Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Welcome to the Grow Show Powered by Stihl. On the Grow show, we share ideas, tips, tactics and insights to help you grow your landscaping business. Based on our team's 40 years of experience running a landscaping company and working with other owners and their teams to do the same, new episodes are released weekly on Wednesdays. Here's your host, Marty Grunder.
[00:00:22] Speaker B: Well, good morning, good afternoon, good evening wherever the case may be. This is Marty Grunder from Grunder Landscaping Co. And the Grow Group. Thanks for downloading the Grow Show Powered by Stihl. Today we're going to talk about having a great season kickoff meeting. 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 a team member with a great attitude. We had a large, very challenging snowstorm recently here in Dayton, Ohio and our team worked very long hours and dealt with a lot of stress. Those of you that do snow removal, you know what Uncle Marty's talking about. I had to deal with a very frustrated client, was trying to make her happy and had to call one of our team members on our leadership team that has a plow route and ask him to high tail it over to her sights. I didn't want to do that. I knew he'd already been out for 15 plus hours. I knew how much he'd been working and how much this storm was a challenge and it would not let up. So what does he do? He, he starts joking around with me, took all the stress off the call and turned a tough situation for me as a leader giving out directions into a win. Brian is his name. He went onto the site, was polite and calming as he could be for our client as well. Folks, listen, we all have a choice to be positive or negative. Brian made a positive impact that day and I appreciate it. And the question I have for you today on the Grow show is how could you be like Brian at your company? Now on to the Grow Show. Soon we will all be engaged in landscaping, folks. We will go from snow to mow and grow or from not working a lot to working nonstop to get things done before this self imposed or whatever you want to call it, July 4th deadline that many of us have in our businesses. Our longtime client at Coastal Greenery down in Brunswick, Georgia, Jeffrey Johns, calls this the hundred days of victory. We personally love that positive spin on this. Again, a positive approach to what could be a stressful time. One of the things I've learned, ladies and gentlemen, is that the more planning you do, the more communication you do, the more clarity of purpose you have, statements of expectations you share with your team. The greater the chance your team will have to deal with that stress, the pace and the challenges in good order. All of that stuff is tough. These seasonal kickoff meetings that we're going to talk today about on the Grow show Powered by Stihl are very important. Many of us going from being busy here and there to an all out Porsche. Of course, if you're in the northern climate and you do snow, in that case, an argument can be made that you're always busy, that it never lets up. Whatever your situation may be, folks, I don't think that you can argue that having a seasonal startup to the business, a seasonal startup meeting, a kickoff meeting, whatever you want to call it, is smart. There has to be a natural start date in your business, folks, that makes sense. And this kickoff meeting is a great way to get everybody aligned. So first of all, what I want to do is talk about some nuts and bolts, the best practices, if you will, of a kickoff meeting. Vince and myself have visited hundreds of landscaping companies now in the last 25 years. Vince has been doing it 15 years, I've been doing it almost 30 years. And I've seen a lot of companies do kickoff meetings. I've seen them online, I've heard them talk about it. We've had our Grow host in the last 10 years talk about it. I've seen them. There's some definite great do's and don'ts and I'm going to share a few of them with you today. Number one, it's very, very important to have a formal agenda and then follow those start times and the plan and the breaks and all that. Follow it to a T. Remember that, all right? Sharing that agenda with the team ahead of, ahead of the meeting is smart. You're showing them how you want to work. You're, you're leading them. Remember, something we talk about a lot in the Grow group is this concept that you have to be great at what you want your followers to be good at. You got to let them know by your actions in this seasonal kickoff meeting, with planning the meeting, the communication of what you're doing, especially the why. You got to let them know by all that that you mean business. You got to tell them why you're doing the meeting. I think oftentimes we forget this. Ladies and gentlemen, at Team Grunder, we are gathered here today and these are the reasons that we have this meeting. We want to make sure there is complete and total alignment amongst all team members here. We want you to see what's in store. We want you to understand why we're doing certain things. We want you to know that you're valued to us. We want you to know that your opinion matters. We want you to be engaged in your work. Like, why are you doing the meeting? I hope you're not doing the meeting to get a cool post on your social media platform and to have something put out there on LinkedIn. Honestly, who cares about that stuff? How does that help you sell work? All right, what you're trying to do is get your workforce engaged and have them understand why you're doing things. So, number one, plan it and plan it well. Don't just run by the seat of your pants. Number two, and I think this is very important, make it experiential. And what we mean by that is get them involved. None of us, including me, my 41st year in business, got into this business to sit in front of a PowerPoint presentation, turn out the lights and bore me to death. Okay? It's not about you. For owners that are listening to me, it's not. It's about the team. I don't get up and lecture my team at these meetings anymore. Do I speak at our seasonal kickoff meeting? Of course I speak at it. All right? I'm the CEO. I'm the founder. I've been here longer than anybody I've seen, more than anybody. It would be foolish if. So, Seth, our president, who runs this meeting, this kickoff meeting, didn't ask me to be involved. But it's not just Seth up there either. It's other members from our team talking about their respective areas. Get outside, do a mower obstacle course if you want. Drive to skid steers, dig holes, do whatever you want, but get your team together. Get them actively learning, get them laughing and smiling and moving around and energized.
