Mike Minutes Mastermind 01/11/2023

Hope you're doing super well. Let's go get started. There's a whole bunch of questions. I saw it came in today and yesterday. One quick thing. I just made a post in the Facebook group. We did decide to remove Dix Hills, New York and Aviloy from Augusta Nation. And so the only reason I'm even talking about it is because I know he will reach out to many of us. And I just want you all to know for myself directly that we have removed him, we have disabled his accounts and he is not, has not been a brand ambassador and someone that we would look to as representing a Gust Nation. Well, and ultimately we do not stand for lying and we have countless accounts that have been recorded, both the customers, employees, myself, et cetera, that they're just straight up lies happening. So thank you for all your feedback at the conference to the leadership team, the Franchise Advisory Council, and we took action immediately this morning once that came up at a meeting and within five minutes had everything taken care of. So I will. I undoubtedly know that most of you will be contacted. If you have any questions, I'm happy to answer them. I do not want to deface him or make him look bad, so I will not comment further unless he takes says weird stuff about us. So that's fine.

But ultimately someone's outside the systems, does not represent what we stand for and is lying to.

Make themselves look better and to increase themselves is not something we stand for. And so there have been plenty of warnings over the past few months. We've been tracking this situation for the past three to four months very closely with the employees, past GMs, past family of the owner. And if we need to, we will comment further. But I don't really want to. I don't really. The point here not to deface him or make him look bad is simply to notify everyone that that had happened. And I made the decision to do that. And if you have any questions based upon what he says, I'm happy to answer them. I would rather not though, because someone that is manic or someone that's kind of having a rough time in life, I don't want to push them down. The goal here is not to make him look bad. People go through stuff and go through life and they do dumb things, but ultimately cannot affect Augusta Nation and the other owners that are around him. So made that decision. And those are not easy. There's absolutely no financial incentive whatsoever for me to do that. There's really no incentive for me to do that other than protecting the other owners around him and protecting the brand. So let's just move forward. And if anyone has questions, submit a question, please, on the Mastermind. And anything you hear, just ask me before you believe anything. All right, let's go ahead and share this and let's jump right in.

All right, here we go. When someone switches to bi weekly in a season, do you keep them on bi weekly the following year or do you always default them back to weekly promoting? So for, for us specifically in at Bellingham, we require weekly service from the beginning of the spring rush till the end of May. So we just always start them on weekly. Excuse me. If they want to switch to biweekly, they can. If you don't have that in your estimate document that you require weekly for the certain months, then I would probably just start them on the same frequency of schedule that they had last year. But that's personally why we do it, so that we can start everyone on weekly. If they want to switch to biweekly, they can.

Excuse me.

Are you able to show the P and L of Command center and provide commentary? It'd be really interesting.

I don't know. I could. There's nothing legally holding me back from doing that. We'll see.

Because it's a lot of. It's like wages, for example. It's like, well, what percentage of some people's time is spent on Command center versus the rest of franchise and coaching and helping one on one with owners and things like that? So it's a little bit hard to delineate directly of Command center versus the rest of the franchise sometimes. But.

How do you balance your personal desire to help as many lawn care companies as possible with your desire to out compete other longer companies with the franchise version of Copilot? On the surface, the goals seem to contradict. Yep. So this is just a matter of not having a scarcity mindset in my mind. Like by helping other people, it doesn't take anything away from you. And so ultimately, let's just say Copilot takes a couple percentage points of the market when it comes to CRM. That means that 98%, if we're going to create such a better product than everyone else, I mean, it would be that 98% of other users have a penalty or have a weakness compared to us. And then the other people that join along inside the program that are not inside of a Gusta nation going to be supporting the things that we stand for and likely be doing things like P4P and helping them, the overall industry, to improve the bottom Line is the reason Augusta exists is to increase the level of professionalism, landscape, industry. And the only reason people even would listen to me about Copilot and what we're trying to do is because of Augusta Nation and the size and scope of what you built and because many of them are starting to compete with us. And so the whole mission of Augusta is to change the level, professionals, landscape, industry. And then behind that is in doing so we will all become. The goal is to become wealthy for all of us as franchisees and part of a destination by being on the cutting edge as things change and realizing that if you just change, if you just have one part of our systems, it doesn't work. You need everything. You need the entire system. You need P4P, you need command center, you need the website, you need all the things that we offer. You can't just say, oh, oh, I got copilot, therefore I'm going to be able to compete with Augusta. You will not be able to. There are pieces and parts that if you leave out same thing with like some people like, oh, P4P doesn't work. It's like, well, yeah, you don't do open book management, you don't do profit sharing. That's why it's not working. If you leave pieces of the system out, the whole thing doesn't work at to the same extent, at the same level. And so.

