THIS is how to keep your best employees!

The first thing we want to talk about is team meetings. Now, every single business sort of finds their own cadence and how frequently they want to have team meetings. Just keep in mind team meetings. You're not producing any revenue and so especially if you're having pay for performance, the crew wants to get out and actually make money as quickly as possible. So being super organized, being quick with your team meetings, really important. Here's a couple of things that worked well for us. We have team meetings twice a week using Mondays and Thursdays. And what we're going to do is start off with yellow slips, which is callbacks from the previous week. We'll talk more about that in the future. But the reason we do it in the morning and we have a stand up meeting is because otherwise it can get dragged out really long. Just by standing up, you will cut the time it takes for meetings to go by in half simply because everyone is standing up. Also, for your frontline team members that are out in the field, a lot of times they're just tired in the morning, they just finished their coffee. They literally roll out of bed 20 minutes ago to have a sit down meeting. You are going to have much, much longer times spent doing nothing in terms of labor revenue. So try to make it as tight as possible. Have an agenda for the meeting so you can quickly get to the items if it's only five or ten minutes. One thing that can a lot of times you can fall into the trap of is being super negative and harping on the same three or four things. I've been to a lot of team meetings and usually the same five or six things are said almost every single meeting. Make sure you clock in and out of the jobs. Make sure you get the equipment on your truck so you're not coming back to the shop. It's the same four or five things. Remember to clock in and out. All of these things are said the same way every single time. And if you start to do that at every meeting, it just becomes white noise. So try to mix it up a little bit. Try to change kind of the cadence of your team. Means can be helpful. There's a couple of tricks to making that happen. Number one is get other people to say stuff instead of you as the owner. When I go to a team meeting and the owner or the primary manager is the one doing all of the talking, many times it shows that there is a weakness of communicating between the team members. So for example, instead of you talking about how everyone needs to clock in and out, have someone else that Clocked in really, really well. Give some of their tips and tricks to make sure they don't forget. So. So the rest of the team is hearing from one of their peers instead of their boss all the time. Another thing is instead of harping on the bad, focus on the good. So the one person that did actually fuel up their truck before they got back to the shop, praise them instead of punishing everyone else by keeping them through a longer meeting and talking about how bad they're doing. So instead of always focusing on the punishment, focus on praising what's actually working. Well, one way to do this and kind of also achieve getting other people to talk is have what we call moments of appreciation. Usually you'll start being the one that actually gives out moments of appreciation at the end of each meeting. But eventually the goal is to get your team members to call up their peers for things that they're doing where they go above and beyond. Maybe it's they really pushed extra long and finish up a project or they worked crazy hard to get a certain part of the product done that was not fun, like going under the Accra space or underneath the deck. This went above and beyond. Or they help someone else at the end of the day clean out their truck. These types of moments of appreciation is a way to fortify the positive behavior instead of always being negative. And trust me, it's. It's easy to fall in that trap because it usually is the same four or five things that the crew does that just really drives you up the wall and it just feels like you're saying the exact same thing over and over. So try to get them to talk as much as possible instead of you always being the one that's doling out the criticisms. Another thing that's been really helpful for us to keep really good team members is just off site meetings. We've already talked about having on site meetings a couple times a week in the mornings at your shop. But this is actually Bob's Burger and Brew where we've done a lot of our off site team meetings. And there's a separate little room in the. We're able to have privacy. And at these team meetings, there's a few things you want to do. Number one, just make it a nice time where you can kind of appreciate everything that the team's done for you. A lot of times a really nice dinner can go a long way just to saying thank you to everyone. And then usually I'll spend 15 to 20 minutes and just go over where the business is at. We Usually do two off site meetings per year. One in the spring and then one and towards the end of the fall. Now for us we do at the beginning of spring when we have all the new hires have joined. And so the goal is like looking forward to the upcoming year. We what the goals, the projection of the business, what's going to be new on the upcoming horizon for the team members and getting those new hires kind of integrated in the culture and really speaking about why Augusta exists and our goals for the company. And then in the fall we also have another offsite meeting. Again, off site is simply like just away from your shop in a nice spot and yeah, you're going to spend some money on it. You're probably going to spend 30, 40 bucks per person, but trust me, the return is huge. In the fall, what we're going to do is do another offsite meeting and we're going to look back, we're going to look at okay, do we hit our goals? What were the profits? We're going to look over the profit and loss statement. We'll see what can we improve. What are we going to do next year that's different to make sure that next year is better than this past year. And we're also going to look forward to the winter and say okay, what, what is going to be in the future? Like do some people need to get laid off or some people are going to get some part time jobs or do we slow down? Do we want to actually like accelerate into the winter? And also I usually do my off site meeting in the fall about five to six weeks before the end of the season. That way it's like, hey, it's end of the season. But like let's not let off the gas. Like let go full board. Let's do upsells, let's really try to finish the year strong. And that's usually when I my second off site meeting. But a place like this is great. Look for a spot. Ideally we can get a separate room. I don't think you need a conference center. I don't think you need to do catering. I've tried those in the past. They get a little expensive and it's honestly more headache just to manage the event. Whereas at a restaurant a back room is all you need. Somewhere you can close the door and talk business. Now don't get all motivated and revelated for an hour and a half about your business. They don't care as much as you about the numbers. They don't care as much as you about where the business is going make it short, to the point and most of all make it about them and what it's going to do for the company. But more importantly, their paycheck, their future, their compensation, their benefits, make it all about them. That's why you have the off site meeting, is to get them motivated and keep them on the team. One of the most impactful ways to be able to improve your culture and be able to retain great employees is to have one on one meetings. Especially if you have less than 15 or 20 people. You as a manager and the owner, being able to spend time, even 15 to 30 minutes with your crew can be the difference between them leaving for another job or staying with you for much, much longer. And just the overall cohesiveness of the culture will be much, much greater. What I recommend during the one on one meetings is stay focused on what can be better for them. You know, what parts of their job they like, what parts do they prefer not doing or could be improved, what things they think could be improved in the business, who do they like working with and then really focusing on them and their future and their career. So g critical feedback about like, hey, here's the things you can do to be able to make more money. Here's the things you can do to be able to get a promotion. These are the type of things that focusing on them and them only on a one on one meeting is super valuable. If you get like 30 or 40 people, it can be very difficult to do one on ones. And I've had managers have like 60 to 71 on ones that they have to do each month and that can be tough. I usually recommend having a one on one meeting between the manager and the frontline team member at least once a month. If you were going into a business that was failing and the culture was really, really bad, the first thing I would be recommending is doing one on one meetings. Getting a pulse on where every team member is at, creating a benchmark of like what is good supposed to look like. And as you do them each month, you're able to look back and see the goals that were set in the previous one on one and see if those were met. You can also tie incentives to around it. It's like, hey, what do you want to improve before our next one on one meeting? These are the areas of improvement. All right, let's see if we actually made progress towards that goal. We zeroed in specifically day on h but if you want a step by step guide of starting a lawn care business specifically from zero to past $100,000 in annual revenue. Watch this video right here.