Jeff McManus (University of Texas): How People Growth Drives Landscaping Success

00:00
Robert
Hi, everyone, and welcome to the I Am Landscape Growth podcast, where entrepreneurs help entrepreneurs grow faster, better, and stronger in the green industry. From leadership to sales to recruiting and operational excellence, we cover the topics holding entrepreneurs back and share how to get past those bottlenecks with the best in the industry. I’m your host, Rob Murray, co founder and CEO of Intrigue, a digital marketing company focused on helping landscape companies grow. So sit back and enjoy the show. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the IAM Landscape Growth podcast. I have an esteemed and I would say specialized guest today in Jeff McManus. The reason I say that is because the most successful entrepreneurs I’ve ever interviewed in this show have all talked about the idea that they’re actually training in development companies first and landscape companies second.

00:50
Robert
And I feel like we’re about to experience some of the inner works of a brain that has been focused on training and development for a long time with a beautiful amount of experience in the green industry. So much so, I won’t even say the amount of years, but I would say I was very young when you started. So, Jeff McManus, thank you so much for being here and thank you very much for Jeffrey Scott for introducing us.

01:12
Jeff
Absolutely. Rob, Brad, to be with you. And yes, thank you, Jeffrey, for connecting us.

01:18
Robert
Okay, cool. So as we need to do, just for the sake of the hundreds of people that will be listening to this thing, who are you, how did you start in this industry, and what are you up today? In two minutes.

01:34
Jeff
I am currently I’m serving as the executive director of grounds and landscaping at the University of Texas. So I started that job in February of 25, and for 25 years before that, I was at the University of Mississippi. Some people may know it better as Ole Miss. So that was it. We had won five national awards as being the most beautiful campus from Newsweek, USA Today, Princeton Review, pgms. And so we’d also gotten mentioned in the New York Times for our landscaping. So we. We did a lot. We did a lot of training there. We developed a program called Landscape University there. And I’ve used that to help companies that really want to develop their people and create ownership and engagement and who want to do it the right way. So that’s. That’s been. My passion is to.

02:29
Jeff
Is to be a landscaping coach for companies and leaders who. Who don’t have the time to do it, but they want to do it and do it right.

02:38
Robert
And how the heck did you get started this whole thing?

02:41
Jeff
Well, very young age. My dad had me driving A Massey Ferguson tractor, like around 8 years old. And I actually did not enjoy the. Because I was the person who did all the work and I just. Man, it was brutal. You know, I thought it was just terrible. But now I’m so glad my dad taught me how to work and taught me how to do a job well done and I’m so grateful for the habits he gave me. So that’s how I ended up here. I was a marketing major because I didn’t want to work outside, right. I didn’t want to do. I didn’t want to work with my hands. And then I failed marketing. I said, well, I better rethink this. Took a class in Horticulture and Dr. Harry Ponder at Auburn University.

03:23
Robert
Not to be confused with Dr. Harry Potter.

03:25
Jeff
That’s right. Dr. Ponder gave me the enthusiasm and excitement for the Grin for plants and people. He was a people professor, but he used plants to conduct his work and he just knew everything. And the most important thing that he knew was his students names. And it just resonated with me and I wanted to emulate his style. And I became a hort major and so I had got to take all those biology classes, but it was worth it. And to get a degree. The only thing the degree did for me was open the door for opportunities to work at places like University of Texas and Ole Miss. So that’s kind of how I’ve gotten here today.

04:08
Robert
Okay, that’s cool. So two quick questions on that one. One was, well, not a question, I guess first was a statement. Never have I ever heard somebody say they failed at a marketing and passed biology. You know, like I’m a marketing student at some level and then professionally and all the biology students around me were studying their butts off. And so anyway, good on you because obviously you found a calling. But the question I had was around, what was it that flipped the switch for you around this training component and this whole concept of leaders to leaders?

04:49
Jeff
Well, there’s a couple of things. One was doing, like you said earlier, you’ve learned that the successful landscaping companies I like to read and study entrepreneurs, business people who’ve been very successful. And of course one of my heroes is Truett, Cathy Truett. Cathy started what we all know as Chick Fil a in the United States. And so yeah, they’re doing all right. Yeah, they’re doing okay. They’re either the second or third largest quick service restaurant enclosed one day a week. And he told his team, you know, he. One of his quotes is we’re not in the chicken business. We’re in the people business. And I realized with his passion and his. His input is all about developing people. Chick Fil A, a couple of years ago, had 120. No, they had 200 positions open to be a store operator, to be an owner operator.

