Mike Minutes Mastermind 01/13/2023

Hey everyone, let's go and get started. Make sure this is working correctly. Cool. Gotta drop this into the Facebook group. Alright, I saw a bunch of questions come in on the form so let me jump into those in just a second. Just gonna throw this copy onto.

Facebook group safe. Boom. Refresh copy.

Paste. All right, we're off to the races. All right. Good morning everybody. Happy Friday. This is moving day for command center.

As I say the other day, everything should be going smoothly today. If you see any sort of delay in service from command center, it would be just the last couple hours of the day. Probably 3 to 5pm Pacific Standard Time. Other than that we're. We should have good coverage. Sufficient enough for no missed calls or anything like that. Tomorrow we'll be over at the new shop, new office hours will be the same. Everything should be rolling pretty smooth.

All right, let's roll into present questions. Boom.

All right.

A landscaper north of me is getting out of recurring moment he wants. He's wanting to give me 20 accounts for free. They are locked up. Locked in two year contracts. Wowzers. Trousers is about a 30 minute drive 18 miles Mercy North. But should be all be doable one day with one truck of one or two guys. Do you think it would be a good idea to absorb these clients? If so, what paperwork should I fill out? Should I require him to sign a non compete? How do I make sure I can raise prices on those clients in the spring if they are currently in a contract?

So most contracts are null and void when the one of the owners transfer.

Equity. So your your contracts they could back out immediately. What I would personally do in this case, if they're giving you for free, there's no point in having him sign a non compete because that he's giving to them for free. So if you wanted to do these because there's a solid route and it's not in someone else's territory, there's something you could do.

I. You know driving that far is not a great idea in my opinion. But if you have them really tight and you could do one truck, one guy for a day even if there's 10, 15 of them, maybe it's a good thing for now down the road you're gonna have to raise their prices probably to absorb and make sure the guys can make P4P because of the drive. 30 minute drive is an hour a day. It's gonna be tough for them to be efficient on.

That being said, in terms of paperwork he's giving to you for free, I wouldn't worry about that either. When you're not paying for things. Don't worry about this stuff. I would also recommend if you have everyone else in your database on per cut pricing, try to switch everyone over. You have nothing to lose. He's giving them two for free. All right? They can jump out of their contract anyways because it's a transfer in equity. So just be open. Honestly, like, hey, we do per cut pricing. So that way you pay more when you, you use our services more and you pay less when you don't see us as often. You could try that method and you have nothing to lose because they're literally free. So if half of them Cancel, you'd have 10 good clients. You'd still have a one person, one day route. You can make that work. You could do that or you could try to put them up into contracts. But again, I would not recommend doing that if you are not already doing contracts with all your other customers. You're adding too much complexity to the business for a few clients. Honestly, I would literally not spend much time on this. He's giving to you for free. There's 20 of them. If half of them cancel out, that's 10. You're going to get that many customers in a week or two in spring Rush. Don't spend too much mental energy on this one. In my opinion, they're not great clients in terms of where they're at, in terms of how far away they are. And the fact of the matter, if you're going out of your systems that you have for every other customer, other hundred, 150, whatever it is, you're going to get yourself into complexity issues in Spring Rush. Also, is it possible to read people's names out loud when you're. Okay, yeah, I can do that. You're listening when you're driving. Okay, sorry. This is Garrett from Glendale, Colorado. That's a great point. I will read people's names on Mastermind. Sorry about that. Great. Paul.

Kevin tanis from Bloomington, New Jersey. I did 130,000 last year. I'm gunning for 320 this year with two trucks and four employees including myself. Do you think it is possible to make that revenue jump? I have 10k poured into marketing with lots of yard signs left over from last year as well as utilizing one click estimate emails with 330 contacts. I'm counting on a 20x return on my marketing spend to make that jump to 200k. It's my second spring rush with Augusta, which I understand is a time of massive growth. But I Guess I'm also concerned about recession limiting my growth. Yeah. So this is the deal. The 20x return on your marketing dollars. When we use that number, you're assuming that every single lead comes from your marketing. What's going to happen in your second spring rush? And the reason why we always talk about this is because now you finally have some brand awareness. You should be ranking well on Google, and therefore you should not have to have to spend money for every single one of your leads. So I think as long as your personal capacity is there, you, you should be able to hit this with quote, unquote, relative ease. Because if you simply look at what you're doing at the end of the year versus the beginning, the beginning of the year, you're making 2,3000amonth. End of the year, I imagine you're probably doing 15, 18, $19,000 a month. If you literally just take that, what you ended off at, and you did that for every month of 2023, you'd basically be hitting your goal, right? So that ramp, you literally, that ramp up from 3,4000, you're probably doing next to 2025. You literally could just do that for the next 2023 and grow slightly and you would hit this goal, right? So I don't think the growth is not going to be the issue. It's a matter of can you handle that much growth in terms of employees, the trucks, and personal capacity to be able to do this? Because your second spring rush, you're not going to have to spend 10k in the marketing, in my opinion, to get this to happen. So just keep some powder dry. But I don't think you'll need to spend that much because your second spring rush will be getting a lot more web traffic and referrals compared to your first year, where every single lead does come from.

