Mike Minutes Mastermind 01/06/2025

And we're live. Welcome Augusta Nation. Happy Monday. Let's get the show on the road.

We are exactly 10 days away from Blue Collar Summit and Landscape Summit, also known as Augusta Nation Conference.

It's gonna be fun. Can't wait for it. Exactly. Actually in 10 days we'll be starting registration.

So.

Thoughts and prayers everyone on the massive snowstorm kind of hitting the middle of the US hopefully within 10 days that'll be cleared up enough so everyone can make it safely to conference. But yeah, really looking forward to next week. All my secrets that I've been trying not to say I'll be able to share. It'll be great. But looking forward to seeing everyone there. Definitely one of the highlights of my year for certain. Alright, let's go and jump in. We got seven questions. It looks like today here on Marathon Monday.

Boom. Let's get started.

First up is from Eric from Largo, Florida. Hey Mike. I plan on switching to weekly billing for monthly. Better cash flow is nice but I mostly want to cut down on customers that rack up a whole month of services to then become non payers as well as cut down the angry customers needing to have the occasional extra week in the month. Explained because no one ever looks at their invoices before getting accept. Great point. Being able to direct clients to client portal for the receipts and not flood email is a nice factor as well. I was trying to decide on making the switch now or wait until March so we get through into services first. We had a lot of. A lot more cancellation than I anticipated going into this winter this year. So I don't want to rock the boat with our remaining recurring customers more than I need to. Although the 4 cancellation I've had so far after December's billing were all customers who had an extra service in the month. Oh yeah, that, that. Yeah. It kills. You would appreciate your thoughts on the timing of the switch. Yeah, I agree. I would wait.

We had a really like at the Bellingham shop. We're just. Our winter services are just off the charts. Really good. I think we. They said they we lost a few after the last billing in. In January here I think it was. I might be wrong. It might be four or five but when you have a few hundred like it's not bad. So like very happy. Um and so I wouldn't rock the boat like I'm taking like okay what would I do here? I would not be rocking the boat if you have winter services on. I'd be keeping it right until March 1st probably and then just going into mowing season, just start doing weekly billing. I would probably just put it on the first invoice, honestly, like, hey, we're now switching to weekly billing. Going forward, if you'd like to see your invoices, just click on this link, you can see our customer portal and you're good to go. So that would be my recommendation. Give me one second. I think I did something wrong here. Give me a second.

One second, one second.

Did I make this? Okay, cool. All right. So yeah, I agree with your assessment. I would wait until your first mowing invoice to make the switch over. I would just inform everyone that that's what's happening. And then your classic line can be like, if this somehow puts you in undue stress financially, please reach out and make arrangements. You'll get like one or two people to do that and then you can assess whether or you are willing to, you know, you're okay with them staying on a certain billing cycle. So and you could technically just change their one person's settings to be where it's monthly if you wanted to, or just you have to let them go or do an upcharge or however you go from there. But it's always a good thing. Like when you do price increases, if you want to come across like, and not get really mad people, a nice way to say is at the very end, this comes from Alex. Basically just like, hey, this puts you in undue financial hardship, please reach out and we'll see what we can do. Essentially just humanizing yourself at the end. Mr. Anonymous, what are the metrics you track from month to month to ensure a GM and or location is performing well and not running the business into the ground, like what happened last year at your Bellingham location. Yeah. So the weekly scorecards for the GMs is important.

I would also say even when you know they're running like they're not doing a job, you can ruin a location and four to six weeks. And that's what happened at Bellam Shop. Because like at first they were doing really good. And it's just a matter of once your GM checks out. Like, it'd be like if you, like if you as the owner just stopped showing up on time, stop getting estimates out on time. Literally from four to six weeks, you would burn through your backlog, you would lose some key team members, you would lose the culture of the company. Like it could be a matter of four to six weeks. And this is the challenging part with general managers is if they go through like a personal issue and like, hey, I want you to succeed. But, man, even if it's four or six weeks, it's affecting the whole organization here. And so that's when you got like, you gotta move faster, essentially, in terms of like either a putting them on some sort of improvement plan with support, or you gotta get rid of them. And so, you know, it's not like the Bellingham location, for example. I didn't know what was happening because the metrics were very clear. It's more a matter of like, oh man, maybe they'll pull through. Maybe they're learning their first spring. And then also it can be happen very, very quickly. So something happens in their personal life and then it cascades within a matter of a week, two weeks, three weeks and all, the company is like, literally struggling. You can go from like, great performing location to 911 status in four weeks easily, if a GM checks out. And so the weekly scorecards are important for that. And then I would say, like, in hindsight, it's like not thinking they're like, oh man, they'll pull through. Like, after this, they'll pull through. You got to be a little more sharper with the sword sometimes. So. But yeah, the weekly scorecards, I'd be filling those out. Those are basically the numbers I would always be asking is like, budget hours, capacity, how many budget are on the schedule? How far are we booked out? What's the efficiency score of the team? Those are like your main things that I'm looking for. Basically, I'm like, are we busy and are we doing the work that we are doing efficiently? If those two things are checking out, you cover a multitude of other sins. Your close ratio, yes, it's important. But if you're booked out six weeks and all of your crew is at 80 to 90% efficiency, I'm like, who cares? So those are kind of the main things I'm looking at, Mr. Anonymous. One location is at 1 million in revenue, 10 employees. And other location at 240,000 in revenue, two employees. I know metrics will be different for each location, but what is the best way to hold GMs accountable, to ensure everything is going good?