I have no, I do not concern myself with this at all. And I just truly believe that less than 1% of my audience will actually do everything I talk about in terms of like, hey, if I would have asked, for example at a conference who has command center? I know, I know that outside of our franchisees there's less than 20 people that are actually users of P4P software.com and then also have long term web design and have our CEO that we work on all the time. And by the way, we're doing a redesign of Augusta's site. Should be done in August. The stuff that we are pumping into this make it so fast and incredible. We can now finally afford to spend some really, really good money on site. Some technology that we cannot ever use on anything. Lawn care, web design because it's just too expensive. We can only use it on Augusta because now we have so many owners. Things like that. We're just going to keep adding to that. We. There's just some things you can't do for an individual operator and we can never do. We never will do command center for outside of a destination, never. Because it will never be able. You can't do the prices that we're doing. If you open it up to a bunch of different business models and different softwares. You can't. You have to follow a certain system in order to bring that cost way down. And if you do that over and over and over again, you have cost savings of 5, 10, 15% at every single aspect of the business. And you can eventually get to where every single part of the business is vertically integrated. That's where we can all save so much. But that will not be possible for other users. People are just like randomly using the other stuff we're building and using. Renting the space you mentioned. Update videos that we've attached to estimate the former video feature. Liz, are these new videos active? Are they still in the works? The former video feature list are these.

Yeah. Every, every month they're changing the videos that are attached to the estimate. So there's. Liz was last month. I think there's someone else coming up this next month. They're making new videos all the time. You have a whole folder of them and they just go through the different, different members of Augusta or Command center. Do you recommend emailing all active clients one to two weeks before their mowing season to inform that they are on the schedule and we will service the property unless they're told? Unless they tell us other. Yes. Yeah. One or two weeks before, recommend sending an email to your clients that are on the schedule and saying, hey, we're going to start mowing on the state, no action needed kind of thing. If you're raising prices, you would put your prices in there, the new prices. And then to all your customers who are not on mowing service, you're going to send them a one click estimate email basically saying the same thing, hey, we're starting mowing in a certain date. If you'd like to get on service, please let us know. You know, click on the button. Basically.

Will there be a discount for Omni hotel rooms for Augusta Nation October they're giving us a rate for everybody. It's all unionized. They literally cannot move it. There's a link already on mycanies.com summit if you want to book your hotel rooms just for everyone here. I can't. I don't really say this publicly. If you want to book your, if you want to book that whole week and stay at Equip Expo at Omni, I'd recommend doing that now because right now they're allowing us to book that whole week. They're not supposed to. They are supposed to make it where we have to stop our reservations after Tuesday and then rebook inside of a different window for Wednesday through Friday. Because Equip Expo has a cap on the entire hotel. So for now you can get in if you. So if your plan is to stay at Omni the entire week, it's an expensive hotel. So like I don't expect everyone to do this, but if that is your plan, I would definitely recommend using the reservation link now because right now they're allowing us to book the whole week, but they're not supposed to. So just a heads up on that, I'm not gonna say it publicly because then they'll catch it immediately.

Do you know what the details for the next Augusta conference Landscape Summit is going to be? I'm going to book my hotel in flight and flight asap. Yeah, it's going to be Monday and Tuesday. My current drafted plan is that Sunday night we rent out a whole nother restaurant like we did this time they have to be off site and we would do that together on Sunday night. And then all of Monday, all of Tuesday. And then Tuesday evening we would have dinner and then go late into the evening together with Augusta Nation ending earlier at the public conference and then going in together. I like the idea of kind of doing it after the conference, all of us, because everyone's kind of broken in. You've met a bunch of people already and then we do Augusta's conference. I have not nailed all those details down. We're just massively constrained by the fact that, that.

