[00:00:01] Speaker A: Welcome to the Grow show, brought to you by Mardi Grunder's Grow Group, where we specialize in helping landscaping companies clarify their platform, grow their people, build their processes, and realize profits. Everything we teach is grounded in real experience. Our team's actively involved in the day to day operations of Southwest Ohio's Grunder Landscaping Company. New episodes are released weekly on Wednesdays and are made possible by the support of Aspire, Bob Yard and Exmark. Remember to subscribe so you never miss an episode. Now, here's your host, Marty Grunder.
[00:00:30] Speaker B: Well, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever the case may be. This is Marty Grunder from Grunder Landscaping Company on the Grow Group. Thanks for downloading the Grow Show. Today we're going to talk about training your team and what that looks like and what you can do this fall to finish the year strong and just as importantly, what you need to be doing now so you're ready to come out of the gate next spring. I've got a lot to share. Excited about this one.
But first, a reminder. You can get the latest edition of the Grow show delivered to your phone, tablet or computer by subscribing wherever you get your podcasts or Watch us on YouTube for an enhanced learning experience. The Grow show is the greatest thing since Greenius, the training platform for landscape pros. Yes, Greenius.
This episode is on training and we rely on Greenius to help us train. We use it on the production side of our business and on the sales side. My sales team is getting quizzes from me every other week to drive points home. And with snow season upon us, we're pushing out training on that to everyone.
I love what they do. And a big shout out to Matt Krinklaw, the co founder from Greenius, who I work with a lot. Thank you, Greenius. Onto the Grow Show. Spring training starts in the fall, folks. Okay, so here's what I want everybody listening to. Think about. It's fall. You're busy, your crews are working, you're trying to finish projects, you're getting enhancements done, you're doing fall cleanups, you're. You're dealing with leaves. Maybe you're prepping for snow. If you're up north, maybe you're trying to close out the year and hit your numbers. And because everybody's busy, one of the easiest things I think to say is, quote, we'll work on training this winter and then what happens? We all know December comes, the holidays come, you get tired, you eat too much, you take a vacation. January comes, you're working on Budgets, you get a blizzard, you're planning, you're fixing equipment, you get distracted, you're recruiting, you're trying to sell work. Then February comes, you get a couple nice days, the phones start ringing, you go play golf, and suddenly someone says, hey, you know, spring's three weeks away, we better start training. And then that's not a training program. That's panic. That's chaos. And I've been guilty of this, folks, so I'm perfectly well licensed to talk about this. What I want you to understand is that your 2027 training program shouldn't start in January. It should start right now. Because right now you have something incredibly valuable. Evidence.
You can actually see what your team knows and what they don't know. And one other thing, your mindset. It's very important to look at this whole thing before you tune me out. Training is an investment. It's not an expense. Okay, so let's talk through several things. Number one, train what you see right now. One of the biggest mistakes that I see companies making with training is they make it way too complicated. They think they need a classroom, a PowerPoint, a four course breakfast, a trainer, an expert to come in. We just need to get everybody together for a couple hours. That's all you do, okay? Sometimes you don't even need that. Most of the training doesn't even have to look like that. Like, if you start embracing training, folks, training can happen in 10 minutes. Let me give you some examples. You see somebody loading the trailer incorrectly, you don't just fix it, you teach it. You stop it. You saw somebody not hooking up a trailer, right? Tonight, tomorrow morning, you bring everybody together and you teach it. You see somebody borrowing grass clippings into the street, you stop. You don't just tell them to clean it up, you teach them why we don't do that and what the standard is. So many times we leave out the why, folks. When you tell people why you do things, a lot of times it gets the transfer in their brain and they grasp it and they see the importance to it. You see somebody pruning incorrectly, you stop.
You show them the right way, you explain it, you have them do it. That's training, okay? You see somebody talking to a client in a way that isn't consistent with your company, there's a training opportunity. You can role play the right way to do it. One of the most powerful things a leader can develop is the habit of saying, I saw something today that we can teach from. You hear somebody saying, learn from. Let's say Teach from okay. Instead, too many leaders see mistakes, they get frustrated, they call up a fellow member of their peer group, they lament to their spouse, they fix the mistakes themselves, and they move on. Then two weeks later, they see that same mistake again.
