Mike Minutes Mastermind 01/12/2024

Hello, Augusta Nation. Hope you're doing fantastic. Let's go and get started. A couple quick announcements, nothing major.

The coaches have been getting coached the past few evenings after training. There's seven of them in town and so that has been going very well.

Let's just drop this link in here.

So I will say it is not easy to be a coach. Give them a little bit of grace in their first few. It's pretty nerve wracking to basically get live on a call with someone and have to by the end of the call give them direction and advice for their business based upon a thousand, excuse me, a thousand different variables of how much cash in the bank, when do they get started, what are their goals, what stage of growth are they in, are they in profit mode, are they in growth mode, how many employees do they have, what capacities are they at? So all different frameworks that are being taught are the things that we talk about at a destination all the time. But to be thrown all that information at you and then have to come up with good logical decision making process is not easy. So give them a little grace in their first few coaching calls. I'm sure they're fantastic. And in terms of, you know, my recommendation in terms of coaches, I would probably change up your coach once in a while just to get a different perspective. That's the whole goal and purpose of having the different coaches and creating the coaching program is so that you can get different perspectives.

And not have a limited perspective on your business. There'll be ones that you might disagree with, etc. Those are fantastic. If everyone agreed with you on how you're running your business, you probably mean that you're not making much progress and your decision making is probably too slow. And so I recommend you'll switch it up, talk to different coaches, they'll be in touch a lot. They'll be taking internal notes on your account. Also next month we'll be launching the coaching platform. So that way all of your scorecards are digitized and stored on record and you can put all of your numbers in prior to your coaching call on the coaching dashboard online. So that'll be really, really good as well. To keep organized, you don't have to worry about papers or PDFs or anything like that and should save everyone time, including the coaches as well. So they've been doing a lot of role playing and teaching frameworks etc for the coaches and I look forward to being able to get that out to everyone in the next couple weeks. So thank you to all coaches coming out here and I think most of them brought someone with them too. So it's definitely a sacrifice in their part. I do believe it is the next stage of learning and that is once you have done something, then to be able to teach it, you have to really understand it. And it's one thing to be able to do something, it's another thing to be able to explain how you did it. And so I really do believe that the coaching program will become a cornerstone to Augusta Nation as we move forward so that as you grow and you might be in that stages, you know, years 4, 5, 6, etc. You go and teach other people how to do things, you really cement the systems in your head so that when you do multiple locations, when you start getting general managers, it is like naturally baked into you to be able to teach, be able to coach, be to able to help others. And that's really what we kind of are trying to do here. So looking forward to it. I'm sure there'll be a few bumps in the road, but we will make sure we get those ironed out and the coaches are solid, so appreciate them for coming out, sacrificing their time to come learn this week. All right, let's jump into some questions.

All right, first one's Kyle Tarvin. Do you have your GMs handle things like filing on filing, employment tax, insurance, stocks etc or is that something a regional manager would handle? So regional manager typically handles anything with banking and insurance, but in terms of filing employment tax that's all through payroll which is command center. So for me it was like insurance and banking was the main thing that they the regional would handle everything else the general manager would handle. But yeah, payroll is obviously handled by command center. Alex has three questions. I apologize for using Mastermind to bring up the copilot Bugs and issues. 1. Can you please update us on when the offline support for mobile app will be released? We need this as soon as possible. The app is not working 1/3 seriously of our service area where we have poor coverage. Yeah so we were shooting for January 1st. We're about a month behind on all of that. We are relying on a third party to get this done for us and so we're just behind. So I'm still shooting optimistic for February 1st. It'll definitely done before spring rush though. 2. Time tracking is working correctly. Clock in required is unchecked. Not all the clock time is being recorded. I think I saw this one get fixed yesterday. When did you submit this question?

Okay, you submitted this two days ago I think this morning, like literally an hour ago this was deployed.

If not, feel free to submit, but I'm, I'm 90% sure this one got fixed. Basically it was if you had clock in not required, it was adding in some of the times in between drive time, et cetera incorrectly. And it's based upon your time zone. That's what was causing the issue. It looked like so 3 Command center has imported about a thousand clients from SA to Copilot for us. The sales tax rates read zeros for all of them. The use property location for tax rate feature only works for newly created client properties, but not for the thousand client list that command has imported for us. How soon should we expect a bug issue like this to be resolved? It's not a bug. Told me that they look into this. Not sure. Yeah, it's not really a bug. It's basically it's imported from service Autopilot without the tax rate. And the feature inside Copilot that uses the property location only works if you're creating the property inside of Copilot. So at least the best reimporting clients.

I would first make sure that before you reimport I would make sure that you can actually bring over the tax rate and if it was even in service autopilot I would confirm that and then make sure it actually exports correctly depending on how you have it set up in there.

