About the Author
Hugh McPherson, Maize Quest’s Maze Master, has been “losing” guests and telling “corny” jokes since 1997 on his home farm. Maize Quest’s Corn Maze & Fun Park is home to the annual corn maze, and now features the annual Sunflower Festival.
The home farm, Maple Lawn Farms, welcomes guests to pick-their-own peaches, apples, pumpkins & blueberries through out the season. In 2015, Hugh launched Maple Lawn Winery to add value to the fruit crop and welcome a new tribe of wine-loving guests.
Maize Quest, through www.MazeCatalog.com, designs corn mazes, games and attractions for over 85 farms in the U.S., Canada and the U.K. The Agritourism Manager Boot Camp is Maize Quest’s first online course. Reaching over 120 farms in the first three years, Boot Camp is the #1 program for agritourism and farms with seasonal, retail employees to build a complete, staff management system.
Hugh served for 6 years on the North American Farmer Direct Marketing Association’s Board of Directors (NAFDMA). Hugh also serves as the choir director at Centre Presbyterian Church in New Park, PA and plays Ultimate Frisbee in a local league. His pride and joy are his wife Janine, daughter Annie, and son Ian.
About the Book
Do the math. The average 39.2-hour-per-week worker, in 50 years of employment, will spend over 92,000 hours at work. If you are a business owner or a farmer working 60 hours a week, that number climbs to over 150,000 hours at work. For most of those hours you won’t be alone. You will spend them working with employees. For much of it, leading a team.
For so many business owners, working with employees feels like a constant struggle between ‘us’ and ‘them’. So powerful is the memory of ‘that one time when an employee stole money from me’ or ‘when she called off on our biggest day of the year and I had to make donuts myself for 12 hours’, that employees are forever adversaries – not to be trusted. Us against them.
What a terrible way to spend the next 100,000 hours of your life. What if there was a different way to interact with your people? What if you could build a team that was enjoyable to work with and got plenty of work done? What if your team wasn’t a mindless league of robots, but started thinking of more efficient ways to serve clients, complete tasks and innovate?
There is a way, and the process starts with you. Today.