When David Alexander accepted the position of CEO at TruGreen, he had first-hand knowledge on why the company was struggling. Download Super Cleaner Full Crack. “I fired (TruGreen) a few months before I was offered the job,” Alexander says, adding that he rehired them the weekend after he was hired. “I cancelled my service because they weren’t doing what they said – because they weren’t showing up when they said.” So, it wasn’t a surprise that Alexander intially balked when he was approached about the CEO job. But after discovering his values aligned with TruGreen’s parent company, ServiceMaster, he changed his mind and joined the struggling company.

Case 2:05-cv-01203-RLH-PAL Document 39 Filed 10/02/07 Page 12 of 18 retaliation. TruGreen LandCare shall: a. Publicize the steps employees should take to bring a complaint of discrimination or retaliation via inclusion of such information in its employee handbook, the memorandum referenced in.

Those no-shows were a good indicator of why TruGreen had an 8 percent revenue decline in 2013 revenue, lost 400,000 customers in two years and went through three presidents in three years. The company was also spun off from publicly traded ServiceMaster and is now owned by the private equity firm Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, who also owns a majority share of ServiceMaster.

But that split from ServiceMaster gave Alexander and his team at TruGreen the flexibility to get back on the right path. Alexander says 2014 was “probably the best year in a long time” for the company in many areas and revenue has increased by $40 million. “We probably measure, I don’t know, 25 or 30 different metrics, all of which we exceeded in 2014, so it was our first year as a standalone company, and we literally cannot be more pleased with the kind of year we had,” he says. “We added 44,000 or 45,000 customers. So, it was a pretty phenomenal year for us.” One major hang-up was the routing software TruGreen shared with other ServiceMaster companies including Merry Maids and Terminix – companies that performed services indoors and didn’t have to change plans when it rained. “We’re using the same software dramatically customized for us, and then we have some internal software we’ve developed that is also very valuable for our business,” he says. But the software wasn’t the only reason for TruGreen’s struggles, and those problems were weighing a lot of employees down.

Alexander had to do the basics and make sure employees were showing up on time and servicing customers’ lawns the right way, but he also had to boost morale and shape a culture that would make staff proud of their employer. As the largest lawn care company in the United States, the masses judge lawn care companies by how TruGreen does business, leaving Alexander with a lot of influence on how the industry is viewed in the public’s eye.

In this exclusive conversation with L&L, Alexander talks about his first months on the job, why he describes the TruGreen acquisition mode as historic, what he sees in TruGreen’s future and much more. Lawn & Landscape: You came into what sounds like, from the outside, a mess. What was the atmosphere like and what were some things you did to repair it? David Alexander: That was kind of a fairly accurate description. It kind of was a mess.

I came in December of 2012, started a week or so before Christmas, and one of the first things that I tried to do was get out in the branches and listen to our folks. In the two years I’ve been with the company, I’ve been to 88 of our branches (as of Feb.

2015), and what I try to do in a branch visit is listen to our frontline people, our service managers, our specialists, our general managers, our sales managers. I try to learn what they think is going on, and what I heard in my first few months here was that we didn’t give them the tools that they needed to do their jobs. That they were very, very frustrated with routing, with scheduling, with planning. Not that our folks in planning and scheduling and routing weren’t strong, but their tools were so misapplied and so inappropriate for what they were trying to accomplish that, in effect, we handcuffed them in terms of being able to do their jobs. L&L: These branch visits, which you still do, are unannounced. Why do you choose to do them that way?

DA: I don’t want people spending a lot of time making a branch pretty and working all night and doing those kind of things. I never announce I’m coming, I just show up, and I talk to whoever’s there. So, sometimes that’s the techs, depending on the time of day it may be the specialists. Other times it may be the service managers, the sales manager, the general manager, it may be customer service people, it may be the office manager. But, I try to talk to whoever’s there and try to learn as much as I can about how they think the company’s doing. So, even at Family Dollar (Alexander was president of Family Dollar from 1995-2005) when I visited 600 stores a year, they were all unannounced. I’ve never done announced visits, and the reason I haven’t is, very early in my career we’d hear the CEO was coming, and we’d work all night to make the store perfect and he wouldn’t show up half the time.

So, instead of being a positive, it became a negative. I don’t want to see what’s not real, and I don’t want them working lots of hours to make it just right for me. I’m there to listen, so for that reason I don’t tell them I’m coming.

L&L: When you first started doing these visits, I have to imagine people were a little worried about losing their jobs. How do you get them to be honest with you? DA: It was fairly easy, actually because they were so frustrated that they were ready to be honest with somebody. It was surprising though how honest they were. I had one guy I talked to early on who’d been with us for almost 40 years, and I said, “I appreciate all your service to the company. It’s so great, almost 40 years.” And he looked at me and said, “The key word is ‘almost.’ I don’t think I’ll make it 40 years.” I said, “Why would you say that?” He said, “I’m so frustrated with the systems, the fact that nothing works, and the fact that I can’t serve my customers today like I always have that I don’t think I’ll make it another six months.” We had a lot of folks with a lot of tenure and a lot of loyalty both to the company and their customers, who felt extremely frustrated that they couldn’t deliver the service that they wanted to deliver. L&L: Did you have to do any layoffs when you first got there?

