Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Welcome to the Grow Show Powered By Stihl. The Grow show is brought to you by Marty Grinder's Grow Group, where we specialize in teaching landscaping companies how to clarify their platform, grow their people, build their processes, and realize profits. Everything we teach is grounded in real experience. Our team is actively involved in the day to day operations of Southwest Ohio's Grunder Landscaping Company. New episodes of the Grow show are released weekly on Wednesdays. 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 Co. And the Grow Group. Thanks for downloading the Grow Show Powered by Stihl. Today we're going to talk about training the trainers. 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. The Grow show is the greatest thing since training. Training is an investment, not an expense, folks. And at this time of year, that's why we're going to spend some time talking about training the trainer. We have added four points to our bottom line in the last seven years by spending more time on training. So I hope that motivates you to do more of that this month as we talk about training the trainer. Now, on to this week's edition of the Grow Show Powered by Stihl. Training the Trainer. Teaching your crews the skills that they need to know. This is going to be kind of a quick addition that you can listen to. Maybe you're out on a mower, maybe you're driving in your truck from a job to job and you're thinking, well, Marty, I don't have time for training. I can't do that. Ain't got. Ain't nobody got time for that. Well, au contraire, brothers and sisters. I think you need to make time for it.
One of the things that's really important with training, I think, is, is to make sure people understand where the company's going because we're not just training for the heck of it. So when we're talking about training, when I recently did a Train the Trainer session for my team, the first thing we opened up with was our vision statement, okay? And our vision is to be recognized as leaders and as a growing company that provides opportunities for our team. That's our vision. That's our Super Bowl. That's our ideal state. That's where we aspire to go. Our mission statement is to create opportunities for our team to grow and succeed by Enhancing the beauty and value of every client's property while exceeding their expectations every step of the way. That's what we're going to do on a daily basis. The vision is where we're going. The mission is how we're going to get there. And then the core values, quality leadership, teamwork and profitability. The beliefs and the behaviors that must be present in the organization to win. So I think it's very, very important that you're always reorienting your compass. Where are we going, how are we going to get there? And what are the beliefs and the behaviors that we're going to use along the road to get there? We have eight non negotiables. I don't want to get into the specific details of our non negotiables because we kind of feel like those are us and we don't really want to share them. But I'll just share like a brief overlay. So we have eight of them. The first one is take initiative. I think you can figure out what that means. The second one is to have a positive attitude. I think you can figure out what that one is. The third one is to communicate effectively. The the fourth one is to be accountable. Okay, you follow me? The fifth one is to have a growth mindset. The sixth one is manage your time. That's very, very important in a business that sells time. Number seven, uphold the grunder level of professionalism. And number eight, expect continuous improvement. We frame all of our meetings so when we start out, a train the trainer or a sales meeting or any of that, we're always talking about our vision, our mission and our core values. And we're constantly reinforcing the eight non negotiables behaviors that have to be present in your organization. We're not going to waver on these. And the non negotiables were ones that the team came up with. I didn't come up with them. So having that as a framework to focus here on what we should train, the next thing I want to talk to you about is why we train and if we think about why we train. And this is what you should be doing with your trainers. They're group leaders in our companies, your other managers. We get asked all the time, hey, how do you find team leaders or salespeople? You're going to have a really hard time finding team leaders and it's going to be hard to find salespeople that are going to come in and be able to sell. You're going to have to make them. So you got to have Some people on your team that are excited and capable of training. And we want to create more leaders. You know, when we think about what the goal is of an organization is to create more leaders, not followers. We want to be creating more people that can take a crew out and get work done, that can go out and sell work on their own, that can handle a particular responsibility in the company with little or no input. So we want to be creating more leaders. That's why we train. We want to be creating opportunities for our team to grow and succeed. My buddy Mike, Rory, you've heard me say this numerous times. I want to attribute this quote to him again, he said, marty, the best reason to grow a company is you have so many good people, they're pushing you and if you don't create opportunities, you're going to quit and they're going to go look for another opportunity. So we train to create more opportunities so we can do more work management and promotion opportunities. Right? Those are very, very important. So basically, three specific reasons why we train to create more leaders, to create opportunities for our team and to have people on our team that, that can get promoted, that can do more things and go do things. How we train. There's a mindset there. You train from the very first day they start there. They should come into your company realizing this is different. While we appreciate the fact that you have ways that you did things at your other company, we have a certain way of doing things ourselves. And you got to do them that way. You got to do them the grunder way. And one of the things I always tell our managers and our leaders that in the train to trainer sessions, just picture for a moment that your little kid brother, your little sister, your mom.