05:44
Jeff
And they had 125,000 applications for those 200 positions. So that’s. That’s pretty good. You know, I’d say that’s decent. Yeah. So their biggest problem is weeding out and getting to the right. To the right people. But you got to have chemistry. He taught me that too. You got to have. You got the three Cs that he talked about. Chemistry, competency, being a competent person and character. Those were three big C’s of big takeaways. And so that’s. That’s sort of how, you know, I followed and got into, like, hey, I need to get people excited about plants. I need to get them excited and. And be where they want to know more about this. So I started drilling down more on how to do the technical part, how to do it but do it right. And then.

06:32
Jeff
And then coaching them and letting them become the teachers. I got it to where they became better than me, and. And so that I could step out of the picture and let them become the mentors and the head coaches out on the field. And to me, it. In the big picture, it made my job so much easier, made my life so much easier, and the quality, the customers were happier. But just watching how people were empowering their people, those business owners. Who’s the guy who did Southwest Airlines?

07:06
Robert
Herb Kelleher.

07:07
Jeff
Yeah, there you go. I mean, he was the master of it. He didn’t serve the customers. He served his employees. He chased them. He loved them. He hugged them. And I don’t do that. I don’t hug my employees. I really don’t. But he had the passion for them to be successful. So one of my big sayings is, how do we make our people successful? How do we help them be successful? And that’s not necessarily making tons of money. Not everybody. People want to have a purpose. They want to know that they matter. They want to know that they’re important, and that’s a big part of helping them be successful and that we need them. So, yeah, I think that’s how sort of turned for me to start focusing more on the people part instead of the list of getting things done. Oh, that’s cool.

07:56
Robert
Because everybody’s got a list, right?

07:58
Jeff
Yeah.

07:59
Robert
And. And a few of those lists have bullet points around how do I grow this person? How do I make this person better? You know, there’s usually a lot of issues. We talked about this idea of fires. You know, like entrepreneurs have a tendency to treat all fires equally. But if you look actually closely into firefighting within a business setting, there’s probably some dumpster fires that are self contained in metal boxes and there’s probably some house fires that need to be attended to because if you don’t, your house will burn down. But for some reason we always treat all fires equally. But I would say, like to your point, the people live in the house, not in the dumpster. So maybe the house fire is more important and the people are part of that.

08:38
Robert
So I can’t get away from the main question of the podcast, which is what is the primary growth constraint you see holding entrepreneurs back in the growth industry?

08:51
Jeff
I think it’s the people part. Right.

08:53
Robert
And that was a, that was definitely like a self serve up question for you. So we’re going to go into it, but go for it. Break this down for us.

09:00
Jeff
Well, all of. I have my own landscaping business too. I don’t know if we even mentioned that, but I have a.

09:06
Robert
Not yet.

09:07
Jeff
Yeah, so. So what keeps me small, but I do want to stay small because I’m doing some other things and I don’t. But I’ve seen it. The limitations is the people, right? We can only do so much and then I’ve got some really good core people, but I don’t really want to expand that yet. Most entrepreneurs want to expand. They want to grow that business, they want to flourish. And it’s. Who do you hand it off to? And that’s why we’re all looking at automation and we’re looking at how things, mechanically, how can we do things that we don’t need people because we want that consistency, we want high quality and that’s a hard standard. You got to look at the companies who have really high standards and how are they doing it? One that I used to love to look at was Disney.

09:55
Jeff
Disney has over 80,000 employees and yet it’s the happiest place on earth. How do they do that? They’re very intentional in how they do that. So tried to emulate some of the things they do.

10:09
Robert
Okay, so then we got people as the constraint, growing them. You know, the essentially what I’m hearing is the idea that like the capacity that a leader has to grow their people is the constraint on growing the business. Is that a fair assessment?

10:26
Jeff
I think it is. And so it all it really kind of comes back to me as the leader. I’m the constraint. I’m usually the challenge. I’m, I’m. Whatever my ceiling is going to be the ceiling for the company. And I have to recognize that. I just heard Dave Ramsey talking yesterday, and he was talking about Dave Ramsey, who gives out financial advice. Everything revolved around him. And if he were to die, only 3% of his company would have passed on 20 years ago. And so he had to change that. He had to change it to where he had people in the system that were doing something. And it wasn’t all Dave centered. And I think that’s.

11:05
Jeff
We, we get caught into that we’re, we’re so focused, everything around us and as leaders that we can’t give things away or maybe we don’t have the people to pass it to that we trust.

11:20
Robert
Or maybe we’re not willing to trust. You know, we’ve been burned.

11:23
Jeff
We’ve been burned in the past. Just talked to a guy a couple of weeks ago. I mean, been burned majorly.

11:31
Robert
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12:13
Robert
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12:44
Robert
You can grab it, download it right now. It’s completely free. Hope it helps you. You’ve said a couple of things and actually more than a couple that I want to dig into. First of all, and I’m going to come back to this because I wrote it down and put a star next to it. But you said the system. Like Dave Ramsey 20 years ago, if he had passed away, only 3% of the business would have moved on, and he had to change that so people were in the system. So that is something we need to speak more about before we do that. You mentioned this idea earlier about how you became the student or how your students surpassed you. And I mean, I can’t stop thinking about Star wars and Obi Wan and Qui Gon and whatever.

