NO-SHOW Lawn Care Employee! My Reaction to B&B Lawn Care

Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes. You're listening to Landscape Business Course. And today we're going to be doing a reaction video to BNB Lawn Care. Blake from over at BNB Lawn Care and he recently just had a. He was ghosted by an employee that he thought he hired. The next day they didn't show up. I'm gonna do my reaction to this video. I think a lot of good nuggets for hiring culture, things like that. And I want to just make one, one click quick clarification. I've done about five or six of these reaction videos and I wanna make it very, very clear that this is by no means a way to make these people look bad. If you notice the tone of these videos, I'm not trying to say that they're wrong about things. I wanna add perspective. And I want you to start thinking critically about the business advice that you're hearing and taking the pros, the cons, and filtering out what is good for your business model. There is no right, there's no wrong. Not everything I say is gonna be perfect for you for your local market. And so I think it's very good to hear multiple opinions. And I think these reaction videos get me to start thinking about things I've not talked about before and maybe things that you have wondered about. So this is by no means a way to say, oh, like they're wrong and I'm right. That's ridiculous. I've never made it sound like that. I'm definitely not gonna put the word expl in my thumbnails anymore. I'm not trying to expose anyone. This is simply a way to create some conversation around what the business advice is and for us all to learn more about the business side of things. And so if people are making bad comments about the people I'm reviewing in the comment section, I'm just going to ban you from the channel because that's not what this is all about. I'm not trying to make me look good and them look bad. It's ridiculous. I'm not trying to do that. And if you're gonna badmouth the people I'm reviewing, I'm going to ban you from the channel because that is not what we stand for here at Augusta Landscape Business Course nothing. And so this is not to put them down, it's actually to elevate what they're saying, bring it to the forefront, analyze it. And I hope that we are all doing that for, you know, all the information that we take in for our business advice. So without Any further delay. Let's jump into this real quick, though. Thank you to everyone that has been joining landscape business course. Joining there as well as we had a couple more people join Lawn Care Web Design the past couple weeks. We've where we build your website for you. There's no upfront cost. It's just a monthly subscription and there's no contract, so check that out. I really appreciate that all that money goes towards creating more content like this. You've seen the kind of behind the scenes and some really cool stuff that we've been able to get Josh involved with. And that's all made possible by those of you that are joining the course and Lawn Care Web Design without any further delay. BNB Lawn Care, let's go ahead and start this off and see what he's up to.

Blake Albertson here with BNB Lawn Care. This story, this is like gonna have to be two parts because I meant to make this video a couple days ago.

I'm shaking my head right now, dude, because I don't know what the heck is going on. Well, I do know what the heck's going on, but I have some bad employee problems right now. Bad hiring issues. Not the guys that I actually find are great, but right now, man. Whoa. My gosh. Like I said, I meant to make this a couple days ago, and a lot has happened since then. A lot of juicy stuff, a lot of kind of scary stuff.

I don't know how much I'm gonna say, but that's for the next video. For this video, I want to talk about my first. The first guy I hired this week. Literally this week. It's Wednesday. I've hired two people this week. Okay. First guy.

A friend of a friend of a cousin of a friend who knows somewhere along the line we were connected. Somebody connected us, which is awesome and which normally works out about a lot better than if you just hire somebody from, like, the open market, I would say, like indeed.com, where they don't know anything about you or your business or anything.

