Mike Andes explains a temporary boost to P4P compensation from 33% to 45% at Bellingham for April and May to help crews earn incentive pay during spring's longer grass and bad weather. The shop hired four people this week and uses higher commission and benefits instead of raising base pay to attract workers.
Hey, everyone. Hope you're doing super well. Let's go get started. Gonna drop this into.
Facebook.
I just am posting. I posted. Let me see if it's loading. It's still loading. Video of Lee at the Bellingham shop this morning. Morning, when I was there for the meeting, he was explaining to the crew about the increase in pvp to 45% through April and May. So that is going up right now. If you missed the. I talked about yesterday extensively as to why we're doing that just for those two months.
I don't think you'll need to do that. By the way, if you only have one or two employees and they've been with you for a while, most of you, the fact that.
You don't have a whole bunch of new team members, that's a big part of it. When you have start having 10, 15 people out in the field or 20 or whatever is when spring rush comes around, not only is it longer days, grass is longer, weather's bad. It's the fact that you have so many trainees, it slows everybody down. So if you have an employee or two that have been with you for six months a year, it's likely you will not need to do that. I don't think everyone should go do it because Bellingham did. I think you need to look with your coach, go over numbers, see what percentage of your guys are above base pay, and see, based on what we talked about yesterday, if whether you should be raising prices to give them higher base, higher PvP, or if you should be doing an actual percentage increase. So definitely check out yesterday's if you have not Yesterday's Mastermind, if you have not seen it already.
All right, let's jump in, see what we got.
Right. We got Kyle, Tyrone, are you increasing your P4P percentage to 45 for May and June only when it comes to will go back down to 33%. How are you telling the crew about this? It's not for May and June. It is for April and May, and it will go down to 33%. Yes. Because the crew has no problem hitting above base pay in the rest of the year, especially summer and fall.
But for May, for April and May, we're putting out to 45 in terms of how we're telling them. This morning, I shot that video because I thought this would probably come up, and it's now live on the Facebook group, Lee explaining it using someone's actual numbers. I kind of started the video, like 30 seconds late, so I apologize. But you'll get the gist. And then right before that, I just quickly kind of shared why we're doing it. And that is we want everyone to make sure it is obtainable to hit P4P when it is the hardest time of the year to do the work. And that is when the grass is growing crazy and the weather's bad in our market.
This goes along with my question regarding giving more percentage of PvP. Is Bellingham having difficulty retaining and finding people this year? As with every year? Yes.
And it's not so much retaining as finding them. And again, they show up the first few days, like if they last a week and they show up consistently that first week. So.
We don't want to raise base pay. That's our goal. We haven't raised base pay since the beginning of P4P, and our goal is to keep it that way, but then once they get in, retain them because of the higher percentage of P4P. Now we have medical benefits, stuff like that. So it's a bit of a different game we're playing because we have the medical benefits, gym reimbursement program, profit sharing is significant, etc. What you could do, I know some people play with us. We have not done this in Bellingham. We do at Bellingham, we do the $100 gas card. If they have perfect attendance for the month, you move that to a week. And so that way, like the first time they get like right away, they're right after the races are encouraged and trying to get the first week of being on time every single day, you'll potentially do that. I wouldn't be opposed to that, but I wouldn't say we are having any harder of a time now than we did the past few years. Finding people, it's just the same thing. Right. So potentially down the road, we would have to raise the base pay to 20 just to be find enough people that want to join. But, you know, they've hired four people this week and are trying to get a fifth one. And I think they have two that they were kind of iffy on, but they aren't hiring them unless they have to. So that's a good place to be in when you have a few people that you could potentially hire that you've interviewed in the past week or two that you've told them you'll get back to them kind of thing. And you don't have to hire them if you don't need them. So that's a better place to be in. But yeah, they've. They struggle part of it too is just like, you need a lot of it. With experience of hiring and interviewing and training, you get better and better at that process. And so whenever you have new GMs, that's going to be the bottleneck and the stress point. And the thing that they will typically not be as, as efficient at is finding people, training them up, etc, because they've never done it before, and that's very common. Unless they've had some sort of management experience in the past, it's unlikely that they're going to just pick up interviewing, hiring, onboarding, like, like super, super easy. So. All right, well, that's all the questions I had for today. We'll cut it short because yesterday was pretty long. I appreciate all of you, and we will see you tomorrow. Take care.
