Your Ceiling Isn't Demand Right Now

Hi H Client!

Somewhere in your market this morning there's a crew leader sitting in his truck at 6:40, doing the math on whether he wants another season where he is. He isn't on a job board. He's been half-watching two or three companies in town for the better part of a year, whose trucks look sharp, whose crews seem to like being there, whose work he'd want his name “on.” When he finally moves, he'll move fast, and he'll go to whichever of those companies he already trusts. 

That's a growth conversation, and it rarely gets treated like one. More than half of the owners and leaders in this industry now name recruiting and keeping people as a top business risk, ahead of most economic worries. And the scarcity isn't entry-level labor, it's crew leaders, irrigation techs, designers, and others. Those are the people who determine whether you can say yes to the next big project and of course, no amount of demand fixes a capacity problem.

We're hearing it directly, a number of the companies we work with are stalled somewhere they didn't expect this year, the demand is there, the work is sold, and the growth is waiting on a crew leader who hasn't been hired yet. When we ask what's really in the way, more often than it used to be, the answer is the team.

The part that's easy to miss is that he vets you the same way a homeowner does. Eighty-six percent of candidates read reviews before they apply, and nearly nine in ten under forty. Your site, your social, the video of your crews doing good work, that's your recruiting pitch whether you built it for that or not. Most companies run a serious system for one audience and leave the other (recruitment/talent) to chance, then wonder why the roster is what holds the year back. (Remember a recent email I sent on reviews, here is another reason to make sure you keep an eye on generating more reviews!)

You keep a short list of subs you can call when a job gets big, and you didn't build that list the week you needed it. Talent works the same way, except most companies start the list the morning somebody quits.

If crew capacity is what's actually capping your year, that's worth a conversation. Your Project Manager can look at what your company looks like to the person you'd most want to hire.

Until Tuesday,

Anna Halstead

Co-Owner, Halstead Media Group

Coming Soon: Kelsey Blomquist-Wright, our Director of MarTech, is hosting a HubSpot webinar for clients on September 17 at 2:00 PM ET. Registration details in the next couple of weeks.