Mike Mastermind 02/09/2023

What's up, everybody? Again, this is a late night one. Don't have to listen to it now. Watch tomorrow if you're going to bed. All right, we're going to jump into a mastermind. Day three of training went fantastic. Tomorrow's last day.

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Here. And present. And you got four. Yeah, four questions. Let's jump in. First question is from Jason from Knoxville, Tennessee. Mike, I've heard you mention that you have a 400 minimum for projects. Is that across the board for new and existing customers? What if Mrs. Jones just needs a couple of bushes trimmed or some limbs on a back on a tree cut back is wondering how you handle small tasks like that to keep, keep or make customers happy, but still be profitable to the business. Okay, that's the first question. So let's talk about that.

So you don't really have a minimum because if you have an estimate fee and you have like a two hour kind of minimum charge, that's going to get you right up against 250, 300, already, right? So, for example, if you said, okay, we have an estimate fee, you have an hour or two of minimum charge and like, you know, pick up a debris, you're already at like 250, 300, so you don't have to have a minimum project. Now.

Like you said, if you have a mowing route and someone's like, hey, I need these three bushes trimmed, and you say, okay, it's gonna take an hour. Okay, I'm gonna charge an hour. And then they'd like an E fee. Maybe it's like 140, $150. Right? So on recurring jobs where you can knock something out really quick, especially if you're on the truck with the crew, if you're like solo operator or working on the field, I would, I wouldn't sweat a minimum as much. When you have to send an estimator out to visit the property, that's when we kind of enforce the $400 minimum. And we're typically already at $400 just by having an E fee. Because at the Bellingham shop, it's a hundred bucks and then a dump fee, 100 bucks, and then a couple hours worth of labor. Like you're already over $300. Right. So, but, and, but the $400 minimum for us is, has to do with SV when we get to go out and do estimates. Also, I'm a bit Concerned that our Google Ads are not working correctly. We spent about $1,000 in January and I don't believe we got any leads from the spend for Augusta. All the calls we're getting are coming from our other company web page and ads. I wasn't going to take these down until I knew Augusta was bringing leads. I'm also wondering where Augusta Knoxville is ranking right now. Thanks for your help. So you can look where you're ranking in terms of your website by simply just searching Knoxville, Tennessee Lawn Care. So like we could just do it right now. Knoxville, Tennessee Lawn Care. Yeah, if you, if you're switching over from another website, I would recommend in general to, to wait.

Until the leads catch up on Augusta Lawn Care and you can easily transition over by, on your old website putting in.

You know, whatever service provided by Augusta Lawn Care. And then that way the phone calls can still go to command center and be ran through like regular. And then people aren't like completely caught off guard. So like I'm looking right now, you're on the second page of Google and I'm going to guess.

Let me see if I can find you on Google listings.

I don't know if you set up your Google listings, but I don't see you anywhere on the map. So I don't know if you've switched over your old Google reviews and everything like that, but you're on the second page of Google that is usually tell tall sign. One thing, two things. One, either no traffic or B, there's no reviews. These are almost always why we will get. We'll hang out on the second page for a very long time. So I would guess one of those two things is happening. Since you haven't activated your location, you're actually driving traffic to that site. And secondarily would be the fact that I don't know if you moved your Google listing reviews over yet. So I haven't looked into that. But if you haven't, I would definitely recommend doing that. But for anyone that has had a business, for example, like Jason here had been for years, you're going to have incoming leads from that website constantly. I would definitely keep that until you have your Augusta site is brought up to the speed and getting all the leads. And if you're having the leads coming in through command center, you can simply.

