It’s fairly routine for business owners to be good career planners, the kind of people who obsessively scribble down their personal and business goals every day, week, month or year.
But Steve Pattie takes that approach a giant step further: He requires all of the employees of his landscape-design firm to do the same.
His business grew from his love of the outdoors. He began as a landscaper at the age of 13, and not too many years later was making a real living from it.
“I tried to get a job, but nobody would hire me,” he says.
So, by 1966, at the age of 15, he was in business as Pattie Landscaping, which his brothers ran for him while he was away at college. By 18, he had hired his first landscape architect as a subcontractor.
The enterprise has since grown into The Pattie Group Inc., a landscape development firm in Novelty, organized into design, landscape construction and landscape management divisions. The staff includes everyone from hourly lawn-maintenance grunts to registered landscape architects, even a nursery staff that oversees plant stock grown for customers. (About 80 percent of employees are on salary).
Its burgeoning reputation for first-class horticultural design — projects have gone as high as $300,000 — has brought some unique opportunities: Four years ago, The Pattie Group designed an 8,400-square-foot garden for a show at the Cleveland Botanical Society. It’s been called the world’s largest indoor display garden.
But Pattie has always been equally concerned about growing — then retaining — good employees.
“I think it costs us 10 grand when we lose an employee after you put two or three years of training in them,” he says.
He places the price tag at seven times that for senior sales people. And so he’s tried to bring the same green thumb he has for elaborate horticultural projects to the area of internal employee retention.
And the proof of his approach is in the numbers: He says the company had 100 percent retention last year and more than 98 percent the year before.
How does he do it? By pushing goal setting deep into the organization.
“We’ve always been good planners,” he says. “I still go back and read my goals from when I was 13.”
But about five years ago, when he noticed that his management staff wasn’t filtering down to the rank and file the same goal-setting and planning approach that he was preaching for the managers, he initiated a change.
“Everybody in this company is required twice a year to update their goals — personal and business,” Pattie says. “And that helps the managers know what the guys are thinking, and to help make a career path for them.”
Rather than lose bright, ambitious junior people, that process helps the management team organize a customized plan that lays out to an individual how he or she might make a well-paying career of the field.
To supplement those efforts, he develops what he calls “a nice farm system” for entry level people by hitting the podium at career days whenever he gets the chance.
“We never turn down a career talk or a seminar on horticulture,” he says.
His goal is to drive home one key point: contrary to what young people might imagine, there really are long-term career opportunities in the industry, as well as in The Pattie Group. Those in sales and management, or project foremen, can make as much as $50,000 a year, Pattie notes.
The competitive pay is only part of the story, though. He also supplies the staff with in-house classroom training in horticulture, conflict management, even personal finance. And in an industry that’s more weather-sensitive than most, he generally guarantees the staff 40 hours of work year-round.
All of those threads have apparently built unusual employee satisfaction: In addition to the high retention rate, he notes that a lot of employees are now giving two to three months notice before leaving. One even gave a year’s notice.
None of it came easily for Pattie, though. He remembers tougher financial times, when he borrowed money from his parents, even from the organizers of Dale Carnegie courses in order to attend the training. In the end, it all worked out, and left him with an enduring sense that a determined entrepreneur can get through just about anything.
“I guess that’s where I learned you can work anything out.”
