While many people tend to think of growing their company in terms of adding employees, Andrew Weilbacher says that having too many crews was a mistake for his business. It became tough to manage multiple crews and he was getting callbacks on jobs he didn’t personally supervise because mistakes were being made. For his small landscape business, he found that less employees has actually meant more profit and fewer headaches.
For a while Weilbacher, who owns Weilbacher Landscaping in Millstadt, IL, says that he had about 10 employees and three separate crews going out on jobs. Though he grew the business from doing side work on his own into a full-time career, he figured that adding more crews was the best way to move forward and grow his business. But what he found was that having his hand in the work and overseeing it as much as possible was actually more effective for him.
“As the economy got shaky and I cut back my employees to just three or four crew members over the last couple years, I’ve found that I’m actually making more money and dealing with a lot less problems,” he says. “My quality control is much better because I’m able to be the job myself most of the time.”
Weilbacher says he started the business as a hands-on owner and has found that it works better that way for his business. “With a few crews going out that I wasn’t personally working on I was getting callbacks that the work wasn’t done well enough or there were mistakes,” he recalls. “That’s a big problem for my business. Most of my jobs are week-long jobs where we start on a Monday and finish up by Friday. If we get a call over the weekend that something needs to be fixed before we get paid it means spending half a day back on that property on Monday instead of starting the next job.”
Since downsizing to one key crew with himself as the leader, Weilbacher says he’s no longer getting those callbacks. “It’s my company and I’m looking for perfection,” he says. “I understand that a laborer getting paid $12 an hour isn’t going to care if it’s perfect—but I do.”
Today customers are happier and Weilbacher says he’s enjoying a simplified payroll. He says that paying 10 employees each week was really eating away at his profits and he started to feel like he wasn’t making as much as he should be. The extra work he was getting done by having multiple crews just wasn’t paying off with all the callbacks he had to handle.
While things have much improved, Weilbacher says one problem he continues to have is finding good employees. Though he’s currently happy with his crew, laborers tend to come and go and Weilbacher says that finding good help is extremely hard. “Just recently I went through four laborers to find the one that was great,” he says. “One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned from that is the fact that you have to be your employees’ boss—not their friend. You need to find the best person for the job and not worry about hurting anyone’s feelings. What I do now is give employees a two-week trial period. I explain up front that if it doesn’t work out, they’ll still get their paycheck, but we’ll have to part ways.”
Weilbacher says that knowing whether or not to cut down on the number of crews is really a thin line for small businesses like his. He knows that the common thinking is to add more crews and get more jobs, but he says he’s found out first-hand it’s not always as simple as it sounds. “Everyone always wants to know how many employees you have and they think that it’s somehow a measure of how good you are,” he says. “But a bigger business isn’t necessarily a better business. After all, it’s not about what you bring in, it’s what you take home. I’ve definitely found that I have less headaches and more money and I’m much happier with the way things are today.”
Weilbacher Landscaping
Headquarters: Millstadt, IL
Owner: Andrew Weilbacher
2010 Revenue: $500,000
Projected 2011 Revenue: About the same
Clientele: 80 percent residential; 20 percent commercial
Services: 70 percent retaining walls; 20 percent paver patios; 10 percent design/build