Just put on your old website, you know, Bob's Lawn Care provided by a branch or a division of Augusta Lawn Care. That way your phone calls can still go through command center. Do that for six months. Most time people cancel within three to four. To be perfectly honest with you, that's totally fine. I know a lot of our longer web design clients become Augusta longer franchisees, and they'll usually, they'll say they're going to do six months. After three or four, they switch everything over to Augusta and stop their website. Just totally fine. So that'd be my recommendation. Keep the site. The leads will come in, but make sure your Google listing, all the reviews are brought over. And then in terms of ad spend, like we talked about yesterday, you are spending money in January. So, um, you might be driving some traffic to your site, but you, you're. You're marketing into no demand, right? Like for the vast majority of us right now, you can spend ads all day long, but, like, there's no demand, right? This is why I say, like, during the spring rush, your customer acquisition costs might be $20 to $40, whereas in the winter, it can be 10 times as much. Because there's no demand, right? So you could literally spend 5, 6, 7, 800, $1,000 and get one. No clients, because there's no one. There's no one looking for your services. And the only way they could potentially even see it is through a YouTube ad. Or if they search for it, there's no pain to buy. They don't need their lawn mowed tomorrow, right? So just keep that in mind.

Next question. Derek Durant, Allen Park. Okay, in passing. You mentioned IRA account you have. When talking about your tax document yesterday. What is your view on saving for retirement personally, then, what do you recommend for franchisees? One, pause retirement investing when starting up Augusta. Two, abandon retirement investing until you're done growing your business. Could be 10 plus years. Three, keep investing a small amount. Invest higher amounts after you've gotten a gust off the ground. I'll keep reading here a second, but I would typically say it's when you start having a significant taxable income. All right, So I would probably just have a throw a number there. When you start making above like, six figures consistently in annual profit, like, take home a adjusted gross income on your tax return, that's when I'd start thinking about doing something like an ira. Because you're literally just doing it for tax purposes. That's the only reason why I do it. And it's such a small number. And in part, I wanted to do it just to be able to know how to do it so I could tell other people, you know, how they can do it themselves. There's no way I'll ever make a meaningful impact on my Net worth using an ira. All right, so, you know, no one ever said, I got rich off of an ira, ever. And if you look, if someone's like, oh, if you do X amount, if you do, you know, the, the $6,000 a year for your whole thing, you're gonna have like a million and a half dollars when you retire. Trust me, in 50 years or 40 years when you retire, 30 years when you retire, a million and a half dollars probably will buy you a shack. All right, you got to look back 40 years back in 1980s and 1990s, what you could have bought for a house, you know, 20, $30,000 for a house. That same house today is 300,000. So just keep that in mind. When people start rolling numbers about what you're going to have when you retire, you got to, you got to think about what that money is going to look like in terms of value. All right? And, and the last 40 years has been relatively low inflation, it's been 2, 3%. If we're going to run the next five or 10 years at even say 3, 4 or 5%, a million dollars in 30 years is any, absolutely nothing like, comparatively to what it is today, it probably would be equivalent of today's money, like 250,000. So just keep that in mind. I keep reading. For non business owners, there's pretty simple math and plans to follow. Invest steadily as business owners. We are usually getting all our resources together for the new endeavor and can't invest for retirement and start a new business. Just want to hear your thoughts. Yeah, so I would definitely, if you're starting, if you're in the growth mode, if you're trying to get in multiple locations, your return on that is going to be so far greater than any money you put in an ira, even with the tax benefits. Okay. And if you take that money out sooner than your retirement, you get penalized and you got to pay taxes and it's not good. So there's obviously different types of IRAs. You can talk to, you know, a banker about the differences between Roth IRAs and different options, a traditional IRA, etc. Basically, it's like, when do you get taxed? You're going to get taxed either at the beginning or at the end, but there's definitely incentives in terms of no one ever got rich on their ira, I'll promise you that. So I would look at it as personally, you have invest in the business, there's really nothing else to invest in. You throw the $6,000 or whatever your cap is, if you're married, you have a little more in terms of what you can invest in ira. And basically the goal is that that money can grow and the increase of the investment you don't get taxed on. Right. Again, depending on if you're a Roth IRA or a traditional ira. But I would just say that if your net worth is under a million dollars, an IRA should like be the last thing in your mind because you're not going to in 10 years. You're probably going have $90,000 in your IRA in 10 years. Putting that $60,000 to work in their business could literally lead to a business that's profiting conservatively, $100,000 in annual profits per year and it's running without you. Right. So.

