The Green Talent Playbook With Jay Worth of Down to Earth

Rob Murray (00:29): All right, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the IM Landscape Growth Podcast. We have a returning guest, Jay Worth. Jay, thank you so much for doing this.

Jay Worth (00:37): Hey, thanks for having me back, and pretty quickly too. I think I struck a nerve or something.

Rob Murray (00:43): Well, it’s just something everybody’s got to hear about. We hear it time and time again. Jay’s coming back on the show today in a bit of a different role, from a speaker and author perspective. The book he wrote, and has been speaking about as he travels to conferences, is called The Green Talent Playbook: Recruiting and Retaining the Best in the Lawn Care, Tree Care, and Landscaping Industries. So many people say there’s nobody out there to recruit, but all the most successful clients we have, and the people we speak to, don’t have any staffing issues. I feel like you nailed it with this book. People can read it and understand what it takes to recruit folks and keep them. So what made you decide to write it?

Jay Worth (01:27): If I have to hear one more person tell on themselves by saying “nobody wants to work anymore,” I might just go absolutely bananas. I live in Florida now, so it’ll be one of those Florida Man headlines: “Florida Man Arrested at Trade Show.” I just can’t get my head around it.

It’s not to say that some markets aren’t competitive. They are. And it’s not to say that recruiting and retaining is easy. You have to put work into it. But to your point, the companies you have as clients that are the most successful have figured out a lot of the keys to this, and they have very little problem with it. Not because they’re able to pay more and throw money at the best people. Look, the highest paying job I’ve ever had in my life, I did not last very long at. It was not a good situation. Retention was a problem, and at that company, to this day, it still is.

It’s not just about the money. If it was just about the money, everyone could fix this problem with a capital infusion. There’s more to it than that. So I sat back and looked at the industry, at the things I think we do well and the things I don’t think we do well, and I identified the things I think we’re really bad at as an industry and how we address those. So I wrote a book on it. I’ll be speaking at a few conferences this year, including NALP’s Elevate, on how you stop the bleed: how you recruit really high quality talent and keep them. I’ve identified eight keys, or pillars, that I think are really valuable.

Rob Murray (03:20): Okay, we’re going to dive into a couple of those today. But before we do, there’s something that struck me personally many moons ago. I was reading The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership by John C. Maxwell. Great read. If anybody hasn’t had a chance, pick it up. There was the law of the mirror, and it was essentially this: everything people do in your company is happening for one of two reasons. Either you let it happen and settle for it, or you model it.

And I was like, “F***. It’s all my fault.” We had people publicly saying they watch YouTube channels and wasting time in front of each other, and I’m just like, “What is happening?” People were doing all this stupid s***, and I was freaking out. Then I realized it was all my fault. Something clicked for me at that time in my life: I’ve got to be a leader that’s worth following. So before we get into these pillars, I’m curious. Across your work, did you see leadership make a big difference here?

Jay Worth (04:35): Absolutely. I’ve had three leaders, three bosses in this industry, who stand out. I might have talked about one of them last time. His name is Jerry Link. He ran a company called Green Visions Irrigation and Landscaping, based in Northern Virginia, in Sterling or somewhere around there. Then there’s Jason Holder, who I worked for at Scotts Lawn Service. He’s the one who hired me into the industry. He saw my resume, which was all over the place, and said, “I think you’re looking for a place. I think I’ve got it for you.” He really developed me and built into me. The other one was a guy named Bob Kandratavich. He was a sales manager at a large landscape company I worked for called Tomlinson Bomberger in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

The thing that was key across all three of those guys is that they all expected a lot, but at the bottom line, they were all invested in the people who worked for them. I know it’s a platitude: nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care.

Rob Murray (05:38): Cliché to say, not cliché to do.

Jay Worth (05:40): But when people feel cared for as a whole person, they’ll follow you anywhere. I would follow those guys to the moon without a helmet. If Bob picked up the phone and said, “Hey Jay, we’re getting on a rocket ship right now. Are you with me?” I’d say, “Bob, let’s go.” I would.