Picture somebody that you're emotionally attached to, gets a job at your company. How would you want them treated from the day they got there till the end of their first day through their duration? Wouldn't you want them to be trained? Wouldn't you want them for safety reasons to be shown how to do things? Wouldn't there be some extra special concern you'd want to put forward? I know with our H2B workers, we encourage them to recommend family members to come in on an H2B visa because we know the other family members will help them succeed. Now, we try to not put them on cruise together, but they'll be telling them on their way up from Mexico or El Salvador, this is how they do things. This is what you're going to want to do. You're going to want to learn English this is how you hook up the truck. And again, we're training all that stuff. But man, if you get people in the mindset that we care about one another and we're going to teach them how to train better, I think good things can come from that. So we talked about how we set up a meeting. We talked about the non negotiables, we talked, we talked about why we train, giving people reasons for why, and we talked about how. Let's talk about the steps to train. Number one, in everything that you do, you should be focusing on safety. Everything that should always be number one, focusing on safety. Number two, having patience, being mindful and being patient with people. I know my son, when he worked here, his first day, when he worked here, he was in high school and he was working up in the healing area trying to dig some plants out and somebody told him to go get a nursery spade and he came back with a round point shovel. My own son, now, he was only 16, but my own son didn't even know what a nursery spade was. We got to be patient, okay? We have people coming from Mexico and other areas that have never done this work. They've never run a blower, possibly they've never run a weed eater as possible. We got to be patient. You weren't that good when you started either. So be patient, be detailed, follow the SOP. There's a reason we put the SOPs together and that's for people to use them, right? We don't just go and wing it. We have an SOP that we follow. One of the things we learned early on, not early on, I guess I would say late on about SOPs was we started doing them with videos and we quit with PDFs. Videos were just a lot better. To do that, we use Greenius, which is a wonderful training tool that you should look at. Clarity. You got to be really clear about what you're doing. You got to tell somebody if you're teaching about installing trees, you got to tell them why. We're talking today about planting trees. We don't want to go back and replace trees. It's costly. We don't want a client to be unhappy with a dead plant. And maybe most importantly, we don't want you to hurt your back or get hurt planting a tree. So this is how we're going to go through these steps. So be really, really clear about what you're doing and why you're doing it. Repetition, I think this is something we mess up.
