MUST KNOW Hiring Tips for the Lawn Care Industry!

Hey everyone, it's Mike Andes and you're listening to the Business Boot Camp podcast. Today we are talking about some of the tips and tricks, the five things I want to share about hiring regardless of what industry in. But for small businesses, some of the things that you can do as an interviewer as well as someone that is looking for employees and employer, what you can do to find great talent, retain those people and build a world class team. Before we get into that though, a big thank you. Today's sponsor, which is Gusto, if you haven't already, go to gusto.combootcamp and try out their software completely free for an entire quarter. So 90 days. And just a couple of things they do in addition to actually running your payroll is they submit W2s and 1099s for you. Direct deposit.

Workers compensation administration, automatic payroll tax filings, off cycle and bonus payrolls. You you can do across multiple states. Expedite, they can expedite payrolls, they do tax form amendments. Just a whole bunch of things they do. And what's great is they don't have any contracts too. So once you get started, it's like six bucks a month per person. After your free three months, there's no contracts you can cancel anytime. It's month to month. So really love it. Check it out. Go to gusto.combootcamp alright, so we got five tips today. Things that I have done to build our team. By no means am I a perfect employer, by no means am I a perfect interviewer. But you know, our team of the people that we have as well as the people that I vet for the franchise. So for example, from the franchise level, I have done probably about 280 calls now for people that are interested in the franchise. And so I guess there's a less than about 5%, 5% of people actually get through that are interested and want to join the franchise. And so it's really like an interview process for that as well. That's probably the biggest part of any interviewing that I'm doing now. But I want to go over the five tips for you as a small business owner that you want to be thinking about if you're trying to hire your first employee or maybe you're 20 or 30 or 40. These are still things that I find very, very useful. All right, number one is sell the dream. Especially if you're very small, especially if you're trying to first find that first one or two employees. You're really looking for a number two to kind of follow in your footsteps. Be really close to you as the executive CEO and really trying to find someone that is going to be really the trailblazer for the culture of what you want your business to look like. So especially if you're really small, you don't have any employees, or maybe just one or two when you're looking for employees, you don't have a team that's going to, you know, create a culture for them. And so you're gonna really have to sell them on the dream of what the business can become. If you don't have a very big business, if it's kind of a, you know, you. And now you're hiring one person, you're gonna have to sell them on the dream of what you want to build the business into and what they can be part of in that company as it grows. Number two is references trump all. All right. References are a make or break on so many different levels. When it comes to interviewees. We've got great people come in for interviews, then you call their references, and they're kind of mediocre. We won't hire them. The references need to be a raving review. If when someone mentions. When I mention their name or whoever's getting the references mentions someone's name, a potential hire's name, it needs to be like, unequivocally rave review. And that is, we would love to have this person back, we'd hire them back in a heartbeat. They're the greatest worker we've ever had. Things like those comments are the ones we're looking out for. Whether or not, if they would not hire that person back, there's a really good chance we're not hiring them either. And so unless their references are all great, we are not hiring the person. Literally, if just one of them is mediocre, like, yeah, they were fine. Or when we ask about their performance or their attendance or their participation as a team member, and if there's even a hesitation, we're going to take that as a massive red flag and we're not going to hire them. So references trump all. We've also had people come in, they're kind of like an okay reference or an okay interview. Their resume is okay. Their experience is okay. Then we call their references, and they're just like, off the charts incredible. And we hire those people immediately. And so references for us is probably 80% of the equation when it comes to whether or not we're going to hire somebody, because it can tell a lot about the cultural fit that we are going to expect from them. It tells a lot about if they've worked really well for some other employer and then a second and a third employer, and all of them have rave reviews. There's a really good chance you, the fourth person, you're going to luck out and you're going to do really well with this person, too. You're going to be a great fit, they're going to be a great employee. And so we are. I'm not really going to go over what kind of reference questions we ask. More or less, though I want you to extremely wait and value the opinions of the references that you collect. And we also take much less weight from a reference that is listed on their resume. We are going to try to find the references during the interview. So the first interview, the first time they come and interact with us, mainly the most important thing we're really doing, like, we're talking to them, giving them information, asking them questions. But the most important thing we're doing is getting references from them. And they're not going to be on the resume. We're going to ask them who their supervisor was, who people that worked for them, ask for their cell phone number, ask how to spell their first and last name. Write that down right in front of them. And so references trump all. Number three. Your ads will govern your lead flow. All right? The same way that your advertisement governs in the creative of your ad, the text of your ad governs how many leads you're going to get. The same thing goes for your job ads. Your job ads will govern how many