Long hours, shrinking pay
Pros
The pay structure they offer when hiring people in the spring pays well. Before the call centers were introduced, the local branches had individual offices and felt connected to the community. Really, it felt like a family more than a business. It was a wonderful place to work in the late 90's-early 00's. The pay was great, the people were friendly. The managers knew you as a person, not a number. There were company picnics and pot lucks, baby showers and table tennis. I have very fond memories of the company in those days. In most states the employees get a seasonal layoff (which you will need if you work for them). As door-to-door became a bigger focus, I was surprised to see the tenured sales people (who had little experience other than fighting for inbound calls) be forced to prove if they could sell. Many d-2-d sales people had felt resentful about that, so it was nice to see management recognize the disparity.
Cons
TruGreen went full corporate in the mid 00's. At that point, the focus became to find ways to change the commission structure in late spring in order to increase profitability for the branch for the rest of the year. Incentive-based pay became first on the chopping block (not the manager's pay, of course). Back-end commissions (you had already earned months before) vanished as the company forfeited them in the new commission structures. Suddenly you had to sell 30% more just to reach the first commission level. Not that it mattered, the weekly new full-program customer goals were always 20% higher than the year before. You would finding yourself working 1130-9 Monday to Friday and 9-4 on Saturdays (the entire late spring and summer) chasing a new almost impossible sales goal. Even worse, when your reached your individual commission goal you had to stay/come in on Saturdays if the "team" was behind. The same happened, to a lesser extent, with the techs.... who every year had slightly larger routes and longer days. Having worked at several branches, it is pretty much a given that at Tru-Green the sales manager will fraternize with certain sales people and these are the people who get promotions and spiffs. Personal politics often matters more than performance. There is also a look-the-other-way attitude by branch managers when managers of various sections (sales, office, production) cross the line in the way they speak to their employees. Screaming sales managers are unfortunately a very common thing. Now that I think about it, almost all of the most inappropriate things (sexual or otherwise) I've ever heard in a work environment was said by a sales manager at Tru-Green. Other parts of the branches were more integrated, but in my experience the sales rooms were places where jokes about female and gay employees were tolerated (if not outright encouraged). Branch managers also can have some odd rules (such as salesmen having to wear pants and buttoned up shirts in 100+ degree heat) or not allowing someone to sign up for service unless they prepay for everything up front. Upper management (above the branch level) spends too much time meeting with other managers and very little time actually doing anything (other than coming up with new ways to cut incentive pay). Well, I'll give them a little credit: they also spent time cooking up new sales training modules . . . problem was, the new sales methods (STAR reps, etc) were cooked up by people who knew nothing about selling. It was nothing but wasted time and money (that could have been left in employee pockets). In recent years, sales goals would be met occasionally but even then there never was enough technicians/trucks to do the work. There would be aeration-overseedings still being done when snow was in the forecast. Free service calls to customers would be a week late (well after the guaranteed 48 hour turn around time). It is common to have customers that have cancelled not actually be counted on the books. (Local managers control the books with basically no auditing by an independent source. Sandbagging sales is common.) Uncancelled cancelled customers can cause problems since any day it rains you will be calling people in endless computer-programmed phone campaigns. Of course, if the branch gets fined for violating the do-not-call list, the employee gets scapegoated. It's a shame because the company wasn't broken when it became part of Service-Master, yet management and bean-counters found a way to turn the company into a well-oiled national corporation that is disconnected from the places they serve and the people who work there. A textbook study in how stockholders, executives and management can destroy a company.
