Attracting and retaining top employees in the commercial snow and landscape industry is very difficult. Check out this conversation with Eddy Zakes from Earth Development, who won the Snow and Ice Management Association's Best Place to Work award two years in a row to find out what is culture, what does it mean to him and how does he manage it? What are Earth Development's three core values? And what's the number one? One thing Eddy asks each employee before hiring them?
Hey, it's Jack Jostes, and welcome to the Landscaper’s Guide podcast, where we share sales, marketing, and leadership inspiration to help you grow your snow and landscape company. I met today's guest at the SIMA Symposium the other year and I'm really excited to share this conversation and I hope to meet you at one of our upcoming events. We've got one coming up on recruiting, which is today's topic, and employee retention. So check out our show notes landscapersguide.com/events to see our in person and virtual event schedule.
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Landscaper’s Guide podcast. Today I'm excited to have Eddy Zakes, the CEO of Earth Development, which is a commercial snow and landscape management company with clients all over the northern midwest, and they're expanding even beyond that. And Eddy, Earth Development has won the SIMA Best Place to Work award two years in a row in 2022 and 2023.
1:38 - The Key to Earth Development's Award-Winning Culture
Jack Jostes [00:01:38]:
What would you say is the key to the culture at Earth Development? Why do you believe you've won that award?
Eddy Zakes [00:01:49]:
Well, first, Jack, thanks for having me. I'm really, really happy to be here. Earth Development, I think, has worked really hard to try to be different and to actually plant a flag and say, we're not trying to be the company that everybody would want to work at. We're trying to be us. We're trying to be our unique identity within the snow and ice and landscaping maintenance space. And we've really planted a flag around our culture and our investment in our people. I think that is what is attracting people to work at Earth Development and also what makes us a great place to work within this industry.
Jack Jostes [00:02:27]:
And when you say investment in culture and people, culture is kind of this nebulous thing. What does it mean to you and how do you invest in it as a leader?
2:39 - Eddy's Unique Path to Landscaping and Acquisition of Earth Development
Eddy Zakes [00:02:39]:
Absolutely. So I am maybe a little bit different than many landscaping executives. I didn't grow up in this industry. I'm not the third generation of this. I didn't start when I was 16 years old and move up through operations. For me, my path into this is really very different than most. I have an entrepreneurial background, have done a variety of different things. And in 2021, I bought Earth Development from the founder.
Eddy Zakes [00:03:04]:
So Earth Development was started in 1999. This year, we're celebrating our 25th anniversary. In those 25 years, it went from being the one man with a truck and a trailer, making it happen to being. Today we operate. In the last year, we had operations in 14 states. We rely on a broad base of service partners to help us to achieve that service. But when I got here in 2021, the team is looking at me as like, who are you, and where did you come from? The company had a culture. And like you said, culture can be this mushy, nebulous thing.
Eddy Zakes [00:03:43]:
It can be a couple of phrases on a wall. But a lot of times, you could take those culture statements, that mission statement, that vision statement, crumple them up, throw them in a big popcorn bowl, shake it up, and we can be at a meeting of a bunch of CEOs, and any one of us could go into that bowl and pull out one, and it could sound good for our company. And Earth Development had a little bit of that. And then we worked hard to create what we consider to be our unique identity today. And when I talk about investing in that, that was a process of a lot of discussion and a lot of, I want to say, soul searching. But a lot of who do we want to be when we grow up to arrive at a handful of statements that really create that decision making framework that we use on a day to day basis to make Earth Development better?
4:32 - Maintaining and Evolving Company Culture in Daily Operations
Jack Jostes [00:04:32]:
So you bought the company. When you bought the company, what aspects of the culture did you know that you wanted to keep? And then which ones were things that you knew you needed to change?