But I’ve also seen the converse of this. I worked at a company one time where the owner had to approve every single thing that went out the door. Another guy and I were trying to put together a proposal to get in front of him for approval. He walked in the room, asked one question, found the one thing we’d missed, blew it up, and said, “You’re not ready for this. Call me when you’re ready,” and walked out. About twenty minutes later we had it fixed, called him back, and he said, “It’s too late. I’m gone for the day now.”

The COO, a woman who had worked for him for maybe ten years, had her office right next to where all this was happening. She walked out and said, “I don’t know why you’re beating your head against the wall.” I said, “What do you mean?” She said, “It’s just about timing. You just caught him in a bad mood.” How is that a way to run a business?

Rob Murray (06:51): Is there a schedule I need to know about?

Jay Worth (06:53): Right? So what does that do to morale? What does that do to your efficiency as a company, when everything revolves around whether it’s sunshine and daisies in your head? So yes, absolutely, these things rise and fall on the individual leader. If you can’t trust your people enough to let go of some of that control, or you can’t create the systems to standardize the outcomes you want, you’re always going to have these problems.

Rob Murray (07:20): Love that. So there are eight pillars. We can’t give away the whole book, and we’ve got the better part of half an hour. Where do you want to start?

Jay Worth (07:30): I don’t care if I give away the whole book. I want people to have it. But we can’t talk about all eight, so I’ll tell you what they are, and you can pick the ones you want to dive into. Does that work?

Rob Murray (07:50): Yeah, okay, cool.

Jay Worth (07:52): Creating a clear career path. Explaining the purpose behind why you do what you do. Company culture. Work-life harmony. I heard you on a podcast with Mark Sedgley, and I know you’re going to disagree with me a little on this one, so we won’t call it balance, we’ll call it harmony. Exceptional onboarding. Pay and benefits. Creating an ideal candidate profile from which you can recruit. And candidate experience.

Rob Murray (08:20): Epic. Well, culture is something I think is misused, overused, or not used. It’s kind of a slippery term.

Jay Worth (08:26): It’s a buzzword.

Rob Murray (08:28): A lot of people can’t really put teeth into it, and it’s a personal passion of mine. So maybe start here: if I’m listening to this episode and I think my culture is fine, but maybe there’s some stuff happening that I don’t like, what are some common symptoms you see in cultures that are a little bit off?

Jay Worth (08:56): Blame is one of them. People blaming one another, people shifting blame, people afraid to take accountability for anything. Lots of finger pointing. Here’s one that’s going to strike a nerve with somebody, I’m sure: when you tolerate bad behavior from someone in a public-facing role or in your C-suite, because they’re a high performer, and that behavior runs counter to what you say your company stands for, just because they produce, whether in operations, sales, or wherever, that’s a culture killer.

I had a teammate I lost. He got poached by another company in a different industry. He had told me he was looking for a different career trajectory, so we built a plan around that and worked him toward it. But in his exit interview, he told HR, and I know because he told me and my office is next to HR, “It was really easy for me to leave, because our company values say this, but we tolerated this behavior from this guy.” Specifically.

Rob Murray (09:59): Repetitively.

Jay Worth (10:00): Those things all kill your culture. Now, I want to say it’s Harvard Business Review, which, by the way, if you’re not subscribed to HBR, go do that. I love HBR.

Rob Murray (10:09): That’s a no-brainer.

Jay Worth (10:11): For sure. Culture is the sum of what is encouraged or discouraged, permitted or frowned upon in your company.

So whoever’s listening to this, think about your day to day. If you’re the owner, the manager, or even a crew leader: what do you tolerate? What do you encourage? What do you just let go by because it’s easier than picking a fight about it or taking a stand? You are developing that culture on your team and in your company. So you have to get crystal clear about what you want the rooms you walk into to look like.

For example, one of the things our CEO encourages at a leadership level is that the gloves are off. If we can’t have hard conversations with each other, there’s no point in us meeting. That should have been an email.

Rob Murray (11:09): Right.

Jay Worth (11:10): And I like that. But he has to remind the team of it almost every meeting, because it’s important to him. What are you reminding your team of constantly? What are you policing? Or are you letting one person get by with something you’re not letting another teammate get by with? Then you’re creating the perception of favoritism. You have to be crystal clear about what you want that room to look like, and then what you need to encourage or discourage to get there.

