Mike Andes says new lawn care hires learn fastest through twice-weekly team meetings, hands-on daily training with a mentor, and open-book management showing how their work affects the company's profit. Skip the orientation videos.
Mondays and Thursdays, with an optional Wednesday meeting.
Next question. How do you transfer the systems you come up with from your mind to your employees? Computer files, binders, emails. I have it all in my mind, but I'm not sure what the best way to pass it on would be when I begin hiring next spring. Thanks, Thomas. Okay, so yes, computer files, binders, emails. You've done videos. Honestly, I would start with this weekly team meetings and then do two weekly meetings with your team. So we do Mondays and Thursdays and we've added a third one on Wednesday, that's optional, where we actually talk about stuff outside of just lawn care landscape. We talk about their personal finances and their careers and leadership. Doing that is going to get whatever's in your mind into their mind a whole lot better than computer files or binders. Like you got to remember these are hard working guys. They don't want to sit down and watch videos. We've tried this before, we where they have an orientation system of videos for their first day or two and my goodness, they don't like it. And they glaze over after 10, 15 minutes. And if you have five, six hours of video like we did and we had all videos and all chronologically showing them how to use certain equipment, guess what? These are workers. Unfortunately, they're not gonna sit down and absorb information for six hours from a video camera or video screen. Like they're just not going to do it. So definitely have a system in place for training. Whether it be the big part of just making it incremental. So like day one, it's like you got to learn how to use the software, use a line trimmer and a blower, like that's all you learn. Then like maybe day four you learn to push more. Then the next day maybe you learn zero turn. The next day you learn how to drive the truck, then you learn how to back up the truck. Then like you just have it. That's the best way in terms of making sure it's systematic. And then the biggest thing though in terms of getting your mind into their mind is those team meetings to check in with them. We've also had where when we have a lot of new in place, we try to actually get mentors for every single new hire. So they have a mentor and a mentee and they get like a buddy system. So I think we have like four at a time. So when there's new employees, there's four assigned mentors to them. And those mentors are the ones that check in with them on all their jobs. They make sure that they are the ones that kind of sign off on that person being ready to go solo and being ready to be able to run a route themselves. And so that's what I would recommend. If you have a lot of team members, do the mentor mentee thing, where the mentor, who's been around for a while is responsible for the success of the mentee, the new hire, and then have a systematic way of training them where it starts with very, very basic. And then there's kind of a last thing that they gotta do in order to be able to kind of be like, all right, you're out of training. The initial part at least. Obviously, you're gonna train them ongoing through those team meetings and things. But in terms of culture and getting that culture of learning and education and getting what's in your mind and in their mind, you to start with team meetings. And then I definitely say you got to do open book management. That opens up the culture to where when you do have something in your mind, they actually care because it affects their paycheck, it affects their pay for performance, it affects the profitability, which then they know and see, and they can start to learn business and things. So that's just my two cents, my opinion.
