Nobody Goes Home

Six years. Over a hundred team members. Not one person ever sent home. This is the promise everything else in this series exists to keep.

This whole series has been leading here.

My grandfather taught me that the worst thing that can happen is a great year. My first year taught me what I didn't know. The data taught me what's coming before it gets here. And last week I showed you where the money goes while the harvest rolls in. This week is the why. Because none of that discipline was ever about the money. It was about a promise.

Let me start with the summer that promise really comes from.

Freshman year of college, 1999. I had just moved out on my own. I'd worked for years, paid off my first car in high school, and then ordered my dream truck: a brand new 99 Toyota Tacoma, 4x4. Waited six weeks for it to come in. Then I went to work for one of the biggest lawn and landscape companies in town, and they promised me a minimum of 40 hours a week. I was making right around eight bucks an hour, and I built my whole life on those 40 hours. Rent. Utilities. A brand new truck payment. College coming.

About two weeks in, they started sending us home early. Not once. Almost every day. And my month started outpacing my paycheck.

I remember the stress like it was yesterday. Within about a month, every single one of us on that crew quit, four or five guys, all promised the same guaranteed hours that never showed up. One of them lost his apartment and got sent to collections. And I was scared that I was next, that one more short week meant losing the truck I'd waited my whole young life for and cratering my financial future, just as I was getting started.

Now fast forward about twenty years, and here's the part of this story that's hard to tell. I became that company.

Our first couple of months open, the city had to redo the main water line and shut us down for two days, a Thursday and a Friday. Money was already tight, and I sent the couple of team members I had home unpaid. Not because I didn't care. Because I couldn't afford it, and honestly, because it hadn't even crossed my mind yet. The kid shoveling out his paycheck math in a lawn truck had grown up and started doing the sending.

And my store showed it. That first year, we went through over 60 attendants to fill 4 positions. Our average tenure was only a few days. We were close to three years in before one single person made it a full year with us.

Then came the winter that changed it. We'd been open about a year when ice and snow closed us for three days. I won't ever risk my team on icy roads, and I won't risk a customer going down in my parking lot. Walmart doesn't close for weather. A family operation does. But a week or two after we reopened, one of my attendants quit. Nothing dramatic. They just went to a job at a place that never closes, and it took me a while to understand why. They needed the hours. Their rent didn't close for the storm.

And standing there, it all came flooding back. The lawn crew. The ramen noodle weeks. The fear. I had felt exactly what my attendant felt, and I had promised myself at nineteen that I'd never be that employer. So Hannah and I made it official.

The promise went into our hiring process, in writing. It usually comes up near the end of the second interview, the face to face one in the store, and it sounds like this: if you're anything like me, I know you have bills to pay, between car and rent and utilities. So as an added benefit of working for our family business, even if we have to be closed because of weather, or a water line breaks, or something outside of our control happens, you're still going to get paid the hours you were supposed to work.

You read last week where the money for that comes from. The savings account every store feeds all harvest long is what pays full wages through the 5 to 9 ice days we close every winter. And there's a second layer most owners have never thought about, and I only know because of my insurance years: I pay extra premium every single year so my business interruption coverage includes lost income, built so that if a tornado or a flood ever takes a building, my team members' paychecks are covered while we rebuild. The promise isn't a feeling. It's funded twice.

But a promise is only worth what it costs you. So let me tell you about the winter it got tested.

Another storm, another closure, and we couldn't afford to pay a service to clear the parking lot. So I braved the roads, bought one of the last snow shovels at the local tractor supply store, and spent about seven hours out there frozen, shoveling a parking lot that hadn't made a quarter in days. And the whole time, the math was running in my head. At one point I got back in my car to warm up and called Hannah, and I told her the truth: I don't know if we can afford to keep our promise to these people.

But I also told her the other truth. I don't break my promise, because my word is the strongest thing that I have. If people think I don't tell the truth, I've lost all credibility, and I'm not willing to do that.

