Q&A: How to Motivate Lawn Care Employees and BOOK OUT Projects!

Hey, everyone, it's Mike and you're listening to the Landscape Business Course podcast. Today we're doing Q and A on the Facebook group. If you have not been already part of the Facebook group, make sure you join Landscape Business course Facebook group is where I'm asking for questions and I'm going to go ahead and answer the ones that have come in the past 20 minutes or so. I'll try to get through at least the ones that have come in already. And as they come in, I probably won't get to all of them. So let's go ahead and jump right into it. First question is from DJ Babinow. Have you considered putting a debris bin on the front of the truck where the tow hooks mount in order to run a bigger mower on the trailerless setup? That way the mower would go in the bed. That's a cool idea, actually. I've never, ever thought of that. But I think in our market, we have so much debris, you would have to have a massive container and. And you'd have to cap it because now the clippings would otherwise end up on your windshield. And yeah, for us, we fill that whole bed to overflowing. And so I think the amount of space you need up front, I don't even know if that's legal because you would definitely cover your front license plate. And in our state, we have to have the license plate. That's something I've never, ever thought of. So kudos to you for even thinking about that. But I don't think it's legal to have that much space. Like, we would need to go out like six feet to have enough space to keep all the clippings. And then again, like, we'd be mounding it and needing like, tarp it or like even that's like, if it comes undone all of a sudden your clippings are all over the windshield. That'd be. I've never thought about that in my whole life. I will think about it more, but I don't think it's legal here, at least in our state. David Henderson asks, what is your best asset in your business? For me, it's having great staff. What's yours? If it's staff, what things do you do to keep staff motivated? I know after a long few weeks for us, staff can sometimes get their head down as work can be constant. What do you do to keep them motivated over hard weeks? Henderson Garden maintenance from Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland. Very cool. Best asset in your business is absolutely your people. And especially when you start to grow and scale. Your managers definitely are the most valuable to you as the owner because they are your connection to the rest of the valuable assets, which is the frontline employees. And so managers, you want to compensate them, right? You want to make sure they feel taken care of, that they feel heard, that their input is received and implemented because they are harder to find. And they are usually go getters that need constant challenges. And so to make sure that's happening, they're gonna be growing, giving them opportunity to scale or giving them more positions of responsibility and leadership inside of the business. And so definitely, your people, your great, greatest asset, like you said, your managers, as you grow and scale to a million plus, is definitely very, very key. So, for example, last weekend, my managers at the local shop, they do everything, and they were the ones that stepped forward and said that they wanted to take the business a certain strategic position and start to scale it again and really grow it. And so I listened to that. I really didn't. Either way, I was kind of indifferent. But that was their decision. And so I support that because I need them to feel like they have something to kind of chew on. And that's difficult and hard because they are great. So. Okay, let's see here. Next question. Oh, the next part of that question was about keeping the staff motivated. That's a great question, especially when you're on P4P, because P4P is a great way to motivate your staff. But when they know they're hitting base pay and they are on P4P, it's actually sometimes very difficult to keep them motivated. For example, last week we had the rain just pouring down. There's just no way they're not gonna hit anything but base pay. Like this paycheck. I'd say 60 to 70% of them will hit base pay. And that stinks. I hate that we're in the middle of June, and usually when it's dry like this, everyone's making 20, 23, $24 an hour average and above 30 on the high end. And so that kills me. I hate that. But it's part of P4P. However, it still doesn't take away from the fact that I do not like them having to be out mowing in horrible weather and making less. That's very demoralizing. So, honestly, in that scenario, I try to sympathize as much as I possibly can with them. We try our best to minimize the work if it is like horrible weather, for example. But in our climate and in our market, we have to Keep working throughout the rain. We can't just pause and push it off because we would not get any work done during the spring. So in order how to keep them motivated, I think the culture is what's gonna keep them. Trying to empathize when you can, but then asking them to push through when you need them to. And sometimes that's what you gotta do. And so culture's gonna be the thing that kind of keeps them in the game when everyone's head is kind of hung down. And if you really have an extended period of time of that, I think an off site meeting can break people out of that. Having a whole team off site with dinner, going over the goals, getting everyone focused back on the why, the mission, that would help probably as well. Brandon Greenfield Kelly asks, how do you recommend learning how to do great lawn care and landscaping work? I'm growing too fast for my skill level. Getting higher end customers calling me who want very professional work done, but I do not have the confidence or experience in my work to schedule it. I watch a ton of