Holding someone accountable means that they share in the wins and the losses and that.

They are reporting to somebody. So I'd say number one is like, is. I wouldn't. I don't think necessarily you treat these people differently. Like, I think that's what you're getting at here. What is the best way to hold your own to ensure everything is looking good? How much will be different for each Location. Okay, I'm guessing you're talking like, metrics in general. The main thing is that you're tracking it. That's why the weekly GM scorecard on the dashboard is helpful, because it takes five to 10 minutes. But everyone has a clear language they're speaking in terms of whether or not the location is doing well. You should never, like, wake up in the middle and be like, I'm wondering if my location is good. It should be very blatantly obvious in terms of the trajectory of the company. Now you might actually see this trajectory going down and then you not react fast enough, think that they're going to do, you know, they're going to pull through their personal situation and then you just don't pull the trigger fast enough. That can happen. Um, but it shouldn't be like, you shouldn't be guessing as to whether or not the location is doing better, like on the up or going on the down. So, like, some of the ways you can measure this year over year, if you're thinking more longer term is like number of recurring customers last year versus this year. That's why I love on the coaching dashboard, like the. One of the main metrics is like number of recurring customers. That's a very good indicator because if you have a location that turns south, your saving grace is your recurring customers because that revenue doesn't go away. And it is your back, your backstop, it's your padding. And when that starts to deteriorate, that's a huge indicator to me that, like, something's going wrong. Because usually that means Churn is going up. Customers complaints are increasing and we're not, we're not beating Churn. Now, do I expect that to go up during the spring and then kind of like plateau during the year? Yes. But if it goes up and then it's over the course of the year, it's constantly going down by 60, 70%. We have a big problem in our hands. So I'm holding them accountable to what's on the scorecards, which is I want to fetch schedule full and I want the work being done, being done profitably. If you're doing that, then I'm happy. Now if you're like, well, what about close ratio? Again, close ratio is going to be a lagging indicator as to whether or not I even need jobs on the schedule. So filled schedule to capacity and work being done efficiently, you will have a profitable business. They can't control a lot of the other stuff because if your crew is working efficiently, it means they're probably doing great one on ones team meetings, they're training well, they're hiring well. And if they're booked out far, it's like they're just. Those are so much like if you just boil down what we do, it's like we do work and we do it profitably. I just need to make sure there's work on the schedule and it's being done efficiently. That's like if you just boil it down, the role of an operations person, general manager is that that's the goal.

Mr. Anonymous. Hey Mike, I would like to research the Carnivore diet you speak about sometimes. Do you have any resources to recommend to learn more about it? Do you follow a specific program? Yeah, there's a bunch of podcasts and books and stuff like that. I'm not like the type of person to usually read those because I have burnt on them, honestly got burnt out on them during medical school.