Rob Murray (11:43): That’s cool, man. We wanted to encourage failure. If everybody always has to ask, “Can I do this thing?” then we all just slow down. People were scared to make the wrong decision. So we took our weekly wins huddle and made it a weekly fails huddle.

Jay Worth (12:05): Nice.

Rob Murray (12:06): I had to start it by telling them how I’d screwed up. Paul and I did a bunch of presentations on the biggest mistakes we ever made. Big, big mistakes. Then we came up with stories about mistakes other team members had made in the past and said, “You know what? Chalk it up. It’s training. People make mistakes. It’s all good.” It worked a little at first, but once the team grabbed it, they started sharing it with new recruits. Now there’s this storytelling that happens from the team to new team members, so we don’t have to do the weekly fails thing all the time to keep it front and center.

I think it’s really cool the way you’re framing that. One thing you implied is that culture exists no matter what. Whether you shape it with crystal clarity or you don’t, culture will exist. So outside of reinforcement, what practices are you seeing work for building culture with intention?

Jay Worth (12:57): I think it has to start with what you want. One of my favorite interviews when I was hosting the Green Industry Perspectives podcast was Amy Nakai. She’s the owner of Rooted Tree Specialists in Omaha, and she said, “It’s always the right time to do the right thing.” No matter where you are, it’s always the right time to do the right thing.

For her, that means doing emergency tree work at 3 a.m. and then letting her crews have the next two days off if they’ve worked 40 hours. It means building playgrounds in her community, because she wants a company that is community centric. So I think you have to look five years down the road, or six months down the road, and ask what you want the company to be. Then you have to be constantly and relentlessly vigilant in stewarding your culture. There isn’t an interaction in your company that isn’t impacting your culture. Anytime two people get together, culture is forming, whether you’re in that room or not.

So I think the main place to start is asking: a year from now, what type of company do I want? And it all dovetails. What type of person do I want to recruit? What does that person value? And how do I create the place that person wants to work?

Rob Murray (14:20): That’s great. Reverse engineering, right?

Jay Worth (14:23): Absolutely. You do this all the time.

Rob Murray (14:24): The way you were describing it, it’s almost like writing your company’s eulogy as if it’s going to die in five years. Then you ask: do we live up to that? Is what I wrote aspirational, or is it what we are today? And what do we need to change to become the thing I want to write about in five years?

Jay Worth (14:44): Yeah, and maybe you are there. Some of your clients are. In that case, you have to keep stewarding it. You have to keep defending it vigorously.

Rob Murray (14:55): Nicole Downer from Downer Brothers talked about how they had a really strong culture until they got to about six or seven million. As they blew past that toward ten, it unraveled a little, because the same practices didn’t work. The team was getting so big, and they weren’t around everybody. So they had to come back to it, figure out how to systemize it, and bring intention to it across a larger team. To your point, stewardship is like raising kids. As they grow up, there are different things to deal with. Babies, toddlers, kindergartners all need different things, and we have to evolve as they grow, just like our companies.

Jay Worth (15:33): Absolutely. Not only that, if you don’t have core values, I’d encourage you to create them. I’m not going to walk people through core values right now. I’m sure somebody else is more qualified to do that. But I worked at a company one time where the core value was “do the right thing,” and what was great is that they gave an example of what that looks like: when you’re on the mower and it throws a rock into someone’s window, you should be the one calling me to tell me, not the client. You’re not in trouble if I hear it from you. You are in trouble if I hear it from the client.

Rob Murray (16:16): Great. That’s clear.

Jay Worth (16:19): It’s really clear, and that’s scalable. Maybe those core values change as your company grows, as you add people with different ideas, or as the community you serve changes. Maybe you need to update them, and that’s okay. But you have to have them, because you need something to work toward as an organization. This is who we aspire to become. Maybe we’ll get there, maybe we’ll never get there, but we’re always going to keep working toward it. Because if we’re better than we were yesterday, then we’re more likely to be the place these high achieving people want to come work.

Rob Murray (17:07): I love that, man.

Jay Worth (17:14): “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” was a quote I found doing research for this, and I love that.

