teeny, tiny, little things. Okay, let's talk about that. Well, how you doing? Welcome to the show.
Welcome to... I was gonna say, you know what I was gonna say? I was going to say, welcome to As to the Garden Geek. That was my radio show that I did for like eight million years.
No, 35. But still, that's a long time. And I've been doing the daily grateful now for many, many months. And I was just getting ready to start and I started out and I was gonna say, welcome to As to the Garden Geek.
That's weird. That's really weird. What we want to talk about, oh, by the way, my name is Michael Kross. And I apologize for my voice.
I don't know what's going on. Oh, I do know what's going on. There's massive pollen in the air. You walk out my front door and you look at, you know, the cars, they'll have this green tent on it.
That's all coming down from all the pollen. It is outrageous. It happens this time of year. It affects the voice.
It does. But I'm going to work with it. My old friend Ted Webb said, the late Ted Webb, the late great Ted Webb radio pioneer. He said, gargling salt water when this happens.
I have tried that on several occasions. And I've got to tell you, I can't warm salt water. Gargling in warm salt water. He said, I've tried that.
And oh my God. I don't know, man. I think I would rather have, I don't know. I'd rather have my chest hairs pulled out one by one.
But it's rough, but we're going to get through it. That's what we're going to do. Today we're talking about tiny little things. Tiny little things that make you grateful.
Tiny little things that make you smarter. We're talking about tiny little things. You have to look for them because they're not always evident. You're out there in real life.
You're going through your day. You're learning every day. We learn stuff. We learn different things.
Every day we explore all kinds of opportunities every day. And you look for tiny little things. And some of these things stick with you forever. I mean forever.
Let's go back to I think around 1971, 72. Maybe it was somewhere in there. There was a guy running for Congress in Florida. His name was Glen W.
Turner. And he was an entrepreneur. As a matter of fact, he was all over the news in those days. He got arrested.
And you know what's amazing? Everybody loved him. All his purported victims. All of them.
As a matter of fact, none of them ever complained about him. Maybe they did. But you didn't hear anybody complaining about him. What he did is he had two companies.
He started off with Cosmetics. And that was, he got some private label company and came up with a bunch of Cosmetics. But that wasn't the deal. That isn't what made him the money.
What made him the money is if you want to be a Cosmetics distributor, it cost you $5,000 in 1971, $5,000 in money. And after you paid that $5,000, you got a box full of Cosmetics, I guess? I don't know. But you got a briefcase.
And the briefcase was the deal. The briefcase was the trick. Because in the briefcase, we're a bunch of cassette tapes of Glen W. Turner giving you all kinds of advice about life.
Once you paid that $5,000, you were then allowed to go get somebody else to pay you $5,000. And out of that $5,000, you got to keep $2,500 of it. And then it went back to the person who brought you in and back to the company, somehow. I don't exactly know how it worked.
But it was obviously a pyramid scheme. You were actually, and he had any ad products. He had Cosmetics. I never saw a picture of anyone wearing his Cosmetics.
Did not. Then he started something called Dare to be Great. And that's what he's most known for, I think. I don't know.
He started this company. And it was a motivational company. And with that, in order to join, you paid $5,000. The bottom line is after you paid $5,000, and you got the briefcase with all the tapes in it, with Glen W.
Turner telling you all about life, you were allowed to go out and sell more of those things. Now, strangely enough, by the way, he went to jail. He went to federal prison for this. And while he was in the middle of being tried and getting ready to go, fixing to get ready to go to federal prison, he decided to run for Congress.
Why not? You know, they're going to put me in jail and run for Congress. Does that sound vaguely for anyway? He's running for Congress.
At the time, I was dating a girl named Michelle, eventually married her years later. But I was dating her. And she was a reporter for a local newspaper. And I went to pop in there.
And I don't know. I would just pop in there every once in a while to see her. It was fun. I enjoyed the newspaper business.
I enjoyed going up into the newsroom. And then so when I pulled up to the parking lot, right next to the building, is a Winnebago camper. And they were kind of new. Winnebago's were reasonably new at that time.
You didn't see a lot of them. And on the side, it says, Glen W. Turner for Congress. And the door was open.
I said, huh, I know, I've heard this guy. I've been reading about this guy. I've been reading about this guy. So I go over there, and I look in the door, and there's a big old Winnebago at the dining room table that didn't win a bago.
And I said, are you Glen W. Turner? He goes, I'll show you around. I said, oh, OK.
So I went in, sat across from. And I said, aren't you a scam? And he goes, oh, what do you think? I said, I don't know.
I don't know enough. And I said, what do you do? So I help people. He goes, I'm here to help you today.
And I don't want any of your money. I just want to help you. And I said, OK, how do you want to help me? He goes, any way you need help, I'm going to help you.