13:29
Robert
But the idea is sound in that as a leader, I’m going to spend time developing, coaching, mentoring, training, supervising, however we describe it, to get people to a spot where they want to get better and then pursue things at a level beyond me. So the question is, how do you coach folks? Train, supervise, coach, mentor to do that?

13:57
Jeff
Well, I think there’s a little bit of coaching that helps, but you got to have that person that is intuitive, that understands that it’s not about them, it’s not about me, it’s about us. It’s our team. And so how do I help others become successful? And so I just left ole Ms. After 25 years of successfully winning some national championships. Our guys got national championship rings for landscaping. Right. We’ve won some big honors. We’ve had some amazing. I’m going to show it to you here in just a second. And so we had some. We had some cool wins, but I, I wasn’t going to be there.

14:37
Robert
That.

14:37
Jeff
That university is going to go on forever. I want to make sure the guy behind me is more successful than I am. So I want to. Or. Or woman. And. And I’m going to train them and I’m going to develop them and help them be successful. I want to be their best coach. Right. So.

14:55
Robert
Oh, that is legitimate. If you’re not watching this. You’ll have to check us out on, I don’t know, make this part of the thumbnail.

15:05
Jeff
I’ll have to take my blur vision off here.

15:08
Robert
No, when you first showed it worked great.

15:10
Jeff
Okay. So anyway, yeah, so, yeah, this was cool. And I let our employees help design it, so it became their ring. So, yeah, it’s, I don’t, I don’t remember your question now, but.

15:22
Robert
But how do you coach people to go past you?

15:25
Jeff
Yeah, you have to be selfless. You have to be willing to take the back seat and not take the glory. And you’ve got to see yourself because it’s. How many times I’ve seen people sabotage the person below them because they don’t want, they feel like they’re going to lose their job or so then speak.

15:44
Robert
To it though, from your mind. When you’ve got people, like help people understand the way you think about this instead of know, telling them what to do, how do you think about it? Because like, it seems like you’ve got this DNA now. Not to say it’s always been there where you’re just like constantly trying to figure out how to grow this person and help them succeed. And so where does that mindset come from?

16:10
Jeff
That’s a good question. I really haven’t thought about that. I, I think it’s part of my core values and that’s going to take me to a very personal place. So for me it can even drive me. I mean, it’s who I am. Like, it’s, yes, our personalities, but I think even for me, it’s part of the spiritual side of me, the faith part, which I go, I want to help, I want to help people, I want to help develop them. I want them to be successful because that’s, that’s self, that’s. What do you call that? Servant leadership. And that’s where I see it in my faith is servant leadership. And I’ll just say, I mean, the great role model I’ve always seen is Jesus, how he just kept doing stuff for other people.

17:06
Jeff
And so that’s, I mean, when you actually, I mean, you ask a real personal question there, that’s probably where for me a lot of comes out of.

17:15
Robert
But I, I think that’s necessary to get out because a lot of people like, you know, Jesus or God or religion, you know, aside the idea of serving others as a servant leader, like, I think a lot of people miss this. And I think it’s where the most successful people are the most successful for a reason because they actually want to lift people up as opposed to being lifted up by them expecting that because they’re getting paychecks, their life should get better because They’ve hired people to flip it upside down and say, I have the opportunity and privilege to bring people into an organizational setting to help make lives better. Personally and as a group, what can I do to serve people and make their lives better? I think that mindset is a big deal that doesn’t really get talked about a lot.

18:12
Jeff
Oh, it doesn’t get talked about much at all. I mean, you look at Mother Teresa, and I haven’t done a lot of reading on her, but I’ve. I’ve listened to a few podcasts about her, and she was so fulfilled, but yet she didn’t have a lot of worldly possessions because she had purpose. And I think that a lot of what you’re talking about deals with our purpose in life. A few years ago, there was a book written called Drive by Daniel Pink.

18:40
Robert
He’s pretty good.

18:41
Jeff
It’s really good book. And basically it talks about what drives people. And he boiled it down to the three simple principles, and one of those was purpose. People are motivated when they have a purpose. And that’s probably what you tapped in for me right now was just my purpose. And then two is that autonomy, right? And training gives people a lot of autonomy because they’re. They’re going to be able to. To know how to prune, right? They’re going to know how to weed eat, right? They’re going to know all these different things, and they get a lot of autonomy. They get to decide because they know how to do the standards. And then the last one is mastery. People like to know that they’re one of the best. They’re. They’re good at what they’re doing. So Landscape University helped me give people certificates.