I've just mostly seen the Carnivore diet work and people around me, I'm like, okay, it's been good. In school I've always ate a lot of meat. I had the whole like lift heavy things, eat meat, lift heavy things before Carnivore. Also I, I throw in greens. So I do spinach and kale as the two other things I add to my diet. Mostly because I enjoy spinach omelettes my go to every single day. And then secondly I could just kind of. I just can't wrap my head around not having those greens. I think how somehow, somehow those are bad for my diet. I understand that's like pesticides and all this other stuff in terms of other things, like you can kind of make it. It's kind of an expensive diet. But what you can do is you can. There's a few things I'd recommend. Just meats is a pretty good subscription to get like very clean meat with no like other stuff in it. And it's relatively cheap. Like I usually got two to three meals out of it and it would cost between 10 and $20 per meal. So not bad as long as you're okay with just like straight meat. But you have all these different types of meats. So like steaks, chickens, porks, shredded pork, shredded chicken, like they kind of mix it up for you kind of nice. Also you can. One thing I'm looking into now is like getting a quarter of a cow. So like 150 to 200 pounds of meat. Now your cost per pound might go down like 4 to $5 per pound. Instead of, you know, looking for really good meat from like Snake River Farms where you're paying like 40, $50 a pound, you can get someone local support, local farms. As long as you have a deep freezer, throw a ton of meat into there and it doesn't become as expensive. Also, you eat way less, so eating out gets very expensive. So I've started probably eating out less because of it. Because when you go to go to dinner, like the most expensive thing is a steak. So I don't want to pay 70, 80, 90 for a steak. When I know that same steak, I can get like a local one and pay like, you know, 10 bucks for. So, you know, some hacks would be like just meats, kind of mix it up if you're on the go. And then you can eat those, they're already cooked, so you can just peel them off and eat them cold if you're in a rush. And then if you want to get a local going, like local Facebook groups, they'll have like farmers that sell their stuff on there. So you get like local cheese, local dairy. If you're doing adding dairy into the carnivore diet, you could do that and then like quarters or halves of a cow and then they do different types of steaks, cuts, meats, ground, etc. So how do you recommend?

I would say if you're, if you're thinking about doing carnivore and you're cold turkey, never done anything like that before. I would probably ease into it. I think most time if you read books and podcasts about it, people will talk about like how like the. They have like crazy amounts of issues like with their, with going the bathroom and stuff for like the first week or two. Then they all sorts of just integrate more and more meat if you can. And then I would slowly merge into it less and less you're cutting out other stuff. That way you don't have this weird, like we have like you're lethargic. Like I didn't have any of that because like I were just eating a lot of meat. So I was already eating meat twice a day probably. So all of a sudden switching to like mostly just that besides the greens wasn't like a huge shocker to my system. And like you, you say filled up like a long time when you just eat meat and you can creative like you can have. I put in my stories on Instagram the other day. But like pork rinds is just pork that's air fried. If you have an air fryer, super, super cool makes, makes things a little bit Simpler.

But yeah, just trying to mix it up. Like, if. If you look up anything online and then just put Carnivore before it, you can usually figure out how to make a recipe for it. So again, I'm not, like, I'm not the type. Like, everyone should go diet. Like, I'm not. I'm not saying that. Just eat healthy, lift heavy things. Like, it's. You'll be fine. Especially for most of us that are still kind of in the field. If you're in the field a couple days a week, like, you're burning so many calories but cannot overemphasize the amount of the importance of staying strong physically because it has a ripple effect on productivity mentally. Like, like, if you're working out not even just from a perspective like longevity, but simply from the perspective of productivity. Like, you're like, well, man, if it takes me, like, I usually work out, work out between like 25 and 35 minutes a day. Um, so if I take that time and okay, you got a shower change, let's just call it an hour. That's really realistically less than 5% of my day. So the question is, do I become 5 more, 5% more effective and efficient throughout the day because I worked out and like, it's a resounding yes, you're just gonna have more energy, et cetera. But it's easy to be like, man, I don't have time for it. When reality, even if it made you 10 or 15% more efficient because you're like sharper, you're more nimble, et cetera, like, more clarity of thought, you react to things faster, you walk across the room faster. Like, these are things that actually add up throughout your day. Usually it makes a lot of sense just from a time perspective. Mr. Anymouse, I've been having a ton of people click upsells on instant quote forms because they don't realize that their requests are received and they think that they need to click something else to submit. Could text such as thank you, your submission received be much larger and bolder at the top? Could no thanks, maybe next time be added to the last upsell option? I've attached a screenshot of the upsell page as reference. See here.

Mr. Anonymous. That's funny. Your monk has been received. Would you like an additional quote?

Yeah, but right below this it just says no. It says no, I believe. Just forget what it says. Right below this you're saying like, no, thanks. Below this. Yeah.

Yeah, I think. Let me see one second. What do you. What did you say here.

