Mike Minutes Mastermind 01/017/2023

Oh, I'm live. Let's go. Oh, hi, guys. All right, let's rock and roll. Sorry. I had done four zoom calls this morning. I'm basically tired of looking at my face in the screen. Okay, let's go ahead and jump in. I don't think I announcements. Let me just triple check.

I did not. Let me go ahead and post this into the Facebook group. I saw the mathematics were posted this morning. I haven't had a chance to look at them, but definitely check those out on the dashboard. All right, let's hop in. Let's rock and roll. All right, share screen. We got 12 questions today. Let's do it. Window. Boom. Okay, first question comes from Kyle Tarvin. How often should we be changing around the copy on our Google Ads? How often should we be replacing the Google Ads with new ads? So if you're doing just.

Search, I don't think changing out is super important. I'd change them out once or twice a year based upon the seasons, like one for spring and summer, one for fall and winter. That's probably fine, honestly, if you're doing videos, pictures, etc. The nice thing about Google Performance Max is you can put like five videos, five pictures, and then it cycles them through and optimizes it. So most of the time you don't need to change them much. What you will want to change though is like based upon the season. Like if you're focusing on mowing spring rush, I do one for that. Let it run for three or four months and then maybe switch to projects. Then maybe you switch one to fall cleanups and then maybe do one for like winter services and winter cleanups. Maybe three or four times a year is, in my opinion, the only times I would be switching them up. I think we only do it twice. And that's like more of like a spring, summer, and like fall, winter cleanup type stuff. Stuff. I'm working on my ad calendar and when we will be putting up ads for specific services. I was planning on just running one mo ad and one cleanup ad in the spring if that's possible, but putting a large budget behind them and then switch to mulch and project ads in the summer. That's totally fine. That's perfect. And what you can do with Google Performance Max is do both. You can do mowing, you can do mulch, you can do multiple of them and see how they perform. And then you'll usually see them kind of migrate away from mowing as you head into the summer. And then that's when you could switch and you know which, which of the, the taglines and texts are being clicked on the most. But you got to remember this, this is something that everyone forgets in this industry. You probably only have 20, 30 people in your area searching for lawn care. You're probably only showing up five or ten times. You're probably only clicked on a couple times a day. So keep that in mind when you start like making broad assumptions about like which ads are doing better. On Google because it's intent based marketing, you don't get a wide sample set, you're getting much more of a narrow sample set. And so it can literally be the weather why you get more clicks on a certain thing for a week. Just keep that in mind. Everyone's like, oh my gosh, it dropped. Like it didn't work for the last two or three days, just dropped. My, my cost per click went way up. It's like, look, wait, it's pouring down rain and it's two weeks before mowing season. No one's thinking about it, right? So just keep that in mind. With Google you have a very small sample set. Amount of impressions is so much lower. But you do one, one day of Facebook ads, you'll get like a few thousand impressions. With Google you're lucky to get 15, 20, 30, 40, because if you're in a small market, there's only so many people looking up the keywords of lawn care, landscaping, et cetera. Peter in Virginia beach, what is your policy or suggestion for employees that request later start time 9am due to childcare? With this hard to find employee environment.

We don't really negotiate on start time. This would work when you're smaller, but when as you get larger, if you have that truck sitting there for two hours extra in the morning, they, I'm assuming they're going to work later in the evening. If they're not, then that truck is being used less throughout the day. Asset utilization is lower. And then if they are going to work later, the question is, well, who's going to manage them when they're coming back now at 7pm right? So it just throw the monkey wrench and things. When you're smaller, 1, 2, 3 employees, maybe you can work with this. It gets hard to deal with the cultural because now you have a double standard. If like, hey, you can start at nine because the child care will. The other person's like, well I need to sleep in, so can I start at 10am so like you just get a weird standard, right? So for guys in the field, because we're working around the daylight hours, I just say, have a hard start time and just roll with that.