So, number one, planet. Number two, practice experiential learning. Number three, you are the owner and you should not be doing all the talking. For those owners that have joined us today on the Grow show Powered By Stihl, have your team lead their own sections of the meeting. So when we have to get in front of a group and talk, no matter what the group is, you have to prepare. When you ask your team to do that, you are showing them how much respect for them. You're showing how much trust you have in them. They certainly know they have job security. You don't plan on putting Them up in front of the whole team and then getting rid of them. Right. All right. It's a way of showing you trust them. And I think they should take that as an honor and they should prepare. And they will prepare. Okay. And they'll get up. And the more you have them talk in front of your team, the more the team looks to them as a leader and starts asking them questions instead of asking you all the questions. And if it's their department, they're responsible for that. I see way too many owners that step on their leaders, and the unintended consequences of doing all the talking is. And I know this isn't what you're trying to do, but it could be misconstrued to believe you don't have faith in them to get up and talk about the department that they're running. Let them go up. Don't be worried about you being in the show. Okay? All right. So number one, plan and plan it well. Practice experiential learning. Number three, not just the owner talking. Number four, share more than you're comfortable with. We share an unbelievable amount of information with our team. 25 years ago, I didn't share this much information. And I'm going to be completely blunt with you today on the Grow show Powered by Stihl. I didn't do it because I was afraid that my team would take the intimate details I was sharing about the financials of the business, other planning and other stuff. I was afraid they would take that and go hurt me with it, start their own business and use this proprietary, or what I thought was proprietary information to hurt me. The fact of the matter is, what I've realized at age 56, 41 years in business, there's. Then I can't do anything with that information. All right? They need your whole team. And if they're going to hire your whole team, including you, okay, yeah, they can probably do something with the information. But by not sharing information with your team, the unintended consequence of that is you make it look easy. And what I have found in the over 200 landscaping companies I've personally visited in the last 25 years and worked with, you make it look so easy, they begin to have these false conclusions in their mind that there's something along the lines of this. Well, gosh, I mean, Grunder Landscaping did $15 million last year in sales. All right? All Marty did was buy a phone, buy some trucks, get a website, and he did $15 million in sales. He netted $17.5 million off the $15 million in sales. Now, I hope you're laughing because that's impossible. Okay? And I'm just doing it for you to remember this, for the effect, to make you laugh. I hope you're laughing. But they backfill with an innuendo that isn't necessarily true. And we don't want that. Rumors within an organization are awesome as long as they're positive rumors. The cascading of positive rumors through an organization is great, just like the cascading of negative rumors through an organization is bad. So if you don't share with your team what you're doing and how you're doing, they often, and I think I'm going to be so bold as to tell you, rightfully so, assume the worst. And that's not what we want going on. That's not what we want out of the President United States. That's not what we want out of the pastor at our church. That's not what we want out of our spouse, a friend. We want a hot environment in our workplace. An honest, open and transparent A hot workplace. So share more that maybe you're comfortable with. Now. You don't have to share your salary. You don't have to share the exact profits of the company, but you can talk about gross margin. You can talk about how you're trying to cut costs. You can talk about the fact that because you're very bad at collecting receivables, you spent $23,000 in 2024 on your line of credit because you were bad at collecting receivables. There's nothing wrong with that. That helps people understand the why. And again, let's go back to one of the principal tenets of having this seasonal kickoff meeting. It's to get your team to engage and they get engaged and more and more engaged by understanding the why. So share more than you're comfortable with. Okay? And then lastly, debrief after the meeting, steal the format that you've seen us use it. Grow. For those of you that have attended, Start, Stop and Keep and make the Next one better. Normally, what Seth has me do at the end of the Grow meeting is I get up and I summarize everything in the meeting that we had. The big takeaways. I usually give a motivational quote or I just kind of tell a story. I'm fortunate. Most of this just kind of comes to me during the meeting and we do a nice wrap up. But then when we're done with that, we meet with our leadership team. We say, okay, what should we start? Stop and keep doing the Next time we do another kickoff meeting. Now, to really help you, let's go through the 2024 slides. Not all of them, but I wanted to share with you enough from what we did in our 2024 kickoff meeting to hopefully inspire you to either do a meeting for the first time or maybe to improve the one that you've got. So the first thing we do is we open up and we talk about our mission. And our mission is to enhance the beauty and value of every client's property while exceeding their expectations every step of the way. One of the things we do with the meeting, ladies and gentlemen, is we share all of our slides in English and in Spanish. So the Spanish is down below there. And again, it doesn't have to be terribly complicated, but we're going to start our meeting off with sharing that we talk about what the purpose of this kickoff meeting is. It's to get everyone's attention on what matters most. What does everyone need to focus on? I don't think safety and integrity should be a core value. So we're going to talk about that being a given. We're going to touch on our core values. We're going to get our team to help us and understand this should not, again, just be the owner talking, if possible.