applicants you're getting in. What I mean by that is, if you're getting too many leads, like you're getting like 100 applicants for an opening, what you need to do is you need to weed out a lot of those people by making your job ad much more comprehensive, putting in what you are not looking for in individuals, what individuals will not be successful in your organization and really make it more comprehensive. On the flip side, I've seen people have these massive job ads that go through mission statements and what they want out of people and physical requirements and team requirements and experience requirements. And all of a sudden they have weeded out so many people that they're actually weeding out people that are potentially good hires but might miss out on one little tiny segment or have a question mark about it and not apply. And so if you are getting one or two, you know, applicants on a really, really elaborate job posting, maybe scale it back a bit, maybe take some of the requirements away, take away some of the things that are you're trying to weed out bad people. Take some of those away because you're probably weeding out good people. They just have question marks based upon all of these requirements and all of these things that you're trying to put stipulations around. And so you're, you're. The way that you phrase your ad, the way that you set up your ad is going to govern the applicant flow. If you have too many, you're going to have add to it. You're going to have to add in things to weed people out. And if you're not getting enough, you might need to open it up a bit in order to get enough leads because you might be cutting out good people by putting too many stipulations, too many requirements, too many reference requirements or educational requirements or experiential requirements. Really if you put three plus years of experience, what if they have two and they're a great applicant otherwise but they don't apply because you said three plus. So things like that you might want to remove. If your applicant flow, your deal flow is not enough. Number four is ask yourself when you're making your job ad, what makes your job what makes your job ad, what makes your company different than every other one? Alright, so when they're scrolling through Craigslist or they're scrolling through Indeed or they're going through a monster, they're going through any other job board on Facebook or whatever, what makes you stand out? What makes you different than every other business in your industry that's also putting ads at usually the same time of year, especially if you're seasonal business. They are looking for the same people. They are looking for the exact same person as you are. What makes you different? What is going to get you the different applicant? The person that stand out. That's a plus. That is a world class team member. What are you doing in your job ad to make sure you're extracting out of the labor force those individuals that are great. What are you doing to stand out from all of your competition? Are you doing another Just kind of like yeah, we're here too. Like yep, we're just another ad. We're just another person looking for help where there's another company help wanted. We're just another company looking for someone to just man the system, you know, be a cog in our system or what are you doing to try to stand out? A couple of those things we've done is a compensation is a massive part. Do you pay people more? Do you have a pay for Performance model. Do you have a system in place for performance or for commissions or some way that you take away the ceiling of how much they make? Is there opportunity for them to grow in your organization? If there is, you better highlight that. Because if you are comparing, if they're comparing apples to apples against your competitor and it's an entry level position, if you can give that person the ability to see down the road of what the opportunity for that position can become, you can win out. All right, so what are you doing to make your job ad and your job position different? Another thing is scheduling and flexibility. Like, that's another way to stand out from all of your competition location. How close are you to your applicants? Like, if you're living, if they have to travel 30 minutes to you, but then all of Your competition is 10 minutes from their house, guess what? They're going to choose your competition. All right, so proximity. There's a massive study that was done and there is a lot of research around the distance that someone has to travel to work every day in relation to their average tenor, how long they stay at the job. The closer they are to their workplace, the longer they, on average stay to work at that same company. And so making sure you're close to your workforce is important. When we started command center for Augusta lawn care for the franchisees, we have a command center. It's kind of like a call center thing like that. We do estimates, all that sort of thing, Clerical work. We made sure that we were not in Blaine, which is kind of like 25, 30 minutes from the heart of where our county is at. We made sure we were a lot closer. We made sure we were on a main street. We made sure we were next to a bus stop. We made sure that we were in a residential area where a lot of our type of demographic is going to be living at instead of out in the county or even downtown where it's gonna be hard to find parking and all the rest. So, like, we were very intentional about where are we gonna put this place? Because we wanna have close proximity. We wanna be close in location to our workforce. Another thing is that you can make yourself different than all your competitors. Is your culture? Is your culture? Is your team a place where everyone wants to work? Is it a place people talk about and rave about and something's different, whether it be on your online reviews from your customers or. Or from if you have a careers page where you talk about your culture and the people that work for you and your team and that mentality and what you're trying to build together. Is that culture something that is attractive enough to someone for you to stand out? So those are some of the things you can do to make sure your job ad, your posting, your position stands out. Number five, the golden interview question is.