If you are having a real big issue with this, deal with it for now. Like put up with it, find a replacement and then basically tell this person like, hey, look, this needs to change or else we're going to have to let you go. But this will work just fine as long as you have three or four employees. Anything more than that, it's going to get challenging. I don't recommend it. It'll always lead to a lot of issues down the road. Kyle Tarvin, having talked a lot about personal capacity, how does one increase their personal capacity in business? I know it's somewhat circumstantial and genetics, but if I wanted to push more, how would I go about doing that? I don't have a family and more than willing to put in the work and I'm financially able to take risk at this point in life.

So when you talk about personal capacity, you could then break it down to a whole bunch of other things in my opinion. Like you could talk about spiritual, psychological, mental, emotional, all the rest of it. Right? So, like.

It definitely something. You could go very deep on each and every one of those. Like, especially on the emotional side. It's like, okay, if you don't have family, great. But if you're. If that means you're emotionally lacking, that could bring your personal capacity down for the business. Right? Because if you don't have family, friends, people to hang out with, people that love you, that. That could be a real issue. If now you get lonely and then you're in a spiral for two weeks of depression. Right. So having all those other aspects is what allows personal capacity to really thrive, is like making sure all those other things are in check. I wouldn't say balance, but in check and not running low on fuel. So, you know, especially for someone that's willing to work really hard, you have the finances to do it. If you don't have family things, those are, those are things you just want to keep an eye on, like physical health. Same thing like making sure you work out, etc. So we're creating a program. I mentioned that conference. My trainer and I are creating a program that I've used and hopefully I'll make that public to everyone. If we do something with it commercially, I can make sure everyone said Augusta has some sort of benefit or discount or something. But here's one thing that everyone here can do. Oh, this is a great. I was thinking about sharing this the other day. Here we go. One Second, let me take this off. Okay, here's the deal. So this is what I do with my trainer.

And we're testing this out so we can launch something publicly. I have not had this trainer for a very long time, but I have worked with him for a few years. He's at Anytime Fitness. He's the guy you guys saw at the conference, and that is Coach Christian. So in this app, and you guys don't need an app, you could do a WhatsApp group. You could choose someone inside of a destination to be your accountability partner. And literally all you do is send pictures of everything you eat. Everything that goes into your. Your mouth has to go onto your group chat. It's great. Check this out. It's fantastic. This will make you so accountable to eating healthy. It's. It's off the charts. Awesome. So we got some chili there. What's that? Oh, this is a crab cake. Let's go. So, you know, we got some vegetable. So highly recommend that. That'd be a good step. You choose someone. Hey, look, all we're going to do in this group chat is send what we eat. Whatever we put in our mouth, we're going to put a picture of it. It's the best. It's better than doing calorie counting. It's better than having, like, find it on, like, an app, how many calories and all that. Just take pictures of everything you eat. It's amazing because at the end of the day, you have to be very aware of what you put in your mouth. It works very well, and it doesn't take a lot of time.

For you, Forest. We are currently. We currently have a single member LLC for Modesto, and we're opening a second location in Tracy. Can we convert our single member LLC into an S corp, then just add a DBA Tracy, under the S Corp? Or we have to start a new S Corp. Augusta Lawn Care and list Augusta Longcare, Modesto and Augusta Lawn Care of Tracy as DBAs. You don't need to do either of these things. You could literally just do under your current llc. You could still just have a second DBA with the two locations. You can do that. What you might want to do is just start a second llc. That's going to be the easiest, in my opinion. You should just start a second LLC to keep everything separate. And then when you have like a third or fourth location, then create a separate S corporation, a holding company for all of them. But if I was you personally, I would just do an llc. It's going to Be simple, it's going to be cheaper, it's going to be simpler to set up. You're not going to worry about an attorney and getting articles of incorporation and a whole bunch of other garbage. I just highly recommend that.

And if you're a single member LLC and you ever have a bank ask you for articles of formation, there is a document inside of the academy that will work for 99% of those times. Because if you're a single member LLC, if you're an S corp, you need like a longer page thing with a number of attorney, but articles of information sometimes required by a bank, certain phone products or banking. There's a document template inside that I've had my attorney go through and it will work for 99% of the time if you're a single member LLC. So check that out. It's helpful. But for us I just recommend starting a second llc. It's way simpler, way cheaper, way faster. And then down the road once you're getting like third or fourth location, then start an S corp at the very top with all those LLCs underneath in a holding company. So then you'd be sending one tax return for the S corp with all of those underneath.