The. The whole city is basically locked down with the union for Equip Expo. Like they have everything on lock, like hotels, everything. So it's just a little bit difficult. Like I tried my best to try to get like Wednesday as a at a separate conference center for just a guest nation. But like there's Nothing. I've tried 20 plus different places like everywhere where you could potentially get 100 plus people. I have tried in Louisville, so there's all locked down. So I think we can make it work though. Having a Sunday evening dinner off site at like a restaurant, doing what we did. Probably add some more structure to that one though. This time Monday and Tuesday and then Tuesday and early the afternoon, like 4 o' clock for the public and then go directly into ours, have dinner, go to like 10 or 11 that night, all of us. So that's my current plan. Not locked in stone. I would not book your tickets yet because I have to like figure out what restaurant can accommodate 150 people, etc.

What do you think about having seven to eight employees per location with one manager or 15 or so employees, but needing two managers like Bellingham? What would you think about having multiple shops and teams in a territory over time versus one large shop? Okay, let's attack the first one. Yeah. So you know, five, six, maybe seven employees. That'd be a working GM and working GM model. I like that. That's fine. And then 15 or so employees, you need two managers like Bellamy. Again, fine. Just the caliber of trying to find people for those larger locations, sometimes more difficult. And your overhead structure is very different. What would you think about having multiple shops and teams in a territory over time versus one large shop? I don't think you'd ever need to make multiple shops and teams inside one territory. That's why we are trying to make sure the territories are smaller to prevent this from needing to happen. But furthermore, if I was in like we're within three miles a radius, I was dominating and like I needed to have a second shop space inside. It's such a small area. I would rather just turn on the profit knob, raise my prices and constrict growth. So if you're like seven, eight employees, like, hey, I don't want to go to 15, I don't want to get multiple shops. I would just turn on profit mode personally. That's what I would do. And then start maybe another location like we're doing in North Carolina and we just overlapped it slightly into one of our other locations that had quite a bit of is 3 miles and 3 miles, but then we overlapped into one a little bit because we don't think we need all 60,000 people in this one territory to make it successful. So we just overlapped it. So I would personally not do multiple shops though in one territory. If you're, if you're doing a small area, like again, if you're going way outside your territory and way out in the massive service area like 30, 40 minutes away. Yeah, like that might end up making sense if you've grown to a certain size to have a separate shop, but wouldn't recommend that. I'd rather just turn that location into a money maker and turn into a profit center instead of trying to grow and expand and you immediately shift your whole profit, your whole overhead dynamic. When you have two shop spaces inside of one location, I would just definitely be like, hey, keep the one ramp up prices, switch into profit mode and become, you know, making a money money hole and then start up another location, start up another territory, put a Separate GM into it if that's something you want to do separately.

On my question from yesterday, it looks like I didn't finish what I was trying to ask. Is it okay to just advertise on Google Performance Max plus Google Local services or should be advertising on Facebook too? I would do all three. I would probably allocate most of my money towards the Google side of things. I'd max out Google Local services. I spend the majority on Google Performance Max. And then I'd be testing Facebook because I'm still seeing in some markets where Facebook is doing very, very well because everyone's leaving the platform in terms of marketing, a lot of big players are leaving them. They're going to Snapchat, they're going to TikTok, et cetera. And so it's leaving a bit of a void. And so sometimes you can pick up really, really good cost per clicks. The quality clicks are usually lower, but it's just a numbers game at that point. Can you check our Norman Google page? I had multiple resumes over the past week and none of them showed up. I think Google is removing them in the advice. It's probably not removing them.

Let me just pull it up. Augusta Lawn Care, Norman, Oklahoma. Yeah, so I see your Moore one and then here's your Norman one. So.

Let's see here. That's one kind of Norman.