What will Bob Jones say about your performance when I call them? In this case, Bob Jones would be the person that is the reference. So for example, if they say, hey, I worked at McDonald's for 10 years, all right, who is your manager? Bob Jones was. Okay, well, how. Number one, Bob Jones is an easy name. But like, usually I'm going to ask them to spell out their name, make sure that they know that I'm actually writing it down, writing it down in front of them. Bob Jones is not going to be on their existing reference list on their resume. I'm looking for people that are not on there because obviously they're assumed to be great. And so I'm going to ask for Bob Jones name. I'm going to say what was a position or relation to you at that previous job? And I'm going to ask for his personal, his or her personal phone number for that reference. And then I'm going to ask him the golden interview question. What will Bob Jones say about your performance When. Not if. When I call them. The reason you say when is because you make it very intentional that you're going to call this person. Not if you call them. Like, if I call them, what are they going to say? No, when I call them and I've just wrote down their name and their number, which you just pull out your personal cell phone and gave it to me. What are they going to say about your performance? What are they going to say about. You can just go down the list. What are they going to say about your attendance? What are you going to say about you being a team player? What are they going to say about your ability to learn fast on the job? And you can literally ask those type of, that type of question in relation to things you might have questions about or see gaps in their experience or gaps in their. Like if they have a gap in experience, for example, I'm going to ask about what will Bob Jones say about your ability to learn quickly on tasks you've never done before. I'm just going to ask it out blank and I'm looking for the slightest hesitation because it's amazing how someone will think, say everything is great when they left this other job, they left it on good terms, blah, blah, blah. But when I get asked the golden interview question and they Are not expecting this setup of, yeah, everything was good when I was working at McDonald's. Yep, everything. They love me, everything. I'm just looking for a new position, wanting to grow, blah, blah, blah. And then I asked him this question after getting Mr. Jones phone number and I asked him, what will Bob Jones say about your performance when I call them? And all of a sudden there's quietness and you will be amazed. 50% of the time they say, well actually let me tell you about this. And then you tell about a little story and say, he might say this, but I think overall he'll think I'm good, but he might say this. And you all of a sudden get the real story. You get the stories that they didn't tell you originally, the skeletons in the closet they were trying to hide before they all of a sudden have to reveal it because they know if you call Mr. Bob Jones and Mr. Bob Jones tells you the story, it's gonna be a whole lot worse. And so they will give you the true story right up front. And so it's amazing. Literally 50% of the time there's a hesitation and then they give me the real story of really what happened when they left that position or what really happened when they were working there. And so that is my golden interview question. Those are the five tips I would recommend for any small business owner to be asking when you interview and when you're looking for great team members that build a world class culture. If you have great team members, if you have the right people on the bus, you are going to get a much better company and you're not going to have to manage them as much. Great people don't need management. It's the people who are average or the people who are under average that require you to manage and to oversee and to make sure you keep them accountable and make sure you keep them prepped up and make sure that you make sure they come into work and all those great players, great team players, great employees, they don't need management. They self manage. They make sure they're motivated, they make sure that they're on time, they're the ones that are actually getting things done. And so something I heard that was really, really good recently is people will stay on the bus for the people that are on the bus because. And you want people that are so involved in the team because if the bus changes direction then you want people to stay on the bus. Whereas if someone joins your team because of the destination of where they think the bus is going and they're in love with the destination of where the bus is going, where the company is going. You might need to change course or change the direction the business is going, but they have their heart and their mind set on whether bus was going. But if you can get them to buy in and love the culture, love the people on the bus, regardless of where the bus goes, regardless of the changes in direction or the modifications or the pivots you have to make in your business, they'll stay on the bus. You've been listening to the Business Boot Camp podcast. I'm Mike Andes. Until next time, be great and nothing else. Pay.