Growing Tomorrow’s Leaders Today

It seems that every store window has a help wanted sign in it these days and the news is full of stories about how difficult it is to hire good people. The landscape industry is no different.

At a time when there is plenty of business available, finding people to do the work is a huge challenge for most companies. The issue is compounded when trying to fill the most important position in any landscape company, the Crew Leader.

Crew Leaders are the one’s who get it done. They are the face of the company to the customer because they are seen every day during a landscape project, or every week for maintenance properties. They lead a team of people. Their performance can mean the difference between a profitable season or a losing season.

Because good Crew Leaders are so difficult to find, Allentuck Landscaping Co. decided to take a different approach. We decided to grow our own (we grow plants, why not people?).

We had already developed a solid Crew Member training program when we launched MyLandscapeAcademy and were getting solid results through it. Our company is fortunate to have lots of well-trained employees who understand our company culture. We needed to leverage this.

We created Allentuck Landscaping Achieves.

We designed Allentuck Landscaping Achieves to cross train both maintenance and landscape work so our graduates could be deployed to either side of our company. Potential participants were asked to apply to the program. We had eight applicants to fill five slots.

The Allentuck Landscaping Achieves program is six months long and students meet every other Thursday for a full day of training. Some would say that pulling five people out of production that much would have a negative effect on revenue and profit, but we take the long view and feel otherwise .We consider it an investment in our company’s future and the future of our employees.

The syllabus for Allentuck Landscaping Achieves is robust and includes topics such as Crew Management, Quality Sites, Core Values, Paver Construction, Garden Layout and many more. At the end of six months these five individuals will be set up to succeed.

The ultimate goal of Allentuck Landscaping Achieves is to develop team members into excellent Crew Leaders who are armed with the knowledge and skills to run efficient, quality oriented and safe teams. They will be able to contribute to the training of their Crew Members and, clearly, to our company’s overall success.

That being said, we have noticed some profound unexpected benefits. The participating team members have shown a sense of pride that they are in the program and rapidly advancing their skills. This has been noticed on the job sites that they work on.

The participants have also created strong bonds between each other, much the way a sport team would. We purposely provide lunch at each session to encourage this rapport. Breaking bread with others always strengthens relationships.

The status of our leadership team members who are teaching the courses has also increased among all of our employees. Through teaching, they have demonstrated their expertise.

There is no doubt in our mind that by investing in the growth of people, our company will continue to improve and provide exception experiences to our customers, and our employees.