Yeah, I would definitely, probably say, number two, abandon retirement investing until you're done growing your business. That's probably what I would be saying. Yeah.

Because if you look, if you spent $6,000 a year on marketing for 10 years, the impact that having your business is so much greater than $60,000 sitting in an IRA. It's incredible.

Vlad Winter Garden we are moving into spring rush. What would you recommend if you have a budget for performance max.

Not a lot. Like if you're starting mowing in April, I would wait. The only person I'd be starting to thinking about, okay, let's start marketing in anticipation of like mowing season is if you start mowing March 1st. And so like we, we start mowing March 1st, we're starting to, we won't market, but we'll start sending like our one click estimate, email out.

Things like that here in the next week or two. But just know that like hot spring rush comes very quickly and people don't think about it a lot until maybe one or two weeks before that. All right, so you know, $20 a day will keep you relevant. Maybe get some early adopters, maybe people moving into that move throughout the winter to your area. And now it's like they're starting to think ahead. But very few people think ahead when it comes to lawn care.

They either have an existing service or they're going to mow it themselves.

But the person that doesn't have a service set up is usually waiting until the grass is long. Right. And that's what leads to a spring rush. Right. So.

I would just keep your powder dry, basically. Right. Because again, you will obviously want, you want the leads to come sooner. I get that. However, when demand is high, that's when your customer acquisition cost is low. Spending too much money when demand is Extremely low means you're paying extremely high customer acquisition cost. And I'm literally talking about 6, 8, 10x times the customer acquisition costs during the winter compared to spring rush. So try to keep some powder dry. Pictures attached. This is Evansville. Hopefully if you search long here, Evansville like I did, you can physically look at the reviews. Look at who? Google. In terms of where we show up next to our local map, we have 35 star views and that is the goo, the page that got set up for me to manage. When I look at Google Local service reviews, they are views from my old company, Grass Matters. It seems that Google changed my old company profile over to Gus's names based on my address, phone number, et cetera, without me. Interesting.

Okay, before joining, I only use Safari and prevent something like this from happening. I specifically set up everything on Chrome that doesn't. That won't matter. Oh, I, I see you're trying like your Google account. Got it. But it seems that it followed me over. I had to log into my old email to even see the reviews. How do I get Google Local service to not reflect my old review page and reflect the new review page? You need to contact Google Local Services on this one.

Because Google Local service is technically different. And like that's why when you do your, your business verification process, they actually have you do two reviews from a completely different link altogether. So it's very possible that your Google Local services is connected to your old account and that might even be inactive. And then your Google listing is attached to your new Google listing, obviously. So what you'll need to do is contact Google Local Services like, hey, I switched from this old business. The business name has changed. Here's my new Google lifting. Let me know if you need any verification of this. That's what I would be doing. Oh, sorry. You have pictures.

See what we got here. Okay, so you got the longer services as an ad and your Google guaranteed. Oh, I see what you're saying. So you're still, you still have the 21 and a 4.5 star from your old Google. Got it. Yeah. So I'd contact them, send them these screenshots and like, hey, this is showing. This is pulling from my old account. Oh yeah. Yes. You got 35 stars in Evans, Augusta, Longer Evansville. You have 4.5 stars, 21 reviews from your old account. Here's now they're not connected. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, so give them a give. Definitely reach out and contact them and just be like, hey, this is my old account. My Google local service is attached to my old account. Please change it to the new one. That's what I would be doing.

