The BIGGEST Beginner Mistake In Mowing Businesses

Let me ask you something. When you first started hiring people, what did you think was going to make the biggest difference in how fast you grew the business? Most guys say the right truck, the right equipment, the right routes. Those things do matter, but I'll tell you what changed everything for us here at Military Lawn Cuts. It wasn't the equipment, it wasn't the routes, it was how we pay our people. I've been in the lawn care industry for for years now. I have built Military Lawn Cuts to 3 locations, nearly 25 team members, and we are scaling hard in the Dallas-Fort Worth market. And one of the biggest shifts that got us here was moving off of hourly pay and into a performance-based pay. And today I'm going to break it down for you so you can do the same thing for your business. You see, here's the problem. Most lawn care owners, in fact, most business owners are paying hourly. And I get it. That's how most people operate. It feels safe. It feels simple. But here's what nobody talks about. Hourly pay is a built-in conflict of interest between you and your team member. Think about that for a second. You want the job done in 2 hours. They want it to take 4 hours. You want efficiency. They want overtime. You are literally pulling in opposite directions. And you wonder why you can't scale, or you wonder why you're always babysitting your team that aren't following directions or aren't following the systems. It's because of the pay structure that's working against you. That is the real problem. It's not your team members are lazy, which they could be, some. It's not that you hired the wrong people, which again, maybe you did at some point. But most of it is that the system rewards the wrong behavior, and you're stuck because of it. So here's what we did to fix that and solve that. We moved to a pay-for-performance pay system. We give our teams a percentage of the labor revenue they generate for the business. In simplistic form, the harder they work, the more money they make. So for example, if we're charging the customer $60 to mow their lawn, very simple, they get 1/3 of that, which is $20. The more efficient they are, the more lawns they can do, the more money that goes into their pocket. And the result our guys are making $25 to $35 an hour on average. In fact, some guys make more than that, and it's because they earned it. And the culture shifted literally overnight when we implemented this. The complaining about the hours stopped, the dragging of the feet stopped. People started moving because moving meant making more money. A lot of the C players didn't last long when we made this change. And here's what I want you to understand. P4P is not for everyone at every stage. There's a specific moment when you need to make this switch, and if you miss it, you're going to keep grinding and wondering why nothing is changing. The moment is the second truck. That's it. That's the line. When it's just you and one other team member in the truck, you see, you can hold them accountable. You can set the pace. You're right there. You could what's going on. You can coach, you can mentor, you can push, you can model the behavior that you want. But the second you add that second truck, that team member is now operating without your supervision. You have no lever to pull. You can't set the pace from a different vehicle. So if you don't have a pay structure that creates that accountability for you, you're going to get mediocre output every single day. And here's what that costs you. It's not just slower jobs. It's team members who are watching the clock instead of actually working. It's you getting calls asking where the crew is. It's jobs that should take 3 hours that somehow take 5. It's your reputation on the line because the quality drops when nobody is watching. All of that goes away when the pay structure is doing the managing for you. Let me give you our personal proof from our personal experience. You see, years ago we had 9 team members. 9. We were paying them hourly. The business was moving, but it was very heavy. After we switched to pay for performance, we were able to do the same workload with 5 team members than we did when we had 9 on hourly rate. It was the same routes, 4 fewer people on payroll, and this was not because we fired great people. It's because the right people started to perform and the people who weren't willing to work for it self-selected out. They didn't like the culture change. They didn't want to work harder. They were honestly C players that I couldn't recognize at the time. After some time, they left. And you see, that's what performance pay does. It's a filter. A players run toward it. C players run from it. So here's how to think about it practically. You set a base rate for the job. You calculate what the revenue is on that job. You give the team a percentage of that revenue that they generate. When they finish a full day's route efficiently, they know exactly what they made that day. There's no mystery. There's no, I wonder if I'll get overtime this week. It's simple. Your team doesn't have to ask you for a raise. It's transparency. It's fair. And fair is what attracts the top talent because everybody has an even playing field. It doesn't matter if you've been here for 3 years or doesn't matter if you've been here for 3 weeks. Everybody has the same ability to make more money if they put the work in. You see, A-players don't want to be paid the same as the guy who coasts or doesn't show up. They want to be rewarded for their output. When you pay everyone the same hourly rate, you're telling your A-players they're worth the same as your C-players. It's an insult to them. Hourly pay runs off your best people and keeps your worst ones comfortable. P4P literally flips that completely. Now your best people are thriving. They're making more money, real money. They're proud of what they've built in a day. They're coming in early and staying efficient because they understand that more efficiency equals more dollars in their pocket. And they go home and tell their friends, and their friends, guess what? They want to come and work at Military Lawn Cuts because they're making $35 an hour mowing lawns. This is how you attract the top talent without Recruiting Hardcore. So here's what I want you to do. You're still watching this. I want you to drop in the comments right now and tell me, where are you at? Are you still on hourly or have you already made the switch? And if you're still on hourly, what's the one thing that's holding you back from changing? Drop it below. I want to know exactly where you're stuck so I can help you get through it. Because here's what I will leave you with. You are the ceiling to how big your operation gets, and the pay structure that you choose is the foundation under everything else. If your pay structure is working against your team members, it is working against you. But when you build a system where them winning means you win, everybody gets on the same page and everybody as a team wants to win. The morale changes, the output changes, the quality of people that you attract changes. It starts to open up your eyes to see, wow, this is what a good employee looks like. They show up every day, they work extremely hard. You tell them to do or change something one time and they do it differently the way you want it every time thereon after, instead of having to repeat yourself constantly. And they start building the business for you. Stop paying for time. Start paying for output and performance. That's how you build something great. Thank you so much for watching. 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