19:29
Jeff
They were internal certificates that certified that you know how to do this, that you are really good at this. You are a master of pruning. You know how to make the plant wider at the base, you know how to selectively prune, you know how to shear correctly. And that gave them a sense of. Of ownership and belonging, that, hey, somebody validated my work and validated that I know how to do this. So those three. Those three, I think, are really important.

19:56
Robert
Yeah. And you articulated it better than anybody I’ve heard before. And to. To reiterate Daniel Pink’s stuff, Drive is, you know, this idea of purpose, autonomy and mastery is master, is magically impactful. One of the things I found interesting with autonomy is autonomy of time, task, and team. So this idea of building out a group of masters, it’s kind of like the Golden State warriors. Thing like when they were really good, and they still are good, but when they were really good, there was like, I want to go play there because I want to be around the best. So we refer to this idea of the Golden State strategy when it comes to, like, team building and recruitment.

20:36
Robert
But one of the time, one of the things that we hear a lot is that when a low performer gets let go, everybody’s like, thank God. And then you hear about it, you’re like, oh, I wish people had maybe talked about some of this stuff before for. Because a lot of people don’t want to throw people under the bus. And it’s difficult to build an organizational culture where high performers can say, hey, this person isn’t pulling their weight. It needs to be addressed. I’m wondering, though, if you can help understand how a leader can, you know, pardon the pun, weed out the poor performers in a simple way with grace and some love instead of like, stick to, then move from what might be. Because we hear it all the time. I’ve had this person, they’ve been here for seven years.

21:26
Robert
I don’t know if they’re a good fit, which means they probably aren’t. And more often than not, they aren’t. But they’ve been loyal. When we started, they were there when it was hard, but they’re holding us back. So what do you have any experience on essentially pruning the organizational push?

21:44
Jeff
Yeah, I think for me, and I wish I had it in a cute little acronym, but for one, I want them to be successful. I want that person to be successful. Two, I want them to have clarity. I’ve got to have clarity. They need to have clarity. And then three, what are those expectations? We’re giving clarity to? What expectations? On what the job is and what needs to be done in that job.

22:10
Robert
And how it looks like to win.

22:12
Jeff
That’s right. And so you define it. When you get those expectations, then you give clarity to what the win looks like. And then there’s got to be the follow up. Right. There’s got to be the circle back there. How did we do? Let’s meet in 30 days and let’s measure. Did you meet the expectations? Yes or no? And if you think you did, but I don’t think you did, then that allows us to have a conversation on where you fell short. So they’re not easy conversations. And I’m. I deal with this quite a bit in the workplace, but if I don’t know what I expect, there’s no way. Yeah. How do they know?

22:51
Robert
Oh, Jeff. I don’t know. We gotta hang out, man. Because, like, you are preaching to the choir. The idea of clarity on how to win and then follow up. Like, I think if it’s an urgent issue, maybe a month, you could probably condense it to a couple weeks, whatever.

23:05
Jeff
Yeah.

23:05
Robert
But next week, did. Is it clear on how to win? And then let’s review. Did we win? And if I think you didn’t and you think you did, we’ve got a conversation to have for sure. And what I found really impactful over time is that if it’s consistently like that, the stress that mounts with the person not winning when they think they are, they end up probably leaving on their own more than we have to, like, come down and say, you’re fired. Like, it doesn’t have to be like that.

23:35
Jeff
Yeah.

23:35
Robert
Can you speak to that for folks? Because leaders have a hard time trying to figure out how to, I mean, coach someone out. A lot of people use the word terminate, which I think is probably aggressive. But, like, what. What has that been like for your experience?

23:49
Jeff
Well, as leaders, we have. We. We know what we need. And we. And. And so we have. We have sometimes this curse of knowledge. We know how to do it. We’ve seen it done. We’ve done it now. We expect everybody else to know now. Now. And so I didn’t come up with that. That came from. From the two brothers who wrote the marketing book about stickology and being sticky and stuff made to stick.

24:19
Robert
Yeah.

24:21
Jeff
And so we have the curse of knowledge. So we think that. And so for us as leaders, we have to slow down and we sometimes have to get somebody around us and say, let me tell you what to do, and let them write it. If we’re not good at writing or we say it into some automation and we get that out of our head and get it onto something so that we can start clarifying what is it. I need. The other problem I see is sometimes people know how to do the job and they know how to meet the expectations. They’re blowing it out of the water.

24:56
Robert
And.

24:56
Jeff
And you hear comments like, he or she is really good. However, their attitude is killing us or their sarcasm or whatever. And that’s a totally different way you address that. Right. Because they don’t need to know the processes. They’ve nailed it. So what I’ve learned to do with those particular ones is you kind of begin to shine a light on what you want your culture to be like. And if you don’t know what you want your culture to be, your team will dictate what your culture is going to be. And so you have to start planning your culture. So I’ve only been here two months at UT, and I’ve started working on our culture. Got 100 people that work for me, and I’m working on the culture right now.