YouTube videos for every job I do, but I still see my work as mediocre and it's the biggest thing holding me back. So I would highly suggest don't go after those jobs that you don't feel comfortable with. Stay inside of your wheelhouse. You're going to be more profitable, you're going to feel more confident, you're going to be a better salesman and better closing on those jobs because you are confident and you're going to have happier customers, you're going to have better staff. And if you stick to what you know, you, you're not going to be reliant on one employee or two employees that are really, really good at that skilled labor. And therefore they have a lot of, you know, they have a lot of leverage. That's the word I'm looking for against you. So for example, if you are trying to change the direction of the business down the road, but if you're depending so much on a couple employees who have all the skills, you don't, that's challenging. So that's why I really would recommend you scale back to the simplified services at first. And if your goal and you want to do landscaping, you want to do hardscaping, just slowly grow into that. And maybe at first like, okay, we're only going to do $5,000 projects and below, which means you're not going to these massive jobs, then maybe you grow that to 10,000. When you start feeling more comfortable, maybe you get a bigger piece of equipment, you get some training, you go to different seminars that like HD Fowler or Ewing or SiteOne have. Those are great ways to learn too, in addition to YouTube. So educate yourself, get to the place where you learn, you know something and then you feel confident to sell it. I think it's actually a really natural progression because when you're confident in something, you can sell it. When you're not, people pick up on it and if they don't pick up on it, they start to see it when you do the work. And that's the worst feeling in the world is have no pride in your work. So I always recommend, stick to what you know, do it really well, do it profitably and then just if your desire is to scale services, which is not necessarily the right thing to do in terms of profitability for some people, but if that's what you want to do, like you enjoy doing that type of work, then just do it slowly, don't rush it and be willing to say no to jobs that are too big for you and out of your scope of work and skill. John Garretson. I attended Landscape Summit this year but would like to hear more about any watch outs regarding acquisitions. I just got the opportunity to purchase the number two landscape maintenance company in our service area. Their service area is smaller and contained within ours. Okay, so this is a great point. So at Landscape Summit this past year, for those of you who watch the recording or there and present, we spent quite a bit of time on acquisitions and I talked through about three or four acquisitions that I've done. How you can value them, whether it be like, there's just so many ways to value a company and determine whether or not it's worth it. And so if you are in the course, definitely watch those videos in depth of different acquisitions we've done and how you can look at the price and see the value and all that good stuff. That being said, some watch outs, as John said. Let me think, first one is gonna be overvaluation of equipment and assets. And honestly, it's not a bad thing to have overvaluation of assets because what you can do is use it against them and basically say, okay, hey, I wanna break down. If you're asking $500,000 for your business, I want a breakdown of your equipment and your assets versus your goodwill or the brand or the contact list, or just ask for a breakdown of the valuation. What you're gonna find is out of that $500,000, 400,000 of his trucks, trailers and equipment, they overvalue it they don't take into account the fact that they're not gonna get full price for that piece of equipment. And then what happens is they put $400,000 and then $100,000 for everything else. And then you come and said, okay, great, you keep the $400,000 worth of equipment and assets. I don't want those, I just want the contacts. And they've shown their cards. And so that's my POV is get their contacts. Because you don't really want their used equipment usually. You don't usually want their trucks. Like, go get your own stuff. Pay $200,000 to get that $400,000 worth in their eyes of equipment and keep the $100,000 going towards just getting the contacts, getting the contracts. Contacts and contracts are really where the value of these acquisitions are for small lawn care and landscaping businesses, in my mind, in my opinion. And so I would say the biggest watch out is overvaluation of equipment and assets. Next thing I would say is watch outs is a balance sheet and financials that are completely construed. And usually that's not hard to find. Usually if someone is saying that they're making like 40% net profit and they're doing a million plus in revenue, probably not realistic. Like, look for like big signs like that. Look for if they're declining in revenue, look for employees that are all star employees and see if you can look in their CRM and see if there's a reliance on too many on an employee. Which means, for example, we buy a company and literally there was an employee that only this employee could go to these like 40 houses. Like only that employee. Well, those employees, those customers aren't worth very much because they're so reliant on that employee. And that employee probably is not going to come with the acquisition. And if companies ever start to bake in the idea of employees being in the valuation, I take that with a massive grain of salt because most employees will not stay throughout an acquisition unless your company is very big and you're keeping the management team. So if you're talking like a million dollar