Do you want to build a landscaping team who not only gets your clients results, but who also are invested in staying with your company for years to come?
In today’s episode, I’m talking with Nick Klotz from EPM Professional Ground Services and he’s sharing his secrets for keeping employees motivated to perform and grow through a strong, positive company culture.
00:00: Guest Speaker Nick Klotz of EPM Professional Ground Services Joins Jack Jostes to Discuss How Solving Your Labor Shortage Will Fix Your Company Culture
You probably think of your snow and landscape equipment and vehicles as assets. But what about your people? If you want to increase your employee retention and recruiting results, check out today's conversation with Nick Klotz on how to solve your labor shortage by fixing your company culture. Where he shares actionable tactics and ideas that he's personally implemented to achieve over 90% employee retention at his snow and landscape company. Nick shares tips on how to create an employee education budget, the value of team building events, and how to promote bad fit employees to join other companies.
Hey everyone, Jack Jostes is here. Welcome to the Landscaper's Guide where we share sales, marketing and leadership tips to help you grow your snow and landscape company. And today's topic is all about employees and culture, and part of culture includes eating beef jerky, at least at Ramblin Jackson, we have a beef jerky club where we promised to be on time and prepared to add value to all of our meetings. So we're a very punctual company and we want to show you how punctual we are and how good the beef jerky is by sending you some in the mail. So claim your Landscaper's Marketing Toolbox at landscapersguide.com/toolbox. See our show notes to click on a link and I'll send you some beef jerky and a cool marketing field guide that'll help you figure out which marketing you should focus on first. And with that, let's get into today's interview with Nick Klotz.
All right everyone, welcome back to the Landscaper's Guide. Today I'm excited to interview Nick Klotz, the president of EPM Professional Ground Services, a multimillion dollar snow and landscape company in Michigan. Nick is also a business coach on the topic of employee culture and in fact, I met Nick at the 2023 SIMA Symposium where he was presenting today's topic, Fix Your Labor Shortage by Correcting Your Culture. So Nick, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Nick Klotz:
Hey, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. Pleasure to see you again. We had a great chat at SIMA back in, was it June or July? Over a drink. So it's great to connect again.
Jack Jostes:
Absolutely. So Nick, tell us a little bit about yourself, about your company, a little bit about your background.
Nick Klotz:
So I am bred into small business. Both my parents have had small businesses as long as I can remember. Kind of fell into grounds care. My mom worked for a company, ended up acquiring that company in grounds care, lawn maintenance, removal. Worked that up through high school, parted ways over a difference of trajectory for the business, got into a different line of work for about three years, hated every minute, and dove right back into snow and landscape maintenance.
Jack Jostes:
What is it that brought you back? What do you like about the work?
Nick Klotz:
Being outside, seeing a finished product, just the overall challenge of it. I enjoyed being the leader of a company, jumped back into that at a very small scale compared to what it was before. But just miss being outside and having some freedom in my schedule, which really isn't the case when you start a business from what I thought, but mainly the outdoor portion of it.
Jack Jostes:
So I'm curious, how long have you had this company?
Nick Klotz:
EPM was founded in November of 2010, so we're on 12, 13 years, something like that now.
Jack Jostes:
And when we talked, you told me that you're only working like 20 to 25 hours a week. Is that true?
Nick Klotz:
It fluctuates. On average I'm probably in the office two to three days a week. I have my phone on me, I work 20 to 25 hours a week. As a small business owner, I am always available to my team and they know that and I think that's why I'm afforded the ability to be out of the office as much as I am because they know I've got their back when needed.
Jack Jostes:
Yeah. Well I'm curious, so if you've reached this level of running your company where you're only able to work 20, 25 hours a week and you have a team, are you still doing things that you enjoy in the business, like being outside and the things that you're kind of telling me that brought you back to it? What's that like at this phase of business?
Nick Klotz:
That's the comical portion is, I guess I miss saying this prior, I got back into this line of work because I hated staring at a computer screen and doing numbers and now my main focus in the business is staring at a computer screen and doing numbers. Two of our clients are still hands-on clients. For me, the bulk of my time is supporting our team, helping our team grow, culture events, drive our culture forward, but then looking at the financial aspect of the business is probably my primary focus at this point.
