How to Recruit Great Employees (and Keep Them!)

When you are starting your own landscaping business, a key consideration is recruiting and retaining amazing employees. The ability to grow, manage, and develop a team is crucial for your company and it starts with you. Strong leadership, good management, and an overall positive culture all work together to attract great workers and entice them to stay.

In our experience with franchisees from diverse backgrounds all over the country, we have found that the following things continue to work for recruiting and retaining employees:

• Treating employees like you treat your customers
• Sharing your company vision
• Creating a positive and safe work environment
• Providing employees with the training and tools they need to be successful
• Caring for employees and improving their lives and communities

Recruiting Employees

Business owners cannot build and grow large-scale businesses by themselves. You need employees surrounding you to help spread out the workload, share knowledge, and serve a wider client base. Finding quality employees who are willing to work hard is an important part of starting your own landscaping business.

Treat Employees Like You Treat Customers

When you are scouting for customers, you emphasize the quality of your brand and the services you offer. You should use the same techniques in recruiting your employees. Show them that you and your company care about your employees, and then continue to prove that to them throughout the hiring, training, and working process.

The bottom line: Focusing on customers and employees alike makes for a stronger business.

Retaining Employees

Businesses of all sizes, and in every industry, have to work hard to retain employees. We don’t need to tell you how expensive and time consuming it can be to hire and train new workers, so retention is key to keeping your business running smoothly. Whether you are starting your own landscaping business or joining forces with a franchise, these tips will help you keep the great employees you hire.

Share Your Vision

As the owner, you have a vision for your company: Its growth, its reputation, and its values are all things you have carefully thought out. Share that vision with your employees! Even better, make them part of it. Show them how they can impact the company overall and work with them to create your vision.

Create a Culture

If you have spent any time as a landscaper, you know that this job requires hard work. It is hot, the equipment can be heavy, and the manual labor is intensive. As a boss, you cannot alleviate this hard work, but you can build a company culture that shows your employees that they are valued. Make sure each employee knows that they are more than a hired drone; instead, they are an essential part of the team.

Provide the Tools

Giving your employees the tools they need to thrive in their jobs is essential to keeping them around. Employees who are empowered to do their job well and own the services they provide are generally happier and more likely to stick around. Although equipment like lawn mowers, shovels, and trucks are important, the key tool you can give your employees is proper training.

In a labor driven business like landscaping, your infrastructure is what keeps your business sustainable and growing. As one of the major parts of your infrastructure, training can have a big impact on your employee retention.

Hint: If you join U.S. Lawns as a franchisee (instead of starting your own landscaping business) you will benefit from our thorough and comprehensive training program. We take our job as trainers seriously. In preparing our franchisees, we train them on training so they can pass their knowledge onto their employees. We also include online training modules and a training manual for your employees. Further, we launched The Best Place to Work initiative, which has helped us empower our franchise owners to train, coach, and manage their teams.

Care for Employees

It is no secret that happy employees stay at their jobs. Take care of your employees and they will take care of you. Competitive pay is only the beginning. The best part of owning a landscaping business is that it leaves a larger impact. Your employees help your business grow. Your company improves the community by creating beautiful and functional outdoor spaces. And you help your employees support their families and the people who surround them, which is the biggest success.

At U.S. Lawns, we believe in providing an amazing experience for customers, franchisees, and employees equally. It is important to us that we are the best place to work. If you’ve been thinking about starting your own landscaping business, start thinking about investing in a U.S. Lawns franchise. You can learn more about our opportunity here.