business, $5 million business, and they have like managers in place and they're staying on board, Maybe the frontline, frontline employees are going to stay, but typically they're going to leave. If they're like four or five employees and you're buying a company out, there's a good chance those frontline employees are leaving. So if someone's like, oh, well, you know, $10,000 per employee, and I got 10 employees so $100,000, like I wouldn't buy that because I probably say six out of those 10, seven out of those 10 are not going to be sticking around and you might not even want them around, honestly. Next question. How do you deal with property management companies that owe you a lot, that continue to make excuses and not pay on time? Then Sean responded, are you talking about national companies? Marcus said, yes. Sean says that's a great question. I can't wait to hear this response. I use them because they, they're usually, they're low pay but usually low maintenance. So it's nice to mix in sometimes. I don't like having my names on the trucks on those jobs though. They hold you to the amount of work you put in each job, basically. So when it comes to property management companies, I don't care if you're national, I don't care if you're local. We hold them to the same payment terms as our residential customers and if they're not willing to do that, we're walking away. That's just how we operate. That's how I truly believe that's how you need to operate your business. I don't care who you are, I don't care how big you are, you're paying on our terms. And if you're not willing to do that, you're out. So if they can give you a credit card, if they can do ach, if they can, if they don't, if they are going to go into collections, we're going to send them to collections and we're going to make sure they pay. And honestly sometimes just be annoying being the squeaky wheel, you get the grease and it works out. And so we've had like when we've acquired the companies, the property management companies were used to paying 90, 120 plus days later and we got them back in line sending them a good collections automation that at the end is basically threatening them to go to collections and their credit score being affected. They get moving like a business that is reputable national does not want to go to collections. It looks really bad for them. And so if you can properly threaten, quote, unquote, threaten them, then you can use that as leverage to make sure they pay.

AB by the way, congrats to AB. Big shout out to AB. In May 2020 he was our number one overall rank for our franchisees. He started this year, never done landscaping his whole life, restaurateur becoming a landscaper. And he did 54,000 I think last month in revenue. So congrats to AB he's really figured out the system side of things now because he scaled so quickly from zero to that this year. So congrats to him. But we got a question. It's getting really busy for me and I feel that if I tell customers that I won't be able to do the work this week, I need to push it off for a week or two, will I lose them? Okay, good question, AB So this is something that I dealt with when I was getting started too. And starting to scale is I can't say no to people because they need their landscaping job done right away. You can book landscaping projects out five, six weeks easily. There's a lot of landscapers that are really high end hardscaping that will book out five, six months down the road. So the nice thing about projects is you can book a far far out with maintenance, like an overgrown lawn, you kind of got to get to it within a week. Even property cleanups, you can't really let the weeds in the beds stick around for three or four weeks because they're gonna double in the amount of time it takes to weed the property. And so property clamps and mowing and maintenance typically gotta get right on it. Projects. The great thing about projects is you can book far out in the spring, you can book big jobs out in the summer. That's what I love about it. Now how I recommend you use projects when you're scaling quickly, especially for someone like ab that's how you use projects as a way to make sure you have enough work for new employees. So what I mean by that is you book your schedule out say three weeks. Then what you do is in three weeks you start booking your schedule for the fourth week as if you have another employee which, which kind of puts the wick on you and kind of makes sure that you. Or the fuse, sorry, make sure that you get an employee within the next three weeks, get them trained up, and you have to have them ready to go by that time. And from that third week and onwards, you are booking as if you have another employee. That's how you can consistently grow and know that when you get the employee, they immediately have full time work, is using projects to slot in that time and slot in those jobs. So I know specifically with AB he has some pretty big jobs he's been working on, you know, five, ten plus thousand dollars. And so those are great to be able to book down the road. Know how many employees you're going to need. And specifically to you, ab, you need to talk to lonnie at Command center about team up and the calendars on those to be able to book those jobs far out and be confident with the amount of people you're going to need when those jobs arrive. So talk to her about that. I know you guys just started full service. All right, let's see here. One more question. Sean Hancock asks tips for creating great culture. Great question. This is something we go over quite every year. We will go over this in the conference because it's something that kind of changes and evolves and we're always adding to and adjusting. But let me think in terms of our current, what we've changed recently. Let me think if there's anything recent that we've done. Let me think, let me think, let me think.