05:10: How P&L Reports Help Nick Spot Employee Problems In Advance
Jack Jostes: Well, so what do you enjoy about that now that you're kind of in that seat?
Nick Klotz:
So if you would've asked my high school math teacher, if I was a numbers guy, he probably would've laughed and fell out of his chair crying. Turns out I'm a numbers guy when it comes to P&Ls and any report that has to do with financials of a business, absolutely love that portion of it. Now, trigonometry and algebra in high school hated every second of it. So just the challenge is seeing the working pieces and how things fit and where they go in a P&L and how to make improvements in months to come.
Jack Jostes:
I think that the difference is when you're working with your own numbers and there's an actual reward at the end of doing it, like a financial reward, it suddenly makes more sense.
Nick Klotz:
Yes.
Jack Jostes:
And if you've screwed it up and had net loss or realized, wow, I wasted thousands of dollars or worse on something, you kind of figure it out. So that's at least been my experience with math. I now know all my numbers really well and I can access them pretty quickly. But when I started my company I didn't. And I used to think, I'm not a math guy, I'm not good at this. But then I learned it and now I enjoy it too.
06:28: Nick Explains The Secret to Keeping a 95% Employee Retention Rate
Jack Jostes: So many of the people listening are having some sort of challenge with either employee recruiting or employee retention or maybe both, in the snow and landscape industry in particular. So tell us at a high level, what is your talk, Fix Your Labor Shortage by Correcting Your Culture, what does that mean and what are some tangible real life business results of this idea?
Nick Klotz:
The real life result of it, we average probably about a 95% retention rate right now. We don't have the industry turnover that most do. I attribute that to our culture because we've done such hard work and had such dedication to making this such a positive and helpful and great place to work. It's by no doubt not all me. I mean, I can put the bulk of that on the shoulders of my team and my managers and the rest of the team that makes us make leaps and bounds forwards every year. The largest thing I guess I would attribute to a positive culture, at least for a business owner manager is that we have line items in, we just referenced P&Ls, we have line items in our P&Ls, in our budgets for, say, a three-quarter ton Chevy pickup. You have a budget for maintenance on that piece of equipment every year, your asset.
7:50: How Nick Maintains Such a Low Team Member Turnover Rate
Jack Jostes:
What are you doing to maintain your greatest asset, which would be your team members? Is there a budgeted line item to move them forward every year?
Nick Klotz:
We do. We have that figure in our head that what we plan to spend per head, per team member. But when you look at most businesses in many, many different industries, they view their assets as the piece of equipment, the tax write off at the end of the year. Well, without your greatest asset, which is your team, all of that equipment doesn't move. And if you don't treat them and build them as your greatest asset, it's not going to move efficiently or move well.
Jack Jostes:
I agree. I love hearing you say that and I also think you're that one of the first people that I've heard assign a specific budget to it. Have you ever thought about looking at your people as an asset and assigning a financial value to it like you would your fleet of vehicles?
Nick Klotz:
We do. We do. So actually I'd never heard anyone else that had did this before my talk at SIMA and I actually asked that question and I had a guy raise his hand and I looked at him, I said, we need to be friends. So our dollar value that we have per head, it fluctuates a little. We have a little bit of gray area in it. But it's like 800 to $1,200 per head per team member that we budget not just for growth for education. Education we look at is a whole different avenue. But this is just for fun events to build the team. For instance, bowling's an easy one. I mean everybody can go bowling. But we've done Detroit Tigers games, we have done scavenger hunts, just something outside the box.
09:30: How In Person Company Events Boost Team Member Morale
Jack Jostes:
So I recently had a retreat where my company we're all remote.
Nick Klotz:
I saw that. That looked great.
Jack Jostes:
Thank you. It was great. It was awesome because we all work remotely and just like you and I are having this great conversation over Zoom right now, we're getting really good work done and our retention rate is very strong and our client retention, all the numbers are good and there's something about being in person that it was just great to do that. I don't know that I could assign a dollar value to it. I've thought about it. I got texts though from people that they were really excited to be back to work and they've never been excited to do that.