So we didn't break it. We broke our own budget instead. We didn't take a paycheck that month. We didn't take anything out, not even for groceries. We skimped by in that little rental duplex with a four year old and a one year old at home, having already sold everything to be in that town. The team got every dollar they were promised.

And they never knew. We just made sure they were taken care of. And in return, they took care of us.

That same promise covers the ordinary slow days too, not just the storms. In six years and over a hundred team members, I have never once sent anybody home. If it's slow and the laundry is done, our laundromats have grout lines, and grout lines can meet a toothbrush. And if I pull up the cameras and see a spotless store and somebody twiddling their thumbs? That doesn't tell me to cut their hours. It tells me to get up and get my marketing machine in gear, because it's not their fault it's slow. It's mine. We always offer: if you want to go home, you can. Some take us up on it. But going home is their choice, never my cost cutting.

Here's what all of it bought. Today we have 25+ team members across our stores. At least a dozen of them are at or rapidly approaching two years with us. Fewer than 10% of our new hires leave in the first six months. From 60 people through 4 positions in year one, to that. You cannot buy that kind of loyalty. Well, I guess I actually did buy it. One full paycheck at a time.

So let me land this series where it started, back in that cotton field with my grandpa.

He taught me the worst thing that can happen to a farmer is a great year, and for four issues we've treated that as a warning about money. But I don't think money is what he was protecting all those decades. The discipline, the stored-up harvest, the refusal to buy the shiny tractor, all of it existed so that when the drought came, the people depending on him didn't feel it. That's what still standing really means.

Your harvest is rolling in right now. Your winter has a date on it, and you know roughly when it lands. The only question left from this whole series is what your people will be able to say about you on the other side of it.

Make them a promise. Then go stash the money that keeps it.

One of our stores sits in a small town, and there are a few days a year where it just goes quiet. I remember pulling up the cameras on one of those days and seeing the whole store spotless. Machines wiped down. Floors done. Folding tables cleared. And my attendant standing there with nothing left to clean.

There was a version of me, the 2021 version, that would have looked at that screen and seen wasted payroll. The version of me writing this sees something else: a team member who did everything right, in a store that I hadn't filled. That screen isn't their report card. It's mine.

So that day went the way those days always go now. They stayed on the clock. I went back to work on getting people in the door. And somewhere in town, there's a team member who learned one more time that slow days at Wash Bar don't come out of their rent money.

Two moves this week, one free and one that costs a phone call. First, write the promise down and put it in your hiring process, said out loud in the interview: if we ever have to close for weather, a water break, or anything outside your control, you will still be paid the hours you were scheduled. Don't make the promise until Issue 4's savings account exists to fund it, because a promise without money behind it is just the lawn company that lost me and my whole crew in a month.

Second, call your insurance agent and ask one question most operators have never asked: does my business interruption coverage include lost income, and can it be built to cover my team's payroll if a catastrophe closes us? I pay extra premium for that every year, and it's some of the best money I spend. Your agent can't offer you what you never ask for.

Everything in this issue, from 60+ attendants a year down to a dozen people pushing two years, came from changing how we attract, hire, and keep team members. And we turned that entire playbook into a course inside Laundry Advisors called Built to Stay. It's been one of our most popular resources, downloaded daily, and every piece of it was developed live in our stores first: the ads that attract the right applicants, our multiple interview process and the psychology behind the questions, how we stay connected in the days before someone's first training day, the work buddy we assign every new hire, and the 30 day check ins and quarterly sit downs that follow. The work buddy alone was a breakthrough for us. People who used to wash out in the first 90 days started staying past a year.

Laundry Advisors is a community for operators who want to grow and scale, with trainings, weekly video calls, and resources covering staffing and HR, marketing, SOPs, equipment mix, customer retention, and expanding to additional locations.

Every store's next hurdle is different, which is why we start with a conversation instead of a pitch. Schedule a complimentary call with our team, tell us where you are and where you're headed, and we'll point you to the tools that fit.