In this solo presentation, Will Kelly explains how his lawn‑care company pays mowing crew members $30‑$35 per hour without hurting profitability. He argues that focusing on hourly wage alone is misleading; instead, pay should be tied to the amount of work produced in an hour. Kelly describes the use of "budgeted hours"—production targets derived from historical data—to measure efficiency, and introduces the "Big 3" performance metrics: attendance, quality, and production. He shows how rewarding speed alone can degrade quality and equipment, so a balanced scorecard is essential. Kelly also outlines the owner’s role in making performance‑pay work: designing tight routes, maintaining equipment, setting realistic targets, providing training, and defining clear standards. The overall message is a win‑win compensation model where employees earn more when they are more productive, while the business gains efficiency and customers receive high‑quality service.
Chapters
Some of our mowing team members can make around $30 to $35 an hour cutting grass. And when people hear that, the first reaction is usually, how in the world can you afford to pay somebody that much just to mow lawns? The answer is actually pretty simple. We stopped thinking only about how much somebody makes per hour and started thinking about paying attention to how much work gets produced during that hour, because those 2 things are completely different. A team member making $20 an hour can be extremely expensive if they're mowing slow all day, and somebody making $30 an hour can actually cost the business less if they're producing significantly more That completely changed the way I looked at pay. When I first got into the business, I thought about labor the same way most people do. What's the hourly rate? How cheap can we get the labor? How many hours did they work? But there is a problem with that. If the only thing somebody gets paid for is time, what financial incentive do they have to become faster? Think about it. If you finish a route in 6 hours instead of 8, but you only get paid for 6 hours, becoming more productive and more efficient can actually make you less money. That's backwards. The employer and the team member are literally pulling in opposite directions. So inside of our company, we use something called budgeted hours. Every job has an amount of production attached to it based on Years of data of how long that specific job should take. The goal isn't to rush through properties. The goal is to complete the work efficiently, do it correctly, and produce more work in the same amount of time. When people get really good at that, their effective hourly rate can climb. That's how we've had mowing team members earning around $30 to $35 an hour consistently Over the course of this summer. But here's where this can go horribly wrong. You see, if all I reward is speed, I'll eventually get speed at the expense of everything else. Properties get rushed, things get missed, equipment gets abused, customers complain, and now I've created a different problem. So production cannot be the only scoreboard. We actually track 3 things with our field team members: attendance, quality, and production. We call it the Big 3. Attendance means, can we count on you? Because I don't care how fast or how good you can mow a lawn if I don't know whether you're going to show up or not. Quality means, are customers happy and are we avoiding unnecessary damage and complaints? Which ultimately lead to cancellations. Because production without quality isn't really production. It's just creating future work for somebody else. And then we track budgeted hours. Are you actually producing enough work? That is the balance. Reliable, good quality, high production. You need all 3. And that taught me something much bigger about compensation. The goal should not be to pay people as little as possible. The goal should be to create a system where the team member can win when the company wins. Let's say one person can produce a certain amount of work in 10 hours. Another person can produce the exact same amount of work in 7. You can afford to pay that second person more per hour because you're getting much more production for every hour you're paying for. That person wins because they make more money. The company wins because labor becomes more efficient, and the customer wins as long as the quality stays high. That's a much healthier relationship between both the employer and the employee. It's a win-win. We want our team to win. It creates a healthier relationship than me thinking, how do I squeeze another dollar out of somebody's hourly rate? But there is another side of this that business owners miss. You can't just announce performance pay and expect it to work. You have to give people control over the result you're paying for them. If the route is terrible and every property is 20 minutes apart, that's not the team member's fault. If the equipment keeps breaking down, that's not an efficiency problem. If I give somebody unrealistic production targets, that's not performance pay, that's just a bad System. The owner has responsibility too. We need tight routes, working equipment, clear expectations, realistic budgeted hours, training, and a clear definition of what good looks like. Only then a great team member can actually outperform the standard. And when they do, I want them to benefit from that. I don't want my best team members looking around thinking, I work twice as hard as everybody else and get paid the same hourly rate because eventually that person is either going to slow down or leave. Now flip that around. I also don't want somebody who consistently underproduces getting the exact same reward as the person who carries the load. That's not fair either. Good compensation should make expectations more clear, not less. And this is one of the biggest lessons I've learned as we've grown. Cheap labor isn't necessarily cheap. If somebody makes a lower hourly rate but takes longer, creates callbacks, misses work, damages equipment, or needs constant supervision, that person can become incredibly expensive. On the other hand, a reliable team member who produces, protects quality, takes care of the equipment, and doesn't need somebody standing over them all day might look expensive on an hourly basis, but they're extremely valuable. That's why I don't freak out when I see somebody's effective rate get into the $30 to $35 an hour range. If they earned it through legitimate production while maintaining the standard, that's the system doing what it's supposed to do. They're making more because they're producing more. Now, I don't think every business needs to copy our exact system. But I do think every business owner should ask one question: what behavior does my pay system actually reward? Not what do I say I want. What does the math reward? Does it reward somebody for producing? Does it reward quality? Does it reward reliability? Or does it accidentally reward people for taking longer? Because your team is eventually going to respond to whatever scoreboard you For us, the goal isn't to get the cheapest labor possible. It's to build great team members who can make a good living because they're really good at what they do. And if I can pay somebody more while the business becomes more productive at the same time, that's not a problem I want to fix. That's exactly what I want this system to create. It is a win-win relationship. For the employer and the employee. Guys, thank you so much for watching. Make sure you click that subscribe button if you wanna grow a more successful lawn and landscape business. Thanks so much. We'll see you in the next video.