I have having a ton of people click on upsells. Stop sharing. Oops. Whoops. Oops. Okay, I haven't been seeing that in terms of people putting upsells that actually don't need it. So I don't know who this is, but I would be interested, like, what a ton of people is. Is this like two or three in the past week, or is this like, literally a third of people? I'd be interested to know that because I'm not seeing that usually when I look across all the data. Also, I do want people to really have to read it and actually click on something because I have got the form, regardless of whether I know I do it or not. I have, like, that form is done. And so I do want them to actually be like, have to read that line there. So could be bolder. I just haven't seen this data across the system. Tons of people submitting upsells without needing it. Because there is a button, I think, like, here, let me find out right now.

I know what you're saying, though. I get where you're coming from 100%. Let me just make sure. I'll just share my screen.

Work.

Boom. Okay, welcome. We're coming after you.

Boom.

Boom, boom, boom. Oh, wait, I need to make these fake.

This is a test.

That's fine.

Delete me. Okay. All right, cool. We're going to the next one.

Submission successful.

Your one quiz received. Would you like to meet and have an additional of these other services?

Oh, I see what you're saying.

Mmm.

I see what you're saying. Okay, great. Point noted. There needs to be, like, a no, thanks next to the submit button. I got you. I got you.

Screenshot taken. Thank you. I think this was an oversight on my part when we added in the estimator availability. Gracias. Thank you very much for bringing that up. And I'm glad I dug into there for a second. I did not. There was no. There's a no thank you button there anymore. We're on it. We are on it. Please. Do you still take AG1 greens? Why or why not? I do not. Whoops. Oh, sorry. This one second. Present. Whoops. Present. Share screen. I do not. On Carnivore. There's a lot of stuff in there you can't have. Do I think it's bad for you? No. Do I think you can get just as much of the ingredients from just like a good multivitamin? Yes.

If possible. I just like whole foods also, too. So, like, there's such trace amounts of the stuff that's in there that it's just like, is me having like literally 0.001 grams of of celery going to help me? Probably not. Is it bad for me? No. Great, go for it. Let's go. But there's such trace amounts of nutrients in there of whole foods that like you can usually get from a multivitamin to spend like less than 5, a fifth of what you'd spend on AG1. AG1 is like extremely well marketed and there's a huge whoever campaigns or markets gets 50% of their recurring revenue. This is why people promote it so hard. Their sponsorship program is basically if you're a creator influencer and you say hey, go to ag1.commike and get signed up today. If they do that, 50%, 5, 0% of the revenue goes to the creator. So that's why people promote it so hard because it's a great stream of revenue for the creator. They made such a great killer program for the creator and then because of that now everyone thinks it's the best thing since sliced bread because every creator wants to promote it because they're making huge amounts of back end revenue, which is again not bad. Great marketing strategy, love it. But 50% is a really, really good deal for the creator. And for that reason there are people making literally millions of dollars a year. Just saying go to ag1.com my promotional name. Whereas most campaigns will give you like 10, 20%. AG1 has extremely high price tag, but it gives 50% of it to whoever's doing the promotion. Mr. Anonymous, is there going to be a fix for estimate follow up sequences? Continue to send texts and emails after an estimate is partially accepted? No, because an estimate has to either be accepted or not. Anything in between gets hairy. Because some people also use estimates as a way. For example, if you put optional items and they accept only the main one, you don't want follow ups to still be going out based upon that. So this is not in the cards currently. Just because the complexity of then having to decipher between optional items versus if you like good, better, best model for example, and they choose the best model, you don't want to be following up with them about the the good or the better model. So like there would have to be a lot of distinction around do I follow up based upon items and services? And the logic on that would get very complex from an automation perspective. So I don't see this ever happening. Definitely not in the short term because the distinction of you would have to distinguish between certain Items and services would get automated and some would not because like there's times people use, for example, a contract alongside a one time project, they could accept one. The other one I don't want it to be following up on because it's baked into the contract over the course of 12 months versus one time up front. And so every single item in service would then have to have different logic for the follow up process, which just gets really complicated. So I don't see that on the horizon currently, to be honest.

So sorry about that. I hope that made sense. Okay, we got another question came in here.

Yes, the sequences are going out after partial acceptance. Sequence are going out after partial acceptance. What is that? Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What are we talking about? Oh, you're saying like if that's happening currently.

I will look into this.

Yeah, if this is happening, like I'm sure they'll fix this, but I will follow up with them on this. I'm assuming it also might be in your settings because I know there's something they were working on with like some people wanted it to be marked as pending until they're fully accepted. I forget. I will look into this. Thomas, appreciate you bringing it up. All right everyone, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your Monday, a great week ahead and we will see you all tomorrow. Take care.