But even if you literally have a thousand clients, yeah it would take you probably an hour and a half to two hours to actually put them in each one. I know it's not fun, but before you try re importing make sure that it's going to export and import the way you want on tax rates. And I have a feeling that it would be faster literally to just go through the thousand clients and honestly I would probably just filter out the people who actually do recurring service for because the majority of them are going to be aren't going to be an issue anyways.

But if you're just clicking through a thousand customers it'll literally take you a couple hours. So I'd probably default to doing that.

Alex from Stanwood Mike, is every new client that is calling or texting Command center supposed to be asking how they find us? I see entries in some clients profiles but not in others. It would help a lot of Command center did more of that. We would could roughly figure out an ROI on a road sign and some print ads, et cetera. So yeah, we do ask. The thing is a lot of your leads are going to be coming from Sources that we don't, they're not talking to the customer. So for example an estimate request form they are not required to fill in how they found out about you. And so talking to Max, same thing I think down the road once we integrate Max with Copilot to be able to integrate with that little dropdown of like where did you hear about us? He could ask that question at the very end. But again we're trying to get the customers off the phone as quickly as possible. And so right now without it being integrated, it'd be another thing that command centers like manually do.

If it's coming in from any of those places, it could potentially not be getting asked. So they are asking if they're on the phone. But again there's so many different other areas to get. Like if someone submits a door hanger, you know right. It came from the door hanger. But if they're just filling out estimate request form for a property cleanup, they're not required to fill that in.

Devin Sheridan from Red Deer. Hey Mike was For a guy doing under 250k do you recommend Simple Growth? I seen Vel's post about it in ag. I'm wondering if I should do a consulting call. Would you? If I were I met I'm spent. I spent way too much money last year on advertising. Yes, like simple growth is fantastic. The nice amount simple growth is that as things are added to sequence automations etc they'll like update things for you and all that is pretty expensive if I remember correctly. It's several thousand dollars up front and then ongoing is a few hundred bucks a month. Basically.

Once we're in February and everyone is in inside Copilot and is like familiar with the process and everything. Commands are already keeping track of all the accounts that we put in and we'll be able to through Marketplace put more automations inside your account and so we'll get there. Right now we're just mostly focusing on getting everyone in and like smooth into the systems, importing, etc. There's still some laggards that we had planned into January so they're getting those all taken care of. But then we will do most of this. So I would probably wait until like end of February. See. Okay. Is it worth getting simple growth? I think a lot of times.

You can do this like in terms of figuring out the automations et cetera. We are going to be putting more in for you and I look forward to being able to have everyone in one system because then we can actually spend time Refining and improving these instead of what's in the past has been like okay we have some people in one system, we have some people in another we have to make sure that whatever we do is going to work for both. So I really do look forward to in the future like we can really refine these, make these better, et cetera but really each location likes to customize these somewhat and so the only reason I don't like having anybody, not just, I'm not talking about simple growth here but just anybody holding the keys to the automations because like they lock them right so you can't go in and change them, make edits like it is all going through them and so I feel a little bit apprehensive to do that with automations especially if you're paying that much per month.

So that'd be my only concern But I'm not like opposed to it by no means. It's just that I would probably wait till February because we're going to go in, I'm going to probably be looking at myself going through all the automations, refining them, improving them, words, et cetera. I'll probably actually be going through all the wording of it with document Dr. Cashy of all our automations so I'd probably wait on that and then see if you still want more and see if it's worth you know, just the cost of extra cost of that. Chad from Belparatio with snow and ice covering everything limited on what I can do for winter services I was planning on coming winter services and snow removal or adding snow removal to winter services the bi weekly price twice a month and I'll provide some rule for each event on top of the event. Regular winter services I think to retain a lot more customers next time for winter because I only have a handful of snow removal customers I have the time. Does this make sense?

Yeah, it makes total sense and even in our market we do put in applying salt if it's below freezing on our winter services so even like the other day it was, it's super cold here right now where we're at and the guys still went out and they'll put down salt on the steps and honestly salt is one of those things like it'll literally only take a few minutes to put out but people have a huge amount of value attached to it because it's actually tangible something they see and they step out their door like whoa, they're so. Oh that's awesome. Obviously you'll be careful with things like wood or aggregate concrete Stuff like that. But I definitely recommend if you can't do snow plowing, at least do your winter services and include that is shoveling if there's snow on the ground and then salting if it's below freezing.