25:41
Robert
Well, you’re building a championship ring, aren’t you?

25:43
Jeff
I’m really. I’m working for the next championship dynasty here at ut. Right. In landscaping. So I left a dynasty, and I’m coming to make a new one. And it all starts with. With growing your people. Okay, cool.

25:56
Robert
So tell us a story about Ole.

25:58
Jeff
Miss.

26:00
Robert
So that people can, like, listen to what actually happened. Because you did it there. Like, what was it like? Building a culture of winning in the landscape industry.

26:12
Jeff
We had to get the technical part. We had to get the technical part. We weren’t pruning right. We weren’t weed eating right. We weren’t mowing right. We were. We did those and we had good, but weren’t doing it with excellence. We. If you measured us on a scale of one to five, were like a two and three. We were. We were low. We were at five being the best. So we had to work on that at the same time. What I wasn’t realizing, though, is how to deal with the drama. Naders and I had some good drama nators, and that’s those people who bring the drama, and they would. They could. And when I say a good dramator.

26:49
Robert
I haven’t heard that one.

26:50
Jeff
I love that a good drama nator can start a rumor, and you can’t figure out where that rumor came from. And it’ll start two or three days or weeks after they planted the seeds of discord in the whole group. So I had to learn, and this probably came from a revelation of reading some of Dave Ramsey’s material, that he didn’t put up with drama, he didn’t put up with gossip, and he owns his own business. And that’s. Wow. I work in an institution, a state institution, and it’s a little different. You just. You just don’t fire people right away. So I started doing leadership development, which meant for 30 minutes or one hour a month, I brought small groups of my team in. In from the field. Like, right. We would. We would come in and eat lunch there in the shop.

27:43
Jeff
And then before they went back out, we watched a video and we talked about it, and it was about leadership, teamwork. And I’m doing that right now. That’s what I’m doing right now. We just Watched.

27:55
Robert
Yeah, There it is.

27:55
Jeff
Please.

27:56
Robert
Yeah. What are you watching?

27:58
Jeff
So one of the ones I. Okay, the first one, you’re gonna laugh because we watched a Rocky Balboa, and I don’t remember which. Which of the movies it was. It’s when he has a conflict with his son. It’s about a 2 minute, 42 minutes and 46 seconds. Seconds. And his son comes in, and his son is complaining to him about why is he getting back in the ring. And Rocky standing there saying, somebody along the way poked a finger in your eye. And basically his son was. Was. Was playing the victim card and just feeling, whoa, sorry, is me. That was the first one we watched. The last one we just watched was Admiral McCraw. McRaven. McRaven. And he. I did not realize this. He gave the commencement speech at the University of Texas in 2014.

28:51
Jeff
And he’s the Navy Seal who gives the 10 life lessons on Navy SEAL training, how to become a Navy seal. And his first one, and I know you’ve heard this one, is to make your bed. Make your bed at the beginning of the day. Make your bed. And it just start off.

29:08
Robert
You start off the right foot.

29:10
Jeff
That’s right. And so I asked one of my workers here if he would take. Take those. And so now we’ve turned those into cards. And so now when people come in, we’re. We’re giving them this card. I know you probably can’t.

29:22
Robert
No, yeah, put it. If you can get it right in front of your nose and your mouth. Yeah, you’re good. You got it. You got it.

29:26
Jeff
So those are. Those are the 10. And so now we use those. We’re using this to help reinforce the message. And so the first one. Start the day with a task completed. Number two, Find someone to help you through. Three, Respect everyone. And it’s just loaded.

29:43
Robert
Would you mind doing all ten?

29:44
Jeff
Oh, yeah. Four. Let’s see. Number four. Life is not always fair. Move forward. Number five. Don’t be afraid to fail often. Six, take risk. Seven, face down the bullies. Eight, step up, win times are toughest. Nine, lift up the downtrodden. Ten, Never give up. Don’t ring the bell. Yeah. Yeah. So. And our. Our whole. Our whole theme at Texas is one great team. Right? So that’s one of the reasons I love coming here. And I. And I. I fit into this cultures because our president, our current president, that’s. That’s really a big theme of his. Jim Davis is great. And so this whole. This sort of like, I’m showing this now I’m showing this to our guys. And then here’s what I do. Here’s the magic is once it’s over, I want my staff to talk about it.

30:41
Jeff
I don’t want me to talk about it. And so when I say is, and I do this in a, I know this sounds crazy, but in a non threatening way to where I want them. So I say, okay, just do a takeaway. You give me a takeaway. And so we just go around the table and there’s probably six to 10 people there in the room and they just give me a takeaway and we’ll talk about it. And before long, it’s, the conversation is just really going and people are excited about it. And what you’re working on is the passion, the belief. They believe in something. We’re coming together as a team because we share the same belief. And most leaders don’t see the value in that. Hey, we got to go out and go cut the grass.

