As the labor pool continues to contract, training new hires without green industry experience quickly is more important than ever for landscape business owners.
“The traditional method is on-the-job training. So, you hire someone, you put them on a crew on Monday and you hope it works out. Now, (business owners) have a lot more strategy to that approach,” says Matt Crinklaw, senior vice president of Greenius.
Crinklaw shares how green industry business owners can leverage business software to get new hires up and running with confidence.
Why not?
Making sure your employees are properly trained is a crucial part of running a successful business. Crinklaw says he’s heard that from many green industry contractors, both personally and from surveys that Greenius has conducted.
“It’s so important,” he says. “We sent out a survey to a lot of our landscape contractors, and 78 percent of them said that training is a huge priority going forward and something they really want to do.”
So, why haven’t many of those contractors started making moves toward building a training program? Crinklaw says it comes down to the time and energy it takes to set up your own training program.
That’s where businesses like Greenius come into play, he says.
“We can say, ‘Hey, you can meet with us in an hour and get this off the ground.’ We don’t need a two- or three-month rollout. We only need a few hours. And then you have this full out-of-the-box training program that allows you to really start changing processes really fast,” Crinklaw adds.
Build your own
One of Greenius’ newer features allows contractors to get even more granular with their training programs.
“We recently added a course builder tool, which allows customers to add their training now, so if people have their videos or ways of doing it, they can add it to our system,” Crinklaw says.
Greenius has also begun to partner with equipment manufacturers in the green industry to add tutorials on using their equipment to the software.
“Recently, we connected with Toro Equipment, so we can offer a bunch of their training in Greenius. We’re also working with Weathermatic to get some irrigation training into our system, so we’re trying to expand our library by a solid 10 to 20 percent.”
Outside the box
Another option, used by companies like Conserva Irrigation, No. 85 on the 2024 LM150 list, involves working with a company outside of the green industry.
Conserva’s 22-module-long program helps new employees learn irrigation fundamentals and aims to have new hires field-ready within 45 to 60 days.
At the time, the program’s opening module introduced the new hire to Conserva and its ideals. Other modules focused on sales techniques, leadership training and communication.
“This has allowed us to widen the recruiting nets and look outside our industry for talent,” Russ Jundt told LM in 2022, shortly after the program launched. “We can hire based on the most important human aspects (work ethic, culture fit, coachability) and train the skill sets necessary. This is a game changer. We sell our ability to train and develop employees and help them build a career.”
