Will Kelly pays his mowing team by budgeted hours instead of hourly wages. Each job gets a set production time based on past data, so workers who finish faster earn more per hour. His team averaged $30-$35 per hour over summer by getting efficient at the system.
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.