Wow, that's a great question. Look at this. No name and a period for the submit question here. Let's go. Fantastic question. I love it. Ben Collins Arnold, Missouri hi Mike, surfer. My delayed question. I got Covid on the day I got home from conference. I've been sick for almost 10 days now, but finally feeling better. Oh man, I'm sorry. Let's go. Add two main questions. How to set your man hour rate for mowing. And 2 is paying 32% labor revenue and PPP a good fit for us? Okay, we land a solution but one would love to hear your thoughts and would and how you have chosen both solutions if you were us. I promise future questions will be shorter. Please read the details so others can hear the context. Okay. Oh well, there's more mercy. Regarding mowing hourly rate, what is the best way to choose this farm on cruise? Especially since we'll need it for doing initial mows and affects employee wages. Our guys hit higher speeds than Most, up to $135 per hour on site per person and $120 per hour including drive times on our tight routes. Average weekly mowing price is $48 company wide. BI weekly is 50% more. Some crews can do 4.7 lawns per hour in the summer months including drive time and no complaints. Evaluating the P4P percentage of P for of PvP labor revenue, we will probably offer a base wage of $20 per hour. But if they can hit 135 on site, should we lower what we pay in wages? Is there ever a case where you would wouldn't pay 33% or perhaps lower the percentage during our summer months? Our dilemma puzzled almost everyone I spoke to at the conference but had no clear solution except for Lee. Go, Lee. Yeah, so I don't know what Lee said. So let's see if we match up here. You can always bring P4P percent up. You cannot bring it down. You will lose team members. It'll be bad for morale. So I would personally do in this situation, if you're questioning yourself, like I talked about with you before, Ben, is you just need to make a decision here. You need to stop thinking about this one. I know you've been thinking about this for like the past month, so you just need to stop. You need to come up with a lower percentage and you can always move it up. I don't care if it's 28% that you roll with, Go for it. Just roll with the number because you can bring it up. And if you're doing a 28%, I know you'll be profitable, so that's not going to be an issue.

In terms of the hourly rate for mowing, I typically want that to be at least four times what you're paying on base pay. So if you're paying base pay 20, I want that to be 80. It sounds like you might want to move that to 100 though, because they're already doing so much higher. And so since you're trying to find what that rate is, I'd just probably roll with a hundred twenty dollars per hour as your base and roll with like a 2829 percentage on P4P and just roll with it. Run the numbers for two weeks and you will know if that number is too high or too low. Especially going to like the spring rush, like, oh, it's not spring rush yet. Okay, great. Let's just assume that it's going to be significantly higher. Where are we at now? If they're already crushing P4P and it's the middle of January, probably good inclination that you can bring down the percentage. Right. So this is why you want to run the numbers in the background. Right. So I would do personally, if I was you, I would say, okay, 20 per hour. Let's assume that's our base. Assume that a hundred dollars per hour is our mowing rate. Now let's assume that 28%. Oh, we're going to pay them P4P. Run the numbers in the background and see what they're actually making. And then you'll have a very clear indication as to whether that's too high or too low. Right. But you could always go higher. So if you go 28 and no one likes it because they can't make above base pay, guess what, you can give them a raise and go to 30 or 33. You cannot bring that number down. So if you're afraid about it being too high, start it lower and you can bring it higher down the road.

Kyle, how is Chuck paying for the trucks in North Carolina since Relay doesn't allow for checks and no physical branches to pick up cash?

Excuse me.

I have no idea. It's a good question. Let me think.

He's gonna make a video for us. I told him the other day to make a video how he bought eight trucks in a week.

I'm guessing he's using the Chase account. So we have a Chase account because it's easy to get, like cash, et cetera. It just is like a place to move money in and out of. And we have the Relay accounts where we actually have the Quickbook set up payroll, etc. Comes out of.

