Labor Day is the first Monday in September, and for most people, it means a cookout, a long weekend, and the unofficial end of summer.
That is not how it started...
The first "Labor Day" was September 5, 1882, in New York City, where roughly 10,000 workers gave up a day of pay and walked from City Hall up to Union Square.
Twelve years later, in 1894, Congress made it a federal holiday.
Everything we take for granted now came out of that period and the decades around it. The eight-hour day, the five-day week, job-site safety rules, workers' comp, etc.
Somebody had to go out there and force authorities, companies, and politicians to protect the working class. Nobody was trying to get a three-day weekend to be lazy; they were fighting for recognition, respect, and control over their fate.
That is the same idea we got into on the podcast this week.
JOIN THE LANDSCAPING UNLIMITED NEWSLETTER
Wanting is not a plan
Episode 89 is called "Do Different to Become Different." The short version is that the only thing that ever changes your results is changing what you do every day, not what you know or what you intend to get to in the spring. Everyone feels motivated lying in bed, listening to epic TikToks, and YouTube has all the information you need to get healthier, wealthier, and make progress in business...
The issue isn't knowledge; it's application.
What you do on a morning in the middle of a busy season decides the results you get at the end of it.
Most guys in this trade already know what needs to happen; they know their prices are too low, the crew leader needs training, and the truck costs more in downtime than a payment would. Knowing isn't the problem; the gap between knowing it and doing it is where the years go.
You can run the same year eight times and call it eight years of experience; plenty of people do, and they all hate the fact that their lives are nothing but redundancy without progress...
FOLLOW LANDSCAPING UNLIMITED ON TIKTOK:
What that looks like in the field
Around here the season runs hard from March through October.
Eastern North Carolina heat index gets past 100 by late June and stays there, for what feels like forever... Crews are out at 7 am, sweating by 715, and by 2 pm the sun has taken most of what a person has to give, and then they go and give a few hours more.
That is labor in the plain sense of the word.
The guys who move up in this company are not the ones who talk about moving up. They are the ones who learned to push through discomfort, maintain a standard, and help others find their footing in this industry along the way. They are the ones who started checking their own cut height instead of waiting to be told, and they represent the company well off the jobsite as much as on it. Those who get recognition, respect, and financial investment are the ones who came back after a tough week and asked what the next job is going to be, with a smile on their face.
None of that is talent; it is one changed behavior, repeated until it is normal, and then another one on top of it.
Same thing on the business side.
A company does not get better at estimating because the owner reads about estimating. It gets better because somebody sits down with last year's jobs, compares real hours to bid hours, and finds out where the money went. That is a few hours of unpleasant work (we all hate office work here), and it is available to anyone, yet most people never do it.
To our crews
The holiday exists because of people who worked with their hands and then organized to make that work survivable. That history belongs to trades like this one, where there is no hiding; it's honest work, and it is done in the elements.
To everybody who has run a mower in August, hand-dug a 100'+ trench in 100°+ heat, set 200 pavers on a 95-degree afternoon, or shown up the morning after a storm to clear a yard so a family could find peace and order out of chaos...
Thank you; the work is real, and it shows up in every property we touch.
If you are reading this on your day off, put the phone down and go eat something off the grill. Soak in the day; don't hide from it in the name of "relaxing," as you shouldn't need to "relax" from your life; you should immerse in it and find recovery in the presence of the people and world you have built.
Listen to Episode 89
If you own a landscaping business and you are tired of running the same year on repeat, this one is worth the eight minutes.
Do Different to Become Different | Why Nothing Changes Until You Do
The Landscaping Podcast is also on Apple Podcasts and wherever else you get your shows. New episodes every week out of Washington, North Carolina.