Mike Minutes Mastermind 01/12/2023

Hello, Gust Nation. Hope you're doing super well. It's late at night. If you're watching this live, don't worry about. Just wait till tomorrow. Totally fine. I'm just doing the mastermind early.

Just go ahead and drop this into the Facebook group, though, for tomorrow.

Cool. A couple reasons why I'm doing it late at night here. I eat early for tomorrow morning is one tomorrow, and the next day, I'm gonna be focused quite a bit on moving offices. And then two is I'm trying to see if I can not cough like that because I need to record some other videos for longcarebusinessforsale.com tonight. And I'm gonna see if I can talk for any given period of time without coughing and hacking. So we'll see if that is successful or not. All right, couple things I had written down here. I'm making a. I'm kind of forcing myself in a couple areas for better time management on my own part. I was looking through kind of end of year. I usually do analysis of, like, my communication. So I was looking at where I was wasting time in terms of communication. And one of the things that consistently was I was seeing is like, I'm still texting a lot of owners answers to questions that are not time sensitive that can be answered in the mastermind, and then hopefully answered five other people that had the same question. So when people ask me questions, I'm going to try my best to be. Because I usually just want to. I want to just respond back like, obviously I want to do that, but when I'm getting 20 and 30 a day, I have to be better, more diligent about making sure I focus on the masterminds and put them back into.

The questions here. So, for example, today someone asked me, what is attrition? How do I calculate attrition? Something we talked about, Conference attrition is basically just the number of customers that you've lost over any given period of time divided by the total number of customers that you have. For example, if you have 100 customers total recurring mowing, and you lose 10 in a month, that means that you have a 10% attrition monthly. If you lose 30 for the year out of your hundred, that'd be 30 number of customers you lost divided by 100, your total number of customers. Therefore, that would be a 30%.

Attrition rate for the year. All right, so that. That's one question. One question I had today. Sorry. It's the most pitiful cough in the world. Like, there's Nothing left here to cough.

Anyways, that was one question. Another question someone had for Lonnie, I think with the day and they said they were going to submit a question, but I didn't see one come in. And that is about.

They would. They specifically asked if on their.

On their service area if it could be where mobile homes and then houses that were on busy streets could be excluded from the service area. It's nigh to impossible for us to do that without at least a 20% margin of error at command center. And so basically this person was wanting us to. And I'm not dissing the person, I'm just trying to set some frameworks so people understand more.

They basically, hey, if it's on a busy street or it's a mobile home, we don't want to service them. So the busy street is a complete subjective thing that you're leaving in the hands of someone that could potentially. Well, it's on a busy street. Like what's considered a busy street. Right. It's too subjective. And then secondarily it's just too difficult to say, okay, yeah, we serve everyone in this area. This is our service area. They see a pin, they drop the address. Okay, great, you're inside of our service there. They zoom in. It's like, oh, like your three houses are mobile homes. Therefore I'm not going to give you a property, I'll give you an estimate. So we can't do that command. We can't do like, you know, that detailed of. We do not serve certain types of properties down to that level. Obviously we can do like, hey, we don't do massive commercial, we don't do certain services obviously. But like, we can't, sorry, we can't do it just based upon like, if it's a mobile home, we don't want to do it. So at that point, question is, well then how do I weed those out? In my opinion, you would raise your lower limit of per cut price to the point where you make up for the fact that they're a pain in the neck to deal with sometimes and they're. But if you're getting extra 10 or 15 per cut, it kind of makes sense because typically a mobile home park or a house next to a busy road is going to be smaller lots. So increase your lowest limit price and you're probably going to weed out a lot of those people anyways. And then if you don't, you're. They're paying the premium for that painful having to deal with it. If that's something you don't want to do. Secondarily, what you could do is just cancel the estimate after it's been set up or accepted. I know that's not ideal. I know it's a bad customer experience, but ultimately, if command centers can be answering phone calls, it's just impossible to give that level of subjectivity of like a busy street or whether or not it's a home, mobile home or a manufactured home. Like, it's just too difficult to. For us to be able to hit that consistently. So I hope that makes sense. Those are the two ways I would attack that specific scenario is raising lower low, increasing your threshold of low price and then also potentially canceling the estimates or quotes once they've been given. If it's an estimate you do not want.

