Team Meetings Like THIS Will Change Your Company Culture

Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes here. Landscapebusinesscourse.com and this morning we are having another midweek motivation meeting with our team. So each Monday morning, we come in about 15, 20 minutes early and have this optional meeting with the team. So I think about 10 of them came in this morning. And we talk about personal finances, really just their careers, leadership, etc. So it's always a mishmash of different ideas and. And kind of concepts. This morning we did some Q and A. We talked about a couple questions about like, employee morale, things like that. And I shared a couple ideas. Today's really a big mishmash. I shared some ideas of things I want to do in the future with businesses as well as just kind of ran some stuff by them and then they asked questions about stocks. And we talk a little bit about that. Some of it is we're gonna have to cut out just because the questions came in and have people's names and things. So cut as much out as we possibly can for you all to enjoy. And really, the motivation behind having meetings is so that you can see the value of investing back in your team, your time, trying to help them in their life, their career, their personal finances instead of just lawn care, landscaping, and how to make you more money, really focusing on them. I do believe in the long term, that comes back to you, comes back to the success of your business if you can invest in your employees. So let's go ahead and show you this little clip about 15, 20 minutes that we had this morning.

All right, good morning, everybody. So I figured we welcome Zeus. This is our first team meeting here on Wednesday mornings. So.

I figured we'd do some Q and A. And if you don't have anything on Q and A, if you have some stuff we go over. But I wanted to kind of first give a shot if anyone has a question, stuff we've been talking about anything recently.

So now I forever hold your peace.

Anyone?

I would have thought of questions if I knew we were doing a Q and A.

Okay, no worries.

We'll do questions in a minute then. Okay, so two things. So someone just emailed me like two minutes ago. I figured it'd be good email for us to go over. So I got a lot of these emails. They're from non franchisees. And so I'll read you the email and then I'll get you guys take on it. Before I.

Sundays, I have two employees, friends who are on our landscape crew. One of them is the team leader and foreman. Both have bad attitudes. They Stop at the gas station four plus times a day, don't follow the lunch rules to clock out when leaving in this site, etc. What could I do to correct this? I honestly would like to get rid of them, but I can't find any help on the back end. Our foreman is awesome when he works as is the other member. But the third team member, a guy with great character, came to me to discuss the frustrations that he feels he has to compromise on his morals to work with them best. So any, what would your kind of take be if you were to have to give advice to this person, P.

For P, P for P and then get rid of the foreman or not get rid of them, but like don't add that hierarchy into it because they're. Nobody's gonna take ownership over the stuff they're doing.

Yeah, P4P is a big part of it sometimes the attitud, like if I was telling him I would probably say exactly that, like P4P is a long term strategy, right. It'd take him a long time to switch over. But like, honestly, you gotta find someone that's good and then have the talk with the people who are not good and be like, basically you need to shape up or shape out, you know, because at the end of the day the attitude is something you can't fix. A lot of times P4P is great for the performance side of things, like not showing up to the, you know, clocking out four times or going to the gas station four times a day, all that sort of thing. But it does rarely fix attitude, right? Like you've seen it here, right? You still have people with bad attitudes that we have to fire, right? Or don't care. And it's like, dude, you're on P4P. But it's like they're not money motivated. It doesn't really matter. So PVP is great when you have people who are money motivated, but if they're not money motivated, they still have an attitude or whatever the issue, right?

You probably promote the third guy who wanted to come in with complaints. Promote him, but keep the foreman, not as a foreman over, just as a crew member. It'll humble him a bit. Definitely. Once you realize, yeah, he still works, but he definitely got kicked out a notch and now the guy he was in charge of is now the boss.

So yeah, the challenging part too is it for this guy emailed me. The challenging part is when someone says something. Usually guys don't want to tell on other people, right? Like you don't Want to tell on other people if they do something out in the field. And then from the boss's standpoint, you don't want to promote someone because they said something else about someone else that you have not seen. So that's the hard part. Right. And it just becomes a game of, like, he said, she said. Right. Like, who said what? And then this is the hardest part, is when you have, like, two or three crew members. Here is easy because, like, for example, if Liz wants to fire someone, she can basically tell someone, hey, the guys that have been working with you have said X, Y, and Z. And so we're kind of moving in this direction. Right. Or you need to, you know, improve. Well, when you have, like, two or three employees and you say, hey, the guys you've been working with has said this, you know exactly who they're talking about. And it makes it very difficult to give feedback from third party. Instead, it's like, basically like, hey, you have not been doing well. It's harder to just be like, hey, the people that have been working with you have been giving me feedback. So it is more difficult. But I like that idea too. Like, the third guy, if he's that good, you know, having him be more the team leader. So Cool. Cool. All right. Q and A. Anyone had questions he's been thinking about anything? Nick. Yeah, Marcus, go ahead.

With franchisees, kind of the inquiries you get on people that are interested in starting a franchise.

Yeah.

Can I ask, like, how many serious inquiries do you get per week for somebody that wants to start a franchise?

