Mike Minutes Mastermind 01/09/2024

Yeah, I think that would. I mean that would be ideal. I just want to like, you know.

Oh, sick. I push play Mercy. All right. Hello everybody. Let's go. All right, let me drop this into Facebook. Facebook.

And get on the rock and the roll. Boom. Save. Is it the correct date?

Come on. Post ninth. Okay, good. Sweet. All right. It's in the folder. All right. I'm gonna jump right into questions.

We have training for all the new owners this week. We also have, I think seven coaches. All of them came this time, so that'll be great. Lee will be training them at the end of each day. I saw the curriculum for the training. It looks fantastic. It's gonna be a lot of fun for them. I think they're gonna really get training. They're gonna be all sorts of scenarios they're dropped into and it's gonna be really fun. So I look forward to seeing that. But let's go ahead and get started. I think there's some questions. I just wanted to make sure I don't lose. I get way behind on these this week with training so I might miss one or two masterminds. But I just want to make sure I try to stay as up on these as possible. So get away from us.

All right, let's see here. Why is this off centered? Oh, there you go.

Kyle Tarvin Orkohoma do customers and invoices in Copilot automatically get set up for monthly invoicing? Yes, they default to that when you set up your account. I see some jobs from today that are completed and invoices are pending. Does this mean they are waiting for CC to build them at the end of the month? Yes. I'm thinking this would be similar to SA where the invoices are uninvoiced until the end of the month. Yes, you're exactly right. We basically mimics exactly what is an essay. On that note, my guess is that if we have to. If we have to set the net 15 net 30 billing cycle is that customers will probably start getting the overdue automations in 30 days. What's the standard setup for when we got switched over? I believe it was net 30. I do not know what it defaults to.

You can change this. I would say what I would probably align your overdue fees with whatever you do with your net 15, net 30 etc. Just make sure there's a lineup. So it's like hey, once. Once it's due overdue it starts to actually accrue the over the late fees. If you're having late fees Which I do recommend doing. It's all automated, so it's pretty cool. It'll train people pretty quickly to do that.

Dylan Wor in copa when CC submits a to do it counts as one budget hour. Which make it confusing when looking at the schedule because it's not a budget hour of actual work. Is there any way we can make it so the shown budget has actual jobs and not to dos? Yeah. So in your.

The side part it's going to show your recurring jobs and your one time projects. That excludes to dos. The total budget hours includes everything. Your meetings, everything. Also you can change your default budget budget hours on to dos meetings, et cetera. So you can go in your settings and change that to like, say if you want to like 0.25 or 0.5. The goal in doing that is that you can look at your total and have a brief understanding of what your schedule is going to look like. But you can change it in the settings. And then also looking at your budget hours on the calendar, like that button there, you can. You can see the recurring and the projects and those don't include to do's, etc. Good question. Vince from Medicine Hat. Hey making. Hi Mike. In stage three of growth, there seems to be a lot of problem with employee performance. I'm currently in stage three and I am feeling this. I hire team members who are excited and do great for the first year or so and they seem to fall off the wagon and their performance drops. I'm currently working on improving my ability to hold team members accountable. I struggle with being too friendly. I would agree with that Vince, 100%. But I am wondering first of all why this happens and secondly, what process do you personally use to hold your direct reports accountable? Thanks in advance. So there's two ways of looking at this. One, I agree with your assessment about being potentially too nice. That's something that you kind of get callous to. Unfortunately, I started the same way off like I was way too nice. And like you start to realize it's actually hurting them. It's hurting you, it's hurting the business, it's hurting the team, hurts everybody. Secondly, I would say that the second way of looking at this is if you can keep someone for one year, you're actually doing really good in terms of just like looking at the averages in this industry. So what you can also think about this is like how do I make sure I get them as profitable as possible and efficient as possible so that when they fall off in a year I have to Let them go. But it's not a drag on the business. If you can keep someone on average for 9 to 12 months in this industry, you're doing a fantastic job. And so instead of trying to change all about you and all the rest of it, like I gotta do, all the psychoanalysts don't worry about that as much as let's make sure they're profitable within three weeks, two weeks. So that way if I keep them for a year, fantastic. And then I get really good at interviewing and getting new team members and now the one year I'm fine with it. Right. So I would focus more on that. Like, how do you focus on what you can control, which is the hiring process, getting more applicants, getting them trained up quickly and efficiently, and then like just count on them only staying 6 months, 12 months, et cetera. And if you can still run the business, you know you're going to be fighting instead of trying to fight an uphill battle, which is industry standards. So. And then most people look at this, you know, if you're mowing a lawn as like an entry level job or a step in towards something they want to do later on.