And so I'm guessing he's writing it out of the Chase account and he's moving money from the Relay into Chase and then writing the check. It's all in the same llc, same entity. So I'm assuming that's what he's doing. I'm 99 sure. Now I think about that's what he's doing. He'll make a video for us all. He's going to show all four of the locations once they're moved in to the different storage units. All the trucks wrapped and painted the same. He buys all the same stuff, every single location. It's just very systematized. Can you get some reference numbers? You expect your new location in North Carolina doing March, April, May and June. It looks like we need to do 20 to 30k minimum in those spring months to be able to hit our 300k goal for our new Norman location. Is this accurate? Yeah. If you're trying to hit 300,000 in a year, you need to be up around 20,000 really quickly in the spring rush because you're gonna have to get up to 40, 45,000 per month in revenue by the end of the year. And that's kind of the goal. How we kind of do our GMs now is their second year's salary and compensation is based on the first year's revenues. So they're still profit sharing. However, their base salary on second year is determined by how much they grow in their first year. So there's more incentive that we put on the first year to grow anything over 200. It starts to go up to hit 500. They're like big payday.

Most people will not be able to grow 500,000 in one year. It's a lot of management. You have to grow up to probably 70,000amonth in revenue by the end of the year at least just to hit that 500,000 in that first year. So it's a lot. It's very difficult. But we compensate them if they do that. I would say the more realistic is 250 to 300,000 the first year, especially if someone doesn't have a lot of management experience. But again if they do, they can go for it and we kind of give them that flexibility. So yeah, rough numbers, you know, if they can get above 30,000 in the first three months, that's good because then that's typically where we can be above, you know, we can be profitable and they can start making profit sharing and then it's just a matter up to them if they want to keep scaling from beyond that. But if they're not hitting above 20,000 after three months and I've spent a good amount of marketing, I'm probably going to switch out my gm. Like there's probably other issues.

Okay, this is from Kyle Tarpon. How does PVP work when either myself or GM is in the truck with a field employee working. So if you are dedicated to actually working and not doing phone calls, estimates, a whole bunch of other stuff that I would just run yourself as an employee inside of the software and the money will be split like you would just an employee. Whether or not you pay yourself that money is up to you. But that's how I do it. Just keep it fair to the crew member that you're working with. Kyle Tarvin. Again, I don't have a second truck ready for our new Norman location yet. We are in the works of getting all our more location paints, trucks painted and decals put on. But it's taking about a month to 1.5 months per truck to get it out of the paint shop. Mercy goodness to the decal shop and back to us. Ok. Okay. I'm thinking worst case scenario for a normal location. If we can't, if we cannot get a truck in time, if we were to grow a two man operation, one truck to 15 to 20k per month based on a high close ratio, could we switch to profit mode and raise all of our newly acquired mowing prices up in summer for the remainder of the season? Or would that be a dumb move? My goal is 30k for norm by the end of the year, but it may have to wait. If we cannot find a truck and get it ready in time, maybe I'll buy myself a pedal bike with a little trailer. Let's go.

I don't think this is an issue. I would just. This is not gonna be a problem because by the time you grow to 15, 20,000amonth in revenue, that's going to be.

Based upon your previous question, like May and 8, May, June, so.

Let'S even say March. That's still two months away, right? February, March, it's still two months away. So this is not gonna be a problem. If you get to 15 to 20,000 like immediately. Yeah, just turn on profit mode, raise prices, reduce close ratio so you can keep the one truck, two employees inside of that, you'll still be able to do 20, 22, 23,000amonth in revenue. And then yeah, you can just wait for the truck or if you need to afford the truck, get the profit in the bank so you can afford the second truck. But I do not think this will be an issue for you because it'll take you a few months to get to 20,000amonth. It'll take you a while to get the capacity for the first truck which is going to be around 20 to $22,000 typically per month in revenue. It'll take you a couple months to get there. So if you're still looking for a truck actively, I think you'll be just fine. And used car prices are going down very quickly right now.

When will max metrics be up for December? Well, I think it's up now also. Where could we find the photos from the media team for conference? Such as photos from candid photos in different areas and the awards.

I did catch his eye. I think that we actually have them ready. So I'll put up a link. Hopefully next couple days. There was 1700 of them to go through so I think the media team was working on that. We got some pictures in here. Let's go. Oh yeah, we gotta show these. Let's go. Let's see here, let's see here. Let's see, let's see here. Remove this. Stop the screen. We gotta share these pictures. Present share screen window. Let's do this window, now you can see the whole thing. Let's go. Now this one. Oh yeah, look. Let's go. What's up? Hot hot dog and a burger. Let's go. Okay, and then let's see what this one is.