31:27
Jeff
We got to go out and pull the weeds. Look, if I will grow leaders, they’ll take care of the task. So I really focus on growing the leaders and working in their belief system, how they think, how they want to do their job.

31:42
Robert
Buddy, I’m so happy we got introduced. Now, I know Coach K might be a nemesis at some level, but like, have you watched any of his stuff?

31:51
Jeff
Yeah, I love Coach K. I listen to some of his audio books.

31:55
Robert
Like, you’re just, you’re. Anyway, it’s just very similar, right? And I think a lot of people miss, like a lot of people understand the value of building a healthy culture. They know that it’s important and it needs to, if it’s there, it’s great. But they don’t necessarily know how to do it. And when you talk about the idea of a 2 minute and 40 second Rocky Balboa clip at the end of a lunch with a group of 6 to 10 to start building a conversation around leadership and taking ownership of their lives. It seems too simple. So what do you say to folks that say, that’s never good? How do you stack that up and the outcome? I totally get it, but I could see how someone could be like, I think I need a leadership program needs to be formalized.

32:43
Robert
I need to get them into executive MBAs. And who knows what crazy thoughts can come from this idea that is just not as simple and Beautiful as a 2 minute and 40 second clip from Rocky Bubble.

32:55
Jeff
It depends on what you need. Do you need a major landscape overhaul in your company or do you need, just, do you just need a, you know, show us how to do a little pruning, right? It’s. What does your company need? And so I’m, I, I need an infusion here of leadership, right, to grow and develop and do things the right way.

33:14
Robert
Every, every landscape company needs that.

33:17
Jeff
So you got to start on multiple fronts, right? So this is just one front. What I’m doing, this call, leader to leader. And you say it sounds simple. It is simple. The reason people don’t do it is because there’s a lot of fear in it. Because you’re afraid you’ll be rejected or you’ll be afraid that we don’t have time or whatever. It sounds too simple or. People don’t want to facilitate a conversation with their staff because they don’t want to talk to their people, they don’t want to engage in them. And, and listen, I’m not standing around, we’re not hugging each other and singing Kumbaya. We’re, we’re talking about some, you know, things of leadership. What, you know, what does it mean when he talks about becoming a sugar cookie, right?

33:59
Jeff
Rolling around, going in the ocean, getting wet, rolling around in the sand and you become a sugar cookie and it’s like they’re trying to get you to quit. You know, life’s hard, you’ve got to stick it out. And so, I don’t know, the frontline teams resonate with this. They just do. They resonate. And when you, the leader, talk about this, there’s a connection between you and your team, that you get it, that you understand and so forth. And so I have just found that the drominators, and this happened to me at Ole Miss, the draminators, after six months left, they self selected out because the culture started changing. I started being proactive in the culture and I started planning the culture I wanted. I think we use John Maxwell’s stuff there.

34:54
Jeff
I was using 17 essential qualities of a team and I don’t even know if he still has that out there, but it was a dvd.

35:00
Robert
I haven’t even heard that one.

35:02
Jeff
Yeah, I think they’ve reacted, rebranded it. I think they’ve taken it off market. But. But it was a DVD set, that’s how old it was, you know, and it was 17 lessons, one a month. And I loved it because I didn’t have to develop a lesson. But he talked about things like adaptability. I talked about all these good things that we like to talk about in leadership. Dependability.

35:22
Robert
17 essentials that are quality team players.

35:24
Jeff
Yeah, there’s two of them. There’s the 17 laws, and then there’s just 17 equality. And I like the one you just read. That’s the one I like. And I’m telling you, the drominator. After about. After about six of those, he lost his influence. People weren’t listening to him anymore. And he passed the flag on the drominator flag to the next person, though. And three months later, that person self selected as well. The ones that were in the middle. My employees that were straddling the fence became some of my best mentors. Later on, they became some of my best leaders. They mentored college students, they became great teachers. And they. They. They just. They flipped because I started proactively growing leaders instead of letting them become weeders and just letting the weeds grow. It’s very intentional.

36:18
Robert
Yeah, it’s beautiful, man. So one of the things that’s at least apparent to me when you start taking this approach with humans is that it is a you cannot do it on a do as I say, not as I do platform. Like, it’s got to be modeled. So one thing is to facilitate the sessions and bring in relatable material. And Rocky Balboa with a group of, you know, six to 10 frontline workers is just beautifully, like, perfect. But then there’s this accountability to self. And so, like, if you’re not willing to hold yourself to the standards you hold others to, there becomes this, you know, discord and doesn’t work.

