Building a Strong Landscaping Team: Attract & Retain Top Talent

"How you doing guys, this is Orion with Law Enforcement Partnering with ECHO Means Business.

Advisory Group. Echo means business. So the question was posed to me here recently, how do you grow your team with reliable team members? And when we examine that question, the first thing that we want to talk about is where are we looking? Where are we looking? Everywhere that we go, we should have business cards with us and we should be having our company brand, with our logo and our contact information on it. It can be something as simple as going to your local Starbucks in the morning time or whenever you go get your coffee and you notice that somebody there has got some of the qualities that you're looking for. What does that mean? Maybe they're good at taking your order, maybe they have an upbeat personality. Me personally, if I see that, I'm always in recruitment mode. They have some good qualities that can't be taught, so I'm going to reach out to them, I'm going to slide them a business card. ""Hey listen, if things don't work out here, we're always looking for good quality people."" I'm not trying to take people from other businesses, but I'm also going to put our information out there. ""Hey, you might not have landscaping experience, that's fine. You might not be used to service-based businesses, that's fine. But here's our information. You've got good qualities that we could use in our business as well."" So again, we want to be professional no matter where you go. I can't stress this enough. No matter where you go, how are you representing your company? I personally always drive around a vehicle that is branded with our logo. Again, representation. People's face.

Number two, we talk professionalism, but how does that look when you're on social media? If you are having a problem with your significant other, let's say, or your child, do you immediately get on Facebook and just start airing out your dirty laundry? That is not the way you want to be. Again, people know you in your community with representation. Your company. So again, we talk about professionalism. Let's jump into why is it important to grow your team? It's quite simple to me: scalability. The more team members that I have that are good quality team members, the better my revenue. It comes down to knowing your numbers, do not get me wrong. But if I can add good quality team members that are profitable employees, I can scale quicker. I can do more work, preferably with fewer people. I can do more work, my numbers are going to look better. The more work that I do, the more money that I make. It's quite simple. Again, can I beat out my customers' expectations? We have a saying in our company where we underpromise and overdeliver. So again, if I can take my client and tell them, ""Hey, this job's going to take three days,"" but we can get out of there in a day and a half because we have efficient employees, then that's what we're going to do and people are going to love that. Also, we can talk about the larger your company is with people, again, this is good quality people. I want to stress that, good quality people. So if we have good quality people that work with us, again, we're growing our market share in our respected industry. What does that mean? That means we have the potential to, maybe something happens, we want to get out of it, we have good quality employees that know what's going on, know what to do, don't have to be told. Listen, they're going to go with the sale of your business if you ever get to that point where you want to sell it. It's under new management. I can sell my employees off with the business. Again, that sounds bad, but I don't mean it in a bad way. We can slide our employees. Boom, it's under new management. They already know the systems and procedures. My business has more equity in it because I've got people that know what they're doing and don't need to be micromanaged.

Lastly, let's talk about what characteristics to look for when we're looking for the right team member. We typically go by the four Rs, and they are responsible, resourceful, reliable, and respectful. All those things go without explanation. We also like to add on loyalty, integrity, and understanding. We're just going to expand a little bit on integrity. Integrity obviously means doing the right thing when nobody else is looking. We're not stealing fuel, we're not damaging equipment and not taking ownership of it. We're going to make sure that our people have integrity. Listen, mistakes happen. Who owns up to it and do what you have to do. Understanding, listen, we work in the landscape industry, we also do snow plowing and other things, but the majority of us in the service-based industry, it's usually weather dependent. There's going to come a time where there's an off-season. If we have understanding employees, we can tell those individuals, ""Hey, listen, stand by, we're going to get some more work, but sometimes it's going to be slow. I still want you here, we're still going to keep going moving forward, but sometimes it's going to get slow."" That's why understanding employees are of the utmost importance. And then it also comes, we can tie loyalty into there as well, but us as business owners, we have to always constantly be striving to find good, reliable team members to join our team. That's an ever-expanding thing that we need to never take for granted, and we need to constantly have our eyes open. Again guys, this is Orr with Law Enforcement Partnering with ECHO, ECHO Means Business, User Advisory Group. Guys, take care.