social media BACKLASH over my hiring strategy!

Hey everyone, today I'm going to be showing and responding to several comments that were really, really negative about me as an employer in relation to a video I made a couple of weeks ago showing that someone was two minutes late to their interview and for that reason I didn't hire them. I'm going to show you a couple of clips from that video so you get some context and we're going to jump right in the comments and it's going to get pretty fun. Okay, 9:30 interview. Showing up at 9:32. They're not going to get no interview. How's it going? Are you serious? What actually happened is this video is a few days old. However, I just got a YouTube comment, I was scrol through there, saw one that said, hey, people are really positive on this video about you, but if you go check Facebook, people are just bashing you. And so sure enough, I went to Facebook page. I never ever look at my Facebook page and I started going through some of the comments on this video and there's like over 200,000 views and hundreds of comments and 95% of them are really, really negative about me. So I want to go through those and actually address them because I don't. There's really nothing to hide and I want to talk about them and maybe I'm wrong on a couple things. So we're going to go through those comments, but I want to make a couple of things really clear up front and that is first and foremost, I'm not surprised by the feedback, the negative feedback. I actually am going to show you a picture here of a text that I sent to our media team prior to this video being released. So typically how this works is the day before I see the thumbnail, the title, and then that evening we'll watch the video, but it goes up the next morning. So usually if I want to make a change in the video, it means we're getting someone to come work after hours to like make a change and fix it and re export, et cetera. But I usually definitely look at the thumbnail and title at least the evening before is launched. So that is what, as you can see on my screen, I saw and I screenshot it and I sent it to our team and I said if we didn't use this thumbnail or title combo, what do we do? I don't like making people look dumb, especially because we cut the you serious part of the video out of context. I will likely roll with the thumbnail and title, but I also don't want to make people look bad. So I'm not going to try to use this, you know, say, oh, I didn't know that this was going to be controversial, or I didn't know that this video would spark this kind of response. I know that I take full responsibility for the fact that I allowed it to be cut this way. Ultimately though, I made a decision not to pull them back in that evening to re cut the video. And their job as the media team is to ensure that the videos that I make have the most wide audience and wide appeal. And that means making a thumbnail and title. It's going to draw an audience and cut the video in a certain way that is going to garner views. And if you think that's really bad, every single creator does this as well as news outlet, every single website that's looking for clicks. This is the name of the media game. So I went ahead and left it. Now in these comments, I've scrolled through maybe 10 or 20 of them. There's hundreds of them. But I got a pretty good gist of what we're going to be seeing. And one of the things that kept popping up is like this person would be a horrible person to work for. I'm sure he doesn't pay them a single penny above minimum wage. I bet that he has no benefits, et cetera. Let me be really clear. In order to expel that myth, I'm actually going to show you the month to date numbers of the location in question and what those employees are making. Let me also be clear that the location I'm showing you has paid time off. Two weeks of paid time off every single year. This is for frontline entry level workers. They have paid time off. They have medical benefits where the best plan gets 90% of it paid for. You don't do like 50, 50 splits like a really good medical plan. We also allow them to have profit sharing on a quarterly basis, which last year that was 600 $1,1200 in cash for three to three of the quarters. And now I'm actually going to show you what they're making per hour again as frontline team members. Mowing lawns, installing mulch, trimming bushes. We don't do excavation, we don't do hardscaping, we don't do construction. And 90% of the people that come work for us don't have any prior experience. So let me go ahead and show you this location. This one has about 15 employees out in the field working every single day. And the reason I'm not showing you the one Location where I was actually doing the interviewing that day is because there's at the time only one or two employees. So it's not a good sample set for you to actually see how much people get paid at Augusta Lawn Care. And so let's go ahead and jump into what we call P4P. It's something that we do, pay for performance. And in pay for performance, the employee gets a percentage of the labor revenue that they earn for the business every single day. And again, when I talk about that, people immediately think like, oh, you're just trying to scam employees and it's a horrible system and all the rest of it. Let me show you the numbers. Okay, let's go ahead and jump into the location specifically that I'm an owner of it and is the closest to the Mount Vernon Vernon location that I was doing. And that is the Whatcom county or