37:01
Robert
So how do you approach yourself when you’re starting to build this culture so that somebody listening to this as a leader kind of gets an idea of what they’re stepping into if they want to go down this path?

37:15
Jeff
Well, when I. When you say that, a lot of things run through my head, and a lot of things really good leaders, I think, have gotten habits right. It’s all based on, you know, you ever read the book Atomic Habits? And it’s those little things that set us apart. It’s those little things that we do, and we do them consistently. And one of the things, like, for me, personal growth is huge for me, I mean, I’ve already rattled off a couple of books, right. Do you think most landscapers read those books? No, we don’t. They’re not even landscaping books. And so I needed answers. I need answers. I need answers to problems that people maybe have or haven’t run into. But these books are so wise and podcasts now. Oh, my goodness.

38:07
Jeff
And so personal growth as a leader, if you’re not willing to do some type of personal growth. I think you find yourself always responding in your experiences only so you’re. You’re always just thinking about things that are things that have happened to you, or you’re trying to make a gut feeling, or you’re trying to. A gut decision. And those can. Those can be not always bad. But I also like to have some insights from Truett. Kathy. Like, I never. I met True a long time ago, but I didn’t sit down and talk to him. I read his books. That’s how I knew that stuff. I told you. And it’s like, why wouldn’t you get the.

38:49
Jeff
Go and listen to Rockefeller or go and listen to all these people who have done it, you know, Henry Ford, and learn from them so that you don’t have to repeat those failures. And they. And they give you the salute. Like, this whole Landscape University stole that from Disney. You know, Walt. Walt knew that they needed to have something to help develop their people. And he didn’t develop it. They did it after him. But they have Disney University. They created something to create that culture. That’s why I created Landscape University. And that’s what we’re doing here at Texas. It’s called Landscape Longhorn University. Right. We’re developing it now. So well.

39:32
Robert
And there’s no reason and there’s nothing stopping anybody from starting XYZ company University. Yeah. And Jobs did it too. Right. With Apple University. There is something to be said about, like, how powerful it is to learn the lessons of other people that have made a lot of money and been really successful growing people, and then wrote about all their failures and all their successes and doing it in a day or two or maybe a week or two instead of like a lifetime. Yeah. I just think it’s. I hear a lot of people say they’re too busy. And I’d actually love to get your take on this thing because I’ve had this conversation with lots of entrepreneurs and I’ve had a few mentors kind of help me shape my thoughts on it. But I’d love to get your. Take this idea of time management.

40:16
Robert
We all have the same amount of time, but somehow some people get more done. And what I’ve come to learn is the idea of priority management. Focusing my time on the things that matter most is actually how I can leverage time. But what do you say to folks that are listening to this and saying, I don’t have time to read all those books, like readings, you know, I need to. I got work to do. There’s not enough time. What’s your take on. On time?

40:44
Jeff
Yeah, there’s a flood of things went through my mind as you were asking that. But the number one is my buddy Tim Kunsman used to tell me he passed away a couple years ago, but he used to tell me, you find the time to do the things you want to do. And I want to grow, so I find the time. So when I get in my truck, I have a 10 minute commute home. I will not listen to the radio, but I will listen to 10 minutes of a podcast. And as I get out of my truck and walk in to where I live, I may keep it playing. I make it learn all the way. And if it’s really good, I may listen to it while I’m in my house, change it into my fun clothes or whatever.

41:27
Jeff
And so you find time and you work it in if you want to, but it, but if it’s not a desire, you won’t, and you’ll. Sometimes we tend to default to the things that are easy. Like we want to eat dessert, we want to eat the stuff, but we don’t want to eat the vegetables. We don’t want to take the things that always provide us good nutrients. And so I found that I have to feed myself. This goes back to your other question as a leader, what do I have to do to prepare to do this? And I have to make either the sacrifice or the investment in myself. I am setting the ceiling really low or really high for my organization. And at some point I want my organization to outgrow me.

42:18
Jeff
But, but in the early days, I’m going to be the cap. I’m going to keep people from our company from growing because I can set the ceiling so low. So that’s why to me, listening to podcast is a very low bar. I mean, it’s really low. I don’t have time to read books either, but I’ll listen to them.

42:41
Robert
Yeah, Audible is amazing for that. We have an Audible account we share with our entire organization and clients. I’m not sure, I mean, maybe Audible employee will listen to this someday. Maybe they won’t. Probably not. But, you know, I think we have like 182 people on our Audible account. It’s amazing because it does make it so much more convenient. However, you said something there which I find really fascinating from a selfish point of view, which actually I try to do all of these Interviews from a selfish point of view, to try to draw as much information as I can out of an amazing person like you to then give to the audience.