Kyle Tarvin.

Since everything went down with Chuck, what do you feel you have learned now looking back?

Give me a little more time and then I'll make comments off that. Two, probably two months ago, I asked about what your thoughts were if Chuck early wanted to move away, start up a custom vacation, if you would let them. Looking back now, do you feel that it would have been better to start something maybe in the next day over versus across the country? Any other parting thoughts? No, honestly, like, I think Connor would be an excellent regional manager. He accepted that role the day everything happened and he stepped into it immediately took over full control from command center. Like we already were moving in that direction. But then I had a conversation of like, what are your goals? And because that's kind of how I align with my direct reports is more around what are your goals? It was very clear to me that it would probably be a one or two year stint and then he would want to go start his own and he wanted to be in the 3F program, et cetera. And so I, I knew I could, I could fast track his success and then I could make sure that I stay focused on what everyone else needs me to be focused on right now instead of what is really. This would have been the best thing for me from a financial perspective, which is keep it for one more year, make them all super profitable, and then sell it but.

In terms of no, like, he would have crushed it. And that was what we were planning on, like, in the fresh moment of everything happening. But then, you know, I'm gonna have a conversation with someone, make sure that, like, hey, I appreciate you stepping in and like, doing damage control with me, but what are your goals? And I think if we focus more on that with our team, we'd have more buy in from them. And then everyone else also sees this, right? Like, you have to realize, like everyone else, the team sees what I'm doing there and they realize, okay, like, that was probably like a, you know, a break even or a slight L in Mike's regard. But he did it very quickly because he saw what was best for the team and for the team members and for their success. And so, you know, when you have 150 other people watching what you're doing, I'm willing to take a short L sometimes in order to have 149 other people be like, okay, we see where this is going and we see how people get treated here. So you got to keep that into account. And so. But no, I have no doubt whatsoever that all those locations are crushed this year. The GMs that are all in place are fantastic. Like, it's a solid, solid group. And all the locations would have been super, like, yeah. And Connor would have been a fantastic regional manager. They all adopted that immediately when everything happened. So.

But no, like, down the road, I will open up locations in. Outside of the state. Mostly because places like North Carolina, we. We had good revenue throughout the winter. Like, locations are profitable throughout the winter. And so.

I think, I think three or four of them were profitable last month in North Carolina. So that's, that's, you know, I would still do the same thing.

Jason Storch from Knoxville. Mike, my CPA is really pushing me to a SEP contribution 25k this year, saying that it would. It was his. Was part of her. Our tax planning for the year. I didn't do one last year because I really wanted to have the cash flow to grow this year. And we grew about 60%. We are really wanting to find shop space and looking at buying a piece of land that we could eventually build on. Should we do this up just for everyone? This is a self employment. That's what SE stands for. So that we help our future retirement planning and save on taxes. Still don't really understand why or how that works or keep the cash to help us expand. We have about $150,000 in our bank account right now, which feels really good. But we had about a 60k drop in our account last winter, started 2023 with around 100k and was down to 40k by spring. I don't know, I don't think we will have quite the drop this year because we, we have quite a few winter services. We were still doing 85, which keeps one crew busy and have about a month's worth of projects on the schedule. Great job. Great job, Jason. You guys been great this year.

Give me one second to think about this.

So first off, I don't really respect a CPA telling you to do this without explaining this part. And that is you don't really understand how it works. Right. So basically with retirement planning you have two different types of accounts. One is pre tax, one is post tax. So one is like you're going to put money in today and you're not going to have to pay taxes on it is likely the type of program she's using with you. And then it grows and then when you take the money out, you got to pay taxes on it. Then other accounts you put the money in that are post tax dollars, but then it grows and you don't have to pay any taxes on the growth of that money. So it's basically the way for the government to incentivize retirement savings because either you put money in tax free or the growth of the account grows tax free. You know, basically like usually if you're younger, having your growth get grow tax free is the better benefit.

And so I would just say a business that grows by 60%, you probably added 300 to $400,000 of value to the business this year. Let's be conservative, let's say $250,000. Do I think that $25,000, if it allows you to keep doing that, I think you're going to have a better return on your investment. And I would take you back to what we talked about at the very last part of training, which is like your business can grow to the point where it does kick off enough cash to provide for your retirement. Like no one got rich with a SEP IRA. I'm just saying, right. And everyone pulls like these one off examples like Peter Thiel, like with, with his 401k, you know, much money on, it's like, I'm sorry, like 99 of people don't like attribute their wealth to a retirement account.

