L&L Insider

CENTS 2015 looks at personalities

The event’s educational sessions included lessons on understanding employee behavior and insight on how to read body language.

By Katie Tuttle

COLUMBUS, Ohio – It’s important to know your employees’ personalities and how they can hinder and/or help your business. That was the message during Richard Arlington’s session “Managing Personalities and Processes not the People” at CENTS, which took place in Columbus, Ohio in early January. The owner of Richard Arlington & Associates said there are four types of personalities that landscape contractors should know about: caloric, sanguine, phlegmatic and melancholy.

Caloric employees work best if they feel as if their choices play a large role. If you have an employee with this type of personality, it’s important to let them make decisions, even if they’re only minor ones.

Sanguine personalities are the type of people that will do any job, as long as it’s fun. Making a task into a game will make them more likely to do it willingly.

Phlegmatic employees are the people who stand around and wait to be told what to do, so always make sure you know these employees and give them tasks to complete.

Melancholy employees analyze every part of a situation before doing anything. Arlington said these are the types of people you want as landscape architects because they will break everything out into great detail before getting started.

Arlington also said there’s no such thing as a bad employee.

“A bad employee is an uneducated employee,” he said. “It’s just someone who hasn’t been trained properly.”
 

Body language. With a background in training members of the CIA and FBI on reading body language, Janine Driver gave her tips on what to look for when you are face to face with a customer or employee.

Driver, founder of The Body Language Institute and a previous law enforcement officer with the U.S. Department of Justice, said “Mind reading is the cancer of sales,” explaining that body language isn’t foolproof.

“Body language in and of itself is not enough to tell the whole story,” she said. To demonstrate this, Driver had an audience member ask Driver if she’d ever cheated on her husband.

Driver said no, but also shrugged. The audience member said that meant she had, but Driver said that’s not always true.

“A shoulder shrug doesn’t cancel out what you say, it just means you’re holding something back,” she said. An interrogation takes steps to get to the conclusion, so the shoulder shrug should be step one.

After her keynote, Driver did a follow-up breakout session on lie detection. She said that people never offer information before it’s asked for unless they’re trying to cover something up.

“If you’re interviewing someone and they offer evidence before it’s asked, be very wary,” she said.

For example, if you were interviewing someone for a job and they voluntarily told you they hadn’t been fired from their last job before you asked them. That should raise suspicion.

Another point Driver made was most job applications have a paragraph at the end that states something along the lines of “I certify that my answers are true and complete to the best of my knowledge” and offer a place for their signature.

Driver said that statement should be at the beginning of the application, because if someone’s lied about a question on the paper, they’ll have justified their answer to themselves before they get to the statement.

If they’ve already said that they’ll be truthful before they fill out the application, they’re more likely to be truthful.

“Prime brains by telling someone to tell the truth at the beginning,” she said.

We’re giving away money

GIE Media, Lawn & Landscape’s parent company, is accepting applications for the annual Richard Foster Award. Last year’s winner of the $2,500 scholarship, Patrick Vaillancourt, seen at right, stood out in a crowded field of more than 40 applicants thanks to his broad base of industry knowledge and the strong desire to learn more about the technical and business sides of the landscape industry.

Visit bit.ly/llscholarship to download the application. Please print off and fill out the form completely, then mail it to Chuck Bowen, Lawn & Landscape, 5811 Canal Road, Valley View, OH 44125.

To be eligible for an academic scholarship, you must be enrolled at a recognized two- or four-year college or university working toward a degree in horticulture, environmental science or other fields related to a segment of the green industry.

The deadline is April 15, 2015.
 

Letters to the Editor

Have something to say about an issue of Lawn & Landscape magazine. Email Editor Chuck Bowen at cbowen@gie.net.

Keep it clean

Editor’s note: We love hearing from you, but especially on popular topics in the industry. That’s why we decided to run this back and forth on a story about an owner who wasn’t paying himself in our September issue.

Mr. Bowen,

I very much enjoyed your editorial: Stop peeing in the pool. You addressed many of the pitfalls that plague our industry. I couldn’t agree with you more. However, I was shocked to see included in your magazine the article under Operations Profile.

Why?

According to the article, “In fact, now in his sixth year of business, Lenard still hasn’t paid himself one cent. Relying instead on his military retirement pay, all the profits go back into the company to promote growth.” Seriously!!! Is Mr. Lenard peeing in the pool? Is his labor considered as profit on a balance sheet or is it unaccounted for in the actual costs? What bank would approve loaning a business money with a business plan that does not provide an owner a salary for six years?

If Mr. Lenard calculated pay for someone else to perform his job for those six years, would the cost be offset by the value of his business and depreciating assets? I bet not. While I applaud Mike Lenard for enjoying his hobby for six years, seems to provide quality work according to the article, I can’t help but wonder how starting and running a company this way is good for our industry.

After 20-plus years in this industry, I doubt he will ever be able to get a ROI, labor included?

– Todd Cannon, president, TODDCO Grounds Maintenance

(Below is Editor Chuck Bowen’s response:)

Todd-

Thanks for reading and taking the time to write in.

While I can see where you’re coming from, I don’t think Lenard qualifies as the same type of contractor who “pees in the pool.” Those guys use unscrupulous or unsavory business practices to stay afloat, operate unsafely and don’t fully understand their own costs.