Forest, can you show me a week of Bellingham's locations route map? I'm having trouble breaking up my current route. I want to move customers around to make more sense, but I'm not sure how to do it. I attached a photo my week route. Matt, let me know your thoughts, please. Absolutely. Let's go ahead and share this screen. All right, let's see here. Remove. Stop Screen. Share. Present. Share. Screen, window, Chrome, tab, picture. Boom. All right, this is the map. So a bunch of Modesto. We got some green, orange. Okay, cool. So what would I do? So you got yellow, you got a bunch on Wednesday, you got a bunch on Thursday, and you got a bunch of Friday, and then you got a couple random ones out on Monday. Okay. So it looks like you're doing most of your mowing toward the end of the week, which is a little interesting. Usually I would recommend doing them more towards the beginning of the week, so that way if there's delays, weather, etc. They get pushed off later in the week, and it's not a big deal. Also, it allows you to do. To make sure you wrap up projects on like, a Thursday or Friday and you're not working the weekend. So that'll be my first thing. But that just has to do with this the days of the week. So don't worry about that for now. Let's think more about. Let's see here.

Yeah, so I would. I would. The main thing you're going to do is look on your. On a coaching call, you need to go over how many budget hours are each of these. Right. And try to balance those out. I would personally, if you're trying to break it up in three days, do something like, say, Monday would be like south Modesto.

Tuesday would be like north Modesto. And then Wednesday could be.

You know, Escalon and Oakdale. Right. That's what I'd be doing. Kind of depends on where your shop is at. If I remember correctly, you're on the south side, so I'd probably do it. Like, we always try to end the week towards our shop. Right. So I'd have to actually probably start, like, Monday out here. Then I'd probably go, like Tuesday here and then like Wednesday here. Now, if you're trying to break up mowing for the entire. Over the whole week, but I'm guessing you're not. That's why I said that I'd probably do, like, Monday and then I'd probably do Wednesday, and then I'd probably do Friday. Assume that your shop is down here and you're working five, eight for the week, so. Yeah. Well, what did I just do there? Okay, cool.

So that would be how I would personally break it up. Our shop is an escalon in the orange. Okay, then flip what I just said. We do apartment complexes Monday and Tuesday right now. Okay, so you're saying. Go back to this. You're saying Monday and Tuesday.

You do apartment complexes. And this is Wednesday. Thursday, Friday. Okay, this is great. Then Wednesday, yeah. Great. So you're working your way up. I think this is good. I would say it's a little weird how you're doing the yellows in between here, but I wouldn't say it's, like, horrible. I'd probably just try to make this a little bit more delineated. There's no reason, like, this yellow, this random green one's in the middle of all the young ones. But I don't think it's horrible. I have a general trend. Trend going from the south to north. And if you're in escalon is your shop space. And. Yeah, ending on a Friday. That's great. I think it's really good.

Share screen. Present window. Chrome tab. Mastermind. Boom. All right, next one up is Forest Modesto. Monday to Friday, P1 is two men for projects and cleanups. Okay. Monday.

Three men. Apartments all day. P3 and P4 is empty. So I'm assuming those would be projects. You probably throw them in the projects. Oh, obviously you got three people total. So three people are all doing projects. All right, our apartments, P1, they're doing proper projects and cleanups. Okay, cool. All right, makes sense. Tuesday.

You got some big parks and a mo. One man mo. You got one empty truck. Okay, so you got some capacity here Mondays and Tuesdays. And then it looks like Wednesdays and Thursdays is all hands on deck for mowing, and then Fridays here. Cool.

I think that's good. The only thing I would say is as you start getting above three routes, it is nice to have, like, one crew, even if it's not a designated crew. I mean, like, one crew a day kind of doing some projects. It was like, okay, Monday, I'm going to have two trucks mowing, and this crew is going to do some projects throughout the day. This day, two trucks are mowing, One crew is doing some projects throughout the day. That way you can always. You always have the ability to throw on a project on a given day, and you have the ability to do a larger project and at least have a crew on site in sequential days. Because what my concern is right now, the way you have this set up is if you do a project on Tuesday, but it's a bigger project, the next day you're going to get to them is Friday, Because Wednesday and Thursday have everyone locked up in mowing. So I would recommend when you have three trucks like this, personally, assuming that you have enough mowing, it looks like you do do two, date two, got two crews mowing throughout the whole week and then doing the apartments, et cetera, and then one crew available. And it doesn't have to be the same crew. I'm just saying, like, one out of the three crews would be doing projects, and then the other two would be melling gives you a little more flexibility and allows you to knock out larger projects without having to skip days. People aren't happy if you do some on Tuesday and then you come back on Friday. Right. So that'd be kind of what I shoot for. That's why, like, what's nice is once you get above two trucks, you can always kind of be shooting for. Okay, I'm have at least one project crew going every single day. It's really easy to schedule projects, Especially if you have, like, one. One guy on the truck. You know, it's like eight budget hours. It's super easy to budget to schedule in the future. You know, you got eight hours with the product, you know, every single day. And then you know how many the two crews have for mowing. Right. So I would. I would calculate the apartments all day as a. As a. As kind of like a mowing day. And so if it looks like you're sending all three people, all three employees to the apartments for that one day, that's fine. That's on a Monday.