Yeah, so I would just hold off because once your thing is made, I usually say wait a few days before you even start putting on reviews. But it is weird that they're not showing up now. It's been like a week.

You could contact Google, just ask them directly, just like straight up, like, hey, I have customers writing reviews. Why are they not showing up? There's something I'm doing wrong. But I've seen this sometimes randomly happen where for three, four days. I've never seen a week or more, but where reviews will not stick. And I've also seen some days pop on. The reason I do not think they're removing them, by the way, is because you would see them and then they'd go away. If they were actually removing the reviews, I think they're blocked because it's a new account. So definitely reach out to them. I'd check your business page, see if there's any blocks, see if you need to add your service area, add an address. Sometimes we'll add validity to the page. But what you gotta be careful of is creating a new listing and all of a sudden getting a whole bunch of reviews. Google will flag that as suspicious.

Would it be a bad idea to sell some unwanted assets, gold and jewelry to buy an extra truck and equipment for growth or should I wait until I have the clientele? I wouldn't be going into debt so I figured it wouldn't be a problem. My only thing is I wouldn't be able to use the new equipment right away until I get to work. But my I'm definitely accepted. Excited to grow. Also, can I get a banner made for my email? Yeah. So the banners are available on the dashboard for download and you can download like four or five different email options, email signature options and you can just pop your photo on it on Canva for example. Personally, if you don't want you said old unwanted assets. If you don't want the gold and jewelry turn into a productive asset which is a truck and equipment that's going to make you money.

Personally I see no value in things like gold and jewelry so I would be selling them a long time ago. But it sounds like you don't want them like there's no reason to have them. Then it doesn't seem like there's any sort of nostalgia or reason that you're having these. So I would simply sell them turn into.

A usable asset. Something that's actively making you money and gonna push you forward instead of just sitting a drawer and collect dust. I was speaking to an agent from Empire Collections and they only collect if a bill is over $500. A lot of my non paying clients owe smaller amounts. Am I able to chart change the email sent to commands so they send non paying clients to different collections agency. So what this is talking about is the way it affects your credit so they will go after smaller bills. The reason I know that is because we've collected on smaller bills and I've gotten checks from them for smaller bills. It's the way that it affects the person's credit and the level at which they can go after the customer changes slightly. If you wanted to what I would do if you wanted to actually split off like segment who goes Empire. Who doesn't. I would just make sure that the automation is going to you and then you would determine whether which ones command center sends out by sending that email to them. Or you would potentially go to a smaller collections agency that specialize in small claims. But typically those are the people who literally go knock on people's doors and those are going to need to be local. So Empire is going to work great for these larger ones because we can ding people's accounts and or their credit card. Their credit Scores, et cetera. And we can do it all virtually. If you want small claims, you typically need someone to go knock on the door. And that's when you need someone local and that's optimal. That's the best. And if you can find someone great, I would use them in a heartbeat. I've just never had good luck trying to find it, let alone scale across all of our locations finding a good local collections company. So we've used empire. Anything over 500, we can do a lot more with their credit and it affects them a lot more because otherwise considered small or petty, and those things are typically settled in small claims court and they're not going to fly out to the smallest claim court for your $200 invoice. Right. So just, just know that they do collect on $500 or more.

Just know though that their hands are tied a lot of times because they're just less legal. Things we can do with under $500 invoices. And every state's a little bit different. So, like sometimes your state actually might be higher or lower, but we kind of have to go with the lower end of that just to be able to be safe.

But yeah, if you want that, Max I would do is just have that email come to you and then if you want Command center or Empire to go through with it, you send it to them. And if you want to do it yourself, do it that way. Feel free to look around locally at collections agencies. Those are typically the ones that are going to knock on people's doors. They're the ones that will take someone to small claims, et cetera.

Was there a deal or something you're working on for conference hotels for franchisees? I thought I saw something the other day and was waiting to wait to book a flight and hotel until I heard for sure. Yeah, it's all the same. It's all literally through union. I can't even negotiate. It's expensive, unfortunately. But again, I'm hoping that it's cheaper to have two nights at a hotel that's $100 more per night than having to fly over to Seattle and do that three or four times for multiple team members and drive up from Seattle and get a rental car and all the rest of it. And then hopefully for a lot of you that have been or would like to go to Equip Expo, it's already there. So we can kill all three birds with one stone. Franchise Conference, public conference, and Equip Expo in one, one, one trip and hopefully make it most efficient for everyone.