I think many contractors start out in the business as part-time operators, or run a landscape business while working full-time or receiving benefits from past military or government service. Many also operate other businesses in related fields – construction, homebuilding, real estate, etc. I don’t think those diversified streams of income preclude them from being stand-up and legitimate landscapers.

I think they’ve realized a way to use all the resources available to them to get ahead of the competition. That doesn’t make them sneaky – it makes them savvy.

– Chuck

Chuck,

I appreciate your taking the time out of your busy season to reply. I certainly don’t mean for this to be a back and forth. However, I wholeheartedly disagree with you. From your “Peeing in the pool” piece:

1. “It’s a race to the bottom.”

If Lenard omits his salary from his expenses, how is he accurately pricing his work? How could it not be underpriced? If Lenard’s pay of $0.00 was entered into the Exmark survey in (November’s Benchmarking Your Business) issue, how can the results be accurate for others to follow?

2. “You run a company … You are a professional who creates jobs.”

Lenard created jobs for others, he does quality work and that’s great, certainly not illegal or unsafe. However, he has not built into his financials a way to pay someone to perform his job. That’s not good business “savvy.”

3. “The work you sell today needs to pay dividends for your company and the industry for the long term.”

What investor would buy a company that has provided its owner a ROI of $0 for six years. Would you buy it? His only return will be selling depreciated assets. One of my competitive advantages is buying those assets from people like Lenard.

We as an industry need to price our work accurately. I am thrilled that young people with business degrees are entering the industry.

We need that. Too many of us in this industry are, as Michael Gerber (E-myth) says, “Technicians suffering from an entrepreneurial seizure.” I remember Jim Paluch (consultant) saying years ago that after working with service industry professions including ours, but also HVAC, electricians, plumbers, etc., that he could not understand why we want to work for rich people for nothing.

While many of us love this industry, we also have bills. We have families to provide for. We look to publications such as L&L, to help guide our course.

The supplement (Benchmarking Your Business) is a great help (except for the part where Brian DuMont “did not pay himself a salary. He took a small regular paycheck…” By definition, that’s a salary.

Please extend a little understanding to my rant. I do read your magazine religiously.

Best Wishes,

Todd

Ask the Experts

Chemical approach

Q: What do I need to know when handling hazardous chemicals?

A: Following label instructions is extremely important. We need to do a better job of following directions on product labels. After all, the product label and the associated safety data sheet (SDS) contain all of the important information on the safe use of the product in and around the work environment.

Among the most important sections of the label are directions on the safe use of the product. This includes the proper personal protective equipment (PPE) to be worn during mixing, loading and applying the product.

Reading and adhering to the label instructions is not the first step in the adoption of safe use practices, however. Actually, Step 1 is assessing the work environment to identify hazards with Step 2 being the incorporation of them into a “written” safety program.

The written safety program is so important that it ranks high on the list of most often cited violations by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

If an OSHA inspector stops by, one of his or her first requests will be to look at your written safety program.

It should contain the above-referenced hazard identification process that clearly states the impact of hazards on your employees, incorporates information from the labels of products like any pesticides being used to control pests, lists the PPE that the employer provides to employees for protection and details the training that is being adopted to reduce the risk of exposure to the products.

With the push by OSHA toward a globally harmonized system, the role of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), especially related to pesticides and the Worker Protection Standard (WPS), has created some concern.

Following the EPA’s WPS and OSHA’s Hazard Communication Standard guidelines does create a need for a higher level of awareness among employers.

But, the most important resource is the product label and the knowledge about the approved PPE to keep employees safe.

Please be aware that the information on product labels has changed over the past several years, and the newer label information and new versions of the SDS documents should be kept in an accessible location.

The product label’s “signal words,” including DANGER and WARNING, will be a strong indicator of the level of PPE that workers will be required to use.

For example, products with a DANGER signal word often require chemical-resistant aprons and bodysuits, while a WARNING product may require that exposed skin areas on the arms, legs, and feet be covered with long-sleeved shirts, long pants, and shoes and socks.

Product users will need to locate additional information in the safety data sheet to know how to handle contaminated clothing.

And since the work clothing may be dealt with when the worker returns home, employee training should include recommendations on laundering the work clothes. Consider these four steps to simplify the chemical application process:

1. Audit or assess hazards in the work environment. Select those products that are labeled for use on the pests to be controlled, and read and understand all label instructions and requirements. This audit should help guide the following step in the process.
2. Formalize your written hazard communication program. It should be shared with employees and made available, upon request, to regulation enforcement personnel.
3. Provide training on the identified work site hazards. Be proactive on your training approach and make it a habit to provide training before workers are exposed to hazards. Keep in mind that business expansion into new operations and the use of new equipment and products can change the scope of training needed by your employees.
4. Document the training by having employees sign a sheet indicating the training topic, trainer and date of the training. Maintain a record of the training in your files for future reference and in the event of an inspection.
   
    

Sam Steel, PLANET Safety Adviser

ASK THE EXPERTS is presented in partnership with PLANET’s Trailblazers On Call program. Trailblazers are industry leaders who volunteer their time and expertise to give back to the industry.