to improve, if I need to change my performance, I'm willing to watch game footage and I'm willing to critique myself and I'm willing to let others critique my performance in order for the collective whole of the team to do better. And that unlock my brain to allow myself to like, okay, we're doing this. We're going to do this publicly. We're going to openly give feedback and criticism because we are a team. And if someone doesn't take that well, it means they are not on the team. Because someone on the team is going to realize that we're doing this not because we hate someone or we tryna pick on somebody or think they do a bad job. It's because we want the team to do better. We want that individual to do better. And I truly believe every high performer wants critical feedback. I embrace critical feedback 10 times more than praise. If anyone has ever talked to me like a fan or something like that and they praise, hey, he prays on me, you know, I deflect pretty quickly. I say thank you or whatever, but we move on. I don't really care, it doesn't help me a whole lot. But if someone's going to actually give me critical feedback, even if it's potentially not correct and like actually wrong, I still look, diagnose and think about that 10 times more because it will do me more good. And if we're only going to praise our team and tell them how great they are and they got five star reviews and you guys are amazing, that's fine, that's good. That'll bring morale up temporarily. But what will bring morale up more in a football team, instead of telling your team how great they did on that play and how great it is, is winning the super bowl, winning games, that's the best way. Have culture as a winning culture. I want a winning culture where everyone wants to win. They're there to win for themselves, for their family, for their success, for their future, for their finances. And they also, by the way, get a bunch of people together in a room that all want to be winners. Guess what happens? The organization, the business will win if everyone on that team is disciplined towards the ultimate goal of winning for the team and for themselves. Instead of looking good in front of other people, getting praise and admiration in front of other people, that's fine, that's good. We do prizes, we do giveaways, we do, we give cash prizes when they read certain books or they do certain things and answer the most phone calls in a day. We do all of those positive reinforcement type things. But I have never in all my years of business and they're not too many, I'm relatively young, but in 10, 15 years of me doing business and all the rest of it, I have always thought that you need to praise people in public and in private, do the criticism. Flipping that on a dime has changed the culture and it's made it to where now anyone should be able to tell anyone else you did that wrong. And if that person takes them wrong, that's on you. You're creating drama because at the end of the day, we all the same goal of winning the game. And if I'm going to tell you to tie up your cleats because if you don't, we're going to trip. And if you trip, that might lead to a fumble and that fumble might lead us to lead to us losing a game. Don't get mad at me for telling you to tie up your cleats and lace up correctly. I'm on the team. I want you to win. I want you to make more money. I want you to improve. And that's what that I think it's working really well. I'm taking, trying to take that same philosophy towards frontline staff workers out in the field, like landscaping, like, look, we're on the same team. I'm going to give you open, critical feedback. I expect the same back towards me for you to be able to tell me when you think I'm doing something wrong, when I could do something better. And that common goal of winning is something I'm very passionate about. If you have other questions about hiring and some of the things that I believe in when it comes to hiring, check this video out here. Give you some tips on how to find good people, people that want to win.