Question about the sale of five locations in North Carolina, how did you finalize the sale so quickly? Do you own or finance a sale? How was what was selling Price, how is evaluation determined a location? They're so new if someone was used, what type and how was it approved so quickly? Reason for asking is it would be good to know how to get a done deal quickly if ever came available. Yeah. So in this regard, you know, Connor can share as much as little as he wants. I don't want to, you know, impose my thing on him. What I will say is how he got done so quickly is we both knew what we wanted out of the deal. We're both very aligned of what we need for Augusta Nation. What I need from him as he continues to take those locations, he'll be providing content for Augusta, etc. I did not owner finance the deal, but I did give enough time for him to go get financing and then I helped make sure that he enough cash to get that, that loan. The selling price, I'm not going to disclose that right now. Potentially down the road, I want Connor to move forward and crush it. And I think it was a very fair valuation. It wasn't a lot of goodwill. It was a lot of. There's a lot of assets and I made sure that I'm not losing money, that's for certain. But there's a lot of potential for that, those and that's what he's buying. So if you use a loan, um, the type of loan is not a hundred percent in, in stone yet. So when that happens, I, I'll, you know, it's up to Connor if he wants to, to talk about it, but I want him to crush it. And he's going to. And in terms of how he did so quickly, we were both like super aligned. We trust each other. You know, I don't think he's gonna try to screw me over. I don't think I'm gonna try to screw him over type situation. And so because of that, you can move quickly. So the same thing happened when I bought the gym. I didn't have the cash up front and he gave me terms where it's like, hey, I'm going to give you the cash, you get the loan. Here's what you're going to follow. I trusted him, he trusted me. We did the deal within about 10 minutes of it being on the market. So do I think I could have made more money if I put it on the open market? Maybe a little bit. But I wanted a mostly smooth transition for the general managers. That was my biggest concern and it has been really, really good.

Kyle Tarvin from Oklahoma. Is it possible to let employees be able to view jobs on copilot but not clock in. Sometimes they like to view jobs the day before or before their shift, but is wanting them to clock in. It's kind of a pain to have to go and edit those times. It's a good point.

It's a good point.

We can make it as a setting probably one momento.

Keep in mind if they are clocking in and like doing work, technically they should be clocked in. But I see what you're saying. Let me make one second. One second.

All right. I have about five or six things that I have noted from Augusta that we will get to.

Next thing. Kyle Kyle Harvin Marklhoma do you have some where you document all your systems as SOP3 internal team? Yeah, we use video a lot. So they're all expected to record basically their role in the business. And at first there was a lot of questions around it because it's like, well, that means that I'm expendable type situation. But honestly, in a growing organization.

The bottom line is you. You move up the ladder once you have been able to systematize and then delegate those to other people. And we do it through video. So everything's just. We use loom a bunch.

Screencastify, whatever is your cup of tea. But we document each role and each task that they're doing that way.

Are you able to add bulk tags in Copilot or do you have to click on each customer? Right now there's not bulk tags, but we do have that on next Sprint.

Formatting question do you recommend including all the verbs from the estimate in the invoicing details? We have quite a bit of verbiage in our snow removal estimates and if each visit is including the invoice, it would make the invoice multiple pages due to all the verbiage getting repeated each time a visit is added. Thanks.

I would probably in this case honestly make the attachment of all your terms and conditions like to the estimate because I do like the idea of job notes becoming your. Sorry, estimate notes become your job notes, job notes become your invoice notes so that the customer is always on the same page. But what you might want to do if you want to keep doing that, is just make an attachment like a PDF of all your terms and conditions or a link in the estimate email. You could just make. Okay, for example, snow. You're going to have a link that says like terms and conditions. Click here in addition to the invoice potentially to prevent a whole bunch of words from kind of clouding all of that because I think it's going to hurt your estimate process just as much as you're invoicing. Yes, you can view them without clocking in. Oops. Oh, I did it in my preferences. Okay, so it's already there. All right, well, I apologize. I did not know that. So, according to somebody on Facebook. I did. Online, it's in your preferences, and you should be able to allow them to clock in and out or not clock in and see their. Their jobs today. Or you can just ask CC to update it for you. Fantastic. Thank you for letting me know. I'm going to now remove that from the list of things.

I was going to say. I thought we talked about this, like, a few months ago. All right. I hope you all have a fantastic day. I'm headed over to training. You'll see tomorrow. Take care.