Eddy Zakes [00:04:44]:
So I bought the company not because I thought it was broken and because I was going to come in as some sort of hero and save the company. I'm not a turnaround specialist. I was looking for a place where I could come in and do my best work. And so the team that was already here, we had incredibly hardworking team members that had put their blood, sweat, and tears into Earth Development success. It was about figuring out how do we empower them, how do we resource them in those ways. I think that we doubled down on our sort of commitment to excellence. We maybe worked to evaluate pay scales and incentives and make some pretty significant changes in that space. But I think the core of the team that was here when I got here is still with us today.
Eddy Zakes [00:05:43]:
And so it wasn't necessarily a lot of times when you hear about somebody buying a company private equity whatever. They come in and they make these wholesale changes, and you don't even recognize the company anymore. For us, I think we are a very different company today. A few years later, post acquisition, we're a very different company. But it has been much more of a transition from that sort of softer, more of a binder in a bookshelf or a couple of statements on a wall to really being the heartbeat of the company today.
Jack Jostes [00:06:15]:
And what are some of the things that are day to day? How do you operate? Like you would know, this is what I want, and this is what I don't want. When I think about my employee culture, a lot of it's about the experience of working with people. It's really all about the experience of working with people. It's how we treat each other. It's how we treat our customers. It's also the quality of work that we do. And I can see when something is a fit in the culture, and I can totally see when it's not. What's something that you would want to make sure happens every day.
Eddy Zakes [00:06:53]:
Yeah. We have three core values that we talk about incredibly consistently. I think most of our team members could recite them verbatim, no problem. Those three are persistently pursuing perfection. Fair and generous, and a passion for our people. And culture isn't what we put on a wall or what we say it is. It's what we actually embody, it's what we actually do. So I, as a leader, can say our culture is x, but if that's not what the people are doing, and it's not how we actually behave in the company, that's not our culture.
Eddy Zakes [00:07:24]:
That's the culture that we aspire to. So persistently pursuing perfection is the first one. When you think about persistently pursuing perfection, the word that most people get hung up on is perfection, and this is the wrong point of emphasis. Persistently pursuing are the two keys that are in front of perfection. So persistence implies that this is something that we're doing day in and day out, every day, striving to be a little bit better. Pursuing. We talk about a police pursuit. So when police are pursuing the bad guy, they're only doing one thing, trying to get the bad guy.
Eddy Zakes [00:07:54]:
So police have a ton of different jobs, but when they are in a police pursuit, they have a singular focus. And that is, I'll drive right past the little lady who wants to get across the street. I'll drive right past x, y, and z. I will not stop for coffee and donuts. I am chasing the bad guy. And so at Earth Development, persistently pursuing perfection is that every day we are hungry to be better. We are striving to be better 1% at a time. And we believe that compounding effort leads to great results.
Eddy Zakes [00:08:23]:
Second one is fair and generous. And this is a compound phrase, so it's fair and generous. Generosity is our default posture at Earth Development. I spent about ten years of my career in philanthropic fundraising. Very strange background for a landscaping executive. Sure. But what I learned there was that generosity isn't just a… When we think about generosity, often I give big gifts to my family at Christmas, or I'm really generous to a charity.
Eddy Zakes [00:08:52]:
Oh, Jack is really generous because of him making big donations or giving gifts at Christmas or birthdays. In reality, generosity is a posture, and it's how we react to each other. And so when I spot a need, I seek to address the need. When I want to be generous, I'd like to you say something that hurts my feelings. Jack. I have two different ways to interpret it. I can interpret it generously and, ah, Jack's having a hard day, or he didn't mean it when he used this word. He was fumbling for the right way to express his emotions, or what's the issue behind the way that he's talking to me, et cetera.
Eddy Zakes [00:09:29]:
So we're going to choose to think the best of people. We're going to choose to seek opportunities to serve them. We're going to try to compensate generously. When there's a dispute with one of our customers, we're going to favor the generous outcome that benefits our customer. We believe that this will reap long term rewards for us in the marketplace. When we deal with service partners and there's some dispute about the services that they rendered, do we believe the best of people and actually seek to be generous toward them? Yes. That's the default posture. Now, what if I get taken advantage of? Well, that's not fair.
