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Owned by Connor

Green Industry Professionals

Public • 25 • Free

A Community for Outdoor Home Service Professionals Looking to Grow! Scaling from zero employees to multiple locations and removed from daily ops.

Memberships

7 contributions to Green Industry Professionals
How to Have NO Clients
Why on earth would I want to have no clients? Hold on you'll see! Charlie Munger, one of the best investors of our time, talks about the process of Inversion Thinking. This is a concept that takes advantage of how our brains are preprogrammed to look for the worst outcomes. We evolved to stay alive but not to thrive, this is why we can easily recall and recognize negative experiences. Therefore, Inversion Thinking is the process of taking the end goal and thinking of all the ways to guarantee the opposite negative outcome. In the Lawn Care and Landscaping Industry what do you need to be successful? Likely clients and a lot of them hopefully! Otherwise having a good crew or a bunch of equipment does not matter if you have no work to actually be done. Using the process of inversion thinking rather than thinking about how to have/get a lot of clients, let's think about 9 ways to have no clients! 1. Never Start - Don't even leave your house or post online. Someone might figure out you have a business. 2. Don't be Consistent - If you did happen to start a business for sure do not continue doing anything that could possibly work. If you are too consistent you could accidentally have success. Randomize the schedule as much as possible, show up when it's convenient for you. 3. Never Respond - Somehow someone knows about your business, make sure they never hear back from you when they contact you. If you must contact them back make sure you are very slow to respond.  4. Bad Offer - Make sure you do not offer services they are looking for. Price your services far too expensive. Never have room on your schedule to take more work. 5. No Follow Ups - Once the estimate is sent, ghost the client at all costs. Never do any follow up calls or texts 6. Poor Quality - Once the job has finally got on the schedule, make sure to do a terrible job. Better yet do not even complete the job. 7. Poor Customer Service - Surely after doing a bad job you should not acknowledge it. You should avoid contact with the customer at all costs.  8. Build Negative Word of Mouth/Reviews - Make sure you keep doing poor work and screwing clients over. You are the business owner so make sure you come out on top in all scenarios regardless of the outcome with the client. Pray for those 1 star google reviews!  9. Don’t Market - NEVER brand your trucks or wear company uniforms. Do not share information about your company and do everything you can to keep it a secret. If you have to market, target areas where people do not buy or you do not service.
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New comment Jun 23
0 likes • Jun 23
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1 like • Jun 23
@Steve Milby exactly, for sure don’t complete the job and make sure it’s messy! Invert Do the best possible job! Go above and beyond by under promising and over delivering!
Friday Morning Coffee
Yesterday we held our first "Friday Morning Coffee" this is a live weekly call for all members of this community. There is no scheduled agenda for this call. Some weeks we may review high level or important posts from the community that week. Other weeks we will chat and discuss your current business, trouble shoot any bottle necks, etc. Join us this Friday @ 9am est while you drink your morning cup of wake up juice and prepare to finish the week strong!
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Friday Morning Coffee
Hiring someone with experience:
Here is a conversation starter: My big biggest bottleneck right now is I’m basically a solo operator and I have more work than capacity for just me and I am struggling to find someone that can trim grass and landscape but mainly right now I’m struggling with someone who is a good grass trimmer while I am doing the mowing. We have two days of mowing . I also have two days a week for Spraying fertilizer and weed control, mosquito control and a few other pesticide treatment programs.I have two or three guys to do landscape projects for me one day a week. I don’t know how to hire people or interview them as I have been fortunate or unfortunate depending how you look at it to have a pool of temporary workers from Mexico, but that’s not gonna work going forward with Augusta. It began as a temporary solution that’s going on for over 15 years and has me stuck. so my question here is I need help with the interviewing on boarding and hiring process for some people especially the first person that don’t need a whole Lotta training. Just need to be readjusted to the Augusta way of doing things and then they can start training people so on and so forth.
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New comment May 10
1 like • May 10
This is a fantastic question and took a lot of learning for me as well. I’ve probably set up 250+ interviews at this point and here’s my process on how to interview, hire, and onboard team members. To start we use indeed to find quality candidates for lawn care or spray technician positions. You can also use Ziprecruiter, Craigslist, or Facebook. Steve for you specifically there is a hiring ad on Augusta dashboard. For anyone reading that does not have access to that have AI generate you a job posting listing the pay, job duties and requirements, and a little about the company. Post your ad as either a free or paid ad depending on how desperate you are to recruit help. When you are looking for one guy I would recommend interviewing at least 10 candidates. Your first hire will be crucial to the business success. If they are a go getter and self sufficient they can take a lot of work off your plate and allow you to continue growing and being efficient yourself. Not to mention the first hire will help set the culture of all future hires. Once you have some applications rolling in, I recommend beginning with a screening call. In the call I want to make sure the candidate can talk to me like a normal person and can pass these 5 deal breaker questions. 1.) Do you have a valid drivers license? 2.) Do you have a reliable form of transportation? 3.) Do you have a good working smart phone with data to load routes out in the field? 4.) Are you able to pass a drug test? Do you smoke vape or chew tobacco? 5.) If I did a background check is there anything I should know about? Once they pass the prescreen set up an interview. This can be at your shop or at a coffee shop. Only really needs to be 15 minutes. In the interview I’m simply getting to know them a bit more, asking about any previous experience, and making sure they can show up on time. Once you’ve reviewed enough candidates and feel like you have a good fit for your company. You’ll need to onboard them. This process involves getting them to sign any legal documents required in your state w4 and i9 typically. We also get direct deposit info to put into quickbooks. Finally I would have them sign some sort of contract of handbook that includes something about at-will employment if that’s legal in your state, company values, and the pay they agree to. This can be as simple as one page.
1 like • May 10
@Steve Milby something I’d consider is finding one guy that you can employ full time to do mowing and projects. That way you can take the spray and application side of things! Having one guy consistently that can be self sufficient and work on his own will help you scale! Probably easier to manage and get better results with having one full time guy compared to 4-5 part time guys.
Passing out door hangers
Has any body ever hired a team to pass out door hangers during the spring rush is so how did it go?
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New comment May 10
1 like • May 7
@George Addai for sure make sure their form of compensation is mostly based on doorhanger return and accuracy of pricing. You don’t want a bonus going out just for number of accepted homes because they will under bid everything. If you are hiring a sales team I’d almost consider hiring door knockers. That’s what I’m looking into next year!
0 likes • May 10
@George Addai 4-8 is considered money hour for door knocking.
Mowing on rainy days
Hey Everyone, Hope all is going well! Got a little debate to settle. Is is okay to mow when is been raining all day? What the risks and is it even worth it?
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New comment May 14
2 likes • May 7
Of course as long as you can clean up and not tear up the yards. Depending on how hard it rains and if the yard drains well. If you get multiple rain days in a row. We have skipped the worst of them to be able to continue working through the whole list. Additionally you could mow front only and get the back done the following week at the next mow. That way their property still looks good and you don’t run into the next week.
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Connor Hutchison
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41points to level up
@connor-hutchison-1625
Owner of 5 Augusta Lawn Care Locations. Goal: 100 Augusta Lawn Care Franchisee Locations!

Active 12h ago
Joined Apr 27, 2024
Charlotte, NC
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