Mike Minutes Mastermind 01/09/23

Everyone, good morning. Hope you're doing well. Let's get started.

We just go and drop this into Facebook.

One second here.

All right. Hope everyone got back home safely or is en route. Back home safely from conference is great. Give us a week or two and we'll have all the recordings available on the Academy for all the destination, both from Thursday, the Augusta conference as well as the public conference. Just give us a little time to get all that synced up and stuff, video and audio and things. I have more meetings today about this other stuff from the conference and things, but a couple of things that did come up from Command center and the support track there I wanted to go over. One of them was RingCentral Call Reports. We will not send those out to owners on a monthly basis. There's a couple of times people asked about, could I get a report of every call inbound and outbound, my location at the end of every month with my invoice. And we're not going to do that. There's such a small minority of people that want that. And then my time it takes for command center to run the report and then go through if people like, okay, I don't want you to call so and so and spend 20 minutes with them and et cetera, et cetera. It's just too much time. And at the end of the day, all of Augusta Nation has to pay for that. When we look at the cost of Command center and so unless everyone was like, we all want call reports and we want to spend that extra time and money doing that, until that point, there's, it's not going to happen.

And so ultimately, if you don't, if you want that level of granularity and detail, I think you're micromanaging and you're not handing things off. And I think that's going to be a challenge for a lot of operators that are trying to start hand things off. When you do, whether it be the command center or you hire someone, you got to let go. You can't constantly be micromanaging things and asking for calling reports and exactly who called and what time and which users. And listening to every single phone call recorded is going to slow down decision making and it's not going to lead to business growth at all. So it's not a matter of us trying to hide information or anything like that. It's simply a matter of it'll slow down the organization and ultimately make Command center cost more. There's no reason to tell someone to answer their phone, answer your phones for you and then ask to listen to all the recorded phone calls and see reports from every single phone call, et cetera. It make us we would not be able to offer the prices that we do at command at a dollar and nine cents. That's why most organizations are two, three dollars is because there's no trust in between and you have to do way more affording so. All right, let's jump into questions. There'll probably be other stuff as I go through other meetings today of stuff that we can address but for now that's all I had. Okay.

Kyle, is command center able to respond a message on Facebook they do have. You'll see it's Augusta CC or CC CC something on the Facebook group. CT Augusta I think it is. You'll see them on the Facebook group. They do see stuff if needs be. If not though I'm usually the first one to see it along with all the other individual team members. I think I asked this before, what do you typically spend per day in ad spend on the location you're trying to ramp up quickly. I was thinking someone the ballpark of 100 to 150 per day. Yeah, we spend about a hundred dollars per day distributed across about four or five different platforms with the bulk of it being spent on Google local services and Google Ads performance max.

Two part question. I know you process invoices once a month to decrease the amount of interaction between clients seeing their charges at their account and reduce the chance of cancellations. Is that for all recurring jobs including recurring bed meetings or one times as well? For one time jobs we do it right away but it's only recurring customers that we will at the end of the month send the invoice out. But you know if we do a property clamp $2,000 profit I'm collecting the next day that like that in the evening or as soon as possible. We currently bill weekly for mowing and right after completion for our recurring monthly bed, flower bed maintenance jobs and one time projects. If we were to switch over to monthly billing for mowing, how do we ensure you will actually get paid for those four cuts? I don't necessarily like sending credit to our customers and not collecting invoices right away. Yeah. So if you have a credit card on file there's a level of.

Obviously they trust you somewhat and obviously you can trust them a little more if they have a card on file with copilot down the road we'll have it where you can only accept an estimate if the card is on file. And so I know it serves Autopilot. This is not an option. You have to kind of do it afterwards and then make sure that those are set up correctly. Um, but you know, I'm not against weekly billing. It's just a matter of them seeing four or five times a month on their credit statement reminds them to cancel. And if I'm sending them email receipt or email paid invoice, again, it's just another email to close their inbox to where they open up the one click estimate email list. And I just depend a lot on that email being opened up. As the organization grows.

With having multiple businesses in different sectors, landscape, business, real estate, franchise and software, how are you able to keep everything under effective management and ensure everything runs smoothly? I feel I would be frazzled without key people handling the majority of the tasks. I just focus on high level stuff in all businesses. Even then, how do you ensure that those key people performing and stay on course?

So first and foremost.

