My First Callback in 4 Years! Customer Was NOT Happy!

Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes, landscape businesscourse.com Today we're going to make some money mowing lawns. And I'm going to show you the good, the bad, and the ugly. Today we got a yellow slip. It was bad news. I'm going to show you what happened and how the yellow slip system works. When we go back to a property and we get a call back, how that really boils down to making more money, be more profitable in your business.

Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes here. Landscapebusinesscourse.com today we're gonna be mowing lawns, making money, and hopefully giving you some tips on doing your lawn care and your mowing business. Couple things today. First of all, this truck is actually the truck that I had before the car that I currently drive. And I was demoted to a car because we had a team meeting and we came up with efficiencies. And one of the efficiencies was that Mike and estimators should not be driving trucks. They should be driving cars for fuel efficiency. So I was demoted to a car. But this is the truck I used to drive all the time for estimates and back when I was out in the field and more project management side of things, this is the truck I was driving. Now all of a sudden, it has a bent steering wheel. I don't know how you bend a steering wheel, but the steering wheel is bent. So this old Sally bad boy hasn't been taken care of. We also have a yellow slip, which we'll talk about more of this later in the video, but this is very disturbing. Oh, I mowed this guy's lawn. You what? I mowed this guy's lawn. When? Remember Francisco? Let me do it. Oh, right. Next. This time we got a 21 inch mower. All right, so this lawn, there's several notes on here. The first one's a little bit strange, but, you know, we're in a kind of a strange part of town. You have that action going on. And. And then when the note on the client's property said that the deadbolt on the gate is just there for show, and the gate pops off at the hinge. So this gate right here is completely fake. So we have a massive deadbolt with a chain. We have someone screaming at us. Over there. It says private property. And then over here, watch this. This is a great, great way to have security for your very, very important deadbolt. No deadbolt. It's fantastic. Look at that. The second note on this property says, do property check and note any Suspicious activity in the notes here for the owner. So this is like the ghetto of Blaine. I guess so. We also get after pictures of this property because they're out of town. We got 41 minutes, which is. You divide that by 60, that's like 0.58 or whatever hours. And if you do the math on that, it is $55. So we got $55 to cut this lawn. This guy's out of town. We have a 21 inch mower. It is going to take me longer. This is much fitt faster with a zero turn. But hey, life is good. We have a trailer set up and we're going through the nostalgia of driving P5 again. So it's a great day trying to get razzed over safety. So there you go.

Don't shoot your eye out.

Do you have sunglasses? Brady? Do you have any sunglasses? No, I don't, unfortunately. Sick.

And just like that, we're finished. No, not really. We started the job and then we realized that we forgot two very important things. Safety glasses as well as ear protection. Both of which are still in my car at the shop. 30 minutes. Wait, we're not driving back there. But we're gonna go to True Value, get a pack of safety glasses. Because if I didn't, people would be livid in the comment section saying that I'm gonna kill myself and I'm hurting it. Blah, blah. Okay, we're gonna go to True Valley, we're gonna pick some them up. That's where we're going now.

$3.49. That's in my price range. Let's go.

Danny.

Dude, he's rad as heck. So funny. Hey, bud, there's another one right in there. We need a quick picture of the arbitrary.

New mascot. So we got some Ear Pro. Yes. What we also we also forgot is Michael's wallet. So therefore, not only are we driving illegally. This episode is sponsored by Danny Menard. Since he bought us these for $12.94.

You gotta spend money to make money.

Oh man, we're in the hole. 12 bucks. Before you even get started on this day.

The next step is to read the entire safety and instructions. Important instructions to put these in your ears. Number one, roll. Okay. Completed. Number two, hold ear. Man, this is intense. Insert earplug. Okay, now everyone can comment how bad I did that. Cuz that's what's going to happen. Regardless of the fact it's important that you follow the instructions. The mean attenuation of the decibel rating of the standard deviation is 36.1.

Alright, so it's Mike here. I'm gonna do some voiceover, add some color commentary, and hopefully you can learn something about business while you see me mow a lawn. Because watching me mow a lawn is great and all. It's oddly satisfying, but ain't gonna make no bank accounts go higher, employ more people, or provide and put food on the table for your family. So let's talk about business. A couple people have been asking about the difference between W2s and 1099s. A W2 is basically an employee. A 1099 is what's called a subcontractor or an independent contractor. You need to be very, very careful if you're going to be doing 1099. It has always been said that you can just take an employee, give them a 1099, they don't have to pay taxes, and then you're free of any liability in terms of taxes and payroll taxes. You need to be very, very careful. There have been many contractors that have used this system. Five years go by and then they get penalized massively and the IRS goes back five years and will get all of those taxes from them. So you need to make sure that you're actually qualifying for a 1099 if you're going to use it. A 1099 independent contractor needs to provide their own tools. You can't tell them to show up at a certain time. You can't tell them to wear a uniform. So the likelihood that you're doing lawn care and landscaping and giving a route every morning or that they're using your tools and they're a 1099 is almost impossible. So keep that in mind. I know there's definitely ways you can sub out your mowing or sub out big projects. Be very careful with trying to make an employee a 1099. It will come back to bite you. And at the end of the day, it's just not right. It does not give the employee protections that they have the right to as an employee.

All right, so the client was nice enough to leave us a chair.

Oh, okay, Fantastic. All right, thank you.

Well, the client did not leave us a chair.

We're gonna have a little stand up meeting now. Okay.