Okay, So I agree with this premise. When you're small, your first couple of employees to be people that you know or that you know about them a little bit. It doesn't sound like they were super close here. Like they weren't like friends or anything. But, like, my first couple employees were people that I knew that I had grown up with. And the reason it's. It's okay when you're small like that is because you can trust them a lot and you operate a lot on trust. When you're that small because you don't have the systems in place. Maybe you don't have team meetings as regularly and you don't have a lot of those different structures that are needed when you're bigger. So when you're first getting started out, you're willing to kind of forego the fact that, hey, like there is a kind of a friendship relationship on the back burner, but you're willing to forego that. Cause you kind of have, you can trust them and that's a big part of when you're getting your first couple employees. That being said, as I've grown the businesses, I have stopped hiring people that I know. And for, you know, in the past few years, we've hired, we've hired one person just recently actually, that I am. I know them and their family and I made sure that the whole hiring process was handled by a manager that they didn't know the person. So yeah, I feel like that's kind of the way we roll as we get bigger. We don't want to have that friendship relationship. Clouding the hiring process and that's the problem when you are smaller and you are hiring friends and family is. That is clouding. Regardless of how you want to separate or whatever, it's clouding your judgment in the hiring process and it will sometimes allow you to skip steps in your mind of calling references and things like that. So I like it when you first start getting started. As we've grown, we have completely put away people who I know, my friends and family members, things like that. And the one person that we have in the past three, four years, four years it's been at least since we hired someone else, was completely handled like they were hired by the time they saw me. And so that was something that, just something I've recognized as we've grown.

We were messaging on Facebook, which say what you want, whatever. We did a quick phone call made sure we, you know, I always ask people like, hey, what do you want in a job? Like, what are you looking for? And then let me tell you what I'm looking for and let's see how close we are and if it's even going to work out.

So I like this thought, like, hey, what do you expect? Here's what I expect is there, are we compatible here? Are your goals and my goals aligned enough for us to work together? I like that idea. I might be old fashioned, but I still wanna see people in person before hiring them.

I don't know. There's a lot you can tell about someone, the way they walk, the way that they have eye contact. I just can't get over the phone call. So I always would recommend in person interviews before you start going down the path of getting them further in the hiring process. Like we do the phone interview, the phone screening. But that's just to get them past stage one, which gets them an in person interview. And half the people who get to the in person interview within a couple minutes, you know, hey, look, this is just not gonna work out. And it's not. We're not creating prejudice, we're not stereotyping. It's just like you can tell by the way that someone carries themselves and the way they communicate and the way they have eye contact and their level of professionalism. And it's just going to come through in that in person interview so you can avoid some mistakes. And trust me, I made plenty of hiring mistakes. I've been sued by an employee. I've had, you know, employees ghost us like this. Like Blake's talking about. Like, I've seen it all. I've made plenty of these mistakes. I've just seen a better ratio of success when I have that in person interview after the phone call. The phone call is great to screen people out who you can just tell right off the bat isn't aren't going to work out. You know, seeing if they have experience, what their motivations are, things like that. But to get them in front of you, in my opinion, is still really important.

And, you know, with both of these candidates, whatever, you know, everything was fine, everything worked out. I told them, like, the lay of the land, the rules, the policies, whatever you want to call them. But this is how we do things. And probably five to 10 bullet points, you know, we start at 8:00 clock at this location. We blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, everything worked out. He's like, cool. Okay. I think it was Sunday night.

One quick thing I'll say is that in our phone screening process, we try to weed out the people who are gonna ghost us or who are gonna come to the interview and fail miserably anyways. And so we ask some of the things that are gonna weed out a lot of the people. And that is like, hey, just letting you know, we do a drug test. Oh, just letting you know you need to have a driver's license and you have a clean background check. Just letting you know that, you know, you being late one time means you might get fired. Like, things like that. Just very quickly. We require them to have a Cell phone. We require them to have their own vehicle to drive to work. And so some of those things can get. You can weed out some people on that initial phone call, but just something I want to drop in there.

Cool. Okay. Can't wait to start tomorrow. Ha ha. Actually, I think I told him 8:30. I did tell him 8:30. This guy told him 8:30 Monday.

Okay.

Well, we get. We're there 8:30.

Nothing.

Tyler and I are there waiting. 8:30. Five.