Can I Get your blessing to change my first time MO's to 133 per minute per man after $60 per hour regular MO.

Yeah, that's fine. So your first time. I was gonna be 1.33 per minute per man after a sixty dollar per hour regular mowing. I mean, I guess, I guess what you're probably saying is you're gonna charge more per hour 80 instead of 60 in the first mill. Yeah, it'd be totally fine. Because when you're charging a dollar 33 per minute per man, you're. You're kind of accounting for the fact that there is extra labor. There is. It's harder work, it's harder on your equipment. So if you're charging a, you know, premium for that, I'd totally be down for that. And Trust me, the dollar to a dollar 33 does not cough people up. It does not. You just do not see a big change in that. Honestly, I'd go like a $50. I guess that'd be what, $90. It just. People don't. People don't bat an eye at it because they just know it's the first visit. And most people you can get done inside the budget hours. Even if it's the first visit.

I made a mistake of setting up the base pay too high. At $22 per hour, our mowing rate is 75. Ouch. Okay. And I plan to increase it up to 85 once we reach capacity again in spring. We give 33% revenue as P4P. To patch the system, I had to give extra P4P route density adjustment bonus of $22 per day. That would allow the crew to hit P4Pmore often. Should I keep the base pay the same and wait it out until our mowing rate gets high enough for the crew to hit PVP constantly? I'm paying too much and charging too little. Okay, I agree with the sentiment 100%. They will never hit above base pay at these rates you need. You'll need the amount you charge the customer to be at least. Like the lower, the better of 25% of what you're paying the guys on base pay. So for example, if you're going to pay $22 per hour to your crew on base pay, you need to be charging the customer at least 88 if they're. If P4P and making performance dollars is ever going to be a thing for your crew. So either a need to raise to $90 per hour in my opinion at least, or I think you could probably get away with this. Spring lowering your base pay down to $20 per hour last year. I know it's hard to find employee. I think you'll be able to do just fine getting with 20. I would move that down and I would move your thing to 85. Like you said, if you do those two things, you'll be fine. No, none of this adjustment garbage. You got to make sure that your base pay is less than 25% of what you're charging the customer. Otherwise giving 33% of labor revenue. There's just not enough difference for the guys to be incentivized. And then people like, oh, PVP doesn't work. It's like, no, if the math is not making sense for the guys to be able to make consistently three, four or five more dollars per hour, it's not enough them to get out of bed actually kick butt on P4P.

I saw your Facebook on ab what happened to cause it to get this point where he was removed. If I was remember right, he was one of the owners that ended up closing on his location a while back. Do not pause on this. Yeah, previously we closed down because he got divorced.

And what happened is for now all I'm going to say is that there was a lot of lies being said to customers that we were getting people calling all the time at command center, previous employees that he threatened and not only legally, but physical harm to.

And sign names that were not his on legal documents. So it's all safe for now. But if I need to go further in because if he says other stuff then I can, but I don't want to defame him or make him look bad. That's not the goal here. It's just simply his actions over the past three months are not in line with what we believe at August Nation. And we've tried and tried and tried to and hoped and hoped and hoped that he get back in line. But you know when people are going through divorces and they're in legal action all the time and they're lying and they're saying things in law enforcement that are not correct, we just, we can't have it around. So.

I talked a little bit other at the beginning of the video. Max, feel free to watch that part again.

I only said it because I know, I know for 100% facts that he'll be contacting a lot of you. If you have any questions, things that he says, please let me know on the mastermind. That's totally fine. He had to make the decision relatively quickly this morning though. But it's been a three or four month process of trying to keep tabs and ensure that hopefully in crossing our fingers, he'd get back in the systems and back getting his personal life back in order. But that just has not happened. So. All right, thank you, everyone. Hope you have a fantastic rest of your week and we'll stay in touch.