I also will tell you, and there are people who maybe are listening, but I have some content on my social media about recruiting and hosting these events like pig roasts or we play the stump game and I get so much trash talk from people like, oh this is BS, you just need to pay people more and nobody cares about bowling or barbecues and why don't you just pay people well? And I'm always like, look, yeah, obviously you got to pay people really well. I think sometimes people think that... I don't know, bowling isn't that expensive, right?
Nick Klotz:
That's our chip shot event that we do every year. I mean it is the cheapest event we do. We actually use bowling annually and the way we do our events is we usually try to have three to four per year, minimum one to two with the entire family invited, one to two with just the team member and their significant other or spouse.
Jack Jostes:
So is it worth it? I mean is it -
Nick Klotz:
Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Hands down. Everybody's always smiling. Everybody's always laughing. We have a very, very small percentage that don't attend because they either are unable, out of town. We have a couple guys that live away from town because we do some remote work for a utility contractor, so we hire some out of town guys so they aren't able to make it down. But I mean just what it pays back in smiles and fun. I attribute a lot to the positive attitude we have around here.
11:45: Nick & Jack Discuss How Investing in Team Member Education Benefits The Company & Employees
Jack Jostes:
Tell me about the education part. So, you mentioned that there's a budget in there for education. And before we pressed record, you were telling me that teaching your people investing in their knowledge is important to you. So how are some of the ways you're doing that?
Nick Klotz:
Yes, so I mean you're basically, you're either growing or dying. You have to continue to level up your intellect, your knowledge, otherwise you're just going to be stagnant. There's no zero-sum days, you're either moving forward or you're moving backwards. So our leadership team all has, I would've to pull up one of their contracts to see, but it's either 1,500 or 2,000 that is your guaranteed training credit per year. You come to me with a class you want to take, an education tidbit you want to do, need my sign-off because I don't need you going and learning about something that has nothing to do with us. But 99.9% of the time it's a yep, go learn and come back and teach us. So a lot of them use that for the SIMA ASM course. Pretty much my entire leadership team has done the ASM course. A couple have started to look into the CSP. One of my department managers is looking into World of Concrete and some classes at World of Concrete because of that education credit.
Jack Jostes:
I really like that. And grow or die is actually one of our core values at Ramblin Jackson. So it's branded. It's part of what we do and it's something I'm very passionate about is learning. And it's one of my reasons for hosting this podcast is that I kind of get to talk to really smart people all the time. It's like an excuse to have a conversation with people. I end up learning a lot from running this show. One of the things I like doing is reading books with people or listening to audiobooks. So we have somebody who's in a new position and we're listening to the One Minute Manager. I don't know if you've ever read that book.
Nick Klotz:
I haven't read it, but I've heard of it.
Jack Jostes:
It's really short, it's really good. It's kind of the framework for our management style. And I love reading books with people and then having a conversation. I think that bringing it back to the team and talking about it is a key part and that when people know that they need to do that, then they take it even more seriously and get more value. And I know as a public speaker, I learn a lot just by preparing to speak. When I'm like, oh, I need to present this idea to people it helps me really own it and learn it.
14:20: How to Extend Company Culture Into Offboarding Team Members & Other Challenging Situations
Jack Jostes:
So this has all been really positive stuff and there is part of business ownership and management and having a culture which is helping people leave the team when they're not the right fit. And this is something that I've developed, it's like a thick skin that you have to develop. It still feels awful when you have to ask people to leave your team. It's always my least favorite thing to do. I think if you don't do it, if you have people who are on the team that aren't pulling their weight or they're not the right fit, what I've seen is the risk you risk losing other people. Like one time I had somebody and I kept them on too long and when I let them go somebody else on the team came and said I was about ready to quit and then I would've lost two people, a great person and somebody that I needed to ask to leave. So tell me a little bit about that.
Nick Klotz:
That you just let hang around.
Jack Jostes:
So you said that you have a zero tolerance for cancer employees. Talk to me about that. How do you have a positive culture where you're coaching people up? Because some people just need some coaching and training and then some people also at a certain point are not a fit and you need to get rid of them. Tell me about this.
