Landscape Business Owner,
There’s a troubling trend growing inside landscape companies. A few owners are giving up and shutting their doors! Why?
Finding employees is tougher than ever! In fact, some think it is impossible to find affordable, dependable help these days. Rather than keep trying…some are just throwing in the towel. That’s too bad.
There are a few creative ways to find good help. More on this in a minute.
First…
According to the latest report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), our national unemployment rate stands at 3.6%. We are at the lowest unemployment rate in 50 years. Which implies…96.4% of willing workers already have a job. Statistically, that’s most people! No wonder it’s hard to find help!
But wait just a minute!
We get this other data… employees are quitting their jobs at record numbers each month! The quit rate is running roughly 3% per month! This implies that 36% of the workforce will change jobs in a 12 month period. That’s a lot of turnover!
Employee resignations… PLUS the frustration of finding NEW landscape employees this Spring is driving a few employers to reconsider their pursuit of the American Dream of business ownership.
The problem has gotten so bad for a few company owners, they are calling it quits.
We know this first hand because we take calls from business owners who have given up. In six cases over the past 60 days, we were able to help the business owner exit as comfortably as possible by purchasing their trucks or equipment. (If you are considering quitting and want to sell your equipment, go here and follow the instructions.)
If they aren’t out-right quitting, they are downsizing their company… just because they can’t find enough people to handle the workload. That’s not good. Our communities need us!
We’ll be the first to admit, finding, recruiting, hiring and retaining employees is the toughest job in the USA (today). But just because the job is hard, that doesn’t mean it can’t be done.
Here’s an often overlooked statistic lawn and landscape business owners need to think about… The BLS employment report is very clear. The unemployment rate for teenagers in the USA is currently 10%. That’s double digit unemployment!
So, there’s something you need to consider in 2022:
Recruit and hire teenagers!
Now wait…
Before you start telling me all the reasons this idea would NOT work in your company, we’d like to remind you that these are unique times. The only way to win in the game of business is to outthink or outlearn your competition.
We admit, hiring teenagers creates a few challenges of its own, but it’s the ONLY demographic category of the workforce population with a 10% unemployment rate. If you’re out shopping for “experienced” landscape employees, forget about it!
The only way to find those guys and gals is to poach them from another company OR buyout another company to get their employees on your team. These are the most expensive ways to get help. Yes, these strategies work for some… But that’s not a strategy I’d recommend.
The one GOOD thing the Covert 19 pandemic did was force our team to enhance and expand our teenager recruiting system (AKA our Internship Program or AKA our Work Based Learning Initiative).
We hired 12 teenagers to work PART TIME around their school commitments. We teamed them up with adults. We encouraged them. We trained them…without any expectation of long term employment.
Twelve months after we started, 5 of the 12 found their way into high-paying full time jobs in our company.
If you are open to the idea of enhancing your employee recruiting system take a look at what we have done. We created two videos that explain the program to our target audiences. By the way, the target audiences we needed to educate about our program include:
- Teenagers
- Teenager’s parents
- Work based learning teachers/counselors
It’s true. We’ve been sharing our success story about our program for a few months now. We share this story because we know that many business owners are very frustrated today with their employee recruiting efforts. We share this story because we know many business owners are skeptical about hiring teenagers. We share this story because we are very proud of the results!
So perhaps it’s time that YOU take a careful look at the data. Understand that it’s going to be a lot easier for you to find more affordable – unemployed teenagers – than the super-expensive poaching “experienced help” from the competition strategy.
We recommend that you:
- Watch these two videos here
- Read about the teenwork challenge we created
- Copy or adapt our incentive based scholarship program
- Lower your cost for employees as you grow your business using an Internship strategy
And after you do these things…
Hit reply and let me know what you think.
We look forward to hearing of your success!
Tony Bass, founder
866-923-0027
PS – One overlooked and often misunderstood part of recruiting employees is figuring out how to target the right employment prospects. We learned that our website needed a special web page to target the teenagers. You can review everything we published for our target audiences by clicking here to watch the videos, read the job offers and download the scholarship program.
One last thing…
When you’re ready…
There are three ways we can help you enhance your systems for finding, recruiting, hiring and retaining super star employees.
- Purchase a copy of our little-known book titled 50 Ways to Find, Recruit, Hire and Retain Super Star Employees. The print book comes with an audio (4) CD set read by the author. Yes, there really are 50 unique ways to enhance your employee systems and we share the details, the scripts, the job offers and little-known government programs to help you get big-time tax credits for hiring certain workers. Click here to purchase.
- Get immediate digital access to The Automatic Hiring Machine training program. You can learn the 11-steps to build a recruiting system that automatically sorts, sifts and selects the very best employee prospects from the lazy and unreliable duds. Click here to order online and get started this weekend.
- You can hire us to help you build your very own Automatic Hiring Machine. If you are super-busy and want to move forward quickly, we can help. Please understand that we reserve the right to limit our services via our non-competitive exclusion zone in some markets. Order the Automatic Hiring Machine implementation service by clicking here.