Eddy Zakes [00:10:05]:
And that's why it's fair and generous. And so while maybe my job is to look out for my team members and say, I see that you're struggling, can I help you? That's generous. But if I do that day after day after day, and you're shirking your responsibilities or you're trying to cheat me, if you're our service partner and you're saying that you did services that you didn't do, that's not fair. And so it's generosity backstopped by fairness. And then the third one for us would be this passion for our people and we actually draw three sets of circles here, and the innermost circle for us is our direct employees. We, first and foremost, are in an industry that has a kind of strange type of differentiation. I don't mow the grass better than any of your other landscaping listeners. I don't have access to a secret technology that makes me better.
Eddy Zakes [00:10:56]:
We're not a pharmaceutical company that has a better drug. We're not a technology company that has a better line of code. What makes Earth Development better is our people. And so the people is we do business for people and through people and with people. Our customers are people. Our service partners are people. Our team members are people. They have lives.
Eddy Zakes [00:11:17]:
They have families. They have hopes, dreams, and aspirations. And so we recognize that and say that we seek to honor and have a passion for that. That then feeds into persistently pursuing perfection and being fair and generous. If you come to our office, we have a beautiful office. We invest heavily in the attractiveness of our space. Very few of our clients come physically into our office. Why are we spending so much on it? Because we think that it leads to better outcomes when our people know that we care about them.
Eddy Zakes [00:11:47]:
Why do we have a nice office? Because we care about. We work here. I want it to be nice for us. And so that passion for our people shows up in compensation. It shows up in continuing education. It shows up in things like the best places to work, where SIMA recognizes Snow and Ice Management Association recognizes. You are offering all of these benefits that are best in class. You are offering professional development that is best in class.
Eddy Zakes [00:12:15]:
You're dealing with customers in a way that is best in class. And that's what really we start to do, because then that reinforces persistently pursuing perfection. We're trying to be better every day.
Jack Jostes [00:12:27]:
So you said there were three circles. One was, I'm drawing over here. So we've got direct employees. And then.
Eddy Zakes [00:12:37]:
It's a series of concentric circles, just like a bullseye, like a target. So the centermost one is our employees first ring. The second ring in these circles is our service partners. And so for us, our service partners are out in the field delivering work on our behalf. And we have a passion for them. We need to do right by them. I think that there are other organizations that do a fair amount of subcontracting, that have really poor reputations in the space, and we want to be different. That's one of our stated goals, is a lot of people don't want to work with a subcontracting organization.
Eddy Zakes [00:13:19]:
And if you do, we want to be the subcontracting organization of choice, that if you could choose to only work with one, you'd go, man, they're the one I really want to work with. And so what do we have to do to be different in that way? That comes down to actually what we have defined as our three brand promises, and I'll get to those in a second. But the third circle then is our customer in those concentric circles. And so, yeah, we have a passion for our customers as well. And it's making sure that, again, the idea that they're people that have a problem to be solved, that they're trying to avoid operational or reputational risk related to the attractiveness of their facility, the safety of their facility, their ability to continue to do business as usual. We have a real passion for making sure that people in those businesses are being served extraordinarily well.
14:13 - Discussing Creating Profit & Results with Integrity in Business
Jack Jostes [00:14:13]:
Well, I love that. So persistently pursuing perfection, fair and generous, and then passion for our people. One of the core values that I was thinking of while you were talking about fair and generous at Ramblin Jackson is Create Profit & Results with Integrity. Right? So there's kind of this balance here. We have to be creating a profit because it fuels everything, all of our compensation, our ability to grow, the stability of the company, and it also needs to be done with integrity. Right. So there's this balance here of essentially what that means to me is when we sell something, we believe it's truly going to work because there are a lot of marketing companies out there who will sell you whatever because it's profitable, but it doesn't really work. That's not really integrity to me, if you know that.
Jack Jostes [00:15:08]:
I mean, I think there's always some experimenting or we can't necessarily guarantee an exact specific result, but we have done this before and we do know what works. And there are ways of doing things that should work.
