Pros
The pay starting off is $11 an hour, plus 20% sales commission and each sale bumps up your hourly rate for that week. You also get customer retention bonuses if less that 10% of your route cancels. You will also work a lot of overtime. The training at the branch is pretty much a **** show and you will have every single person telling you different things, though we did have off site training which was new this year and was very informative and worth wile. My coworkers at my branch were easy to get along with.
Cons
This job becomes extremely monotonous. When spraying you walk a lawn in a pattern doing the same movement with your hand walking at the same pace to ensure the product is spread evenly. Your worth is solely based on the dollar amount of work you do each day. They will tell you they care about customer service and safety, but to complete your work load for the day you need to be rushing every last minute you are punched in. The branch has weekly dollar production goals which is the amount of money in production all the lawn techs do. This becomes a problem when they make you spray on windy days. Your states department of agriculture has wind speed limits to control drift of pesticide spray, if they catch you spraying in high wind they can take your license away and fine you THIS DOES HAPPEN. Also the spray will get all over you in high wind and these chemicals are not something you want on you! You need to ask yourself is the money worth the health risk BEFORE you apply for this job!!! Beware if you are thinking about a career here. The service managers at my branch were the first people in in the morning and last ones to leave at night. They were over worked, stressed all the time and honestly should have been paid double what they were getting. Also they used to promote people from within to get new branch managers. It seems now they are hiring outside people with MBA's, so you may very well have a limit as to how high up the ladder you can go.