Forest. How do you do manual adjustments on P4P? Does employees stay clocked in on P4P even if they're doing shop repairs? Example starts at 8am works till 12pm Budget hours for the day is 4. They are 100% efficient for the day. Then they return to the shop and work until 4pm doing maintenance. If this is done and manual adjustment added to their P4P, their efficiency score is lower than what it actually is. P4P is right. But efficiency score says 50%. Is there a better way of entering manual adjustments? So the employee's efficiency score is right. So efficiency score is based upon only budgeted hours. It does not if it's not affected by manual adjustments ultimately because you want your team to be out in the field actually producing revenue as much as possible. So we do tie efficiency score right now only to budget hours. If you when you're doing the manual adjustment though your manual adjustment is if they're clocked in like this. In this case they would stay clocked until 4pm and then they would do a 4 but a 4 hour manual adjustment to P4P. The reason is the reason you don't want to do it to pay pay payroll bonus is because they're already. If you think about it like here, let me switch this. If you think about it as you have P4P going up and down like or going up throughout the pay period and then you have base pay going up throughout the pay period. If they are doing shop work, P4P is not going anywhere because there's no budget hours being completed. But pay, the.

Base pay is going up. So that's why you only need to manually adjust P4P during shop work. So you know, and some for some people, they do shop maintenance a little bit higher than base pay. That's fine. You'd still just, you know, four hours multiplied by your base pay. There's the dollar amount you're going to be installing for that manual adjustment. So again, the whole reason that you need manual adjustments is because when someone is clocked in, their base pay is moving up. But they're P4P is not. The only reason you would do a manual adjustment to payroll bonus is if it's something that doesn't have to do with them being clocked in. For example, a $50 bonus for a new customer, $10 bonus for an upsell, $100 bonus for referring another team member, whatever it might be. You want that disassociated from performance. So you need to lock it in with payroll bonus so they get that regardless of what their P4P is for that day.

Will CC look to make sure tax rate is included on invoices? If they are doing my invoicing, I did want to set up inside the settings so it's always done the exact same way. Because every single city literally in the US Is gonna have a different tax rate. So you just make sure it's set up in your settings correctly. Aren't you able to auto fill the cells in the in the cab in Excel, for example, typing one tax rate and dragging down to all customers, you could do this. But again, every city is going to have a slightly different tax rate. I know specifically in Sandwood Camino, for example, you're going to have 8.6, 8.7, 8.9. I think there's a 9.2 in there. So that's why the feature in Copilot based upon your address is handy.

But.

Yeah. Coming back to Chad's question, if salting or doing shoveling or snow, would you recommend to add an extra visit for this? So it just kind of depends, like, if you're doing snow services, I want to make sure that winter services is on a schedule. It's not like, oh, if it snows, we're going to be there. Because then customers expected to show up in the middle of snow storms. Like, no, no, we show up on the schedule and if there is snow on the ground, we will shovel. If it is below freezing, we will put. We will put salt out. That in my opinion, is different than snow services where I'm going to show up to your house when it's snowing. So I just be careful with that distinction. Otherwise you're going to have people on winter services like, oh, it's snowing. Why aren't you guys here? You want to make it clear, like winter services where you're going to show up on this schedule. And that's the recurrence that we're trying to build in your dependability. And then if there's snow, we will shovel it and if it's below freezing, we will put salt down. But it is not like when it snows, we're at your house within a couple hours.

So I got a guy that owes us $1,600. I want to take him to court, but have no faith the guy will show or pay if a judgment is made recommend, you know, I'd make a lien on the property before I take, try to take someone to court. Putting lien the property will prevent him from being able to sell it. So eventually you'll get paid usually because in escrow. This is why people do, you know, have title insurance and they make sure they do a title inspection check on the title when during a sales process to see if there's liens on the property. I would probably do a lien.

Yeah, can't get a lien on the property as the work was completed more than 90 days ago. Oh, that's brutal.

Yeah, you could probably do small claims court. You know, I just, I just try to minimize your. If you only have $1600 like you get a lawyer involved and immediately you're at 500 just for like a small claims court, you know, form basically. So I'd just be very careful of the fact that you might put more time and energy into this than sixteen hundred dollars. But this is again why making sure that your, your, your process for collections is not, you know, okay, six months from now I'm gonna send someone to try to get them put a lien on their property.

That's very short. Usually Most, most municipalities, 180 or 360 days. So that's really short. I've never actually heard as close as 90 days like that.

So yeah, like you know, you could look at, look into getting some small claim court stuff, stuff like that. If he doesn't show up to court, it's not necessarily means you can't put, they can't cast a judgment, bring all the information, make sure everything's documented and then you know, give it your best shot. But ultimately I think everyone should know what is that date cut off for putting a lien on someone's property? And make sure it's baked into your automations that if it's 180 or 360 days, it's like any invoices that, that overdue, you should be getting an email like hey, if I want to send this person put a lien on their property, I only have two more weeks to do it. So I, I'd probably bake that in especially at 90 days. I, I would bake that right into your collections.

Process.

All right everyone, I hope you have a fantastic day. I hope you don't have people, you have to put liens on their property. That's not fun. Sorry about that. We will stay in touch and I will see you on Monday. Take care.