All right, Sorry. I mentioned it yesterday about the site redesign. It's a big thing we've been working on. You're going to see it here in just a second. I'm not going to show it to you because we don't actually have the design ready yet, but we're redesigning all the sites. It's going to take us till at least August to get done, but it's going to look amazing and it's going to be technology that I have never actually been able to afford ever in my whole life. And it's extremely awesome. And I don't know of any other home service industry that has used this technology to make sites load as fast as is. It's. It's going to crush on SEO. Really looking forward to it. We spent a lot of money on this and it's something that I. I'm really looking forward to. It's going to come in August, September. We're going to add some different elements in terms of design overall to the site. And so I'm looking forward to that. Like a truck driving across because that is such a emblematic part of our brand. We some cool stuff coming up. So.

That'S what we've been working on too. Let's see. Reminder. One click estimate email document. If you were at conference, you got that email that you can set up your calendar. Calendar for which one click estimate emails you're gonna send throughout the year, whether you're sending them out or command center sending it out. Doesn't matter. It's a good thing to have a calendar. Have them ready to go. Highly recommend you send. You get that done if you were not at conference by hopefully Friday morning, we should have everything up for you to watch For Augusta, the Augusta franchise, the public Franchise Public conference won't be till next week, so keep your eyes open for that. If you haven't, we're not at the conference. If you were at the conference, you need to make sure that document. I would highly recommend putting that document together. Whether Command center is doing it for you or you're sending them out yourself. Make a calendar for your One Click Estimate emails. Keep yourself accountable. The redesigned One Click Estimate emails look much better. And now you'll have them all in one place. Have a schedule and a plan so you can't get behind on those. And then also, if you were not there, just wait for the videos. Wait till we talk about it and Jade and Rachel talk about how it's set up. Then see the document that was sent to you last week. Go through it, fill it out. I think it'll be really, really helpful. All right. Last thing, someone had asked about seeing the profit and loss statement for Command Center. I figured just show it for the whole franchise. I would ask that you try to keep this internal. I don't think anyone would share this externally, but please just keep this internal. This is not necessarily something that most franchisors are going to share.

Let's see if I can share this. Does that come through? Why does Preview never work here? One second. I got to drag this into Chrome. So this is going to be the P and L for the whole franchise.

Kind of walk you through most of this stuff isn't going to be any surprise we talk about all the time. Boom, boom.

Now I should be able to show it. Okay, present.

There we go.

Okay, so this is 2022. This is the franchise. Top line sales 2.4. So we doubled in top line revenue. You guys see the breakdown of revenues for Command center, initial fees, etc. This other stuff is a lot to do with refunds, interest.

People that don't pay, stuff like that. Over unders, et cetera. Pretty basic, everything normal. Here's the big one. Legal and professional includes all R and D. So research and development. So if you take out, if you take out R and D from this line item, it's about $350,000. We spend R&D only about 140,000 on legal. So R and D is big thing for us. I've been very clear that we are testing a lot, we are developing a lot. So this includes the following. The website stuff like I just mentioned, the stuff that we've been working on in terms of speed. It's going to be awesome once we can get it all rolled out. Working on that throughout the year. This includes us testing out different marketing. So any sort of R and D that we, I hire different marketing firms to test and beta test against our our ads and make sure that we're performing just as good and see if there's things I can learn from them. And usually it's not a matter of learning from them, it's just a matter of making sure that like I'm not missing something. And so we will hire pretty substantially ad agencies and compare their ads against ours and make sure we're performing well, seeing what and just trying to pick up on a couple of things from them and hopefully that comes across in the done for you ads when I share them to you. So big chunk of that.

