How to keep an employee from year to year?

[Lawn-Scapes]

I hope to add an employee (hopefully 2) for next year and would like to know what you guys do when winter hits? How do you keep the same guy(s) coming back? Do they collect unemployment? Pay salary year round? Something else?

[tiedeman]

I did two things in the past and it worked, but as you can see I no longer have employees because of a lot of reasons, and one of them is retaining them.

the two things I did was
1. they drew unemployment from me
2. or they were paid percentage for snow removal. Basically they had their own accounts to take care of, and they would get paid 80% of the accounts price. That covered their fuel and pay. They seemed to like it.