I'm going to give you advice that will help you. And I said, okay, now you have to understand where I was at that particular time in my life. I had gone to work for a company in Clearwater. Yeah, it was 1972.
And the name of the company was Ace on the Ball Pest Control. And I was working in the lawn care division. Brain lawns, that was my job. Hated that job.
Oh my God, I was making $2.60 an hour. I hated that job. I could just tell you stories about how much I hated that job. And I said, all right.
I said, here's the help I need. He goes, okay. I said, I'm working at Ace on the Ball Pest Control. He goes, that's a hell of a name.
I said, yeah, it is, isn't it? Don't understand it. And he says, well, how do you come up with that name? I said, all right, it was originally on the ball spray service.
And then they merged with a guy who had Ace Pest Control. And they called it Ace on the Ball Pest Control. Strange, isn't it? Yeah, that is.
And he said, why do you hate it? I said, because it's just monotonous. I go in in the morning and we put all these things in fertilizer and these tanks and we go out and we spray lawns. And the guy had to train me as an alcoholic.
And I had nine million reasons why I hated that job. And he said, all right, I'm going to give you a little bit of advice. I only got one thing to advise you on. I said, OK, what's that?
He said, tomorrow morning when you go to work. By the way, tomorrow when you go into work, and I knew that tomorrow was going to be a really rough day because we had to do this mobile home park. And it was a big job. When you go into work tomorrow morning, you get so many other people work there.
I said, there's like three guys, spring lawns, couple guys doing post-control. Another guy does termites. He goes, all right, you're spraying lawns. I said, yeah, I want you to sit down tonight when you go home.
And I want you to get a yellow pad. You know what a yellow pad is? I said, what's a yellow pad? This is where I learned about yellow pads, by the way.
Changing my life. I'm telling you, it just totally changed my life. Learning about yellow pads. I said, there's a yellow pad right up there on the shelf, right behind you.
I use yellow pads all the time. Thanks to Glen Wtern. I said, OK, get yourself a yellow pad. I said, what's the yellow pad?
He showed me a yellow pad. I said, OK, I can get one of those. I'll go to Echo Drugs. He goes, OK, they're like 30 cents.
I said, good. He goes, I got a bad idea. Here, here's the yellow pad. Take it.
I said, well, thanks. He goes, I want you to go home. And I want you to write down what you're doing now. Everything that you do in a day, right?
It's all down on the top of the thing. On the bottom half of the page, I want you to write in correlation with everything that you do, how you could do it better than anyone else at the company, how you could be the best damn lawn sprayer that ace on the ball pest control ever had. That's what you want to do. Everything that you do, getting the fertilizer and the chemicals ready in the morning, how can you do that better?
Routing yourself out. How can you do that better? What's more efficient? And you'll figure out a way to make that more efficient.
Just do that. How to deal with the customer. Just everything. I just read it right there.
I said, OK, my life sucks. I'm going to go home and try that. And he gave me a yellow pad. Give me a 30 cent yellow pad.
So I went home that day. I went upstairs. I visited with Michelle. So there's a crazy guy downstairs.
He had glint earners down there. Nobody else talked to him. He's not talking to him. He goes, OK.
So anyway, I guess somebody did come down talking because they wrote an article about it. He was crazy. I used to go and jail. And he did.
But anyway, I went home and still depressed, but I went home and I sat in my bedroom on Mangrum Drive in Dunedin, Florida. And I sat there and I wrote down everything that I did. There was like seven things that I did every day. And I wrote it in the order that I did at the job.
And then I went down and I made another list. And I had no number one. How can I get the truck loaded and all the fertilizer and all of that done better than it's being done now? And believe it or not, as I sat there and I thought about it and I saw the way everybody else was doing it, and I'm not going to bore you with the details, but it came up with a better plan.
It would be more efficient. It would get me out of the gate sooner and would be easier for me to get my job done during the day. So that was kind of exciting. Am I going long here?
Yeah, I am. I don't care. We're just going to keep going. So then everything I did during the day, routing yourself out, how do you route yourself out?
And we had a list. My boss, his name was Jack Hiche. He would hand us a list every day of all the yards that we had to go treat. And he gave me more than you could do in case something happened.
Like somebody said no, or somebody canceled or whatever. He gave me more. And I took the addresses down. And I said, OK, how can I do this better?
So I got that list the next morning and I walked in and the office manager was Jack's mother. Her name was Ruth. I said, Ruth, could you do me a favor? She goes, yeah.
I said, could you tell me what the zip code is for this one? Could you tell me what the zip code is for this one? You know, what do you want those zip codes for? Just trust me.
I wrote down the zip codes on all of the addresses. So all he had was 9-11 Turner Street, Clearwater. Whatever. I wrote all the zip codes down.