8:40. Told Tyler. I told Tyler this. So we had some grass in the back of the work truck. I'm like, let's go dump the grass while we're waiting. And I'm like, hey, you can never, ever, ever, ever. Well, I forgot the exact saying, but you. You can't ever make another first impression ever, ever, with a girl with like. Like, if. Listen, I think it's like 5 in. The first two to five seconds is when somebody judges you. Like, sizes you up when they first meet you. It's a human.

Instinct. You can't do anything about it. Okay, this is. Now I'm going off on a tangent. I shouldn't be. But I just want to tell you guys real quick because this is like a little. A little piece of advice myself. When I go meet a new employee, meet a new client, I know that that's why I'm on time. That's why I look presentable. That's why.

I am the best myself that I can be when I meet somebody. Because you can never get it back if you go meet a girl. And you.

Before he gets into his dating advice here, one quick tip I'd have for you. If you're out in the field working and you do the estimates is have a second shirt that you can put on when you're doing estimates, if you're going to do estimates throughout the day. This is something that I did back when I was an estimator. And now our estimators right now, they do on a continual basis. And that is if they're working out in the field or they're on a job site, they always have another shirt that's clean with them. So they can throw that on if there's an estimate that they have to go to or get scheduled for them midday.

Shrug your shoulders and you look down and you're real shy. And trust me, I've been there before, by the way. But golly, have 10 seconds of courage, because the first five seconds, she's sizing you up, man. She's seeing. What is this dude about? Is This a guy that's gonna take care of my family if somebody breaks in, in the middle of the night, is this a guy that's gonna pick me up? And I don't know, that sounded way, way bad, not what I meant. But is this guy gonna take care of my family and me if something hits the family van? And oh, little shy guy that. No. So just remember that when you're meeting people. But anyways, guy didn't show up, dude, 20, 25 minutes, freaking 30 minutes. And I'm calling, messaging him, nothing. I still haven't gotten a reply from this first guy. It's crazy. It's crazy, dude. And here's the deal. That one I actually kind of understand. Because they want the $400 a week bonus on the unemployment line. They're lazy. That's what they want. That and thanks to Donald Trump and the government that are helping small businesses and helping people, the worst thing that they could be doing right now is giving that $400 a week bonus.

I just don't get it. Like their expenses haven't went up since coronavirus. So if they were making it on unemployment, why are we giving them so much? It should be, it should be a $600 a month bonus if they're going to do anything. It's crazy. It's doing. So it's like if you were to say like it's, it's level at zero, the payroll tax extension brings it up three points. Well, the four to six hundred dollars a week bonus, unemployment takes it down about 10 because you can't hire anybody because they just want to sit at home. So dude, I'm going to keep.

Okay, so let me try to explain this. So first of all, let me just make it very clear. I agree with his premise here and that is that like people were not or are not going to work because they can stay at home and make more money or about the same amount of money as they made before in higher income states. Like where we're at that threshold is a little bit because our cost of living is higher. So $600 a week here isn't like gonna make you rich or like beat what you were making before. Whereas places like where Blake's at down south or Midwest, there's definitely people who are making a lot more money on unemployment because their, their minimum wage is seven, eight dollars. In our state it's 15. I think something like that. I think it's 15. And so it costs a lot more to live here. $600 a week is not gonna really Cut it in our area. So that wasn't as huge of an impact on us. However, let me try to explain a little bit why the government does this. Because from a small business owner standpoint, 100% agree does not make sense that you're paying people to stay away from work and yet you want the unemployment rate to go down. I get the frustration, I get the fact that it's like, why is unemployment high? And yet it's still hard to find good people. All right, so let me make this, let me make this statement real quick. And I'm not trying to take sides politically. I know this has become really politicized. But let me try to explain from an economic standpoint. First of all, probably 50 to 70% of it is, is political and that is that we're in election season. Giving money to people, any type of person right now is going to have a weight in the election cycle. That's just going to happen. Let's just face the facts. All right, Take that off the table. Let me explain from an economic, you know, macroeconomic, why, why they're doing this. If, if 15% of the population instantly loses their income and loses their buying power, their purchasing power, you're going to lead to a massive amount of deflation, which means basically people are not buying stuff, people are saving all of their money. People don't have any money to pay for rent and therefore you have an eviction crisis. That's why they've had an eviction ban in most states.

