Mike Andes explains how lawn care and service businesses avoid crisis mode: empower GMs to solve problems before they reach you, and deliberately schedule teams below capacity to absorb absences and turnover without chaos.
The reason is 'cause they have proven to me that if there is a problem, they know the solution before I've come up with one, and then they're already executing on it. And so that's a sign of a great manager, someone that when they come to you with a problem, they have already identified a solution and either running it by you, and most time what I then do as time gets on and they have proven me that they can find solutions, is I tell 'em to execute before talking to me. So I always think of it like it's a feature, not a bug, and I'm going to just make sure I build the business in a way that when I hand it off to a GM, the likelihood of the hair on fire thing happens less frequently. I also like to reduce the budget hour capacity of my team. So if you can get them, like right now if you're say scheduling for 30 budget hours, bringing that down to 28 or 27 dramatically decreases the chance of hair on fire. So when my locations get into profit mode, before I hand it off, I just ask all the GMs, I'm like, I want you to run everything at 27 to 28 budget hours per week or even less, like 25. The reason is because there will be 1 or 2 people that will call out, like that always happens. And also if 1 or 2 people leave, they'll still be able to make it. So I'm much more like, and I know I'm leaving some margin on the table, but my objective is that we never have hair on fire.