If you taught last week on proper chainsaw Safety. And this week is proper trees. And next week is seeding bare spots, applying herbicide and using a backpack blower. When you do the chainsaw training, when you're done, ask everybody for takeaways. When you go the next week to talk about trees, say before we talk about trees, what were the three most important takeaways from chainsaw safety last month? When you're done training trees, you're going to say next week we're going to talk about bare spots, blowing leaves, so on, so forth. This is what we're going to focus on. We're always building on one another. We're always moving those forward. I would look for opportunities to train. I would look at your workers comp numbers. I would see where you've had injuries. There's a training opportunity. I will tell you three, four years ago, for three years in a row, our number one workers comp claim was was poison ivy. So guess what we did a ton of training on. We've got all kinds of experts now on what poison ivy looks like. We've got the skin wash and all that now in the trucks. It's all clear. We're very clear on that. We talk a lot about that. Where did you have an injury? Where did you have a call back? Where were clients upset? Where did equipment get damaged? Safety concerns, any of that? Look at, look back through. So we're not repeating that again. What kind of company would you want to work for? One that focuses on safety or one that doesn't give a darn? What kind of company would you want to hire to work in your own yard? A safe one or an unsafe one? So we got to be clear. We got to be on the repetition. We got to constantly be talking about this. We got to be looking for opportunities. And then I have three more things to talk about here before we wrap up this one on Train the trainers on the grow show Powered by Stihl. I think the single most important thing that you can do to get more of your people on your team doing what you want, need them to do is praise. We don't do that enough. And I think in the hustle and bustle of spring and the hundred days of victory that we're working on, we fail to realize the power of praise. There is so much good going on around you right now. Make sure you slow down long enough to talk about it with your team. And the most powerful of all praise is third party praise. And third party praise is. Hey Jimmy, I just wanted to tell you was talking to Marty. He said he drove by your job, the Wise residence, the cleanup. He said it was fantastic. And you know, that guy's kind of grumpy. He doesn't give out a lot of compliments. So good job. Those are so powerful. I even love to hear it. Hey, I wanted to let you know, Jose, out on the job, said that design you did was awesome. It turned out right. Look at the pictures. Marty, man, did you do a good job with that. We all do that. So again, safety should always be number one. Should we always be focused on safety and have patience with your new people. Work with them, all right? You can't be firing them because they didn't catch on right away. Several years ago, we had a young man working for us, Zach. If you would have watched him at the end of his first week on a mower. He was terrible. And we. And he was my neighbor's kid to boot. We contemplating getting rid of him. We kept working with him. By the end of the year, he's one of the best doggone workers we ever had. In the summer. His lines were straight. He grasped everything. He was driving the truck and the trailer. He was doing great. I still see him. I don't think he's saying this to make me feel good, but Zach still says, Mr. Grunder, I love that summer. That was one of the fondest memories of my life. All those things you taught me, that summer your team taught me was a great thing. It was awesome. So be mindful of that. Be mindful of being patient. Be detailed. Follow those standard operating procedures. Look for videos. There's a lot of good things, folks we can do with our cell phones and we can shoot videos with those that make a difference.
Clarity. Be really clear about what you're teaching. Don't ramble on. We do not need to do a half hour session on seeding bare spots. We probably should do a half hour session on planting trees. We probably should do a half hour session on chainsaws safety where we let people try things out without the chains on the chainsaw. When you're training them, by the way, repetition. Look for ways to bring up last week's and go over and over again. Look for opportunities. Did you have an accident? Was a client? Was a client upset? Could that be a train opportunity? Is there a shout out that something good happened that you could talk about? Did you know a couple years ago, I remember this was several years ago, our guys were driving down the road and they noticed this lady pulled off the road. She was frantic. Her little boy was choking on a piece of hard candy. And our employee did the Heimlich maneuver on the kid and seemingly saved his life. Okay. Boy, that was something to talk about, right? So look for opportunities. Look for opportunities to praise the third party. Praise. All right. And be mindful of all this stuff. So I hope in a small way I helped you see some ways you can train. Think about training your trainers. I think sometimes we don't delegate that accordingly. We just kind of let people freelance it. I think there's some good ways to do that. Also, if you go out on YouTube, I found all kinds of stuff that you can help train. If you're a member of the national association of Landscape Professionals, they have wonderful training opportunities. I highly recommend you join them for the advocacy and the training things they have there. We have a lot of stuff that we'll be rolling out. You've got greeniest to rely on. There's all kinds of ways to do that, folks. Well, that's going to do it for this week's edition of the Grow Show. I hope in a small way we helped you. And hey, would you do us a favor? Take out your cell phone right now and text this episode to a friend, a colleague and other landscape professionals that helps more success minded landscape professionals find us. Really appreciate you joining us here today on the Grow Show. We'll talk to you next week.
[00:14:14] Speaker A: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Grow Show. A special thanks to the folks at Stihl whose support makes this podcast possible and whose outdoor power equipment makes our jobs easier every day. Remember to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And head to growgroupinc.com to learn more about our other offerings or to find more information to help your landscaping business. We'll talk to you next week.
