Mike Minutes Mastermind 01/02/2024

Happy New Year, Augusta nation. Let's go. 2024 is here. This is our first Mike Miz mastermind, so had to get kicked off with better lighting. Let's go.

If you didn't see it already, Liz and I changed a whole bunch of stuff in the office the other day. One of the things is I made sure my lighting was better. Okay, so here we go. I don't know if I like it. It's very piercing. Anyways.

We have only one question that came in. That's why yesterday I did not do a Mike Mance mastermind. So we'll get to that in a moment. Before we do that though, I wanted to go over some announcements, nothing crazy. Let me just drop this into Facebook real quick. Give me one second.

Okie dokie. All right, so as today everyone's in copilot minus a few locations. I've scheduled specifically to be further out into the month with Command center.

One thing I wanted to share though was. Sorry, I'm pulling this up. There you go.

I would say though, in terms of P4P, you can go ahead and I would say it's ready for prime time this week to go ahead and integrate.

Once you put into production. Like there's just a gazillion ways people can try to break this. And so.

We'Ve been kind of making a lot of fix the past few weeks because people get in there and they've set up services a different way in Copilot, et cetera. So there's a lot of different kind of hoops to jump through. But all you gotta do is go up to here, go to integrations and then put in your.

Username and login. And so I already have. But if you don't, you won't see all of this stuff. So it'll just ask for your username and login for copilot. And then this part here is important. Anything that is.

Defined as a project, because we are not handling projects inside of the integration, we are only handling recurring work. Because projects is going to be an entirely massive beast that I'm not ready to tackle yet, to be honest. There's just so many variables anyways, in terms of daily work though, it's ready for prime time. So you'll want to set this though because if someone's assigned to a 40 hour project, you don't want them seeing that today's revenue they're going to be able to make, you know, fifteen hundred dollars. That's not the case. That's over the course of a multi day project. So you'll want to set this. I would say that most of us, you're going to set this in eight budgeted hours if you're doing solo routes. And that's like a safe way to keep the numbers clean and employees that are on big projects not seeing numbers that aren't actually true.

So basically it'll hide the thermometer of amount of money that is being given to the employee for a specific day if they have a big, big project. So I recommend that to be eight for the vast majority of Augusta Nation. But this is ready to go. You can enable which team members you want. This is pulling directly from copilot and then inside a copilot. When you go to the item and services, you're going to see a rate for P4P box, and that number is what we're pulling from when you complete jobs inside of copilot. So basically how this integration works.

Is we are taking the budget hours from your dispatch board and then we're taking which items and services were completed and looking at the P4P rate that you're charging on the back end, we're compliant binding those two and we're able to come up with your time card. So that's like the A, Bs and Cs of it. A big thing that we were running into the past few weeks is there are the inside of copilot. You clock in and out for breaks. Right. What that was doing though, is creating multiple time cards inside of P4P. We don't want that now. It'll automatically create them as breaks.

And then on put it on all into one time card. I am very confident that over the next few weeks there'll probably be still some things that pop up that are really, really fringe that we'll have to fix. Because, like, we just don't see all the ways that people can potentially use it in copilot and then merging that over into P4P. They have to speak the same language, but it's pretty solid. Right now we're going to have some more updated training videos on integration. Things like when you see the time card, if it has blue shading behind it, it means it's syncing with copilot and we'll have the ability to be able to pause that sync. So, for example, if you're like, hey, I want to make some changes in copilot without changing P4P, you could lock the time cards in P4P. So all that to say, the whole objective for now of P4P and Copa integration is twofold. One, save you time on manually finding the budget hours and rate of services and copying those into the time cards as well as like.

There'S no need for the employee once you've made the integration to clock in and out of fever P. So then the question is, well still on this first one, what's the need of the P4P app for the team members that you want them to think? All things money happen in P4P app. All things jobs related, getting my job notes, clocking in the jobs, etc. Happens in copilot. The reason that distinction is important is because right now the second part is the team members can now see how much revenue they are expected to make in this day on their route. And as they complete jobs in copilot in P4P, it'll update of how far they are along so they can set goals for themselves. They know the numbers and it's completely open and transparent for them. Especially for the new team members that might not be able to do the math of you know, 500 divided by three. That's how much I'm making today. They can now just look at the thermometer and as they complete the job that chips away and completes it for them and shows them what their effective hourly rate is as well for the day down the road. We have a lot coming to P4P in terms of same day pay where they can take a percentage of their P4P without affecting you at all. We also have. That one's gonna be tough. That's gonna be probably end of the year. It's more of like a debit card situation that they can like take money out on and then it would sync up with your QuickBooks and stuff like that. We have a lot of work on that one. The one that's gonna be coming first though is.

Achievement awards. And so you'll be able to set certain awards and I a lot, I know a lot of people manually do like perfect attendance for the month to get a hundred dollars gift card, stuff like that. You'll be able to, you'll be able, the team member will be able to see their progress towards certain goals. You'll be able to set up custom goals for things like cleaning out your truck.