Yeah. So there's probably been over 250 inquiries, but usually within 10 minutes of a phone call, 90% of them, they're not gonna work out. I see lots of things that will disqualify them. One, financially, they're just not in a good spot to where I know that they're gonna be able to grow if they're just like, oh, Yeah, I got $3,000, and I wan business, and I've never been in the landscaping industry. Like, we got a problem. That is part of it. Bigger part is, like, culture. If they're, like, swearing about their employees, it's immediate.

I have another kind of franchise question. What's the lowest amount of money that anybody has used to start a franchise that you know of?

Well, some. You can finance it. Right. So if they're in a decent financial position, they should be able to get a loan. So, you know, there's a franchisee that got a $50,000 loan and started with.

In terms of, like, What I'm looking for is either financial, like, stability, where you can go get a loan, or you have cash on hand. Right. Like, I really think someone needs to kind of have 15, 20 grand in cash to kind of just be in a spot where, like, even if they get a loan, they have 15 or 20 grand they spend on marketing their first truck, stuff like that, it would.

Be a long time before you're actually profitable or before you. I can pay that back.

Oh, you mean the loan. Yeah.

Well, we find do finance the initial fee now where, like, they can basically just pay the initial fee over the course of a year. But even that, like, you're paying $1,000 a month on, like, when you're growing, which is hard. And so I still am looking for the financial viability. But say, for example, let someone had 20 grand, I don't want them to give us 15 grand in cash. I want them to go to, like, let would we finance that for them so they can have that 20 grand, go start the business and grow it. Because you need money up front to market, like a good five, ten grand to really get established. Right. And hit the ground run. But, like, in terms of profitability, like, three months, you're looking at to get profitable if you're really, like, pouring money into marketing and all that. So, like, it took us three months down in Mount Vernon, and like, the first year, we'll still be in the red, but from a month standpoint, we're now profitable. Right.

Cool.

We just got one in Maryland.

Maryland? Yeah. Howard county, just outside of Baltimore. Cool. Yeah. So that was a cool one. But any other questions? You bet. Frank's here. He had. He bought Neo a couple weeks, and now it's like, shot up on the stock market, plus his heart. So does anyone have Tesla or Apple right now?

I do.

Josh is happy.

Marcus, why don't you tell us a.

Little bit about your.

Not talking about it.

If you guys are ever interested in getting a dabbling. Robinhood is a good app. It's an easy app to trade stocks on and start learning. What I would do if I was you is kind of think about, like, your hourly base rate as, like, what you need to live on. Anything more than that, that's what I would start invest. Trying to invest in. It's a really easy way, like, hey, if I make 18 bucks an hour covers my living expenses, but if I make 22, that's four bucks an hour. So if you work 80 hours, so you have an extra couple hundred bucks, like, that's what I Would be really trying to think about, like, investing. So if it's bonuses or P4P dollars, just like thinking about that as a way to get involved. Because then that's again, I don't care what you put it in. It's not like good or bad. It's a matter of like, you're gonna start. Even if you put $100 into something, you're gonna like, start watching it, figuring out what makes it move, what's a good investment. Like, you're gonna start learning. You know, all of a sudden, people start listening to podcasts about stocks and about finances because they want to know. So. And if anyone's gonna download it, just send me a quick text first. Josh. I'll send you a link. We can both get a free stock.

One nice thing about Robinhood is that you can schedule transfers. So you know how you have money transferred into your savings. You can schedule a certain amount to go str your investments and it doesn't pick a stop for you, it just goes in there. So like miles, send me an alert, your such and such amount just transferred into Robinhood. And then I can look and see where I want to, what stocks I want to buy. So it's just discipline. I don't have to do anything. I just set it up and it comes out of every check.

You just put it in the account and then whenever you want to buy, you can use it. But yeah, you can do automatic transfers in if you ever want to, like on a bi weekly basis after a paid period or something like that. Cool.

I have a question about a stock. I couldn't find it on Google.

So theoretically, if a, if a stock.

If it drops off like the Nasdaq.

Yeah.

It went to like a different stock market, like Q something.

Yeah.

But it didn't go bankrupt.

Yep.

So kind of could I still pull my money out of it or how does that work?

Did the value drop way down?

It dropped down a little bit.

It's not like as long as it has a value on a stock market, it's public, right? Yeah, yeah. As long as it's a public company, you can still pull money out. Alrighty. Yeah. Josh. Long term, right now. Long term. Long term. Long term. Long term, Long term.

Just because you fall for long term.

Doesn'T mean long term.

So like the Nasdaq and there's certain index funds. Right. So you have like the Dow Industrial Average, you've got the Nasdaq, you've got S&P 500. S&P 500. It's 500 companies that they choose to be in this index. Right. So it's like a lot of people invest in those because they're very diversified, right. But it doesn't necessarily mean all those companies are doing well. So for example, right now in The S&P 500, if you take if every company had the same valuation, The S&P 500 has still gone down 4% for the year. But if you look at the whole all combined, when Apple has a 7% chunk of it, you know, now you're looking at a third 38% increase for the year. So what that means is that you got companies struggling in there and you have companies doing well. So it's a great way to diversify. But you're investing in a bunch of random companies that you might not believe in. Like we talked about last week, right.