Eddy Zakes [00:15:22]:
And that's why we're persistently pursuing perfection. We are not perfect. I mean, you come to work here, and there are days where I am not fair and generous. There are days here where I need the team to be generous to me because I don't handle something the way that I should. And the reason that we have these strong statements is we're saying this is what we want to stand on. And so are there days where there's a gray area on some experiment in marketing? Marketing is hard. It is art and science blended together. And so attribution of results and all the rest of these things can be really tricky.
Eddy Zakes [00:15:55]:
And so we are saying we want to differentiate ourselves at Ramblin Jackson on the basis of being ethical, and that is critical to our success. I can win and win unethically, and that is not the person I want to be. I have one life, one reputation, and I'm going to do everything that I can to protect it. It makes me think of the classic management book, good to great, and Jim Collins addresses the tyranny of the or and the genius of the and we need to reject the tyranny of the or and embrace the genius of the and that I can be both successful and ethical. It's not that I can be successful or ethical. And too often as business owners, we're presented with or equations when we need to convert them to and equations.
Jack Jostes [00:16:41]:
I really agree with that in many ways. I was thinking about that. You mentioned that during a meeting we had. Was that yesterday or two days ago? Recently. So you mentioned that book. And I was thinking though, that quote though, about the or versus the. And I remember when I was starting my podcast, I had a friend of mine actually, who was like, oh, well, you can't do that, because he was basically like, well, I'm not going to do that because I'm a dad and my family is more important. And all of this, basically what he was saying is that you can't do social media and have a podcast and be a good parent.
17:21 - Balancing Professional Growth with Personal Life
Jack Jostes [00:17:21]:
And I'm like, no, dude, I can do it all. This is my job and it helps support my family. And it's not. Or he had this whole idea that marketing his business and growing his business had to be at the expense of his family and his health. And to me it's like, no, I'm going to do both today I'm going to work out today. I'm going to have dinner with my family and I'm going to go to.
Eddy Zakes [00:17:49]:
Maybe, maybe piggybacking on a Jim Collins illustration of the idea of a flywheel, that by being healthy, by being strong mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually, it turns that flywheel one revolution faster and becomes a reinforcing thing. So I mentioned brand promises. So we talk about three brand promises that we aspire to be reliable, responsive and partnering. So we have these core values that's great. We use them both internally and externally to make decisions, but all with the goal of being perceived in the marketplace and not just perceived, but actually backing it up with the reality of being reliable, responsive and partnering. So reliable is when you think about your car, is my car reliable? That means that my car starts every time that I walk out to it if it doesn't start every once in a while, even if it starts 50 times in a row, but then the 51st time it doesn't start, your car is not reliable. So we want our team members to be reliable. We want our service partners to be reliable.
Eddy Zakes [00:18:48]:
And importantly, we want our customers to be reliable. That we show up when we're supposed to show up, that we do the job that we're supposed to do and each of our people does that. Our service partners and our customers are reliable. Responsive is like, do we answer the we when there is a problem? Are we responsive? How quickly can you resolve a problem? Not just a phone call, but if I have a problem between me and you, Jack, how quickly are you responding to correct the problem, et cetera. It's not just emails and phone calls and then partnering. This long term orientation is mutually beneficial and it's a partnership that I have with each of our team members. It's a partnership that I have with each of our service partners. A partnership that I have with each of our customers.
Eddy Zakes [00:19:29]:
A partnership that I have with Ramblin Jackson. It's not short term. It has this long term value creating and a partnership is mutually beneficial.
Jack Jostes [00:19:41]:
I agree.
Eddy Zakes [00:19:42]:
I think so then that becomes a flywheel, just like this individual who's maybe concerned that I can't do all of these things. Absolutely, you can. You might not do all of them equally well. And that's where having strong partners like Ramblin Jackson has really helped us.