Rob Murray (17:19): I think there’s a book on that one. But I’d debate it. Good culture with bad strategy, there’s not a lot of growth. Great strategy with bad culture, probably hard growth. Put the two together, and it’s game over. If you look at the actual definition of a bacterial culture, core values are almost like the petri dish and the environment you create inside it. It’s either going to rot and go moldy, or it’s going to get some light and water and maybe grow into something beautiful.

Jay Worth (17:59): A hundred percent. And tending to it constantly is how you prevent it from getting stale and moldy and gross.

Rob Murray (18:09): Exactly. All right, let’s move on. Not to say that wasn’t tactical. I think you’re in rare air when you can give people tactical nuggets on culture, and you did that. Let’s get into recruiting. I thought I just put ads up on Indeed and get a bunch of employees. That’s how it works, right?

Jay Worth (18:30): I love when someone says, “I want anyone to come work here.” Look, I love my father. He’s got a lot of redeeming qualities. But at this point in his life, he’s in his seventies, he has a bad back, and he moves like a turtle. You do not want him to come work for you.

Rob Murray (18:49): Right. Good dude, though.

Jay Worth (18:51): Good dude. Great for the culture. He’s great with people. He’d be a great account manager, but even so, you don’t want him as an account manager, because he’d take an hour to walk the site. You don’t want anyone and everyone to come work for you. So you have to drill down into a candidate profile.

There are a couple of ways to do this. One can be aspirational: who do we want working here? Get really clear on things like age range, education level, interests outside of work, what social media platforms they use, what music they listen to, and what their hobbies are. Once you understand the person you want to attract, you can craft messaging that draws them in, just like marketing.

Rob Murray (19:37): The parallels don’t stop.

Jay Worth (19:42): Never. The other thing you can do, if you say, “I don’t have the imagination to do that,” is hire someone like Rob and his team to help you. Or look at who you have on your team right now and say, “I wish I had five of them.” Find three people in your company you wish you had ten more of, people who’d have you absolutely soaring. Then find the commonalities. What are their age ranges? What are their experience levels? How coachable were they when it came to training? How did you find them in the first place?

Then you create a profile based on that. The larger your company is, the easier it is to do, because you’re more likely to have some rock stars on the team. The one caution I’d give is that the things that got you to where you are aren’t necessarily the things that get you to the next level. So that exercise works to a point.

Rob Murray (20:45): It’s interesting you bring that up. I know the first level of hiring is hiring people who are good at things you’re not. Then when growth really takes hold, you’ve got to hire people who are good at what you do well and let them do it without looking over their shoulder.

Jay Worth (21:01): A hundred percent.

Rob Murray (21:02): I think this is a really big problem successful entrepreneurs run into. They’re great at sales, so they hire a salesperson, and that person is never as good as them. They get frustrated watching them fumble a discovery call or an estimate, and they can’t get out of their own way. How do you help people with that?

Jay Worth (21:25): I don’t know that I’m a licensed therapist. I’m only a little bit tongue in cheek there. If you’re the founder Rob just described, and you’re listening to this thinking, “That’s me,” being aware that you’re doing it means you’re probably 80% of the way there.

Rob Murray (21:51): You’re on the right track.

Jay Worth (21:53): If you’re not self-aware enough to see it, here’s a test: if you’ve had five sales directors and none of them worked out, the problem’s not them.

Rob Murray (22:04): If you meet everybody in a day and they’re all jerks, maybe it’s you.

Jay Worth (22:09): Exactly. The problem is not them. But if you’re not self-aware enough to realize that, I can’t help you. No one can help you. You have to figure it out for yourself. You have to have a come-to-Jesus moment with the person in the mirror and figure out what’s going on.

Rob Murray (22:25): And if you’re in a position where you’re maybe not aware, there are a couple of mindsets that are real tells. “No one can do this like me. No one can do it as well as I can.” What an egocentric, bananas belief. “I’m the best in the world at this, and nobody can be as good as me.” That was me six years ago, by the way. I’m not innocent here.

Jay Worth (22:59): Speaking from experience. You’re the licensed therapist, Rob. Go ahead, break it down for us.

Rob Murray (23:04): Another one: “There are no good people out there.” That’s just defeatist.

Jay Worth (23:13): Not only that, it’s just not true.

Rob Murray (23:15): And “I need to be number one.” If I’ve got other salespeople, I want to be at the top of the leaderboard as the owner of the company.