Big pieces of. We did pay super obviously to help develop certain things for Command Center.

There's several other things in terms of R and D stuff, but yeah, lots of R and D, lots of development stuff. There's pieces and parts of copilot that for Command center that we will cover inside the franchise versus separate company. So anyways, if you take out, you really have to take out 350. If, if I was not trying to grow or expand or increase what we're trying to do here, this could be $350,000 less. So yeah, you look at the bottom line, it's like a 4% margin business, not great. But again, if you take out the 3350 of R&D and we were just trying to coast like if we were in profit mode, you have to add 100, about $350,000 on the bottom line. But the goal is just on all the businesses. At the beginning of the year I told all the management we have to get to profitability on every single business. And so every single business that I own was profitable this past year to some extent. And it's that balance like we talked about at conference and that is while you're trying to play defense, you're also trying to gain market share and grow and be aggressive. And so I think that's reflective of what we did in terms of just being much more efficient at Command center in terms of our overhead structure, how things were set up there. But then also in terms of at the same time really being aggressive. These investments that 350 will pay massive dividends over the next few years. It'll just be more and more apparent as that happens.

So I think that's about it. Some of this has the new headquarters building and baked into it too though. So that'll get amateurized out or capital expensed out. That's not necessarily a.

P and L item, it's a balance sheet item. So yeah, that's kind of it. Let's see what else we got. We got wages that are in here, total payroll expenses 1.3. So you know, most of that is command center. So that's why Command center just very low margin business. The first half of the year it lost a couple hundred thousand dollars. So we basically back got that almost back up to zero. I think it lost for the year a little bit. Command center as a whole, it's a little bit challenging to break it out of this report because this includes everything. So yeah, that's about it. Web design that includes the stuff that we do in terms of just keeping all sites up. We're constantly changing the SEO stuff, tweaking little things. Sometimes you guys pick up on it, sometimes you ask me certain questions. Most time though, it's just stuff we're running on the, we're testing constantly. So we have several different companies that we work that I kind of just, I hire to poke holes in our SEO, poke holes in the security of the site, poke holes in the speed and, and then obviously our team is putting them up and everything. So yeah, that's that. So I know somebody asked about that and there's nothing to hide. So what else do we got here?

Okay, cool. That's all I got for that. Now let's jump into the questions.

And here we go.

Share.

There it is. Right?

I'm not gonna make a video. See, when you make videos, I don't not like where I have to cut. So any cough in a 5 to 10 minute window of time means no videos tonight. Very sad. Okay, Nick, I didn't save receipts for half of the year last year. How bad is that going to come back to bite me? Just realize that my AirPods in for absolutely no reason whatsoever.

Don't worry about it. If you audited, you're going to have a bit of a trouble. You'll have to supply your.

Or what you can do, just supply your credit reports or your credit card reports, your statements and then just be open and honest with them. And that's, that's what's going to save you is the fact like, hey, I realized my mistake halfway through. I started keeping them from then on and they're going to be usually pretty lenient with you. Especially if you were like super diligent from then on and like you didn't miss anything. They're going to trust you a lot more those first Six months. And again, we're assuming you get audited. So don't worry about it because let's say, for example, there's like $20,000 of expenses that like they can't prove because you don't have like emailed receipts or it's not trackable enough on your credit card statements or whatever. 20,000 you're paying, let's just call it 20%. You're probably paying like $4,000. You're getting audited in five years. Your business will probably be a couple million dollars in revenue. It's like by the end of that time, it doesn't really matter. So don't stress about it. Do not lose any sleep over this. This is not a big deal. You're trying to do your best and they will not penalize you. They might charge you if they. If there's certain things that they can't prove enough. They might charge you for the actual taxes, but they won't penalize you or throw you in jail or anything stupid like that because they can see that you're trying to do your best to now document and they see improvement. They will be very lenient with you when they see that you saw your error, you tried to fix it, you improved what you're doing in terms of documentation and then kept moving forward with that.