Like the gym for example, I'm there for 15 to 20 minutes a week. So those of you that conference, you saw Christian there, he runs everything there for me. Same thing with real estate. I really don't spend much time on it. Liz does the management of side of things. I spent a little bit more time on the Airbnb stuff in 2022 because I need to hit 100 hours to have material participation so I could write everything off. But you know, we're switching those to more long term rentals now because I was able to get the, the accelerated depreciation and get a cost segregation on all the properties. So get that out of the way in 2022 and I can switch it back to more long term, less than my inclination, my involvement. And then when it comes like software franchise, my locations that I own of Augusta myself, it's all in long term landscape. It's all the same language, it's just different aspects of it. Right. So whether it be software or the accounting side or P4P like it's all part of, just part of lawn care, landscaping, what we're doing every single day, it's that I'm drilling down each one and trying to build it out from scratch. Right. So it be the CRM or ordinary command like it just. You would have to do this up anyways. It's just a matter of knowing what we need. And then now we actually are building something that we can control with. Right. So yeah. And then like you, you, if you, once you start growing like you, you have to trust people and realize that yeah, they're gonna make Some mistakes. But like if you constantly are micromanaging them or asking them to report back to you that you will never ever grow the company. So like yeah, I'm sure I leave tons of money and make plenty of mistakes because I just don't look at what they're doing and they make mistakes forever and I miss them. But like it doesn't matter because ultimately my time spent on strategy and focusing on other people and putting them in the right spot in the bus is far more important than accompanying them on the bus. Just make sure they're in the right spot and then trust them and then, you know, let them prove you wrong instead of micromanaging. And that's just a muscle you'll have to to work on as you grow the businesses. Because that doesn't come naturally to most entrepreneurs. It didn't come naturally mean that it's just like let people, you know, die on their own. Sword you trust them, give them the tools, give them the vision and then just where they run with it. There's a landscape supply yard for sale across the street from me. I'm good friends with the owner and he is willing to stay on board to help me with how the day to day is ran. At the moment I was thinking of purchasing it with owner financing, using it for my locations. I open and scale the company in general. What in your opinion on wholesale landscape, wholesale companies and what do you believe is the biggest struggle in the industry? How would you compete against the bigger players? A couple of things that I'd be just cautious about. I'm not saying not to do it, I'm just saying cautious about number one, 2021 and 2022 will be some of their best years in terms of their revenues. As you head into a recession, these sort of industries get whacked and that is product based materials because people just start doing less home improvement. People are more inclined to cut out home improvement compared to home maintenance. And so instead of them coming in, putting a riverbed in, they'll just hire you to come pull the weeds. Right. So keep that in mind.

Biggest struggle in the industry is honestly the fact that you're running a retail operation. It's completely different than service based businesses. And this is why we, we eventually got out of delivery and loading up materials, etc. Is it's completely different business than lawn care and landscaping. It is not the same thing. Retail is very different than service based. And so your hours, for example, like you'll need to be open up on Saturdays at the very least likely Sundays if you're trying to maximize revenue because the majority, 50% of your revenue will come on Saturday and Sunday. So.

It'S just, it's just a difficult industry. And then also your office person, if you're trying to have them do things inside of your CRM for your service based business, it's tough to be like hey, you're an office version. Oh, and you're going to load up material. Oh and you're going to drive a dump truck and do deliveries. It's a very different skill set. It's very hard to find someone like that. That's ultimately why we cut it out too. Finding assistance back for Liz back in the day was difficult. Someone who's like willing to get dirty and also be behind a computer is like tough. Can we just stick with Google Ads or would it be better to get a mix of the two? I'm not exactly sure what you're talking about there. Google Ads or V Best I would use Performance Max which is inside of Google Ads and it would optimize against.

You know, videos, banner ads, search, etc.

Can you create a video or document for us franchisees on the most common tax write offs or loopholes we should or could be, could be using. I just saw this where you can pay your kids up to 12,000. Yeah, so watch the video. I've most recent video on my channel like three videos ago maybe about this specific thing.

I gotta have it prove it. Yeah, so watch the video most recently made. It's public. I don't think there's really a use to make a most common tax one. There's like two or three that you really gotta focus on. And if you're ever buying something for the sake of taxes and you're not profitable, you've been lied to and you are misinformed. So this is why it's so important to talk to an accountant before the end of the year and go over where, where your projected revenues are at, what your projected liability for tax is going to be and having a plan in place. And so if you've missed that, obviously you can only now figure out how your depreciation schedules work. That's kind of what you're limited to. There's some things you do with real estate stuff too but like in terms of equipment and things. So.

