Thanks to Heritage Landscape Supply Group for sponsoring this year’s program
Once new employees are brought on, there’s a new
apprentice training program waiting for them to guide them toward a full career in the industry. “We needed skilled technicians and needed a way to fast-track them to be independent workers,” says Mullarkey. Originally, he had new hires follow established technicians on the job to learn through osmosis, but then he determined that to get the results he wanted, he needed something more structured. So he worked with his team to build a 90-day training
program that organizes a new set of skills to take on over the course of each 30 days. Every segment builds on the last with an 80-page manual that he compiled out of his company’s standard operating procedures. “At the end of each 30 days, we sit down and review
what they’ve learned over that time,” he says. “It’s not just technical skills. It’s also soft skills like what it means to be to work on time, interpersonal skills, how to commu- nicate well.” He and one of his earliest employees began writing
For many irrigation companies, finding success throughout 2022 was all about empowering their employees through methods like providing additional education, communication and team build- ing. Photo: TriState Water Works
Te additional attention to his employees has con-
nected well with the amount of work that’s available in his region as well. “If you’re going to promise somebody that they can move up, there needs to be work for them to do,” he says. He’s invested in marketing to continue to bring in new territories for his crews to hone their skills. “Everybody wants to know where they stand. Every- body wants to know what they can do to grow and prog- ress,” he says. “If you expect your employees to just show up and dig for the rest of their lives, then you’re going to keep on getting the same results with employee churn.”
The Brand Builder
With the influx of new work during the pandemic, Sean Mullarkey, CIC, CID, CLIA, owner of TriState Wa- ter Works and Lux Landscape Lighting in Cincinnati, Ohio, was trying everything he could think of to bring in new employees. He worked with a recruiter and brought on more
employees to build support infrastructure for his compa- ny’s office as well as develop its brand. For one of those employees, part of their job is doing recruiting work in- house, building a social media and web presence that will attract more employees to TriState. Tat includes account management for platforms like
Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, with clips of video interviews with current employees and of company out- ings. Te idea is to show how the work gets done, but it also shows how the company is dedicated to teambuild- ing and paying its employees back for their efforts, he says. “We get a lot of customers by word of mouth and all
our great reviews,” Mullarkey says. “Tere’s no sense in me spending more money on advertising for customers if I don’t have the employees to do the work. So our fo- cus last year and this year has been on marketing to and finding employees.”
36 Irrigation & Lighting Summer 2022
down those best practices and gathering them from early in his company’s history to keep their work consistent. Each practice is about a page long. If they run longer, he breaks them down into a separate procedure. Each of those 30-day blocks also reminds Mullarkey to take time to evaluate whether the new hire is working out, so there isn’t a full year going by with substandard work without some review. He also sets goals for each of the apprentices during the program to help determine what other training or certification they’ll pursue after completing 90 days. “Tey’re expected to get certified to maintain their job position, at least the certified irrigation technician,” he says.
Tough it’s tough to quantitatively measure how much things have improved since organizing the apprentice program, Mullarkey’s business has built a reputation in his market as the “tech geeks.” “I’ve got skilled technicians that come from other com- panies who say they learn more in the first year here than they learned in three years at the previous job,” he says. Employee retention has improved as well, as his crews
feel like they’re picking up a useful skill even in day-to- day work. “Once someone comes on, they pretty much stay,” he
says. “My employees feel like they’re part of a professional organization. It’s something they can be proud of, because they’re learning it and feeling competent. I think there’s a real sense of pride.”
Kyle Brown is the editor-in-chief of Irrigation & Lighting magazine and can be reached at
kylebrown@irrigation.org.
INSIDE BUSINESS
This year’s winners had so many insights into encouraging growth that we couldn’t fit them in print. Read the full version of this article online at:
irrigationandlighting.org/watch-us-grow-2022.
irrigationandlighting.org
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