Michael, you're damaging client property. Shame on you. Okay, so we got a yellow slip last week. The problem is the client did not know that we had a full scale film production happening that day. And we videoed the entire thing. They said that we did not edge under the roadies. So a yellow slip in our books is A callback. The employee that is there last gets the yellow slip. They have to go back and fix the problem because the callback from the customer. So they said, we did not edge underneath the roadies. So we're gonna do a nice little montage of Michael Weed whacking and edging under the roadies. Thank you very much.

Yellow slip. Bye bye. Caleb Clark. Thank you for going back and fixing my mistake. My bad.

Yellow slips. You gotta love them. We're gonna talk about them now because you might be like, what in the world is yellow slip? Your head might be literally doing what that camera was just doing on that mowing shot. A yellow slip. That basically is a callback. So every time that a customer calls the office and complains about anything, what happens is instead the office reacting or the owner going back to the manager going back to the property and trying to fix it with the client. Instead, what we do is we send back that frontline employee to. To the customer's property, and they have what we call a yellow slip. That yellow slip, we fill out, we put it underneath where they hang up all the keys every day for the trucks. And they're going to see that. They're going to see on that the complaint, the customer's name, the address, and their name. And if they see their name on it, it means any guy will fix it within 48 hours. They got to go back to the client's property, resolve it, talk to the customer, figure out the issue was, and then sign it. And at the next team meeting, go over that yellow slip with the entire team. So there's a few things that this helps do. Number one, there's definitely social pressure on the employ to not make mistakes because they're going to have to talk about it in front of the entire team. For some people, it's a big deal. For some people, they'd much rather have someone take money out of their paycheck than have to talk in front of all their peers and explain how they made a mistake. So there's a part of it that puts some good, positive pressure in the direction of quality. Because again, P4P is great. It incentivizes quantity and speed. But we need this yellow slip system to ensure that quality is being maintained. And this is what everyone has a big problem with with P4P. They're like, oh, you can't do pay for performance. Guys are going to run around trying to, like, mess stuff up, and they're going to go too fast and quality is going to drop. You're right. You're going to balance it out with the yellow slip system, which is basically, look, if you're on P4P and you have to go back to someone's property, no more revenue is being generated, therefore you're not making any more money. You do not want to have callbacks. They are killer when it comes to wages on P4P. So it actually increases the quality for the service of the customer. And furthermore, it makes the employee accountable. It makes them accountable for their mistakes. What you do not want is when an employee makes a mistake that you as the owner are running around fixing all of their problems, going back to the customer's house, saying, sorry, fixing the issue, fixing the skid mark or the broken sprinkler head, the employee needs to have the benefits, the ups and the downs of their performance. And if you're just constantly fixing all their mistakes and overreacting the customer's complaint and then running over and saying, oh, yeah, we're fixing, I'm so sorry, and trying to, you basically disarm the employee from taking ownership of their job. They've got to take ownership of the good and the bad. The good is profit sharing and P4P and they get things done fast. But the bad is when they make mistakes. They have callbacks and they make damage cases. And it comes to damage cases, if they actually break something on someone's property, that's when their performance dollars, that is anything above base pay on P4P is on the table, we actually can tap into it. And if they're being negligent and they break something, or if they break dent the truck, if there is negligence on the part of the employee and they break something on the employee or the company's property, that can be taken out of their performance dollars. Again, we will never touch their base pay on Pay for performance. If it's $18 or $20 per hour is their base pay, we will never touch that. But if they're making $25 an hour on P4P and going really fast, we need to have a counterbalance in terms of quality and making sure they're not running around breaking things and making skid marks and damaging a whole bunch of stuff. And that is the perfect balance. That's the tension you want in your business between quality and quantity, speed and perfection. And this also really helps with people asking for raises when it comes to pay for performance P4P, which by the way, landscapebusinesscourse.com has a whole bunch more training on that. But when it comes to P4P the beautiful thing about it is people don't ask for raises anymore. The reason they don't, they don't ask for raises is because there's always opportunity for them to become more efficient, make sure they make more money every single day, and they can learn from their peers that are making more money on P4P. So if someone came to me right now on P4P and asked for a wage increase, I'd be like, hey, go talk to so and so. They're making a lot more money than you. You could probably learn a thing or two from them. One of the most frustrating things is when you as the owner are working your brains out, you're not making any money. You know, your guys are being super inefficient out in the field, being on their phone, stopping at gas stations, and they're asking for a raise. Now you can simply tell them that there's opportunity to make more money using P4P if they're more efficient and more profitable in their day. All right, so yes, that Property was definitely one. I wish I had the 30 inch mower today. We only have the 21 inch mower. Even more ideal would have been a zero turn. I could have got through the gate. This is where a zero turn makes a lot more sense, is these wide open areas, in small areas, even the same square footage with a bunch of flower beds. That's when a small push mower is going to be just as effective. But definitely could have saved some time on this one. But with if we would have had a zero turn. This specific property has a note here, says get after picks for client. And it's because they're out of town so they want to confirm that we actually do the work. So I'm just going to take a quick picture here so that the office can send them these after pictures. And this is an automation we have that basically put a tag on this person's profile whenever we click complete, which we're going to do right now, it's going to notify the office and send those pictures to the client. So on that specific property, we had an estimated time of 41 minutes. On we got it done and we have 17 minutes remaining. So I guess it took us what, 20, 24 minutes or something like that. So we're good to go.

Hey, it's Mike here. Quick note. I just want to say a big thank you for watching this video supporting the channel. Whether you're watching another video you subscribed or liked or not, I just want to say thank you that's it.