DA: No, we have not done any layoffs at all. L&L: What was the most shocking thing you saw when you did these visits? DA: I think it was the consistency of concern that I heard everywhere I went. If you’re the CEO, some people will tell you, “Oh, he’s the CEO I need to tell him something nice, something good, something positive.” Folks were pretty straightforward that this ain’t working, so probably the tone and the tenor of the comments and the consistency of the comments that we needed to fix things, and we needed to fix them soon, and people were frustrated, and people felt very defeated. And now, if you talk to folks at TruGreen, I think most people feel very positive.

We do what’s called an engagement score where we survey all our employees every year on how they feel about the company. And there’s four or five different levels of response, but the top two levels of response are what we call an engaged associate.

They’re proud of the company, they like their jobs, they’re not looking for another job. We saw a 20 percent improvement in that this year. But, most significantly, in our branch managers, that went from a 50 score to a 76 score. So, 76 percent of our branch managers today are very excited and proud of their company. Two years ago that number was in the 40s and now it’s in the 70s.

Their belief in the company, which then radiates to the service managers and then down to the employees, has dramatically changed in the last two years. L&L: What have you done to improve the culture? DA: We began to do a lot of things to incent our employees around retaining customers. One of the things we did is what we call Lawn Stars. Every quarter, every branch competes around customer count, and the branch that wins in each region, we have 21 regions, we have a prize catalog for all the employees. In addition, each branch competes for a charity each quarter. So, if the branch wins, not only do they win prizes, but they pick a charity we then make a $2,000 donation to.

Last year we made about $125,000 in donations off of that competition. (It was) a lot of cultural change in the company, being a lot more focused on the places they live and work, and beginning to feel like they’re winning again, seeing customer count grow again, having tools that they can really believe in that work, both in terms of routing, planning and scheduling, but also mobility tools. We did a survey around what values did they think we should have. We had about 900 people participate in that. They talked about how we want to be a company of integrity.

We want to be a company that focuses on their community. We want to be a company that provides great service.

Turnaround team When Alexander accepted the job, he changed 10 of his 14 direct reports. Even though TruGreen was the fourth company where he has served as CEO or president, he never had to make that many changes with direct reports. Some were brought over from ServiceMaster, while others were promoted from within. “I wanted a management team that really believed in where we could take the company,” Alexander says. “We had some great folks, but we had some folks who were either not good fits for the roles they were in, or they were somewhat beat down in terms of feeling like they’d been through a bunch. They were tired.

And I wanted people who were very high-energy and enthusiastic and believed where we could take the company. Today, we have a team that is very excited about where we can take the company.” Below is a list of Alexander’s direct reports. The Florida Landscape Management Association is hosting a limited commercial maintenance seminar May 29. If you cut lawns and/or maintain ornamentals at private homes and businesses, and wish to apply pesticides, including RoundUp, this six-hour training class is a requirement before obtaining the Limited Commercial Landscape Maintenance license.

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Normal warranty exclusions still apply. CINCINNATI, OHIO – Green Industry pioneer Matt Shooner passed away peacefully on May 21 in Cincinnati after a lengthy illness. With his wife Irene, Matt Shooner founded Focal Point Communications in 1986. Focal Point was among the first companies to offer marketing and advertising services specifically for lawn and landscape contractors. “My father spent 15 years operating a successful lawn care and maintenance business in the ‘70s and ‘80s, but he couldn't find anyone to help him advertise his services,” said son Joe Shooner.

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Funeral services will be held in Cincinnati on May 30. Additional inquiries can be directed to Joe Shooner at joeshooner@growpro.com. BEATRICE, Neb.

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Day started late morning and worked until dark as it was door knocking in the Field and Calls from office when not in the Field. Knocking on doors of current customers was both good and challenging depending on satisfaction of customer and cold calling was challenging depending on condition of lawn and mood of person who answered the door. Overall management was supportive and helpful and culture was positive with the core people that had been there 6 months or more.

Hardest part of job was insuring customer service matched the services being sold. Being in the outdoors and the fellow workers and the good energy of certain people on the team.

My motto in life is give Good Energy to others even when they do not give it back and blessing's follow. Iclone 3dxchange 5 Full Download. Receive my schedule sheet and determine witch materials we need to carry.

I learned a lot regarding lawn problems and diagnostic to solve them. Managers are always to help. Job site is nice, co workers friendly and overall organized. The hardest part is the productivity due many properties are far away under real footage and they pay by production. This makes to much pressure to the technician in order get his daily goal The enjoyable part of this job is to find smiling customers with a greener and healthy lawn.