Yeah, it just comes down to having it. Someone knows they're talking about taxes because watch my video, you'll see a good tax account once. And I tell you to pay more taxes this year because I know next year you're going to need the write offs. And those write offs will. If this year you're making $10,000 in profit, having a write off basically saves you nothing in taxes. If next year you're going to make $120,000 in profit, a 5,000 or $10,000 deduction next year will save you way more than this year. You'll want to take the deduction next year. So you got to think about too, like if you're going to make more money in the future, you actually want to depreciate things because your tax bracket of savings, like if you save, say, okay, I have a $5,000 write off, great, you're at a 10% tax bracket. I want to take that $5,000 tax write off next year or the year after if I expect to make a much profit on that 20, 30% income bracket. And now that savings that write off of 5000 is, is saving me way more money. So you've got to make sure that you're not just like, oh, I'm trying to save, spend nothing on taxes and therefore I should. Right? And then in terms of the child thing, in an audit, 99% of those don't hold up. And in my video I talk about why.

How do you handle an employee with health issues? We had one employee that has diabetes and there's been several times we have to call him because he had blood sugar issues. A human mix several times, seven mornings because of the same issue. He's been a few times working on projects. He had to sit down for an hour mercy to get his blood sugar right. He's a great guy and a good team player, but going forward and growing and giving him his own route in the spring seems like a nightmare to schedule around. If he's above base pay on PvP, I wouldn't worry about it because then just it's okay. Obviously you have some health issues. It's going to affect your performance, it's going to affect your pay. If they're way below pay for perform base pay, that's challenging, especially because now it starts to affect other team members if he's on a crew. But if they're by themselves like you said, you could potentially make it work. Right? So I'm not, I'm not saying you should try to give this guy a second more chances or whatever. I'm just saying if they're above base pay and they're working by themselves, you could probably make this work. Whether or not you can afford to do that in terms of having a Truck dedicated for this individual is a different, you know, different case scenario potentially. If it sounds like you're a good person and you trust them a lot and so I just be open and honest with them like hey, we'll need you to work by yourself because we don't want this to negatively affect other team members on P4P. But if he's way below base pay and you're losing money on him like you're going to have to eventually cut him and you just would cut him for the sake of lack of performance. Has nothing to do with his health issues. That's something he'll need to figure out if he's going to try to keep doing labor based work is how to even that all out. Because you know, from a medical standpoint this can be fixed. He needs to have a better tracking regimen and a better way of tracking things. It absolutely can be done. He needs better medical support. If that's happening where I have to sit down for an hour to get his blood sugar right. He needs more medical attention. So.

Let'S see here. When and when, where and when will the photos be uploaded to from conference? So the photos were on that app that everyone was scanning. QR code on your name tag. There's a QR code in there. There's a bunch of photos on there. We're gonna have a bunch of photos probably next week or two that we will put up on the site and we're gonna get everything ready for Louisville. I'll make this a post on the Facebook group but just so everyone clears this up really fast. We are not doing a second franchise conference in January for Augusta Lawn Care. I don't want everyone have to travel again. It's just too expensive and too costly. I know it kind of stinks. I know a lot of, a lot of us love to come up to. You're connected to me. Someone's audio is connected to me. One second.

Were you on the media phone? No. Oh, weird. Okay, never mind.

So yeah, just so everyone knows, there will not be a second franchise conference. We're going to do what we did this year where we have it together still at at Landscape Summit. I think it's, it's gonna be good now because we can kill three birds with one stone. We can have our Augusta franchise conference. We can have the summit and you can attend GIE all in the same week. So I think it's gonna really help with saving costs. The main reason I'm moving it over to Kentucky is so that all of us can attend are in the east coast, the vast majority of us on the East Coast. So there's no reason to have 80% of our franchise fly across the country. It's a waste of money. Most of you can drive to Kentucky. The majority of you can get on a very, very cheap ticket to Kentucky. Whereas it's three to four times more expensive to fly to Seattle and you mostly don't bring your employees because of that. So my goal is to get over to Kentucky so you can bring your team more and it's as much more accessible, it's cheaper and I don't want to do two because then just too expensive for everybody down the road. We could, you know, down the road in the future we can do something for franchisees only and do something central like in the middle of the year or something. But I think that the Southeast Conference is great for that. They'll probably be doing that in June this year. So there'll be more announcements coming up about that.

But in terms of having a second one, it won't be all together. We'll have to really compress it because Gie literally locks down the city from Wednesday forward. So we cannot get like I have tried 20 plus places to get for Wednesday. We can't do it. So we have a plan in place. I'll have more details coming up how we're going to do October for Landscape Summit and Augusta Conference and Gie etc. So looking forward to it. It's going to be a lot of fun. Thank you all for coming. It was the best. Next time I'll make sure that we have a an outdoor restaurant venue that I'm not screaming for three hours before the event starts. That put me on a bad foot. But anyways, hope you all had a fantastic weekend and look forward to 2,023. Got some cool stuff coming up here and I appreciate you all take care of.