And I listened to a guy who said it's not diversifying as much as you might think kind of index funds because like a large chunk of it is kind of tech companies. So if something happens to tech, then it's like a super large chunk of that.

Yeah, yeah. So I think about 30% or something of it is tech. But that being said, like, you know, if you've been in tech for the past six months, you've done really well. Where right now that's the part sector of those indexes that is boiling everything. If you take out tech out of stock market right now, we're like in a massive crash, not a mass crash. We're low. Right. And so it's good to have some diversity, right? Like right now what I've really been doing the whole six months is because I'm not super risk. I don't want, I guess like throw money into one stock or be in one sector, but I'm not gonna put in an inde fund is looking at the fact that on every single day right now, and I don't suggest you do the exact same thing as me. This is what I've been doing is every single day you look at the stock market right now for the past six months, you got recovery stocks, which is like carnival, the airlines, all these restaurants that have been slaughtered. And then you have tech or like the stay at home stocks. And literally this is what they've been doing for the past six months on a day when this tech does really well, recovery does poorly, and then vice versa. So what you can kind of do is play that game. So when techs go way up, you can kind of move some money over. It's kind of like A barbell. Right. It's kind of like there's eights on both sides. And so, you know, right now tech has been doing really well. I think in the next six months they'll have a bit of a softening and then you're gonna have. If we have a vaccine, you're gonna see recovery. Stocks do well, but again, a lot of those companies that are recovering, I'm not long term in because they're so debt laden just to get out of all this trouble. They've been. They have like hundreds of millions and billions of dollars worth of debt. Well, I don't believe in them long term, but, like, if there's a vaccine, a lot of those are gonna go up 20 to 40% easily, if not double. Because right now they're zero traffic. But there's also massive. The reason they're low is there's literally a risk of them going bk, like bankrupt tomorrow if they're like, hey, you know what? It's just not worth coming out of this with billions of dollars worth of debt. We're just going to, you know, screw the investors and just have everything go to zero. Right. So kind of like stock here. No, I'm just joking.

I have a question. So if, like, a lot of us are young, so if they wanted to start investing and they're not really even interested, but know, they probably should learn stuff, what would be a good one? Would Robinhood be a good one to actually learn a little bit or what should they be listening to or watching to? Just start listening.

Yeah. Lee has a good podcast you listen to. What's it called?

Yeah, Millennial Investing, I think. Nick, do you listen to that one still? Is that what. That's the title.

Okay.

The Investor.

Yeah. So it's by. There's, There's a group called the Investors Podcast Group, and they do. Their most popular one is we study billionaires, and they literally just talk about billionaires and millionaires and how they made it. There's another one that like, basically an intern said, hey, I want to start this. And it's just Millennial Investing. So it's really good. It's like every three episodes, it kind of rotates. So it'll be an episode on the stock market, it'll be an episode on real estate, and then it'll be an episode on like, like personal life, investment life training, you know, life hacking, health and wealth, stuff like that. And then it kind of cycles through. So that's a really good one. I, I listen to that one pretty religiously because it is just a wealth of information. And they kind of respectfully dumb it down if you don't have a lot of experience, which I don't.

So Robinhood is great. It's simple. And there are indexes inside of Robinhood that you can invest in. Like the Vanguard. Vanguard creates indexes of companies. And so you're not going to see 10% in a month, but you are going to get some variety. So you're like, hey, I want to invest something in tech. Okay, well, they'll take 100 companies or 50 companies and they'll do small cap or like large cap companies, for example, that you can invest in. And those are easy. And that's what I would do because this is the bottom line. If you're going to invest money, do not go on YouTube, do not listen to me, I don't care who it is. And be like, oh, they said this company. Like, they said this company. I should invest in them. Like, figure it out for yourself, you know, and like, do the due diligence and figure out what you want to do. And until then, do indexes. Because like, if you, like right now it's like, oh, Tesla, I see Tesla all in the news. There's a really good chance Tesla go down 30 to 40% right now because they've gone up 60% in the past four weeks. So just buying into the news, like, you're gonna set yourself up for failure, right? So basically everything opposite of what the news does you want to do. Like, I sold out Tesla yesterday. So, like, I just think it's hyp. I could be completely wrong. But, like, my training philosophy is, when everyone wants to get in, I'm out.

They put a microchip in a pit.

Yeah, dude, that was incredible. That was a test that was mirroring. But it has connection through Elon Musk.

Anything with Elon Musk does well.

They say.

They say, buy the rumors, sell the news. That's like the classic line. And I would say one recommendation I would have, like Mike said, like, there's YouTube people there, scammers. Like, they're like, oh, get rich quick.

Blah, blah, blah.

As fun as it isn't, like, just go forbes.cometrade.com and read like investing 101. Like, read tried and true articles from like, well established company names. Don't just like, Google YouTube and find some guy who's like, I flipped $5,000 and now I own six Teslas.

Here's my new Lamborghini, right?

Like, don't do that. Go to Forbes, go to E Trade. Go to, I don't know, Yahoo.

Finance?

Yeah, like, Yahoo Finance. I love that app. I'm on that app almost every night. Like, good stuff.

So cool. Have an awesome day, guys. Thanks so much.