Starting the season off right

Here’s a look back at how Lawn & Pest Solutions was fairing in early spring and summer.

April

In the past, Paul Welborn would have taken the lead on assembling his company’s career ladder. But not this year, as Welborn continues to learn to delegate at Lawn & Pest Solutions in New Albany, Ms. He’s put his managers on the lawn side of the business in charge of creating the steps a technician has to take to climb the ladder.

“A year ago, I would have put a lot of the information together and had them look at it and see what they thought,” he says. “Now they're building out that information and I'm giving my feedback, which is the way it should be.”

Welborn has learned through the process that his managers are more than capable of taking on the responsibility and saves him the headache of one more task.

He says they always had the ladder in their minds and operated as if it was official, but never had it in writing.

“It's sort of the way we did it anyway,” he says. “But the value in it now, it's putting it on a piece of paper and being able to put it in front of a guy and say, ‘Here's your path. Okay, here's the things you need today.’ Maybe we were pushing them towards some of these things, but it wasn't a formal, ‘Here's your plan, here's a way you can attack this and continue to move up in the company.’”

In the details. Allowing managers to assemble the career ladder has provided Welborn teaching moments. Technicians will have to take 7-10 tests to move to a new level. The tests are taken via training software the company uses.

The managers were in charge of formulating the questions technicians would have to answer to pass a test. One manager was asking entry-level technicians for knowledge that a technician who’s been there a year and a half would know. So, that manager was asked to create tests for the more advanced levels. And now that the lawn side has a foundation for a career ladder, Welborn wants to build one out for the structural pest side of the business.

“We've brought the pest manager in and he’s going to start giving some feedback of, ‘Okay, we can tweak this to better fit pest’ and make everything match up for their job responsibilities, versus a lawn tech,” Welborn says.

Sales challenge. Right now, Lawn & Pest Solutions is 80% lawn care and 20% structural pest, but Welborn would like to grow the pest side. For 2020, they have mapped out a sales challenge where they will focus on growing one segment of that division a quarter – perimeter pest in first quarter, termite in the second quarter, mosquito third quarter, and then back to perimeter pest in the fall.

Since they started mapping out the contest in the first quarter, the pest challenge wasn’t too much of a priority, which was a good thing.

“Luckily (we didn’t have a) real strong contest in place for first quarter because our weather here has been rainy and very uncooperative,” he says. “So, our customer interaction or upsell ability has been very limited in the first quarter of this year.”

Harvesters’ take. Paul is faced with several key challenges not the least of which has been the weather in February. Rain, and more rain, has affected their production goal drastically from a goal of $116,000 down to $18,000 for the month.

This has put quite a dent into their overall sales goal of $2 million. The team will have to hustle to get caught up and we believe this team will do just that. We will follow this team very closely as they make up this temporary setback.

Another key front is with people. In our last Harvesters’ Take, we shared that Paul had executed our retention game plan Perfectly with a key player and they have decided to remain on board! After deciding that the pay rate was probably too low for this high-skilled position, Paul made an adjustment but that was still lower than the offer they had received. After considering everything, this person stayed on board for two reasons:

• Culture: Lawn and Pest has an excellent culture! People feel engaged, challenged and part of a team that has strong core values and an excellent team atmosphere.

• Location: Yes, location! The excellent job opportunity this person received was a considerable drive to work each day while the Lawn and Pest location was very close. This was discovered during our meeting to learn why they were leaving. Once it was brought to their attention that they would spend more than an hour more per day driving to their new job, they agreed that a better work life balance was worth staying at Lawn and Pest.

• Lesson: Don’t undervalue the location of where you are based.

June

The team at Lawn & Pest Solutions in Mississippi has been busy. Owner Paul Welborn and company beat its production goal for April by 17% and new sales are about 5% ahead of 2019 levels. However, Welborn says they budgeted for a substantial increase in new sales but that hasn’t materialized yet.

If the COVID-19 restrictions on social distancing relax without increased health concerns, he expects to see at least a portion of the increased budget come through.

A company sales challenge to add termite services has been going great because technicians have embraced the upsell opportunities.

The company normally pays technicians $30 for each referral that leads to a sale but have expanded it for the sales challenge. For the sales, Lawn & Pest Solutions is tracking referrals whether they lead to a sale or not and offering prizes for the technicians that get the most referrals each month and then a larger prize at the end for the overall leader.

“One of the pest techs told me the other day, ‘I'm not going to let the other guys beat me,’ which tells me he's having fun with the challenge we laid out for them,” he says. “Our techs are already good at talking with customers, so we educated the techs on the big talking points about termites so they could increase awareness. We increased termite sales 100% over last April.”

Two new hires have been able to get started on the newly implemented career ladder, but it has somewhat been impeded due to COVID-19.

“A major component of the career ladder for the more experienced employees involves tests within some software,” he says. “With the social distancing and our isolation policies, we have not implemented that portion as well. So, we are a little off track from where I had planned to be year-to-date.”

Welborn is also monitoring the numbers more closely while rolling out a new budgeting system and chart of accounts to better watch gross margins and cost of goods sold. Welborn meets with his operations manager and office manager each Wednesday to look at year to date and month to date numbers.

“(We’ve) discussed worst case scenarios if sales do not materialize as we had budgeted,” he says. “Bill (Arman) stressed importance of watching sales week to week and me stepping in as owner to assist closing big sales.”

Harvesters' Take. Paul's company is fortunate because they have not experienced any COVID-19 cases. He did, however, close his office as recommended by the state of Mississippi and followed all the CDC guidelines with their crews and equipment. His manager and office people have been, for the most part, working from their homes.

Regarding sales, so far inbound leads have sustained them but not at the growth rate they expected. They are 5% higher than last year at this same time but that is not enough to support their budgeted growth. They have gotten some new jobs, one of which was particularly good in renovating a sports field. One thing they also tried was having a sales contest among their technicians. This was very successful, and they loved the competition.

In order to accomplish the higher budgeted sales, they brought on a business developer, but he has been struggling. This particular sales professional is excellent at person-to-person sales, but we all know what happened there. Paul is still optimistic that during the late summer and fall he will again be able to meet people and make the sales they need.

All in all, their financials are okay with gross margins running between 50-60% as budgeted. They also got their PPP money and are tracking it carefully with the hopes of having the loan forgiven. Paul is watching the numbers very closely as we requested and hopes the economy bounces back.