Jack Jostes [00:19:57]:
Well, I appreciate, and I like that. Reliable, responsive partnering. Those are things I'm actually presenting at a digital agency conference coming up about recruiting and retention. And I was thinking about why I like working here and I like working with people. Reliability is actually a big deal to me with clients and with the people I work with. So I think that it's part of, like I said, the experience of working with people is the culture. So, Eddy, you're new, right? So you're the new CEO. You bought the company.
Jack Jostes [00:20:35]:
These are wonderful ideas. I love the way they sound. How do you prevent them from being Eddy's cool ideas on the podcast or in the binder? Talk to me a little bit. Like maybe, what's your meeting cadence like at the company? And do these get brought up at every meeting or are they brought up once a year? Tell me a little bit. How do you get it? And also, I think if you would be okay sharing maybe how many people work at Earth Development. So you've got your three tiers, you've got your core employees, you've got your service partners. How many employees do you have? Because I think that's really.
21:14 - Examples of Enforcing Company Values and Culture in the Workplace
Eddy Zakes [00:21:14]:
We're around 25 to 30 team members, depending on how you account for the season, et cetera, that are here in our offices interacting with our customers, et cetera. We have hundreds of service partners that are then out in the field and, of course, hundreds of customers that we're serving as well. How do we reinforce these things? I was smiling as you asked that question because this afternoon at 02:00 central time, we have our monthly all hands meeting and the monthly all hands meeting. So we start always, every time. If there is a new team member who has joined, we introduce this person. We do employee recognition as the second step. And so this is anniversary recognitions. And we have a timeline.
Eddy Zakes [00:22:11]:
Essentially, if you've worked here for one year, two years, three years, there are different recognitions that are in here. And obviously that's reinforcing our passion for our people. We just had our vp of operations celebrated his fifth year. He's in his 6th year now, but he just took a week long trip, or, excuse me, a weekend trip that Earth Development paid for with him and his wife and children. They went skiing as a family on Earth Development's dime because his five year anniversary recognition was this. Today, Adam, one of our field operations supervisor, is celebrating his one year anniversary. He's getting a puffy vest that's like a members only. You only get it if you've worked here for a year that has an Earth Development logo and his designation of his professional status embroidered on end.
Eddy Zakes [00:23:02]:
And then from there, so we introduce new team members. Then we're going to do anniversary recognitions. The third thing that we do every time is wins from the previous month. And I don't have one to show you, but we have a little card that you fill out that says, basically, we are the Earth Development difference because we, the people are the Earth Development difference. And on the back of it says, you were caught demonstrating the difference or something to this effect. And then there's checkboxes that are, you were basically recognized for persistently pursuing perfection, being fair and generous, having a passion for our people, for being reliable, responsive, and partnering. And then here's what you did, and you're nominated for this. And we sit and for probably 15 minutes of a 1 hour meeting, maybe even 20 minutes, depending on the day, it's nonstop.
Eddy Zakes [00:23:45]:
And people are mad because, oh, you stole the one that I was going to give for Jack. Oh, man. I was going to say that. Let me piggyback on what you just said. And it's not about recognizing yourself, it's about recognizing other team members for the reinforcement of these. Love it. And then I conclude every one of these meetings by talking about one of our values, one of those things. And these all have breakdowns that are more than just these statements that I've said to further describe them.
Eddy Zakes [00:24:11]:
And so every month I'm going to pick one of these and focus on it. But then it's also hiring and firing. It's incentivizing, it's building in a complete structure around, this is who we want to be. When someone is in breach of one of these values, what do we do about it? That's when it really hits the rubber, hits the road to say, is this real or is this just something that makes you look like a good corporate citizen, that you've done some exercise? It's not the thought exercise, it's a way of living here.
Jack Jostes [00:24:38]:
I love it. And I can just hear in your voice and the way you're most excited about this. Part of what you told me today is meeting and praising your people. So I believe that it's real, that the passion for your people is real. And I love hearing that you're celebrating it with these different milestones and recognition. It's so important for people to do that. And I'm not surprised that you've won the best place to work two years in a row. So we could talk for this quite a bit.