Oh, I see what you're saying. You do have that. So Monday through Friday, you have one truck for cleanups. Got you. Okay, this makes way more sense. Okay, so exactly what I was saying is what you're doing, you have P1 with two men doing projects and cleanups throughout the entire week. Great. Okay. Yeah, I think this looks good. You kind of have a lot of mowing on Wednesday and Thursday. Okay. And these days, these trucks. Yeah, it looks good. One, two, three. And the two guys. Yeah, that's good. You got projects every day. Like I was saying. Perfect. Sorry, I didn't see that very first line, which is saying that Monday through Friday you have a crew available for projects. And basically, so you're saying you have five employees, two guys on a project crew all the time. And then you have three other trucks with three other employees. And you can either have them all going solo. Gotcha. Or you're doing all of them going to a single property. Cool. I like it. Yep. Very good. And. And if you were like, you know, crushing it on mowing, for example, because dry, you could take one of these three man crews, make it a two man crew, and take that one other guy and throw them onto another truck and to go do a cleanup. Right. So I like it. Good work.

The empty trucks are sitting at shop. The projects are P1 with P2. I got that. Sorry. Can you show me Bellingham's heat map? I do not have it right now, Sorry. I'm at capacity employee wise. So you're at capacity employee wise, but you have plenty of capacity for trucks because you have trucks sitting there. So basically it's going to come down to get your feet underneath you with these five employees. Be really confident. Get them trained up well before you go increase your capacity for labor, which is going to go hire more people. Right. But the trucks are sitting at home empty on apartment days. Yes. You have plenty of capacity for either A more mowing or B more projects while those guys are out mowing or out doing apartments. And so you could definitely hire more people. And then on the days when they're solo mowing, those new employees would just double up with those trucks. Right. So.

Yeah. Yeah. I would just say just knowing what happened last year, everything get your existing crew solidified. Right. So if you have five, six employees and a lot of them are new, get them solidified, get them locked and loaded, get a month or two of them all working together. Then go add the capacity when it comes to your labor.

And you have plenty of capacity. You could do at least two more employees. Right. Because you could have them double up on the days when they're mowing solo routes. And then the days when they're doing the apartments and everything. You can have them.

Going out on project based jobs or another mowing route altogether. Yes. If they're all solid and established, you have plenty of capacity. Hire team war employees. No problem. That means you have four trucks and seven employees. Totally fine. You could technically have eight employees.

Right. So.

All right, everyone. Hope you have a fantastic Thursday and Friday and a great weekend on Saturday morning. I'll do a live stream for P4P specifically. Do note I. I did a free course@mikeandys.com P4P. It's completely free, and it just walks you through more P4P training. So highly recommend it. Most of the videos are already on P4P, and we just kind of repackage it in a nice way on teachable. But There are like four or five new videos that I added on there about P4P and some of the new features. The new features that are coming out are, number one, push notifications. Number two, the 3D notifications going to your employees. Number three is the graph on the mobile app for the employee to see over time, their performance and not just, you know, yesterday's report. And yeah, so that's all coming out here end of February. So we're working on that. All right, Have a great rest of your evening and we'll see you tomorrow. Probably take care.