If there was no rent being paid, then the landlords, they foreclose. Those foreclosures would create a downward pressure on the real estate market. Downward pressure on the real estate market means that interest rates go crazy. And then you got, it's just a massive trickle down effect. If people can't pay rent and they can't buy things and you got a whole bunch of occupancy in tenants because people are just moving out. And so what they've done is trying to prop this whole thing up with giving money to people. And yes, there is going to be perverse incentives like, oh, I can't, I shouldn't go to work because I can make more money. But you got to see why they're doing this. And that is because they don't want this to trickle down, create deflation. So they pump money in the system, which traditionally would cause inflation. We're not really seeing that yet. But the Fed is very set on pumping enough money into the system to create some inflation. Because you see like last quarter gdp, gross domestic product went down like significantly depending on who you talk to last quarter. And that's a big red flag. And they got to prop it up by pumping money in the system. So people buy goods and services, they pay their rent. And a lot of times what's happening right now with employees and people, tenants for example, or even homeowners, they're taking a lot of short term actions. In my opinion, because there's an eviction crisis does not mean you should not pay your rent. You still owe the landlord the money at the end of the day, the eviction ban. And people are thinking short term because guess what? When that eviction ban is up, do you think anyone, any landlord is going to want to rent to you? No. Do you think you're going to go get a home mortgage after your landlord has just put a credit ding for an eviction after you haven't paid for six months? Not happening. Same thing with this whole thing with the employment thing. If I got someone to interviewing at Augusta and I'm interviewing them and they said that they stayed home for six months on unemployment and there's not some good reason why they did not go back to the job they had before and that industry had opened up and there was no reason, they just sat home. That's a red flag out to wazoo because I know they're going to jump at the next opportunity to take advantage of the system, whether it be L and I faking a claim, pretending like, you know, making something up. And so these people are thinking short term, you gotta remember that. And they're probably not the type of people you want working for you anyways. I'd want the type of person who we hire a couple of these folks during the beginning of like March, April, when this was all happening and they were getting laid off. I love the people who just jumped right back into the labor market and were willing to take a pay cut, but they just wanted to stay busy. They're like, hey, I want to work. Even if they were making a little bit less or like the same as if they were on unemployment or whatever, they just like, I want to stay working. Those are the type of people I'm going to make sure I hire. They because they're workers and they're not gonna SAP the system. So that's kinda my $0.02 on the economic reasoning behind the unemployment boost, behind stimulus checks, behind all of that's going on right now is they're trying to prop up the system so it doesn't all collapse. Because if it all collapsed. It would impact all of us a whole lot more if all the home values in your market went down 20, 25% and you had an eviction crisis and interest rates started, you know, plummeting and you had all sorts of craziness happening and, you know, unemployment go up to 25% instead of, you know, 9 or 10% that it's at now. We would have bigger problems. People would let their grass grow, they would not do landscaping jobs. What happened at the beginning, around April, when everyone stopped doing landscape projects because they were afraid that would still be happening because discretionary income would have been locked up. And so because of fear. And so what the government's trying to do is try to free that up a little bit, get people to spend money. And the reason we aren't seeing a massive amount of inflation with this money being pumped in, a lot of it has to do with the fact that people are saving the money and they're not spending it. And so that doesn't create, you know, the money cycle continuing to, you know, generate in the economy. So anyways, let's finish this up.

Keep this video short and sweet. Not going rambling too much because I'm going to work, but.

The next story is just nuts. It's nuts. And my gosh, I wish I could be in a private.

Video with like, you guys right, like you right now because there are some.

Really weird.

Things about this next story.