25:11 - Eddy’s Hiring Philosophy and Why He Looks for The Entrepreneurial Spirit
Jack Jostes [00:25:11]:
We've got to wrap up. My last question for you is, what is something that you always look for in a new hire? And then what's something? Maybe that is a no. Like if you see it, it's a yes and you'd hire them. And if you saw something else, it would be a no, you're not hired.
Eddy Zakes [00:25:32]:
Well, people are complex, and so all of these things are on some sort of a spectrum, of course.
Jack Jostes [00:25:37]:
Right.
Eddy Zakes [00:25:38]:
The very first thing that came to mind is a sort of entrepreneurial spirit. And at Earth Development, we're about people who get stuff done and entrepreneurs. People will talk about an entrepreneur being a person as if it's a noun, and instead we want to think about it as a verb. And so entrepreneurship is a way of being, it's a way of thinking. And so we want team members who. It doesn't mean that you have started your own business, but it's like a bias towards action, a bias towards moving the ball down the field. And so I think seeing that is incredibly attractive. Obviously, you need to understand your role.
Eddy Zakes [00:26:23]:
You need to understand the guardrails on your position, not be doing things that are outside of them wildly. And all the rest of that's not what I'm talking about. But that's the first one that maybe came to mind is that these values, though, that's what I would look for, is like, are you a person who persistently pursues perfection? Are you fair and generous? And so we also use this idea of there's a hiring methodology called top grading. And in top grading, one of the most important sort of tools within it is the thread of a reference check and prospective team members who can talk very fluently about their relationship with their former employers. And even if maybe they left on less than ideal terms, they would say, no, go ahead and call them. They can tell you why I left or they can tell you why they fired me. And I'm not necessarily scared of you talking to them because I'm confident that I can tell you how I've grown through that experience of failure. Or, yeah, my former supervisor was Tom or Susan.
Eddy Zakes [00:27:35]:
And when you see team members who have a resistance to unveiling those aspects of their past, that's a pretty significant red flag. And that's the case whether that person is an entryline employee or a senior executive, the fluency with which they talk about their previous experiences, when it comes to the threat of a reference check, I would say that's a red flag.
27:56 - How to Connect with Eddy Zakes at Earth Development
Jack Jostes [00:27:56]:
Well, Eddy, thanks so much for coming on the show. Eddy Zakes from Earth Development. For people who want to network with you, maybe they're even interested in partnering with you. You mentioned about partnering, and you work with service partners all over the country. How can people listening get in touch with you?
Eddy Zakes [00:28:15]:
Sure. I would say two different ways. If you're looking to get in touch with me personally, LinkedIn is probably the best way you can find me. Eddy Zakes. Easy: Search Eddy I spell my name with a y. And then, of course, earthdevelopmentinc.com is our website, and you can find all the information about Earth Development there. And feel free to reach out through our website as well.
Jack Jostes [00:28:35]:
Well, great. Well, I'll put links to both of those in the show notes. And thanks so much for coming and sharing on the Landscaper's Guide. It's been a pleasure.
Eddy Zakes [00:28:42]:
Thank you, Jack. And thanks for the work that Ramblin Jackson is doing on behalf of Earth Development to help us reach the right customers.
Jack Jostes [00:28:49]:
Well, I hope you enjoyed that conversation. One of the things that I see in common with leaders of these best places to work, the companies that I really like working with is they're always learning. That reminds me of Ramblin Jackson's core value of Grow or Die. We're always looking to grow. We're always looking to get better. And I invite you to join us on that journey. Come to one of our upcoming webinars or see us in person at one of the upcoming trade shows. So check out landscapersguide.com/events. Make sure you subscribe so you never miss an episode.
Jack Jostes [00:29:21]:
My name is Jack Jostes and I look forward to talking with you next week on the Landscaper's Guide.
Show Notes:
Watch the full episode + see the transcript at: https://landscapersguide.com/podcast/
Tell us where to send your beef jerky: https://landscapersguide.com/toolbox
Connect with Eddy Zakes on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eddyzakes/
Check out the Earth Development website: https://earthdevelopmentinc.com/