And there'll be a whole bunch of cool stuff in there. It'll all be like where you can set up the prizes, you can set up the parameters and the criteria for hitting those goals and you can have tiers of team members. So if you want to incentivize seniority or like tenor, if they've been through one, two, three years, you'll be able to create all of that inside P4P. So that's what's coming to PvP. It is ready for the integration though right now for those two primary focuses, which is one, saving you time on daily time cards and two, for the team members to be able to see their daily projected revenue and income. So. All right, let's move on to questions. Oh, another question came. We now have two questions.

All right, question number numero uno. See what we got.

Devin Sheridan from Red Deer.

Hey Mike. We don't start mowing till May and my schedule looks like a mess. Will and can CC optimize all my mowing customers, say 75 and put them in over a 5 day period? Thank you. Yeah, if you're wanting Command center to do something like this and you are full service, you'll need to ask for a project. They can do this for you. Um, and I know a lot of people have them do this right before the spring rush. So it might be a little bit early. If you just don't start mowing till May, you might want to wait a couple months but eventually I would then, you know, ask commands and do a project. They would knock this out within a day to be able to just like take 75 customers. Make sure it's from left to right or right talk to button. But the project would define those terms of what, how you want that set up. The nice thing is with Copilot now with off seasons you shouldn't have to do this but one time because next year it'll still be all in the same sequence. So that'll be helpful. But yes, if you need to command circuit can do as a project, if you're full service, they can help you out. This is from nobody. Regarding GMs you have mentioned you like to give them a goalpost with plenty of funding and send them to achieve it without micromanaging everything they do. If you were getting a new manager of an existing location, what direction or session suggestions would you give them?

Well, it really comes down to what's important to you. Like for me it is twofold. I want the team taken care of and I want profits because the profits are the engine by which I can do profit sharing, I can increase pay, etc. So the only two things I care about is can I get more than 20% profit and.

Is the team being taken care of? That's all I care about. Like if those two things are checked, like everything Else kind of takes care of itself because you need at least 20% profitability to weather most economic recessions, crazy things like pandemics, et cetera. So if you want to risk everyone's job, have a business that does 8, 9, 10% profit margin because you, you don't have enough cash reserves to actually get through a tough time. So if you look at all the, the companies that went under like 2008, 2007, 2009, etc and even like the short ST 2020 and even in the past years interest rates have gone up, is all the companies that have low profit margins. If you have above 20% profit margin, you can weather most economic storms. So in my opinion, as a business.

Matures, it is the responsibility of the owner to ensure that the jobs of everyone that they are employing is safe by having at least 20% margin. That's just my opinion.

So I give you guys the hard goal posts on that. Like everyone will be like, well, it depends on the industry. Like, well, you know, 10% isn't so bad for our industry. You're right, it's not so bad. You're right, it isn't. But I think that should be the goal of us as.

As owners. To be responsible for the people we're hiring to be able to make sure that if something crazy happens, you don't have to lay everyone off or the business just goes bust because interest rates go up and now you're caught because you have a bunch of debt. That's variable interest, for example. So for me it's like get above 20% profit margin, make sure the people and the team are taken care of. That's like the only main two things I really focus on to answer your question directly.

Okay, what else do we have? Oh, I think in specifically to that question, Liz just posted a video from the weekend, I think it was that she interviewed me. We talk a lot about that. So if you want to dive deeper into that subject, go ahead. And then she pulled up some old stories of stuff that happened. So feel free to watch that if you'd like. All right.

Just wanting to confirm that tags are working on accounts such as poop removal, gate, reminder, etc. Is it via email or text that these are able to be sent? Let me see just who this is. Tim. Yeah, they're working. Tags are working just fine. Such as poop removal, gate reminder. Is it via email? You can do it however you want. I would recommend things like that to be email because text is so valuable. I don't want to be bombarding the customer unless they specifically asked for a text message. But in my opinion, like the text is so valuable, I want that opened up and so I would probably, if someone specifically wanted it, I'd probably lean towards more email.

Unless they like, hey, could you text me then? Then I would probably do it. But even at the Bellingham shop, we're reserving like certain things for mowing. Like our first text message, for example, like bulk text message to our customers is going to be a one. Like a hey, we're starting to mowing next week. Do you want to get on the schedule type thing that'll be coming next, next spring. We're reserving like that because we know like our first text message to all our customers is going to like have such a high open rate and like we want to reserve it for selling.

Where can I find the recommended chart of accounts? I can align my QuickBooks with the Augusta Way.

There is one in the dashboard. You should be able to search it.

Tags are not working. Automations there to get ready for it. Which tags? One second here. I'm pulling this up right now.

Because we use this like all the time. Command center would come to a grinding halt. Second.

Oh, you're talking about the merge. Okay, I got you got call note.

I'm not able to replicate. Okay, Vlad, if something's not working for you, reach out to them because there's nothing on the board about tags.

I see one about call note merge, but it was only on one account. Merge tags for call notes.

So feel free to reach out to atc, but from what I see, there's nothing in here.

Type tag. I did type tag. That's what I typed.

There. There you go. Sequence tag getting removed.

Okay, I'll look at this later.

Why is this not working? Sorry, I can't click on anything right now. This new screen is. Oh, it's working great. Anyways, all right, I hope you all have a fantastic day. I'll look at this Vlad and see what's up. And I hope you all have a fantastic Tuesday. See you tomorrow.