Jay Worth (23:25): If that’s the case, you’re way too in the weeds. The other thing is, if you have to be involved in every decision, you are not in the right space.

Rob Murray (23:40): How can I not be? They’re not going to make the right decisions if it’s not me. No one knows what they’re doing, Jay.

Jay Worth (23:44): They’re going to make a different decision. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Those are the leading indicators that you’re not self-aware and that something’s wrong.

Rob Murray (23:59): I’m going to take this section of the podcast and send it to a bunch of people. This is one of the reasons I do this podcast: I can say things in a podcast setting that I can’t say directly to my clients. I’ll be like, “Hey, you should really check out this episode.” I’m not even joking.

Jay Worth (24:03): I have some people in mind too, but I won’t ask you to send it to them. “This other guy I brought on said something really insightful, totally unprompted.”

Rob Murray (24:23): Okay, let’s go back to recruiting. You’ve got your candidate profile. Then what?

Jay Worth (24:28): So you have your ideal candidate profile. If you haven’t done that exercise for your marketing, you could probably apply the same thing there, because it’s a marketing exercise first. I’ve just applied it to recruiting because it works. That’s not my scientific discovery, and it’s not proprietary. Lots of people do this and are very good at it.

Rob Murray (24:50): Well, marketing and sales is the recruitment and onboarding of clients. HR and recruiting is the recruitment and onboarding of people.

Jay Worth (24:58): There’s a beautiful dovetail there. The other thing is candidate experience. We talk about customer experience all the time, and we pay no attention to how we’re onboarding our team. There was a CareerPlug survey that said 66% of people said a positive hiring experience influenced their decision to accept the offer.

Rob Murray (25:20): Two out of three.

Jay Worth (25:21): And 26% declined over a poor experience. So one in four of the people you sent offers to who declined and went somewhere else did so because your onboarding sucks. Because your experience up to that point was really bad.

Rob Murray (25:43): So help us understand what good looks like.

Jay Worth (25:49): What does good look like? Good looks like a good job posting, first of all. I know you may have to list certain requirements for legal reasons, depending on your state, but your whole job description should not be “has a valid driver’s license, can lift 50 pounds, can work in all weather conditions.” You’re laughing because you’ve seen these.

Rob Murray (26:08): Yeah, yeah.

Jay Worth (26:09): That can’t be the sum of your posting. This ties into the pillar about explaining the why, giving people purpose behind the work. Once you know your why, tell it. Did you know there’s a direct correlation, Rob, between the number of trees on a city block and the mental and physical health outcomes of the people who live there?

Rob Murray (26:32): I didn’t know that, but it’s not shocking.

Jay Worth (26:34): There is a direct correlation. So if you work in a city, why would you not say, “Don’t you want to improve the lives of your neighbors? For every tree we plant, we’re reducing the chance that someone in this neighborhood has emphysema”? Why are we not telling that story? Why are we not talking about how kids who can see a tree out their window, and go out in the yard and touch that tree and touch the grass, have a lower likelihood of attention deficit disorders? Why are we not talking about carbon capture and helping fight climate change? Whether you believe in it or not, the people who work for you probably do. When we tell the story of our why in the job description, we’re far more likely to recruit people who have passion.

Rob Murray (27:28): People who believe what you believe.

Jay Worth (27:29): People who believe what you believe, and who are not just there for the paycheck. Zookeepers are some of the lowest paid people in the country. It’s almost shameful how little some of them get paid. So why do they do it? Why do zoos all across America keep finding people?

Rob Murray (27:49): Full employment.

Jay Worth (27:49): Because zookeepers often talk about a sense of calling to the work. They feel fulfilled by the purpose of being connected to the animals they care for. They can see a tangible connection: the work I do has meaning because I’m caring for this. Just because it’s a plant doesn’t mean other people don’t feel that. Have you ever met plant people? Hello?

Rob Murray (28:12): Yeah.

Jay Worth (28:14): So why are you not telling that story in your job descriptions?

Rob Murray (28:20): Love that.

Jay Worth (28:20): Then that goes into candidate experience. Respond within 24 hours: “Hey, thanks. I saw you put an application in. Can we set up a phone call? What’s your schedule look like?” It’s not hard to make that five minute phone call, leave somebody a message, or schedule a 15 minute window the next day. We just suck at getting back to people a lot of the time.