I'm setting up a Google Local services for our Norman location. It is asking for our address. I don't have an address in Norman. I'd like to use it. Use. I'd like to use. So could I just use the middle of our territory that we use Franchise Docs and Map or it'd be better to use our more location address. Google Local services. I don't believe it verifies the address, but you probably need to have an address that you can get mail at. So I would personally recommend trying to get like a UPS store or some sort of box that you could get in the middle of your location.

But I don't remember. I've never tried doing it outside of a service area for Google services. To be honest with you, I don't know if you have to be. I don't know if it'd be better. I think honestly you could probably just do your more location address and be just fine. Because I don't think it has anything to do with your Google Local services where you can do your ads.

I know it isn't because based on your service area, so you'd probably just find it's Google, it's your Google listing that the address matters. So much because it's going to show you on the maps. And I saw today, I saw the day.

First time, actually, I think I was looking at your location. Yeah. So now they're calling businesses and then places on listings. So it used to be like, you know, Google, look, Google my business. Right. Well, now they're showing businesses and then they're showing.

Another thing called places. So they're really trying to integrate. Yeah. So here, businesses. Let me see if I can't make it happen again. I forget what I did. I forget I did something today. And it showed places instead of businesses. They're really trying to integrate maps, business listings, et cetera. So I can see this is your address here. I'm assuming probably like your shop or your house. Now, for Norman, I would just go ahead and use that one probably for now on. On Google Local Services, because I don't think it's a big deal on Google Local Services to be inside your service area. So.

Do you think doubling up at the beginning of the year would be better than sending everyone out as solos? We are considering doing this to be able to get through stops more effectively because the rain, etc. This would mostly, mostly come down to your growth rate and if you're at capacity in terms of labor and trucks. So this is Thomas Hickey. Okay. So do you think doubling. Sorry, I just realized it's Thomas Hickey. So now I gotta read it. Read it again. Because this context. Do you think doubling at the beginning of the year would be better? Yeah. So if you're trying to be in profit mode, probably a better thing to double them up and.

Do it that way so you don't have to buy more trucks. You're trying to grow. If you're trying to make them have more on P4P instead of more focusing on profit, then you potentially are going to get more trucks so they can be solo and make more money on P4P and you'll be able to grow faster that way, et cetera, you'll increase capacity. But I would be really focusing, knowing your situation specifically, Thomas, I'd be focused on growing to capacity, which means putting second guys in trucks and making sure you limit your overhead and then going back to solo. Late spring, early summer. I see you're saying. So you're saying doubling more sound like for morale perspective, however, which is true. Morale, sorry.

Morale is better in the rain when there's two people. However, P4P is almost unobtainable in it. When it's raining up where we're at in if there's more than one person, like solo is the only way for them to make above base pay when it's raining. So it just give and take. Nice. Doubling up is great for morale. It's better for capacity. It's just not good for PvP for guys that are really efficient. So it's just a balance of the two and you got to determine which one you're kind of giving and taking from. If your guys are hitting above base pay, no problem and they're making good P4P, I would say probably double people up. And for the sake of morale and the sake of growing the capacity instead of focusing on just that, morale. Getting as many clients to maintenance clients as possible. We got three weeks booked out last summer season on initial Moe's. Yeah. So makes total sense getting booked out three weeks on Mozo, for example. Like technically speaking, putting them into solos, they'll get those done faster. Right. But like you said, the morale port is very, very important. Based on just knowing your situation, Thomas, I would definitely say you don't want to increase capacity. Take the number of trucks that you have now, figure out the math of what your your capacity based growth, capacity based growth is for assets and then grow to that using doubling up of trucks. That's going to maximize your profit. It's also going to help. It sounds like with morale, which is was a big problem for you last year and it's something that you'll want to make sure you nail this year just to solidify that. And so you're going to give up a little bit of efficiency by making sure that you are able to get guys that stay throughout the spring rush and morale perspective as well as you. You don't have to get more overhead and more trucks and more fixed assets.