Well, why wouldn't you? Nobody taught anything right. We just keep sitting there. Number two, keep a running list of what went wrong that can be on onenote, on your phone. It can be photos, whatever it is. Here's something I want every owner and manager listening to do starting tomorrow. Keep a running list, call it, title it what we need to train on. It doesn't have to be complicated. Put it in a onenote or the regular note in your iPhone or whatever. Put in Microsoft Planner a spreadsheet, a legal pad, a diary, a binder, a journal. I don't care. Okay. Every time something happens in your company that shouldn't happen, ask is this a training issue? Truck comes back with equipment missing, Write it down. Irrigation line gets damaged. Write it down. Crew doesn't know exactly how to identify poison ivy. And now you have a workers comp claim. Write it down. Wrong mowing height. Write it down. Plant installed too deep, Write it down. Property isn't blown off correctly. Write it down.
Somebody didn't speak properly to a client and you cringe when you heard it. Write it down. Crew leader doesn't know how to read a work ticket on Aspire. Write it down.
Salesperson sells something production can efficiently build. Write it down. Time isn't entered correctly. Write it down. Snow. Equipment isn't in a spec isn't inspected correctly. We get it on the job site, it doesn't even start. Write it down.
By the end of the year, folks, you'll probably have 20 or 30 things. And guess what?
There's your training calendar. Your team's going to show you and tell you exactly what training they need if you pay attention. Number three, don't confuse telling with training. And this is a really big one. Managers love saying, I told them to do that. I told them what to do. Okay, you told him or her. But that doesn't mean you train them. There's a huge difference.
Teaching and presenting are different.
Teaching means you're showing, you're demonstrating, you're pausing, you're asking questions. It's a two way conversation. Training is a two way street. Presenting and telling is a one way street. You're pontificating. You're not stopping or pausing to make sure anybody's engaged. And you got to understand that if I say make sure you prune those hydrangeas correctly. That's not training. What does that mean? If I show somebody the plant, explain when it flowers and explain whether it flowers on old wood or new wood, and that will tell them exactly when to make the cut in terms of where and why and when.
Let them make several cuts, correct their technique, and then come back later and expect their work. That's training. The same thing applies to equipment, customer service. We go on for days here. Job costing, safety, snow, sales, leadership, conflict management.
Training should have four parts, folks. It's the tell me, show me. Listen, let me do it. Check me, tell me, show me. Let me do it. Check out what I did. That's a simple training system. Tell, show, do, check. And I would encourage you to teach your managers those four words. Because what happens in most companies, we stop at number one, we just tell them, then we're shocked they don't know how to do it correctly. Now let's hear a word from one of our trusted partners in our success at Grunder Landscaping Company.
The most expensive thing in your business isn't your equipment or your payroll. It's. It's not having the right information.
Good managers make good decisions with good information, folks. And look, if you think you can't afford Aspire right now, I get it. I do. Before I started using it, I would have agreed with you. But the clients who are staying out in front of their business and everything else, they're on Aspire. You need those insights, ladies and gentlemen, at your fingertips to run this business. It's more expensive not to have the data. You can't afford not to have it. Take a look for yourself@your aspire.com number four.
4.
Use your best people as trainers. Another mistake we see owners making or managers making is that they have themselves, the owners and managers. They do all the training. No, stop that. Who's your best crew leader? Have them teach. Who's incredible at pruning? Have them teach. Who loads a truck perfectly every day? Have them teach. Who knows irrigation troubleshooting? Have them teach. Who's your best equipment operator. Have them teach. Who does the best final walkthrough with clients. Have them teach. Who's your top salesperson? Have them teach.
There's two huge benefits to this, folks. Number one. Number one, you multiply your trainers, okay? And you get different voices out there for people to pay attention to and have respect for. Number two, the person teaching gets better, too. Because one of the reasons I feel I'm a good teacher is I'm a good student. Like, I've been involved in this stuff. And I teach a ton. I learn a lot. All right? When somebody has to explain how and why they do something, it forces them to understand the process at another level. And they see all the gaps and they see where maybe before they were going too fast. And here's the other advantage. Your people often, like I mentioned a little bit before, they listen differently when one of their peers says, here's how I do it. That can be incredibly powerful for somebody from your own department to be teaching. The added benefit of having your best people train is the engagement and how important they feel. And also, let me give you another little point of, of something to think about. Look for future leaders in the ones who trains well, okay?