Rob Murray (28:45): Isn’t that the truth?

Jay Worth (28:47): And once you’ve screened them, why are we having four rounds of interviews for a landscape laborer? Explain this to me. You need this person now. I’m not saying they’re not skilled, but at an entry level, you need them to operate a mower or put a shovel in the ground, and you can train them to do that in half a day. So why do we need four rounds of interviews? I’d spend more time on the culture conversation than the skills conversation, unless you’re hiring a crew leader or something higher up. At an entry level, good grief, get someone an offer in less than a week. It’s not hard.

Rob Murray (29:25): Right, and they’ll probably say yes quickly.

Jay Worth (29:27): And this ties into pay and benefits. We think we’re losing people to the landscaper down the street. We’re not. We’re losing them to other trades. I think I’m probably the only person who pulls this data. It’s not super scientific. I’m not pulling it quarterly, just once a year. But every year since 2023, I’ve been pulling data on green industry job titles relative to other industries: fast food workers, general laborers, the person who moves a stack of 2x4s across a construction site. Entry level technicians and concrete workers in America make about $4 to $7 an hour more than lawn care techs and landscape workers.

Four to seven dollars an hour, times 2,040 hours a year. You do the math. It’s not hard to see why we’re losing. And it’s all tied together. I feel like I see connections that a lot of people in our industry are missing, though I could be wrong.

Rob Murray (30:39): Break that down. You’re going somewhere with the connection between those two industries and this four to seven dollar gap.

Jay Worth (30:45): I’m just saying people go, “No one wants to work,” or “This guy left to take a dollar an hour more at a competitor.” That’s not your biggest threat. Your biggest threat is the person who never accepted your offer, because another trade is better at communicating the why, is willing to pay more, gives better training, and has a better onboarding experience. All of it. You’re not losing on just one thing.

Rob Murray (31:12): I think that’s a really interesting piece, because one of the things you mentioned at the beginning was clear expectations and this idea of career paths.

Jay Worth (31:20): Do you know what basically every other trade in America has besides us? A career path. A lot of them are unionized, and love or hate unions, they create a clear career path for workers. Workers know exactly how their pay will change after a certain number of years or certificates. We hire somebody, throw them to the wolves, and put them out in a truck. Then when their crew leader calls in and they have to go on someone else’s crew, they find out they’ve been doing it wrong, because there’s no standardization across our companies.

Then they’re frustrated, because they don’t see a path forward. They don’t see how to get ahead. SHRM, the Society for Human Resource Management, says one in three workers thinking of leaving cite a lack of career advancement. McKinsey puts that number at 41%. If you lost 10 people this year, four of them left just because they couldn’t figure out how to get promoted at your company.

Rob Murray (32:24): So how do I do that? Let’s say I’ve got a company with 20 people. We’re not making tons of money, but we’re doing okay, and I’m still trying to figure everything out. Now I’ve got to come up with a career path for everybody. What if we don’t grow? Am I going to disappoint people? How does somebody approach this?

Jay Worth (32:44): Well, your finances and your growth plan are separate, but they need to match up with your staffing plan. You can’t plan on growing 20% year over year for the next five years and not have a staffing plan to meet it. You’re setting yourself up to fail financially.

Rob Murray (33:04): Big time.

Jay Worth (33:05): So at every level, starting with an entry level worker, ask what any person would objectively need in order to be promotable. Is it passing an internal training program? An external certification? Leadership training? Software proficiency?

Rob Murray (33:23): Number of X completed, whatever.

Jay Worth (33:26): Whatever it is. Is it just tenure? I wouldn’t recommend that. But you have to have objective standards. From there, they can get promoted to crew leader, then supervisor, then operations manager. At every level, set aside the people currently in those roles and ask what anyone would need to get to the next level.

And by the way, owners listening to this: this is going to streamline your conversations about compensation so much. Someone’s going to come to you and say, “I got an offer from so-and-so down the street for an extra buck an hour.” And you say, “Great. I would love to help you earn an extra dollar an hour. Here’s how we get there. Here’s what you need to do for me to be able to pay you more.” Once they do it, they take on more responsibility, and they become someone you can rely on more. That’s what you get in return for paying more money.

