Your Team Doesn't Need More Criticism

If you are repeating yourself to the same people about the same problems every single week, please stop. Stop it. Get some help. Because more words aren't going to fix what a broken system created. Today I'm going to show you exactly why your crews keep underperforming, and it has nothing to do with motivation. A few years into building Military Lawn Cuts, I found myself saying the same thing every Monday morning. Guys, we talked about this. Please shut the gate, keep it latched. The equipment needs to be put away. Take the debris out of the bed of your truck. Same speech, different week. And I kept blaming motivation. I kept blaming the people. I'd say, these guys just don't care enough. I'd try new ways to pump them up. Pep talks, bonuses, recognition. Nothing stuck. Then one day I asked myself a harder question: if this mistake keeps happening, what's the system that's supposed to prevent it? And when I looked for that system, I couldn't find one because it didn't exist. I didn't have a motivation problem, I had a feedback loop problem. The mistake would happen, I'd react, I'd correct it in the moment, and then nothing was ever captured, documented, or built into a process. So the next crew member, or the same one 3 weeks later, walks right back into the same failure because nothing changed. That is when I stopped blaming my team and started auditing my systems. Here's what I see constantly in lawn care companies trying to scale from $500,000 to $1 million. The owner is repeating themselves over and over and over again. The crew is underperforming and the owner concludes, I need to train more, or I need to find better people. Both might be partially true, but neither is the root cause. The root cause is this: there is no system that forces a lesson to stick after failure. Think about it like a burning stove. You want your team member to touch it, feel the heat, learn that it's hot. That's how people grow and learn. But if there's nothing built around that burner, no marker, no warning, process change, the next person that walks right up to it is going to touch the same burner. And guess what? They're going to burn their hand. That's not a people failure, that is a systems failure. And as the owner, that's on you. So what does a real feedback loop system look like? Here are the 4 components I use at Military Lawn Cuts. The first one is capture the failure immediately. Not at the end of the week, not at the end of the day, not at Monday meeting. The moment the mistake happens it gets documented. What happened, when, who was involved, and what was the impact on the operational side of the business? You need a simple form or a voice note workflow that makes this take under 2 minutes. If it's not captured, it doesn't exist. One of the best pieces of advice I ever got from my mentor was this: only take advice from someone who is already where you want to be. And that changed everything for me because I became very selective on who I took guidance and advice from. Now my business partner and I are coaching and mentoring other home service business owners just like you who are wanting to grow and scale their business. So if you're wanting to get to where we are at, click the link in the description below and join us. Identify the root cause, not the symptom, which is number 2. This is where most owners stop. They fix the symptom, tell them not to do it again, don't leave the gate open, but the root cause might be that there's no end of job checklist, or the checklist exists, but nobody was trained on it, or the crew lead didn't have authority to enforce it. Dig one deeper level every time. The third thing is build the fix into the process, not just the conversation. If you fix the problem with a conversation, you didn't fix it. The fix has to live somewhere where the next person could find it. That means updating your SOP, your onboarding checklist, maybe your training orientation, your job completion workflow, wherever that touchpoint lives. If you can't point to it where the fix is and where that lives inside of the systems, that is a problem that is still open. It will happen again. Number 4, close the loop with the team member. This is not the punishment. This is development. Which is what we're doing. We're building people. So sit down for even 2, 3, 5 minutes and say, here, here's what happened, here's what we need to change, here's what I expect going forward. That conversation signals that mistakes get taken seriously and that you're invested enough in them to fix the system around them, not just correct them in the moment. When you run these 4 steps consistently inside of your organization, 2 things start to happen. One, the mistakes stop repeating. Two, your team members start trusting that you actually care enough to fix things instead of just complain about them when they happen. And that is ironically what actually builds motivation. People aren't unmotivated because they're lazy. They're unmotivated because nothing has ever changed. They see the problems, they hear the same speech, they hear us in the team meeting saying the same thing over and over again, and they watch nothing improve. That is what kills morale. Fix the system and watch the culture shift. Here's the hard thing I want you to hear. If you are the one repeating yourself, you are part of the system problem. Not because you're a bad leader, but because your job as the owner or as the manager is to build systems that eliminate the need for you to repeat yourself. Every time you say the same thing twice, that's a signal that there is a potential system problem that's missing that you should be focused on trying to improve. You see, at scale, you cannot be the accountability mechanism at every level. You will be spread too thin. You'll miss things, and the standard will fluctuate depending on your mood and your schedule that day. That is not scalable or duplicatable. It's not a business. That's a job with a crew and some assistants. The goal is to build a system that holds the standard when you're not in the room. That's what gets you off the truck. That's what gets you to a million $1 million in revenue. And that's what makes you an actual leader, because you stop being the one with all the answers and you started building the environment where the answer lives in the process. Guys, thank you so much for watching this video. Make sure you hit the like button. Subscribe to the channel if you want to grow to $1 million in annual revenue.