Bellingham location. Now I'm going to blur out the names of the people in this, but you can see here the dollars per hour earned. Their high, the highest is right around $31. And if you scroll down here, this is every single employee I'm showing you, every single employee is approximately 21, 22, 23, all the way to 31, 30, 29, 29, 28, 27. So this is what people are making at this location. Now, the very bottom here is a brand new employee just started last week, as well as someone that only does the base pay of $18 per hour. So they can less than 18. It's impossible. And so that $18 per hour person is someone who comes in on the weekends and cleans the trucks, fuels up the gas, et cetera. But every other employee that has worked for us for more than two weeks is making a minimum of $21 per hour. And that doesn't include profit sharing, paid time off, medical benefits and the other packages that we offer in terms of things like gas cards, if they just show up on time for a month and things like that. So we do a bunch of bonuses around. If they get referrals, if they get reviews, there's like $50 cash. We hand out thousands of dollars every single month in just cash bonuses for things that I'm not even mentioning. Now the reason I'm showing you that too is because a big reason why being late is such a bad thing for our company is the fact that on P4P or pay for performance, they are splitting the revenue with whoever's on their crew. So what that means is someone shows up at 7:30 and they get the truck ready and they get all the equipment ready and then someone else shows up late and they're showing up at 8:05, someone else is waiting around doing nothing for 20, 30 minutes and that is costing them money. So on P4P, if someone's showing up late, it's not just affecting the business, it's affecting the paycheck of their fellow coworkers. And that is why I make sure I'm so against people being late, because it affects the paychecks of their other employees. And I understand that those standards are very, very high, especially in a very entry level position like mowing lawns and trimming bushes. I understand that. However, I also realize that the average pay that we give is substantially higher than the average pay of our competition locally. As well as most other landscaping companies that are taking entry level workers and doing mowing and landscaping, they are not offering 25, 26, 27, $28 per hour plus benefits and paid time off and all the things that offer. And so because I require someone to be on time, have that extra level of not having drugs, et cetera, that I mentioned in the video. That is why we're able to pay a higher wage. And I know that I will need to pay that higher wage in order to get the talent that we want. And you say, well, that's so bad that you would penalize someone for being on pot or being on drugs. Look, we are around trucks, equipment and things that could damage property and hurt other employees. And there was one specific time where we had one employee that was driving under the influence of pot and the other employees that were in that vehicle came back to the shop and basically said, we are never working with him because when he drove drives, we feel like we're in danger. And I'm not going to have any of the employees that work for Augusta Lawn Care feel like they're in danger of their lives because someone else is under the influence. And it's putting the customer's property at risk. It's putting the employees lives at risk. And that's why we have drug tests and we don't allow it. And I understand that this is a very high standard and that is why the compensation package is built the way it is. Because we do require that we also charge a premium price to the customers in order to be able to afford that level of expectations from our employees because they are back background checked. They are, they do have drug tests. Those are things that are, I understand, in most entry level positions, not going to be afforded or the standard of the organization. But in most entry level lawn care companies, you also don't have the opportunity to make $30 an hour pushing a lawnmower. So let's go ahead and jump into the video. You can see here I'm on Facebook and I just this evening started looking at these comments. I've looked at several like I've already mentioned. Let's just go ahead and start scrolling through some of these and see what we can't learn and maybe I can expound on because this is the major thing. If you watch the first few seconds of this video, the initial cut is taken out of context because we've watched this. Go ahead and watch this video again and it'll. It'll sound like I step out of the office and say, are you serious? As if he's two minutes late. I see him driving in. I stepped out and said that, okay, 9:30 interview. Showing up at 9:32. They're not gonna get no interview. How's it going? Are you serious? However, realized I did multiple interviews in that day and for one of the other applicants that wanted to work, they were driving up and their name was spelled like serious, but their actual name was Cyrus. So when I stepped out of the office and said, are you serious? It wasn't like I was mad at them. And so yes, the media team cut that out of context in order to be able to grab the views and be able to retain the audience 100%. And I ultimately decided that it was fine and not worth pulling them after work to cut that out. Okay. So I'm going to go ahead and just sort this by most relevant. And I think that'll probably give us.