Nick Klotz:
I would say, and it's a process that's been growing over time and continues to grow, but the point we're at now, really the attrition that we have are people, the cancers that need to go, and most of them leave on their own once you've built the positive company culture. Occasionally they have to be promoted to other companies. It does not happen often for us to figure out how to hire right and hire right the first time. But yeah, we definitely have a zero tolerance per cancers, that started probably about four years ago. And when you get rid of some pretty key components that you don't realize it looking at it at ground level but when you get to take a bird's eye view a year later and look back and realize that one to two people can really just make a 30 person team extremely toxic.
16:27: How Nick Tapped Into a New Customer Market at EPM
Jack Jostes:
What are some of the ways that you're growing EPM? You had some questions for me about growth that I wanted to just talk through.
Nick Klotz:
Yes. So some of the ways we're growing, so we're not only in landscape and snow, a fair portion of our annual revenue comes from utility restoration, which is we basically chase a local power company putting pieces back together that they mess up. But in our maintenance department, one of the main things that we've looked at because is we've tapped our market pretty good for the market share that we want locally here for our ideal clients, we're looking to move into another market, another town within a short drive from us.
17:12: How Ramblin Jackson Helps Clients Market B2B for Growth & Acquisition Through Specialty Pages
So I guess one of my questions to you was, I know you guys push marketing from the business to the end user customer quite a bit and have figured out a great way to do that. Have you worked with anyone or have any recommendations for marketing business to business for growth through acquisition?
Jack Jostes:
Yeah, so you're right that a lot of our clients, they have residential customers, so they're homeowners, people like that. A fair amount of our business are multimillion dollar snow and landscape companies that typically have a residential division and a commercial division. So we do quite a bit of commercial marketing. One of the things that we are seeing that works is building out what we call specialty pages.
So as an example, if you worked with industrial complexes, building out a page that's all about your portfolio of other industrial clients and tapping into the challenges that those clients have and how you solve them, and then if possible, having photos and videos and testimonials from other industrial complexes. Once people do Google that stuff, they Google commercial snow removal, commercial landscaping, industrial snow removal and so on. So you can get found from that.
But then what it also does is from an outbound marketing standpoint is it gives you a tool, let's pretend that I was doing sales for you. I would want to come up with a list, Nick, of the top 100 companies in that other city that you want to target. I would create a multimedia, multi-marketing campaign. Meaning, multimedia, I do a lot with print, I do print, I do toolboxes, I send out beef jerky. If you're listening and you want some jerky…
Nick Klotz:
Yes you do.
Jack Jostes:
You had some, how was it?
Nick Klotz:
It's great. It's great.
Jack Jostes:
So it's good stuff and it's a fun experience. And then when I talk to people, they have that reaction. If you want jerky, by the way, see our show notes, go to landscapersguide.com/toolbox and we'll ship you some jerky and a cool marketing guide to help you figure this stuff out.
Nick Klotz:
You're really going to want to do that. It's good.
Jack Jostes:
Thank you. It is good. But now if I have a list of the dream 100, we can send them, I don't know if beef jerky fits with your brand, but you can find those people, you can connect with them on LinkedIn, you can cold call them. It's going to be multiple touches to get to the point of likely having them have a real conversation with you and before that conversation and also after you could send them that page. So, “Hey Carl, before we meet, check out our portfolio of industrial clients. And you send that ahead of the meeting and they're like, wow, they've worked with Amazon fulfillment center …”and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So that's one way I would do it and I would expand that. So if you had, I don't know, HOAs... You don't work with HOAs, do you?
20:19: Jack Shares Tips for Landscape Companies Marketing in an Outbound Commercial Environment
Nick Klotz:
Not much, no. We've identified it's not a good fit for us.
Jack Jostes:
What about hospitals?
Nick Klotz:
Hospitals, there's actually only one locally to us right now and they do their work in-house. So not currently. We would love to take one on though.
Jack Jostes:
Okay, so this is how I would approach marketing in an outbound commercial environment is a combination of digital marketing, having the social proof on the website, video interviews with people, testimonials, photos, and then also outbound marketing. I think LinkedIn would be really good because you can find, and you probably already know which properties you want to go and maintain. There's no one magic bullet in marketing in my opinion. That's why I said multimedia, multi-marketing. So multi-step multimedia marketing where there's multiple steps of acquiring a customer.