Or fixed expenses. Sorry, buying assets. All right everyone, hope you have a fantastic evening. I hope you're sleeping soundly. I hope this did not disturb you or annoy you and I'm really looking forward to getting some pictures from Hawaii because Kevin Fairburn and Mindy. Kevin Fairburn, sorry. Kevin Cohen and Mindy. They went over there because they were franchisee of the year last year and they went over to Hawaii for the week. So I'm really looking forward to seeing some Augusta yellow on the beaches of Hawaii. It's gonna be fantastic. So all right guys, hope you have a fantastic rest of your week. Thursday, Friday we are going to be moving offices. I still think I'll get another mastermind in tomorrow, but if I don't, it's because we are moving everything over and there should not be a lot of of adjustment on Command Center. Everything's gonna go pretty smoothly Friday afternoon. So probably looking like 3 to 6pm There might be a slight.

Delay. But I, we, we have coverage. We have coverage mo from our virtual team. I think we'll be fine. But if there's a missed call or someone has to go and hold for 20 seconds, it's because from noon Pacific Standard Time till 5pm Pacific Standard Time, we are moving. We have teams that are shifting on and off. We have virtual teams. So I think everything's gonna be covered. But if things in the afternoon of Friday seem a little bit delayed, that's why. But we'll be right back into operation Saturday. People will be back in the office and I think it'll go smoothly. So working on making sure the Internet's cool over there at Command center. We improved it massively just to make sure that we don't have any bottlenecks in spring with hiring more people. So it'll be fun, be good stuff. I'm hoping that by me doing this, you guys don't have to go to office spaces and all this garbage. It's annoying signing leases and triple net. Way too much money for Internet. But it'll be really good. It's better that we all split that cost across 110 locations than all of us having to go buy 20003000 dollar office spaces and having to do it that way. So lots of really good feedback since a conference. Lots of of you that I think it was really good to just build rapport up with the franchise Advisory Council with a leadership team. We had several people declare state of emergency because they realized just how far out of the systems they were. And I'm hoping we can get them back in the systems. And.

I am trying to get better at the, the, the balance between being forceful and being nice and kind and giving flexibility to other entrepreneurs. I know what it's like to be an entrepreneur and want to be able to figure out things on my own and be flex and you know, do things the way I want to do them. And then on the flip side.

I know what works and what, what getting out of systems means and what it looks like down the road. And so there's that balance of like how much do I push somebody to like you must do this because I know that's right, what's right for your business versus sometimes unfortunately like I hate, I hate it. But like sometimes I can just let someone make the mistake and then they, we have to pick up the pieces. Unfortunately by them making the mistake, they waste six months a year and then it takes them a year to recover financially typically from the mistakes that were made. And so it's just, it's. I'm still learning that perfect balance. I think I'm trending more in the direction of being a little more forceful as that my tone was at a conference. But I'm always trying, I'm trying to be sensitive because I don't want to tell or force people because forcing someone into something means if I can talk someone into it, they're going to be talked out of it. And so sometimes unfortunately people do have to learn by just seeing something fail. And I hate that. I hate that because I know what that means. I mean I know what that looks like once it comes crashing down. I know what that looks like when someone has a couple hundred dollars in their bank account, they're giving us a call and they're going to the six week program. And I have no pride in being like I told you so there's none of that. But I need a figure out a better balance of when do we tell people you are the systems and in six months you are going to fail or do we ask? We try to get them on a coaching call. We try to say you got to be on P4P. We try to tell them that they're spending too much money. We try to tell them that they're, they're growing too quickly beyond their capacities.

And just being more suggestive. Right. So like when did you draw the line? So there's certain things that we've just, you know, I now kind of not fed up with just like we will not. The line gets crossed. Someone's either gonna, they're gonna get out or like they've gotta get back in the systems. So I'm still learning. I'll get better. I appreciate you all have a great rest of your day. Take care.