How Tree Masters Tree Service Recruits and Retains Top Talent
According to a report in 2019, 92% of green industry businesses find it difficult to find good employees for their business. Rob Graham, Owner of Tree Masters Tree Service out of Medina, Ohio, joined us for a webinar where he shared how Tree Masters has adapted to all of the chaos of 2020, recruits and retains top talent, and tactics he uses to drive performance amongst his team.
Here’s a full recording of the webinar followed by a brief recap.
Rob Graham- Owner of Tree Masters Tree Service
“As we ramp up, things become more challenging. There’s more pressure on employees to get more work done and be more efficient. So one of the things I’ve implemented is a weekly goal. We started it last year and it’s really simple. I’ve got a little board and I put the daily sales figures and I put a weekly revenue goal. We separate the tree work from the land clearing and log sales, and I put a goal for each week. And if we hit those goals, I’ll offer them some type of incentive, whether it be gift cards or things like that, or doing lunch or something. I was amazed at how quickly those guys would walk in, they’d want to see the revenue from the day before to see where we’re at from our goal and what it was going to take to achieve those objectives. I put some criteria on it. The numbers needed to be reached without hitting overtime, things like that. So it wasn’t a layup form, it took effort. If we were hitting those goals, the company was successful and they were able to quickly see it. They understood it and they felt like part of the solution.”
“One of the things I’ve done recently, and thankfully, because this kind of goes into the process of hiring people, is to develop people internally. I’ve had some turnover and been able to replace or move some people internally that I’ve been trying to develop. As other employees see people internally get an opportunity to develop and do a more responsible role, or into kind of learning a new part of the business, like a crane operator or a crew leader, when I hire from within for those types of positions, I think that brings some confidence to the guys. It gives them an opportunity to shoot for increased pay potentially, and for the responsibility. And I think regardless of the level they were brought in at, when they see internal people hired or promoted, I think that definitely keeps people motivated as well.”
Rob Graham- Owner of Tree Masters Tree Service
“That’s probably one of the bigger obstacles. We utilize social media, especially Facebook. And then I use Indeed and have had some success with it. I’m looking to expand into PHC, and I was specifically looking for somebody that was already certified and had the skillset to launch that business. And I was able to find somebody. I have an offer out, so I’m hoping I can make that happen. But I was able to use Indeed to attract him, and we’ll see how that goes. But those have been the two forms that I have used to recruit talent.”
“But when you can find that person, you really have to be aggressive and try to provide something unique. For my size business, I think we provide good benefits. We do provide medical, dental, and vision for our employees. And we have a simple IRA that we match up to 3%. So when you can provide benefits like that, I think it definitely helps your chances and it helps you retain some people. But then there are times when there’s nothing you can do to keep the people they just need to move on. But I think having those types of benefits and things like that, helps us retain some of the people, and attract people that aren’t able to get those from other companies.”
Rob Graham- Owner of Tree Masters Tree Service
“Truthfully, to talk a little bit about how I use SingleOps. It’s using the metrics to make sure as a business, I’m doing what I need to do. I’m using it as a tool to really follow up on all our leads. And as we convert them to proposals, then following up on all them. So I have no doubt that utilizing SingleOps to do emails, to follow up on proposals, and things like that have definitely helped drive my business. I look at the metrics daily, just the basic metrics, understand emails, proposals, active jobs, how many jobs we’ve closed. So for me, that’s just an internal thing that I do on a daily basis just to understand how we’re doing.”
“I also use it because I can quickly look to see how many active jobs we have. And really for me, it’s more about dollar value. Because that dollar value, based on my estimate on a weekly basis, will help me determine when I need to add an additional crew. So my decisions on adding crews are all financially driven. And I’m able to pull the data out of SingleOps to say, my backlog’s getting to this. So if I bring on a second crew, and maybe it’s just a small two-man crew to do jobs two to three days a week, something like that. All right. So that’s $6,000 to $10,000 a week. All right. Is the revenue potential there going forward to justify that?”
“So that’s what I use SingleOps for on a daily basis. It does help drive my decision on when to add additional people and crews, to be successful based on the amount of backlog we have. And then the daily statistics on how we’re doing with closures and followups and leads and proposals. So it’s been great. Again, I don’t have anything more than we haven’t discussed as far as specifically driving top performance for my team, but I am able to go over and review the SingleOps information with them.”
To watch the entire recording of this webinar, click here.
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