Many self-employed people hire their children to help with the business. I didn’t really understand all of the tax advantages that the adults referred to when I was a child. All I understood was that at The Warren Group, I had a job each week after school of coming to my dad’s office and helping collect all the trash cans and take the trash out to the dumpster. We had a huge cardboard bin where we would collect aluminum cans for recycling. It was my job to take them out back, crush them with my foot and then bag them up again and take them to our Boy Scout hut.
I was taught to conserve expenses and not waste trash bags. They taught me how to not take out each trash bag, but instead to use my hand and empty it out or to just take the can and turn it over into the larger dumpster and save the bag. Unless it was obvious that someone had a bunch of liquid spills or something nasty in the trashcan. I also was responsible for cleaning all of the toilets and even mopping the men and women’s bathrooms at the office. That was an interesting but valuable experience as a child.
This janitor position grew, and I felt like I got promoted when I was able to help outdoors with the family business’s yard work. I would walk around and make sure there were no pieces of trash on the property. I was trained how to mow the grass, edge, weed eat and blow right there at The Warren Group office yard. Dad kept a push mower and the lawn equipment back in the evidence storage area. I was paid to maintain the property and my job description grew into maintaining even the shrubbery out front.
One day after I had just finished trimming the shrubs, Maria, the office manager came out and said “I didn’t say butcher the plants” …I guess I had cut them a little too low. I was proud of them, but I learned quick that I needed to ask and get a firm understand of what the customer wanted. When they say “trim the shrubbery” does that mean cut it back by a third of its size or is it just a little hair cut? Big difference.
The main way that I learned how to do things like trimming someone’s shrubs is to do it the best way that I think they should be done and then… brace for impact. Wait and see what they client thought about my work. I had to ruin a few bushes, butcher a few hedges and kill a tree or two growing up.
Dad used to say, “If you talk to a surgeon and he hasn’t killed anybody in surgery, he probably hasn’t done too many surgeries. If you are talking to a landscaper who hasn’t killed any plants or trees, well then he probably hasn’t planted many trees in his life. Even with cooks, son. Cooks who haven’t burn a meal or lawyers who haven’t lost a case are probably not doing enough cooking or cases. That is how we learn, by messing up. Its ok to learn from our mistakes. We just don’t need to let them happen again. We need to learn from our mistakes, pick up and and move on.”
What an important lesson for me at that young age. Solid work ethics were embedded in my soul from a super early age. Being willing to work hard and try new things would later mold my path in middle school to do a respectable job with actual lawn service clients… Working for real clients, people other than my parents and their employees.