The comments that are most liked or upvoted so hard enough to find people who actually want to work nowadays. Stop trying to build your perfect little team and be happy with what you have. I get where this is coming from. It's like, hey, it's hard to find employees. Just be happy with what you get. I understand that. Again, we have high standards. We also have higher than normal compensation. And we actually encourage our employees not to work with us for more than two or three years because we want them to move on and do something else, whether it become a manager, take the skills. We have open book management, we teach all about business management and training and we want them to go do something else, other something else. And I actually encourage them to go start their own business and compete with me for all I care. But go get skills while you're working here and go do something Else. All right, next comment says, so this 12 year old boy thinks, yes, I'm 12 years old. I might look like I'm 12 years old. I'm 26 years old. When I was 12 though, I was just starting getting mowing lawns. And then When I was 13 I started going to college and that's how I went all the way through mowing lawns. There's a couple other comments saying I had no idea what I'm doing in this industry. I've probably never worked a day in my life. I've probably given this to my parents, all that fun jazz. But guess what? I was when I was 12, when I was 12 years old. Although I might look at now, but when I was 12, 12 years old I was pushing a lawnmower and I really did that probably all the way up until the age of 2021 when I started working on the business and then finally now have more than 90 plus locations around North America. So I am not impressed. This guy told him why he was fired and frustrated at his job up front about weed. Two minutes late and can't have an interview. This little boy could be overlooking great employees. I let me just be very clear again, I disagree with the fact that if someone is late to an interview that they are a great employee. If someone would have called me, let's say there's something at home or they hit a train and they're waiting on the train, just give me a call. I had been texting them that morning. Just text me, say hey, I'm waiting a train, I'm on my way, I'm going to be a couple minutes late. I would not have an issue with that. I would 100%. I have hired people that have done that. But to not say anything, just show up to an interview and not even say like, oh, I'm late for whatever reason, not even get an excuse like I don't believe I disagree with that, being a great employee. And we can just agree to disagree on that one. No, I have never talked bad about a previous employer. No, I have never been late to an interview. I have have owned my own company. I have always been a long term employee, but I have had coworkers that you think nope, won't last and they ended up being amazing. This child needs to grow up. Okay, maybe I do. What a clown. Probably always blaming turnover on his employees. Would have given him my two cents before walking out of that interview. So again, you got to remember that the video is being cut up in a very different way. And that these are multiple interviews and they took one little section where I said are you serious? And it may sound like I got out of the office and just told him to leave. I did not do that. I talked to him very nicely out at his car and kind of gave a quick interview and basically said that, you know, being late is something that really hold is really important to us. And it was very cordial. Very, very cordial. And now that I'm looking at this, we have over 215,000 views on this video. So I'm sure there's gonna be more comments if you go check this out yourself. Let's go through a couple more. Let's see here. Someone is very self assured. I love his attempt at reading body language. People also cross their arms when they have something to say. It's uncomfortable as self comforting method but not necessarily because they're lying. This little flip squeak gets off on doing interviews, pretending he's an expert at all things life and judging the out of everyone for all their perceived flaws. He may be the boss, but he damn sure doesn't present himself as a good leader. As part of what I do on the daily for many years now, it's easy to see, see there sucks being judged from just a few minutes. Hey, okay, so first of all I don't really do a lot of interviews. This is probably the first time I've done interviews consistently for price 6 to 12 months and I very rarely do them. This was a matter of being able to video this in order to be able to train other landscapers and other home improvement industries. What is potentially something that's very important inside of interview, what to look for, what not to look for. No one else gives this kind of information. And I understand that I'm going to be criticized when you put this on the Internet. And so this is why I realized when I told the media team I think people aren't going to like this, I understood that. I have full knowledge of that. But I also understand there's people who have no idea how to do an interview and they don't know what to look for or what the red, red signals are. And because of that they hire 20 people and all 20 people don't work out. And then they think that they're just going to work as a solo entrepreneur the rest of their life because quote unquote, they can't find good employees and they just don't have the information of how to what to look for in a potential applicant. So I'm trying to offer my Perspective. Maybe it's wrong. Probably is probably not the perfect way to do an interview. But potentially it's a conversation that is had and someone else can kind of see what works for them. Oh, maybe I haven't thought about that. And they start to improve. Here's one person, they said GMs go to franchise training. Basically that means you don't know about your own franchise. Let me be very clear. I started the franchise, I started the first location and this is, I think location like I don't know, 90 something. We just started recently and that's why I was there to help. You didn't establish this. Oh yes I did. You didn't start this, you just bought this. No, that's not true. He isn't sketchy, can't send angry face, only stars, blah, blah, blah. Okay, Scott Thompson. I got a guy that shows up one to three minutes late about four days a week. He's the only person I have that's willing to work through his paid break or lunch or work late to get a job done. He's never called in sick and doesn't ask off and is almost always able to work his day off if needed. His work is also top notch. Do you think I should fire him because he is continuously late? My other guys are always on time, never miss a break, won't work late or days off. Their work is also good. So here's the thing. If someone's working by themselves, being late isn't a huge impact. But at our company, when they're getting a paid a percentage of the revenue that they bring into the business, they can make significantly