43:12
Robert
But this idea of, I’m a leader, I set the ceiling, whether it’s a low bar or high bar, in terms of expectations, standards, how we live our lives on a daily basis in our habits, our routines, and our calendars. But then at some point, I need to let people go past me. So I’m no longer the ceiling. I’m actually the foundation of growth, of people going past me. Like, what does that transition like? Because that I’m personally struggling trying to figure that out.

43:46
Jeff
Well, I guess, what is it?

43:49
Robert
Do you want, ultimately want awesome people to be awesome?

43:54
Jeff
Why?

43:55
Robert
Because the life needs more. The world needs more leaders, and there’s two people sit on the sidelines saying that other people should do shit when it’s all in our own ability.

44:06
Jeff
Okay, so I’m not trying to annoy you, but why? Why?

44:11
Robert
Honestly, I’m not sure why I want more leaders in the world. You know, I just believe that we have the ability to, I think it’s cliche to say, be the change you want to see in the world. I don’t think it’s cliche to do it. And I would love to build an organizational environment where people feel they have the opportunity to be the change, not just say they want. I think the world’s better off if there’s more people doing the change than just saying they should be changed.

44:43
Jeff
Right, so you’re talking about model the way. So a great. A great book on leadership is the Leadership Challenge, Right? Posner and Boys or I forgot the guys. Two guys. And it’s a book that’s been updated about every five to 10 years. And it’s based on studies done around the world. And one of the number one principles that people admire in leaders is being honest. Right? So being honest. So setting that example they talk about, you have to model the way. You blow up your own company if you can’t model the way because people don’t respect you. And so it starts with you as the leader of having to model the way. What is it that you want? Now, I had a. I had a leader at Ole Miss who walked around campus. He didn’t have to do this every morning.

45:39
Jeff
And he picked up paper and he picked up limbs and sticks and rocks and things. And he didn’t need to do that. He wasn’t being paid to do that, but he walked. He had a walk with me. And as soon as he started doing it. I wanted to do it because he was setting the example. And so he also showed me that he wasn’t above that. Now, he didn’t do it all day long, and he didn’t always do it every day, but he did it enough to make it important for me. Dan Cathy, CEO of Chick Fil, a Truett’s son, same thing. I’m walking in a parking lot with him. It’s not a Chick Fil, a parking lot. He’s picking up trash. I’m going, you know, Dan, I’m thinking to myself, dan, this is not a Chick Fil, A parking lot.

46:23
Jeff
We get to his truck. He pulls out a plastic bag out of his. A little bitty trash bag like you put a newspaper in. He goes, I find these work really good to put trash in. He had intentionally thought that through, that he was going to pick up trash on his way back to his car. Why did he do that? Because that’s part of his DNA. That’s part of who his leadership is. Set the example, make the place better. You know, if you looked up what Dan is worth, he’s worth quite a bit. He does not need to pick up paper, but he does need to pick up paper for his own character, for his own purpose and his own. His own standards. So that told me a lot about Jeff. I don’t have to go pick up paper out here.

47:08
Jeff
I’ve got a college degree. But wait a minute. Is it who I am to set the right example, but it also makes the world a better place when I pick up paper and trash? Yeah, I think that’s what it gets down to.

47:23
Robert
All right, so you’ve shared a lot with us today, and to be quite honest, if I didn’t have to be on a call in six minutes, I would probably talk to you for another hour or two. I would love to have you back on. But before we leave, first of all, thank you. And second of all, you’ve mentioned a bunch of resources from Maxwell to Daniel Pink, Rockefeller, 7 Habits, Henry Ford, you name it. You know, true. Kathy, if there was one that you’d want to share with the audience of, like, hey, if you’re thinking about becoming a better leader and you want to up your game to raise the ceiling of the potential of their people, what would be one you’d point people towards?

48:06
Jeff
Well, I know it’s religious, but I would point to Jesus. I mean, that’s the. That is the ultimate person who had all the authority to do whatever he wanted to, and he chose not to use that power. He chose to serve. And so to me, that is the ultimate leader right there. And so you watch how his inner circle, his leadership circle didn’t get him, didn’t understand him. They even turned against him. And it’s like, man, you know, that happens to us. That happens in leadership. All those lessons, life lessons happen. So to me, that gets very practical. I mean, the. The Bible is very practical for today. And Proverbs, I guess if you got away from Jesus, I would probably go next to King Solomon. That would be one person I would. And I read a Proverbs every day because there’s 31.

48:59
Jeff
And so I read one every day of the month. And so Proverbs, King Solomon speaks to the businessman and woman every day.

49:08
Robert
Thanks, Jeff. I appreciate it, man.

49:10
Jeff
Yeah, thank you.

49:12
Robert
Hopefully get a chance to do this. And thanks, everybody, for listening to another episode of the I Am Landscape Growth podcast. We’ll see you at the next one.