One of my tips for my staff is to be a good networker. Meaning, when I'm at a trade show I'm not just looking for me, I'm looking like, cool, I met Nick and who is Nick looking to meet? And then I might go and introduce you to someone and trying to be a helpful networker often then comes back to you. We've had people graduate from Ramblin Jackson, I had one person actually worked with me for seven years and at the end of that it was just time. It wasn't bad. It was actually good, it was complete. And that person went and started their own company and recently referred a vendor to me that has been a major asset. So it's not like we burned the bridge or anything. If anything, we actually had a celebration of like, hey, this person's going on to do this.
22:09: Nick’s Secret for Recruiting A Solid Team
Jack Jostes:
So what's maybe one more nugget in the either recruiting or retention bucket, what's maybe one final thing that if you could get everyone to do one thing, what would it be?
Nick Klotz:
I'm going to have to go with when you are recruiting and start with your existing team, should you have a solid team. If you have a sketchy team that you need to promote to another company, start with key members of that team that you trust. But start your recruitment internally. We really don't have to hire much from Facebook ads, Indeed, any of that. We haven't hired anyone from Indeed in four years. All of our key members and great, great team members now have come from referrals from within.
So start with what you have and leverage those contexts because it's easy to interview somebody off the street and have them look great in an interview and they show up for their first day and they're great and the first month they're all right, month two, it starts to go downhill. They put on a good show. Now when you have a, say, mowing foreman that's had a best friend for many years that the best friend just all of a sudden needs a job and you have to be looking for someone for a mow crew for instance, when he refers his best friend, you know that you have a solid worker. He's not bringing them in for no reason. He trusts that person and trusts that person's integrity enough to bring them to his place of work and say, hey, this is a great guy. I vouch for him. He's going to treat us well.
Jack Jostes:
Have you ever seen that work in the other way though, where you've had an employee referral who then doesn't work out and then it kind of maybe that you need to get them off the boat and then it impacts the current employee? Has that ever happened?
Nick Klotz:
We have had a couple instances where we have hired team members that have been referred to us by team members. I think it's happened twice that it was, this is not a good fit, they need to go. But before myself or anybody on our leadership team was even able to identify and say something, the team member that brought that person in is coming to us and saying, look, I'm sorry, this isn't what I know of them. And again, I think it's only two instances and I think in both instances something was said to us before we even had to say anything.
24:32: Connect with Nick & Learn More About His Team Growth Coaching Program
Jack Jostes:
Lots of great tips. Tell us a little bit about your coaching program and also how we can connect with you if we enjoyed today's conversation.
Nick Klotz:
The coaching program's pretty open-ended. I mean, it could be a one two time phone call just for some tidbits. I mean, I wouldn't lock anyone into coaching that just wants to ask questions and have a phone chat here and there. Now, if someone wanted some ongoing one year, six month accountability into some processes, then I'd be happy to help. Give me a ring. My website for that is nickklotzconsulting.com. You can reach me through there pretty easily. But it's very open-ended. No contract, no definite structure, you have to do this, you have to do that. It's more what are your needs, how can I help you grow and what can we learn together?
Jack Jostes:
Well, very good. Well, we can keep going, but we've got to wrap up, Nick. Nick Klotz from EPM of Michigan, thanks so much for coming on the show and we look forward to connecting you in the show notes and seeing you at other shows.
Nick Klotz:
Appreciate it. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me.
Jack Jostes:
Thanks so much for checking out today's podcast. Hopefully you got some ideas, I certainly did. Made me think about how I can grow or die a step further at my company. It's already a core value. We're already living it. And so much is changing so fast and my industry and yours, and I totally agree with Nick, that investing in your people whatever way that they're going to learn will really build a strong company.
So thanks so much for checking this out. Again, if you haven't gotten a marketing toolbox, I'd love to send you one with some beef jerky. So claim yours at landscapersguide.com/toolbox. See our show notes for a link. My name's Jack Jostes and I look forward to talking with you next week on The Landscaper's Guide.
SHOW NOTES:
Check out Nick Klotz and EPM’s website: https://www.epmofmichigan.com/
Check out Nick's consulting practice: https://nickklotzconsulting.com/
Connect with Nick on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-klotz-csp-asm-80089161/
????Tell us where to ship your beef jerky + Marketing Toolbox! https://landscapersguide.com/toolbox/