What are the financial goals? Why should the team believe them? We always put up our sales goals, and we show the curve and we show the growth we've had in the last five years so that people can see, look, we're not just winging this. This is what we've done in the past. This is believable. We can do it. And then also a whole lot of what's in it for them? What is the bonus structure in place? What's in it for them? And then the last thing we're going to talk about is a rally cry. So let's go through that a little bit. When you do this kickoff meeting, you should constantly be telling stories of successful team members. I think that's critically important to what we're doing here. Giving them proof that there's a place for them in your wonderful organization and brag. It's one thing to say our mission statement, which is to create opportunities for our team to grow and succeed. It's a whole other thing. If you have examples of that and proof that they can point to it, it becomes believable. And I'm just going to kind of whip through these slides so you can see this. We have a rally cry every year. Last year, it was whatever it takes. We had our Graphic artists work on this. And you can see it's a football field with the core values out to the side. Leadership, teamwork, profitability, quality, whatever it takes. The sales goal that we had, you know, a little rally cry. An opportunity during this meeting to go over announcements, the welcome, the birthdays, the anniversaries, who got promoted, who won an award. Again, the bonus update. Look, this is a. An awesome opportunity to go through things. We do a slide on the financials. We show what our 2023 revenue goal is. We show what our 2024 revenue goal is. We did have a revenue miss in 2023. So we're talking about hot. We're going to be honest now. In 2024, we smashed our revenue goal. So it was a good thing. We were down in 2023 where we wanted to be. We were still up in 2024. We were up 42%. We really smashed it. But again, hot, honest, open, transparent. And we're looking through this stuff. We're sharing financials, we're sharing information, we're going through it. We talked about how land keeping commercial exceeded gold. We had a little rally cry there and some clapping. We talked about the snow square footage that we're seeking. We're also weaving in another little narrative. We have, you see off to the right side there. Trust the process, keep it simple, prioritize and execute. Those are things that are within this. And then the sales department, they have an opportunity. So our director of sales comes up. What went well last year? What do we want to work on this year? What are the goals? And we do this for admin, for sales operations and leadership. Each department head comes up and talks about it. A real simple thing. Seth had a quote that he shared. The fast pace we've seen so far is the slowest pace we'll see going forward. And again, we put that in Spanish so everybody can see this. We ask ourselves, do we have a growth mindset? We're pushing on our people. We. We got to get them to understand again. This is a chance. We have everyone together to rally, to get excited, to be really clear about expectations and what it takes to grow. And we told our team that things don't get easier, we get better. All right, that's something you may want to steal from us and a narrative that you want to push. And these things, they just go on. Look, at the end of the day, folks, this meeting is a wonderful opportunity for you to get across what matters most in your company. At our company, we have non negotiables. There's eight of them. We went over those at the end of this meeting and we said point blank, if you want to be successful at Grunder Landscaping Company, you got to understand what is expected of you. And we wrap the meeting up like that. And that's how it goes, folks. I have to say, the amount of sharing that we do here on the Grow show is incredible. The living laboratory that we have here, Grunder Landscaping, from which we take our lessons and share them with you here on the Grow Show Powered by Stihl. It's amazing. I'm very proud of what we're doing. I hope we've helped you in a way. And I'm going to be so bold to tell you that if you love the Grow show, you'll be completely blown away with Grow in a couple weeks. 02-24-2526 Columbus, Ohio Jason Cromley's Hidden Creek Landscaping is going to be the tour host. We're going to get a firsthand confidential view at their operation. Our agenda is incredible. We're a couple weeks out as this podcast is airing today. We're what are you waiting for? Come see me. Hopefully it's not sold out by the time this podcast airs because I'm recording it a couple weeks ahead of its release date. But come on and see us in Columbus. Direct flights from all over the country and Canada as well. We're going to have a blast. Be there, folks. It's a great learning experience. Well, that's going to do it for this week's edition of the Grow Show Powered by Stihl. 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, okay. And text that episode to a friend, a colleague, or someone else that's a landscaper that you know that'll help us grow the show and create more fans for the Grow Show Powered by Stihl. Thanks for joining us this week on the Grow Show. We'll see you next week.
[00:17:22] Speaker A: Thank you for listening to this episode of the Grow Show. Be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode and head to growgroupinc.com for more information and resources to grow your landscaping business. A special thanks to the folks at Stihl, whose support makes this podcast possible and whose reliable handheld power equipment makes our jobs easier daily. We'll talk to you next week.