That's what you want. You might be finding. And in the process of having them help you train, you may be developing another leader. Speaking of best people, number five, capture your best people before winter. This is something I really want companies to think about. You probably have tremendous knowledge walking around your company right now and that isn't documented anywhere. And that can be dangerous. Your best team leader knows 10 things about installing patios that aren't written down anywhere. Your best maintenance team leader knows exactly how a premium property should look before they leave. And it's not written down anywhere. Your best irrigation technician knows how to diagnose something in 10 minutes that takes somebody else an hour or two hours. Your best snow manager knows exactly how a property should be staged before a storm. Capture it, get your phone out, shoot a video. It doesn't need to be a Steven Spielberg production. It doesn't need fancy graphics. Just ask your best person.
Show me how you do this. Record it in five minutes. And now you got a training. Some training material you can even import into Greenius. Do another one tomorrow. If you just recorded two 5 minute videos a week for the next 10 weeks, you'd have 20 training videos before winter. Think about that now. When a new employee starts next March, you aren't saying, go ride with Joe and hopefully with Joe remembers to explain everything. You've got videos to give them. You've actually started building a training library. Combine that with greeniest folks and I'm telling you, you're cooking with gas. Number six, train on the things that make or lose money.
Don't just train technical skills. Train people to understand how your company makes money. A lot of team members genuinely do not understand that. They think Marty sold a job for 20 grand and the company made $25,000. I know that sounds silly. I'm trying to make you laugh, but they don't understand it. We have labor. We have materials. We got equipment, fuel, insurance, overhead trucks, mistakes. We warranty work. We've got everything else it takes to run the company.
Teach your people productivity. Teach them why we budget hours.
Teach them why starting on time matters. Teach them why forgetting one tool in the shop and having to drive 20 minutes back to the shop is a problem. Let's do the math. Four people sitting in the truck 20 minutes back. 20 minutes to the job. That's 160 minutes of labor, folks. That's three man hours because somebody forgot a tool. Those little lessons are powerful because now people start to understand. Oh, that's why Marty and his team get so worked up and we forget things. Exactly. It wasn't about the shovel. It's about the outright waste. It's about the money getting thrown out the window down the highway. Time to hear again from one of our trusted partners in our success at Grunder Landscaping.
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Number 7. Train your leaders differently. Here's another area I think we miss. If someone becomes a crew leader, we often train them on how to do the work, but then their job changes, and they're not just doing work anymore. Now they're leading people.
So teach them how to lead. Yeah. Teach them how you start the morning. Teach them how you explain the goals for the day. How do you do? How do you correct somebody properly? How do you talk to a client? How do you handle a conflict? How do you coach the slowest person on the team? How do you make sure the truck is ready for tomorrow? How do you close out a job? How do you inspect quality? How do you communicate a problem before it becomes a crisis? Those are leadership skills. Those are the soft skills, and they can be taught. You can't promote somebody Friday and expect them to be a better leader Monday just because you change their title. You got to work with them. Training is an investment, folks. This is how we get people to stay, by taking an interest in them, by getting them better.
Number eight, finish this year by getting better. Here's the challenge I have for all of you. Don't mentally check out because the season is winding. Down. It's easy to do. Your team shouldn't either. We talk about finishing strong financially. Finish strong operationally too. Take the last six, eight, ten weeks of the season and say we're going to be better at Christmas than we are today. Pick a skill each week. Make Monday morning the day to start. Maybe it's 15 minutes. How to load and secure equipment. How to properly sharpen blades. How to perform a walkthrough. How to identify various irrigation components. How to prune. How to mulch correctly. How to back up properly. How to hook up a trailer. How to prune a client's property. How to communicate with a client. How to enter time properly. How to inspect the truck at the end of the day. 15 minutes. Then reinforce it during the week. You don't need a three day university. In fact, when I see that stuff being posted online, I think that's ridiculous. Would you want to sit in a room all day for orientation or do a two week orientation? I actually saw a company in Florida a couple of weeks ago bragging about the two week orientation they did with their team. I wonder how many of those new people were left after day three, let alone two weeks. You don't need a three day university or a two week orientation. What you need are consistency, small bites.
Number nine, build your winner training calendar right now.
And now we're getting into the second half of this. What should you be doing to prepare for spring? Well, I think before Thanksgiving I would have your January and February training calendar built. I'd put the dates on the calendar. Who's teaching? What are they teaching? Who needs to attend? How long is it? What equipment is required? Is there a test? We're going to do our quizzes on Greeniest. By the way, great product. Is there a demonstration? What's the standard? Do this now. Because here's something I've learned, ladies and gentlemen. What gets scheduled gets done. All right. So many things that I've done to be successful are not about how smart I am. It's just I went and did them and I was intentional about them. If your training plan says train everybody this winter, nothing's going to happen. If it says January 13, 7 to 8am Trailer safety and loading. And Brian's teaching the production team now. You got something that's going to get done. The specificity, the intentionality, the organization, put it on your calendar. Number 10, do not make spring orientation your first training. When the new people arrive next spring, that's not when you should be figuring out what orientation looks like. Build it now. What does day one look like? What does the first week look like? What does somebody have to know before they're allowed to operate equipment? At our company, the team leader is responsible for orientating that new person on their crew. We do a little short orientation with them and that's the extent of it. And then we get them out working, have them accomplish something. Don't overwhelm them with so much. See how they do. What does a crew leader have to know? What does a crew member have to know? What is safety training?
