North Carolina Turfgrass – Julie Holt, Content Director, TheTurfZone.com
TheTurfZone: Welcome to TheTurfZone. Today we’re speaking with Neal Glatt, Managing Partner at Grow The Bench and business coach certified by the Gallup Organization. Welcome Neal.
Neal Glatt: Thanks for having me, Julie.
 
TTZ: I’m going to start out with a little explanation about what we said in your intro. You are a business coach, certified by the Gallup Organization. Can you tell me a little about what that means?
NG: I get to help businesses improve, usually around sales and management, which is really my passion is helping teams perform really well. And the Gallup organization is the world’s largest independent polling organization. So especially with election season right now, people are probably used to hearing “According to a Gallup poll…” That’s where most people know Gallup from is they call people up, they ask them what they think and they do it all around the world, more than anybody else and they don’t take any money from anybody, and just spend millions and millions of dollars on payroll to survey people. What they’ve developed are these world-class surveys is a lot of great information about what people really want and how it related to business. So when it comes to high performing teams, Gallup has essentially invented the category of what we call “employee engagement.” For the past 35 years, has been publishing information about what makes a highly engaged team, what even is a highly engaged team, and most importantly for us today, how can we take something really simple, at very little cost and put it into action to get more from our teams and make everybody feel better.
 
TTZ: You mentioned High performing teams, and that’s really what we’re going to focus on today, and fine tune that for the green industry. Can you tell me how you got into sharing this type of information and this type of business coaching, specifically in our industry?
NG: It actually happened the other way around for me. I graduated college with a degree in marketing, wanted to go into sales and started working for a landscaper and so I was working in this industry before I knew any of this great business stuff. And I had all the same challenges that other green industry companies have – too hard to attract people, too hard to keep people, nobody really as invested as I wanted them to be. Just trying to make it, and through that process of being frustrated and failing at management, I started to learn the hard way about some things that needed work. I was fortunate to work with or have employed some other really great managers and I’d see glimpses of greatness from people. And I see, you know, this person’s really great at developing relationships and people seemed to really like that. Or this person’s really great at developing people, and meanwhile their team is doing better with all the hard metrics. So systematically, I studied that and discovered some of the science and a few years ago decided to go out on my own as a business coach and earn some certifications along the way that support that. So I have the opportunity, being self-employed to work with any industry, but I just have a heart for the green industry because it served me really well. I think what we do is so important and so overlooked, and I get pretty excited about bringing this cutting-edge science to the green industry in a meaningful and practical way because I think that the green industry needs some love and gets overlooked by a lot of people.
 
TTZ: I absolutely agree. In these podcasts and in speaking with turfgrass professionals and nursery and landscape professionals across the region, very very few do not point to labor and building great teams as one of the biggest challenges they face. From education all the way to hands-on lawn and landscape smaller companies, everybody is trying to creating workplaces that foster ...