Rob Murray (34:25): That’s cool. And it could be something simple, like levels within a role: junior, regular, and senior.

Jay Worth (34:33): Absolutely. Mower 1, Mower 2, whatever it is.

Rob Murray (34:37): And then, to your point, what are the objective benchmarks that get you from Mower 1 to Mower 2? It probably doesn’t have to be a lot.

Jay Worth (34:47): Absolutely. Someone who’s brilliant at this is Scott Lesak at Kasel Rocks Landscape in Pennsylvania. He has an internal training program. From the moment you’re hired, here’s what you start at, and once you complete a certain level of internal training, you immediately get a 25% bump in pay. So by the end of their first week, they’re basically getting pay raises.

There’s a certain level they’re paid at just for training, just for showing up. If they don’t complete the training, the company is out a little money. But once they’re done, the company has someone who’s automatically producing in the field.

I think you just have to be deliberate about it. It’s a time consuming exercise, and like I said at the beginning, there’s no silver bullet for any of this. These things all work together. But if you put the work in on the front end, you’ll reap the rewards as the company grows. And you have to look five years down the road: how big are we going to be? Here’s our current org chart. If we’re going to be 30% bigger in five years, is that just a matter of adding crews and supervisors, or do we need to add layers of middle management? What does the org chart look like?

Rob Murray (36:01): Or is there a new division we start?

Jay Worth (36:04): How do we plan for that? One of the things I find frustrating is that founders are very idea driven.

Rob Murray (36:16): I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m all about the weeds and the notes and the details. Not a chance.

Jay Worth (36:18): So someone comes to them and says, “Hey, could you also do this thing?” They see light bulbs, those synapses fire really quickly, and they’re out running way ahead of the rest of the team before any planning has caught up. Maybe it’s even the right decision for the business, but you haven’t invested the people resources into how you get there, because you were so enamored with the idea. And then you’re really frustrated.

Rob Murray (36:48): It’s like, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

Jay Worth (36:53): Exactly. You’re frustrated when you can’t match the two up.

Rob Murray (36:56): “They don’t get it. Why don’t they get it?”

Jay Worth (36:58): Why don’t they get it? Because your team is looking around going, “We’re already at capacity. How do we have room for this extra thing?”

Rob Murray (37:05): And, “What is he even talking about?” That’s cool.

Jay Worth (37:06): So anyway, it all dovetails together. There’s not one silver bullet. If you have a chance, come to one of these conferences. I’m not promoting the book. If someone wants a copy, just reach out to me, and I’ll send it to you. I don’t need the $3.99 from Amazon. That’s for people who don’t know me and haven’t discovered it. What’s good about the book is that it’s really practical. For each of these points, here’s what good looks like, here’s what bad looks like, here’s how to fix it, and here’s how to apply it in your business.

Rob Murray (37:39): Love it. You might not need the $3.99, but you can go to Amazon, search for The Green Talent Playbook, and order it for $3.99.

Jay Worth (37:48): You can. In fact, my last Kindle payment, I think I got a penny. So I’m trying not to spend it all in one place or let it go to my head. I don’t make much off it. I don’t want it for the money. I want people to have the information, because I love the industry and I want it to be successful.

Rob Murray (38:05): That’s great, man. We’re in the same boat, and I appreciate that a lot about you. So you’re speaking at Elevate this year. Where are the other two?

Jay Worth (38:10): I’ll be speaking at SYNC Live in Phoenix, and at Aspire’s user conference, Ignite.

Rob Murray (38:18): Epic. If you get a chance, go check out Jay. You’re amazing, buddy. I appreciate what you’re doing, and I’m looking forward to seeing you in Arizona in September at SYNC Live. That should be fun.

Jay Worth (38:27): Heck yeah, bud. Wheels up, let’s go.

Rob Murray (38:30): Let’s go. And if people want to reach out to you, what’s the best way? LinkedIn, email?

Jay Worth (38:36): You can find me on LinkedIn, or email me at [email protected].

Rob Murray (38:44): Cool, we’ll put it in the show notes. Appreciate it, buddy.

Jay Worth (38:47): All right. Take it easy. Thanks, Rob.