Alright, so we'll have to do another reaction video to a second story once he posts it. I'm looking forward to that. But I just want to say that, like, hey, regardless of the size of business that you build, you're going to have trouble with employees. There's going to be really, really good ones that you love and then there's going to be some that you just got to get rid of. And whether you keep them on and they actually come to work and they actually do work for a few weeks or months, and then you have to let them go because they're not pulling their weight or if they don't show up to work like happened today with Blake here, regardless, you have to stay focused on the fact that if you're gonna grow a business, you have to have people and that you're going to have to go through some bad apples to find the ones that are really good. And so don't get discouraged. The big part is manage what you can do. And like, you cannot help whether or not someone shows up to work. But what you can do is have a hiring process that does really weed out the bad apples. So let me show you real quick. I'm gonna have Josh kind of interject a photo, maybe a video here. Screenshot of augustalongareservices.com careers. And this is how we have our applicants put in their application to work at an Augusta Lawn Care franchise or a location. So every single location has their own page, but this is kind of the general one from the corporate page and that you're looking at. And so you'll see in there, there's four videos. All those videos are like a minute or two minutes long that kind of share a little bit about like the day in the life a little bit. The pay for performance model. Just kind of introducing the culture and the mission of what we're trying to do at Augusta Lawn Care, Give some description up top, and then they fill out their application. And the reason for that is cause we're trying to weed out the folks that are not going to want to be in an environment where we have that type of a mission and that type of vision and that type of Pay model. The P4P will weed out a lot of people who are just gonna be absolute slobs and just bumble along with all the high performers. And hopefully they get a little bit of money because they're gonna realize, hey, I have to work hard, make my paycheck. And so I think having as much information and filters before someone becomes an employee is going to help you a lot. The harder you make it. Like if you go to Google, for example, they go through dozens of interviews and applications and like, it's a long process. And that's why they get such great employees at the end of the day, is because they make it hard to get in. The harder it is to get in, usually the better candidates you're going to get. And so just hitting someone up via text, probably not the best idea. Try to at least phone interview them, screen them out, and then do an in person interview and see what the person looks like, how they dress, how they communicate, how they have eye contact, Just their whole. Is this someone that you're gonna be able to work with long term? And usually like Blake was saying, you can get first impressions and know pretty quickly whether or not that is a long term candidate. So that would be my 2 cents for today. And this is going to happen. It's inevitable. Regardless of how good of a system you have, there will be people that get through. Even if you have. They have great references, even though they might have lots of experience. Then they get to your place of work and they have a family emergency or something crazy happens with their health or whatever might happen, and all of a sudden they flip and now they're not any good. And that's going to happen. They're going to be bad apples that get through all the filters. I've been through it all. But there are certain systems you can have in place in that hiring process to reduce the number of people who don't show up, the number of people that don't care aren't good employees. And so one of the things we do after that interview process is actually send them a whole bunch of information about the business. And the office will send out information about my podcast and the video and show a little bit about the franchise and give them about the mission of the business, making sure that they've actually looked at some of those things and seen the videos on that careers page and actually looked around the website. If someone comes to an interview and they know a lot about me, the business, what we're trying to do, and they've watched some videos and they know about, like, our trailer, the setup, and about P4P, and they understand those things and they like those things, trust me, they're gonna have a very good chance of getting a job because there's a very good chance they're gonna stay with us for a long time. So that's my two cents. Try to get people to buy into the mission, the vision of what you're trying to do before you hire them, and screen out 90% of applicants who will not be good. Go after the 10, though, constantly. Be hiring. Like, have ads up on Craigslist with screening videos or form that they have to fill out that will scare a lot of them away. In your ad, make sure you put things like you're doing a drug test. You need to have a clean driving record, and you need to have a vehicle to transport your own vehicle to transport you to work. You need to have your own cell phone, all those things that are really important and down the road become a nuisance if they don't have them. Make sure they're in the ad so you can scare away the 90% of people who would otherwise just waste your time. So this is Mike Andes, you've been listening to Landscape business course. Until next time. Be great. Nothing else pays.