What Safety training is mandatory.
What company expectations do they need to understand?
What are your core values? What's the culture like around here? What does great customer service look like? What does a clean truck look like? And why do we keep our trucks clean? What does a clean desk look like? And why do we keep our desk clean? What's a finished job look like? Define it. Show pictures of it. Show what good, better and best is. Strive for best, folks. And this is where SOP standard operating procedures become so critically important in a growing organization.
Training without a standard is just someone's opinion. You got to be able to say, this is how we do it here. This is the Grunder way. This is what you're trying to build.
And then number 11, very, very important. Here you have to inspect what you expect.
You heard me saying before, it's true. Training isn't over when the class ends. Training is over when the behavior changes. Then you can probably move on to something else. All while doing refresher courses on what you've trained. If you train people Monday on properly securing equipment, inspect the trailers Tuesday if trained on job site cleanup, get out on some jobs on Wednesday and inspect what you trained on Tuesday. If you trained on time entry, look at the entry, see how they are. Because your team notices what management pays attention to. If we spend an hour teaching something and never mention it again, guess what messages we send. It wasn't important. Training requires follow up. And then finally here, make training part of your culture. Ultimately, this is what we're after. We don't want train to be an event. We want to be part of a culture people should expect. We learn here. We coach here, we share what we know here. We don't embarrass people for asking questions. We don't hide mistakes. We learn from them. We care about you and your best team members should understand that one of their responsibilities is developing the next person.
That's how companies scale. That's how you get companies within a company. If all knowledge resides with five people, You've built a bottleneck that can't be grown. If those five people are constantly teaching the next 15 people. You're building an organization that can scale. There's a huge difference there. The fall training challenge Marty has for you. This is what I want you to do. Five things. Number one, start your what we need to train on list every mistake you come into goes into it. Number two, pick one 15 minute training topic for next week and do it with your team. And remember, number three, identify your five best internal trainers and get them involved. They don't have to have management titles. That's okay. Find the people who are really good at doing something. You'll be amazed what it does for their confidence and the bonding to the organization.
Number four, record one training video on your iPhone. Five minutes. Don't overthink it. And then number five, put your January and February calendar dates. The training calendar dates up before Thanksgiving. Do not wait until spring, guys and gals. Spring always shows up faster than we think it will. Every year we say, can you believe it's March already? Yes, we can. Yes, I can. I can believe it because it happens every year. And when March comes, you can be one of two companies. You can be the company running around saying, okay, who's going to train all these guys and gals? Where are the safety sheets? Who knows how to run this machine? Has anybody shown them Aspire? Where's the orientation checklist? Or you can be the company that says we're ready and you can know you're ready. Our training calendar is built. Our trainers know their assignments, our videos are done, our SOPs are ready. Our leaders know what's expected.
And our new people have a clear path to becoming productive members of the team. That's a competitive advantage, folks. Training isn't something you do when you're not busy. Training is what prepares you to handle being busy. And the companies that understand this will finish this year stronger and come out of the gate next spring faster than everyone else does.
So don't wait for winter start today. Look at what you're doing. Look where you're making mistakes. Look where you're making excuses. Look at who your best people are. And be a teacher, not a presenter. That means interacting, not just dumping a bunch of information and saying any questions. Capture what they know. Teach what you're seeing. Build your calendar and get ready. Because spring is coming whether you're ready or not. Well, that's going to do it for this week's edition of the Grow Show. If you haven't done so already subscribe to the Grow show and if you can give it a rating or share a comment that helps more success minded landscape professionals find us. And if you really want to help us, take out your phone right now and share this YouTube link or the regular podcast and text it to somebody that you think would benefit from what we're doing here. Thanks for joining us on the Grow show this week. We'll talk to you next week.
[00:21:46] Speaker A: Thanks for listening to the Grow show and a special thanks to Aspire, Bob Yard and Exmark for making this episode possible. We'll talk to you next week.