more. But if they're teamed up with someone who's showing up late, it can actually damage their own paycheck. And so that creates friction inside the business. If someone shows up 30 minutes early and someone else shows up 10 minutes late, now the other person is waiting around, they've prepared the truck, got everything ready, and that's why we are so stickler on people showing up early. It doesn't really affect the business as much. If they just went out and like you said, worked really hard, it wouldn't affect the business. But it's going to affect the person that does show up early, does get all the trucks, equipment ready to go and is sitting there waiting for them to show up. As a PM that hires staff, there is no way I would ever work for you just based on your, on your couple of minutes you selectively edit to show how you treat potential employees. Yeah, so this is another point of thing Is like This is a 25 to 30 minute interview. The one that was filmed and cut down about 20 or 30 seconds simply to show a couple points that the editing team and myself thought were, were important to be able to show. At the beginning he was very, very nervous. He wouldn look at me in the eye and he was just. It wasn't because he was being sketchy, he was just not comfortable. Notice after I crossed my leg and leaned back and what took a much more casual approach is when he leaned back and started opening up and talking about Pratic's past experiences and being able to have eye contact and actually communicate very well. All right. And then I don't know how much you kind of saw on our job posting, but any question you had for me in terms of kind of what we do here or anything like that. I did have a question. Question actually it was about the pre employment drug tests. So I did unfortunately smoke weed like a week or two ago. Okay. So I won't be able to pass that. Cool. All right. Another non verbal that I picked up on is when he talked about the drugs, he did cross his arms, which typically if people draw the things into themselves or cross their arms, they're usually restricting something or hiding something. And so there's a very good chance that he is actually an avid drug user and uses it normally. And so even though he said it was, he used it like a couple weeks back. I can almost guarantee you use it every single day because the way that he presented that information was not in a very open manner. If you're trying to communicate something very sensitive, it's a really good idea to open up your palms and open up your hands as soon as you do this and cross your arms immediately. People just have that sense that you are hiding things from them or withholding information. Very good chance what was happening there too. Keep in mind there was a lot of other things said that I did not put in there that were much more what you could say I was trying to embarrass him about and I didn't even put it in there. Him talking about other employees and other business owners that he's worked for. I didn't want to put that in there. I was simply trying to make a point. A couple other topics, but you're 100% right. I took a 25 to 30 minute interview and cut that down to probably 30 to 40 seconds. Carl says how many stacks of concrete have you carried? How many loads of shingles, how many many sheets of 4 by 8 plywood or sheetrock. To be perfectly honest, not very many of any of those things because I've never done roofing or concrete or built things. I'm actually really not that great at any of those things. But I didn't know how to mow a lawn and do landscaping, and I've done it since I was 11 years old. This one was funny. Someone got bullied. As a little kid, I was sheltered. I actually did homeschooling for one year for everyone. I was like, as soon as I said homeschooling, like, go to the comments. Let's type out. It's like, look, it was for one year. I did grade 9 and 10 in one year. So, yes, I'm a sheltered child, failed. And that's why I am now retaliating to the employees. Okay, so here's one. Calvin says, what a clown this guy is. Did you even let the applicant know that you were taping this job interview? Guaranteed. The reason bossman acts like this is because he was bullied severely from middle school until he graduated high school. Oh, man. So, first of all, in terms of filming, that's a really good question. So typically when I have a video of somebody, I will ask them if I can record it for training purposes. And also, all of our applicants and employees actually sign off on and us being able to use them in video, pictures, et cetera, because we have the social media and because I do use so much of what they do as a way to train other people in the industry. And if you watch that video, no one besides that applicant would ever know who that person was. We took out all names, all names, the businesses he's worked for. We blurred out his face. And so ultimately, no one, absolutely no one besides him would know who that is. And that's why I didn't make the media team go back and change the clip or switch out the part that was taken out of context with me walking out and saying, are you serious? Because we took out so much other stuff that he said that could have been and made him look way worse. It was all taken out of the interview, and it was only cut down to the part that I thought would be helpful for other people that are doing interviews. And, hey, maybe I'm wrong. I'm not the best interviewer. I don't do this often. This is actually not my job title. I was going down to help this location, and I'm sure I can improve. So I think that's kind of enough. There's hundreds of other ones if you want to jump into the discussion. Absolutely. Feel free. I think the big eye opener for me was the fact that people on YouTube that have followed me for years, they kind of got where I was coming from. The people on Facebook, obviously. I get it first inclination when that, that clickbait of three, the first five seconds is in there where it says this person is two minutes late. And then I'm. It sounds like I'm walking out on. On the front porch and saying, are you serious? That I completely can understand why so many of these comments are like this. And if you look at the. The curve of retention on the video, most people only made it through the first 10 seconds. So in that little short window of time, they would immediately be thinking that this person is a jerk. And I get where they're coming from, but it doesn't mean that I back up on anything I said in the video because I have hired enough employees, hundreds of them, to know that if someone is late to their interview and they don't give notice or let you know at least a little bit beforehand and telling you why, that they are not going to show up on time when they actually start working, working for you. And if that affects the other employees, it is your job and your position as a leader and as the owner of the business to make sure that they do not come into the business because it will affect the paychecks as well as the livelihoods and the morale of the other team members.