Oh, yeah. That's fantastic. That's from Memphis. Gotta love it. Gotta love it. That means you brought those in your. In your suitcase here. Oh, funny. I gotta tell you, Kevin. So Kevin got home, sent me a picture, said he got home safely. But his award did not. His trophy did not make it home safely. It broke. He sent me a picture. It was shattered. So there's a new one on the way. Kevin, it's coming to your house. So no one. You can't trust Kevin with a trophy. That's glass. You can only carry around stuffed dolls and stuffed props for show or pictures. So there you have it. Garrett from Glendale, Colorado, trying not to spend a lot of time in this like you recommend. He also said he is going to send me 500 to 700 contacts from the database. He cases I'm assuming relation to the person you are buying from or that you are thinking about acquiring. Yield study is going to send me 500 to 700 more contacts from a database for me to send one click estimates to. I am working with command to adjust my service area. In my. In your opinion, should I have a gap between service areas or should they be connected? I do not want to ruin P4P for my team members. I am lean towards erasing the portion. The portion circled in red. It is not a part of my service area. See attached picture. What are your thoughts? Okay, let's see what your service area is. Okay. So you're thinking about wiping that out and just having two separate areas. Okay. This is the one that was like 30, 40 minute drive away from you. Yeah. So I would not do that. So I would recommend just having two separate areas like we mentioned. Again.

Obviously these are outside your service area. These are not gonna be good for P4P. We talked about all of this a few days ago. So if you are new, this is brand new. Garrett's question. We talked about all of all this acquisition stuff a few days ago. But if you're going to do this, my recommendation is have that little area of service area above there that you're willing to serve. The command center can see that. Have it disconnected. Have it where? Guys just drive one time back and forth. That's the most efficient. If you start getting one or two lawns along the way, you turn a 30 minute drive into way longer because now those one off stops are very likely to become gas station stops when they start getting off the highway. Just like let them drive up there, do their route and come back home. That just be my recommendation if you're going to buy them out. If he's going to be 5 to 700 contacts, great, you'll get some leads from that. But I don't value those a whole lot, especially if he hasn't been keeping them warm himself. And you're going to be this random person.

You know, emailing them out of the blue about services. There's this less value because they haven't been kept warm. So that's why it's important to keep your leads warm in general is because even if you were to sell those leads are valuable unless they're now cold. Ken Lynn from Fenton, Michigan. Where do we book our hotel for room for conference? Just go to mikeannies.comsummit and there's a link to book a room. It's expensive. I'm sorry, it's just a really, really nice hotel. It's like a five star hotel, unfortunately. Book up, you know, go on Facebook group. Find someone else that wants to split a room with you. Makes it much more affordable. But for now, if you're going to stay up, stay at Equip Expo. You can book the whole week. I think it's a glitch in their system because they're not supposed to be letting us do that. It was actually in my contract that you'd have to make two separate bookings if you wanted to stay the rest of the week. So for everyone listening to this, if your plan is to stay at the hotel, it might be a good idea to book it now because you can do the whole week with one reservation. If that changes, let me know because I think they're going to change that. They're going to see people do it and they're going to change it because technically from Wednesday through Friday, the union of the city takes over the entire hotel. So if you're able to book the whole thing right now, it's great. Instead of having to do two separate reservations, it's not a big deal. If you do two separate reservations is really not that big a deal, but it does save you from having to switch rooms or potentially having to deal with two different reservations. So just throwing it out there. But definitely use a Facebook group if you want to split rooms. They're big, they're really, really nice. They're just expensive, unfortunately. But everything in Louisville that week is crazy. Nuts expensive. And I could not find anywhere in the entire city. And I, trust me, I try at least 20 hotels, but the only one that has any availability that week whatsoever. So cool. I think that's all we got. Someone's laughing. I don't know who it is. Let's go. Oh, it's probably Kevin. Kevin? Kevin deserves it. All right. All right, guys, have a great rest of your day, and we'll see you tomorrow. Take care.