411 on Hiring for Your Business

This is a guest post by Josh, my lawn business partner.

The business of lawn care can be a tiring one, and often ends up being too big of a time commitment for most teens to handle. Here are my ideas, mixed with personal experience, on the hiring of other teens for your lawn care business.

If, (and most probably when), you start getting too many costumers to service on your own, one of the first questions you may have is whether or not to hire some other teens to help you out. You may or may not have started your lawn care business with a friend of yours, but eventually the work load will become too much for any one person, or partnership, to handle. When my partner and I predicted that we would soon have too many clients to easily service, we started investigating whether or not to hire some local teens to help us out. One of the first questions you should ask yourself is, how many clients can I, (or we), handle on our own? Consider the amount of spare time you have, and how long it takes to mow each of your costumers' lawns, I think you can do the math. Once you have that number in your head, figure out if the number of clients you have outnumbers the amount of clients you can service. I know this sounds like a pretty elementary question, but it is pretty easy to get ahead of yourself and start looking to hire more workers when you are perfectly capable of mowing your clients' lawns on your own! If it turns out that you truly need to hire more workers, than you now have to move on to the wonderfully confusing and unpredictable world of hiring teenagers!

In our case, we had a fairly large “labor supply” that we could pull from, which made the idea of hiring workers more plausible from the beginning; but it is fairly likely that you will not have enough teens willing to mow lawns which will put a damper on your plans pretty quickly. If you determine that you have enough teens willing to mow lawns, you have to find some way to tell them that you have a great job for them! Depending on how old you are, many of your friends may have already taken the patty flipping plunge of no return, in which case they will be less than enthusiastic about pushing a lawn mower up and down hills in 90 degree weather. If you are able to convince these minimum wage workers that you can pay them more than what they are currently making, (which might not be the case), than they might be willing to work for you, but I doubt it. Your best bet is to find unemployed kids who don’t fit into the patty flipping mold, and give them a good enough pitch to convince them that playing World of Warcraft eight hours a day isn’t a good way to spend their Saturdays.

Even if you manage to convince some teens to work for you in theory, the practicality of teen workers is slim to none. If you have a lawn mowing partner, chances are you both decided to mow, and you both decided to commit to your costumers from the get-go, don’t assume that all teens will be so committed to your money-making schemes. It turns out that most teens are rather unreliable and untrustworthy, and you need to decide whether or not it is worth having another teen go out and represent your company. You need to decide how they money is handled after the job is done; we usually collected the money from the costumer right after the job, but you probably shouldn’t trust a hired hand to handle your hard-earned cash. Also, your workers will probably not be as interested in protecting your company's name with your costumers, and all it really takes is one shabby mow to lose a client, (speaking from personal experience)! It’s a lot to consider, and in the end we decided not to hire any additional workers; but it also meant that we couldn’t move forward with our company expansion ideas!

Labels: business