Login

USERNAME
PASSWORD

Become a Registered Guest Login Help Lost Password?

“We grew and struggled. Then, we grew and struggled some more. For 10 years, we went through this cycle, and I knew it would continue until I found people who would stay with me.” Sound familiar? These words come from Michael Hatcher, CLP, president of Michael Hatcher & Associates, located in Memphis, Tennessee. Like so many other successful landscape contractors, Hatcher learned from experience that the only way to grow a company is to grow employees, too. Until he was able to identify and provide career paths for them, he would be on a merry-go-round — continuously looking for and training new people — and planned, controlled growth would suffer.

  

Hatcher launched his company in 1986, four years after graduating from Mississippi State University with a degree in landscape contracting. In between graduation and entrepreneurship, he gained industry experience working for a landscape design firm and, later, for an aboriculture company. When he hung up his shingle, he had a pickup truck, some borrowed tools, and a couple of small residential landscape installation jobs. This seems like light years away from a company that today operates three divisions, does more than $3 million in sales, and has reasonable expectations of more than doubling in size in the near future. Now would be closer to then, Hatcher admits, if in 1996, he did not go back to Mississippi State, hire two of the top graduates in its landscape architecture/contracting program, and then make career paths for them in his company.

 

Beyond Catch 22

  

You want to grow, but you cannot grow without the right employees. You have found the right employees, but you cannot hire them without the work. Hatcher found his way around this dilemma by, in his words, “having the pipeline half built before hiring the people.” He explains, “I had developed a good reputation in the marketplace, and our company had plenty of work potential before we hired the two college graduates. They gave us an opportunity to take advantage of the potential.”

  

The owner had taken his first step. Yet, as he points out, there is more to growing employees than selling more jobs. Among other steps along a career path, employees need to share a vision. “The company and employees have to be going in the same direction,” Hatcher emphasizes, “and a company has to deliver on employee expectations. Of course, compensation goals are important, but there are other considerations. For example, avid hunters will want time off for hunting, avid fishers, the same. I found that a big part of developing career paths is understanding employees and being able to communicate with them so I could identify both their career and personal goals.”

 

Then, Hatcher made sure they had the proper training and gave them the opportunity to succeed. He restructured his three company divisions — residential landscape construction, commercial landscape construction, and maintenance — into individual profit centers, essentially setting up three separate companies, and gave his top employees profit/loss responsibility and the important task of developing relationships with customers. “Some of my peers may think I am playing with fire by encouraging employees to get so close to customers, ” says Hatcher, “but, really, the only way to grow your employees and your company to the fullest is to be open with your people and give them every opportunity to succeed.”

  

In 1996, Hatcher brought in JP Horizon’s Jim Paluch to help with employee development and training. The combination of having good people and good training gave him the confidence to build on his success. In fact, Hatcher was forced to pull back on the throttle a bit and not give in to the temptation to go after the big jobs. “I learned that lower profile, smaller jobs were oftentimes more profitable than bigger, higher profile ones. My ego may have said go after the big job, but my mind won out.”

 

Image Counts

  

As he looks back on his career, Hatcher says there is no question that developing career paths for employees was vital. But there were other positive influences, too. For example, in the early 1990s, he hosted a radio show with several other contractors and, later, had his own Saturday morning TV show. The two exercises gave his company invaluable exposure, and being involved with the media taught him how to get the most bang for his advertising buck. “We bought several advertising spots on cable TV during sporting events,” he remembers. “The way the ads were positioned gave the illusion that we were doing some national advertising. Of course, we weren’t, but appearances are important in this industry.”

  

He continues, “We are in the image business, and I have always been a stickler about looking and acting professional. With high-end customers, especially, it is all about image, and I try to make sure my employees understand this.” Just as important, he adds, is for the owner, to borrow a cliché, to “walk the talk.”

  

“I have always tried to set a good example for my employees,” says Hatcher, who notes that getting people to do what you want them to do involves more than showing them the way. Owners need to be proactive. The first step is to make career paths available for them. The next step is to actually lead them down the path. Hatcher never subscribed to the “Do as I say, not as I do” school of thought. In fact, his success over the years is founded less on giving employee instructions and more on bringing them in as an integral part of the team and, as he points out, making sure their career and personal goals are being met.

 

7/03

 

By Rod Dickens, ALCA Contributing Writer