Culture. I think I've talked a lot about these things. Like there's a lot of different stuff. We've talked about everything from pay for performance to having where they can give suggestions into a box and then get like a cash bonus, incentivizing them to get new customers. Culture. Off site meetings, very important. Having open book management, very important. So, for example, I shared with our team, we share all of our profit and loss statements at the beginning and the end of each year at an off site meeting. And so, for example, when we go through this whole thing with COVID and everything that we've been going through, I've been very transparent with them, like how much work we're getting, how much we're spending on marketing. You know, if we're getting money from the government, I try to give that to them because no one abused the unemployment and sick leave and all that. No one abused that. So I kind of felt like, hey, what we get from the government can go to the team. And we didn't get a lot because we stayed over open the whole time. But whatever we were getting, we were distributing things like that. Just being open and honest with people. I generally believe that most people are good, hardworking people. They want to work hard, they want to accomplish things, they want to achieve something in life. And so.

I really try my best to be open and honest and show everything in terms of the numbers and just create that sense of like, hey, you're part of this too. Because, you know, it goes back to the very first or second question about the most important asset of our business is the people. So we should be open, transparent, and really involve the greatest asset of our business in the business. And so I really think, you know, we need to start hiring people's heads and not just their hands. And so getting them involved in changing the business, improving the business. So for example, we are going to be adjusting the shop layout at our Bellingham location. And so I'm going to get input and ideas from not only Lee, our manager, but other people that have great ideas of like how we can make the flow better as we try to scale it and make more room for more trucks and things like that. And so getting their input, making them, that's the best way to get buy in or for people to start thinking like owners on a day to day level is getting them to make improvements for the business. And whether you incentivize people to do that or if you just make a culture where they can talk out in a team meeting and suggest something or point on an area that needs improvement, that is buy in, they are buying in when they start thinking about how they can improve the business. And if you need to do a cash bonus for that, if you need to do off site meetings for that, if you need to share your numbers and have open book management for that, that's all parts. They do not know how to improve the business if they do not know the numbers, if they don't know how much you spend on insurance and on gas, they don't know that gas is such a big expense and that they can figure out a way to make and to improve that line item on the P and L. And so these are all things I think about and things that I think become a positive of open book management. Showing the numbers, doing that off site meetings and talking about money. Like some people will not talk about money. It's like, oh, if I talk about money, they're gonna think I'm rich. Or like, come on, just talk about money on a consistent basis in front of your team, about their numbers, about their performance, about how much money they're making. I will share the numbers. I just talked about you Thiel about the fact that like during the summer period, I know that 9 out of 10 of employees are going to hit above base pay. Whereas last week it's probably gonna be like 60 to 70% of them will only hit base pay because of the massive amount of rain that we had. Like we share and we talk about these numbers and like money is a big part of business. That's why they're coming to work. They want a paycheck. And that's why we as owners are in business is to grow and expand, create jobs and make money. So let's talk about money. Keep it open, keep it honest, keep it clear. Above board. And they're not guessing. They're not guessing if you're a millionaire or if the business is going under. They know where the business is at. They know the strategy, they know the why. They know the goals and the mission of what you're trying to do. And I feel like that creates a big cultural shift. And honestly, that's probably the biggest thing is have a why, have a goal, have a mission. And at Augusta Lawn Care, our mission and our goal is to change the level of professionalism in the landscaping industry. That is our goal. And so it's a big goal. It's something that can get people excited, something that people can rally around, and that creates a great culture. And so not everyone's going to adapt. We don't have this perfect culture. There's days, like you said, one of the questions of the day, people are down, discouraged, bad weather, bad jobs, whatever. It might be behind on P4P. And it's tough. We do not have this perfect, wonderful sunshine and rainbows all the time. But we work at it. It's a constant thing. We are very in tune with what's going on and trying to do our best. And I think the employees appreciate that. So that's my two cents. Thank you so much, everyone, for submitting your questions on the Facebook group. If you haven't already, landscapebusinesscourse.com, join, become part of the course. And if you want a website built for you, lawncarewebdesign.com no contract. No upfront massive fees. You pay a monthly flat fee. No contract. Check that out today. I know be of service to you. Thank you so much for watching. I'm Mike Andes, landscape businesscourse.com we'll see you next.