And then I sat down and I took a blank piece of paper. And I put all of the yards together in one zip code that I was going to do. I would go zip code to zip code. And then I sat there with my map.
And I made little red dots on my map. And I go, one, two, three. Until I got through it. And I had that map folded up and on the seat of the truck next to me.
I go out. Anyway, make a long story short. I figured out all these ways to do things better. I went out.
Now that particular day, we only had one job. We went and it was a mobile home park. And I thought about that the night before. And there was all three of us were going there.
And what we did is we would just go down. And we would do all of the homes. And we sprayed every trailer in there, the lawn, around every trailer that was in there. And I sat there.
And I thought about the way we had done it in the past, which was ungodly long. And I figured a better way. I said, why don't we park at the end of the block, behind it, the mobile homes, where we can pull the hose out behind the mobile homes 300 feet out and work our way back to the truck. That just seemed to make more sense.
And you could move faster. Everybody told me you're nuts, go out. I said, OK, well, I'm doing this section. That's the way I'm going to do it.
I got done with my section, which was about 75, maybe 100 albums. I was done by 1130 in the morning using that system. Boom, boom, boom. The other guys didn't get done until like 3.34 o'clock.
Hot Florida sun. And then the next day when I was out doing the regular yards, I used my routing system. And every day, I came back and I was more efficient. And Jack, my boss, was noticing this.
And my first day back in doing regular lawns, oh, the other thing I did, is when we would do a lawn, we just took this little ticket that said we did the lawn and we'd leave it at the front door. And then they would have to send them a bill. And I figured it would probably be better if I knocked down the door when I got there and said, hey, I'm here to spray the lawn. Here's your bill.
I'll come and get the check afterwards, unless you want to give cash or whatever you want. I just said that because I knew that my efficiency that I developed was going to be a little bit concerning to Jack. I just knew it. Just knew it.
But I figured that if I came back with a pile of checks, he wouldn't be concerned about the way I was doing things. And I did nine lawns that day. And I came back with nine checks. And so I drove up and I went in and Jack was there to meet everybody and everybody got there.
And I pulled in and I handed my clipboard. And he says, what's all these checks? I collected on all of them. He goes, how'd you do that?
I said, oh, knock down the door, handed them the bill, told them what I was doing. And that gave them an opportunity to ask me about any concerns and just had a conversation with everybody. And then at the end, I went knock down the door and they handed me their check. It was great.
Everybody needs to do that. And I said, well, they should. He tried to get everybody to do it. They wouldn't do it.
I'm the only one who did it. Guess what I got? $2.60 an hour went to $2.85 an hour. I said, oh, still in a lot of money.
Then the next one was $3 an hour, $1,172. Anyway, that's what that was all about. And then eventually, at the end of the day, at the end of the very first day of doing all of this, because I got done earlier than everybody else. And I did it my way and I was happy.
I went home feeling good about myself. Felt really good about myself. The next day, when I went out and did all those homes and came back with the pile of checks, and Jack was just really impressed. I felt even better about myself.
So every day, I kept doing that. And I kept looking for ways to do the job better. Now, one little tiny thing the Glen Turner taught me in his soon to be repossessed when a big ole camper, before he went to federal prison, was immensely helpful for me. I didn't give Glen to be a Turner a dime.
I didn't give him $5,000. No, I just sat there and he gave me a yellow pad. And I took it home and I wrote all this stuff. And then I used that yellow pad after that for anything that I was planning on doing, which was different.
By the way, that started my career in horticulture. That started my career in dealing with plants. And that got me into learning more about plants and going to school and learning more about plants and horticulture and all of this. And it eventually got me to where I was a horticulture teacher.
And it eventually got me into somebody who traveled the state, helping people that were in this business keep their CEUs going, either continuing education. It brought me to the Florida Pest Control Association, where I was on the board of directors. And then I became chairman of the publicity committee for the big deal back in those days. I was very sad.
Got me into radio, because I filled in for a guy that had a local gardening show. And within a short amount of time, I was offered a network radio show. So you see, when things like this happen, tiny little things, you just use them and you see where it grows, see what they can do for you. Everything that is significant, that has happened in my life, has happened because of a tiny little thing that I was smart enough or lucky enough to pay attention to.
And that would be my advice to you. Pay attention to the little things. See what little thing you can grab onto and expand on. It always works.
Well, just about always works. That's my advice to you. All right, I'm gonna sit down, put this one in the can and record another one. And then another one.
And then another one. So I've done five of them. Then I don't have to record during the week this week. And you guys get new shows.
A lot of good things happening. New equipment is coming into the studio very soon. The studio might move from this location of a house to the old location in the house. I don't know, we'll see you tomorrow.