Paid marketing.

Next question comes from Kyle Tarvin. Do you pay to have your GMs go to conference every year? Yes, I do.

It's a requirement. We make them. They have to come. Kevin, Bloomingdale, follow up with that. Oh, this is Kevin from Bloomingdale, New Jersey. Follow up with that last question. I want all that revenue to be simple services. Mowing, weeding, mulch, push trimming. I understand faster growth sometimes requires larger projects, but do you think I can grow to grow by 200,000 with only simple services? All right, so let's just break down the math, right? Let's assume that 100,000 of that's going to be mowing and 100,000 that's going to Be other projects. Okay, so what that's going to mean is going to be if we have $2,000 annual value per customer for recurring like mowing, that would then mean that you need 50 new mowing customers to get 100 grand. And then if we assume that an average project size is 1000 bucks, that would mean that you need to have 50 projects for the other a hundred thousand. Right. So 100,000 new revenue for mowing, that would mean we need 50 new customers for mowing for projects at $1000 a pop doing things like mulch, bush, trimming property. Thousand dollars a pop on average, you need another 50 of those. So the question is, can you, in the spring rush over the course 90 days, get about two, sorry, one new mowing customer every two days? Okay. If you do that, you'd literally get to that, that hundred thousand and then can you get one project a week at a thousand bucks? If you break it down like that, you'll be, ah, no problem. I got this. Especially as you head into spring rush, it's simply going to come down to whether or not you're able to take on the massive demand that will influx in your second spring rush. Because now you're going to get leads that are no longer you're able to throttle because it's referrals and it's web traffic. Whereas in the past, if you were too busy, you just stopped marketing and less leads would come in. So this is what typically happens in everyone's second spring rush is why the majority of everyone throttled leads last spring is because you start to get leads that are not paid and you can't throttle them down by just stopping, stopping your marketing spend. All right, so good question. But yeah, break down the math on like this is a great thing. Like, hey, I want to grow by 2, I need to grow by 200,000. Great. How much of that's going to be recurring revenue? How much of that's going to be project based revenue? Look at last year. What percentage of your revenue was mowing? Oh, 50%. Great. That means 100,000 next year is going to need to come from mowing and 100,000 leads to come from these simple projects. And just run the math on that.

The goal with Copilot is to be able to know exactly what your annual value is for mowing customers and then your annual value for project based jobs. So that way that math you could literally do immediately. I'm just kind of rounding some numbers there for you, but Copilot will be able to tell us exactly what those two numbers are.

Max Harwood from Burnaby. In the Copilot ad you mentioned the ability to pay employees daily via debit. Why is this valuable from the employer's perspective, especially if the Employee is on P4P which is calculated over a two week pay period rather than daily. Would we pay the employee their base rate daily? Great point. So this is probably something in 2024 we're shooting for. There's a program we are working with with MasterCard that allows us to happen. We'd have to sync it up with P4P. What my thought process is is that the team member would only be able to take the money on a daily basis, about 50 to 70% of what their base pay is. So that way the rest, because obviously there's taxes, et cetera. And then you can't give them any of performance dollars until the end of the pay period because that money is on the table for damage cases and yellow slips. So the goal, the reason this is is because unfortunately the vast majority of our entry level guys starting on the field, they do live paycheck to paycheck and literally a $200 tire could potentially not allow them to get to work. It could be a big problem for them. So it's very helpful for the team member I like in terms of what, why it's valuable from the employer's perspective. It's not good for you, but it's helpful for the employees. A lot of them at the very entry level, this is a very big deal for them to be able to ensure that a 200, $300 expense is not going to put their family in jeopardy and they will value this a lot. It'll also reduce any sort of asking for pay advances because they'll have the ability to dip into their paycheck if needs be. It's not something that I would recommend and it's something like optional meetings. I'd probably be telling my team like hey, try not to use this. It's a bad habit to get into. It's bad for budgeting. Then you're going to put yourself behind on your next paycheck because now you're getting less. But it's definitely something that especially from attracting talent is going to be a very, very big deal.

And it makes P4P even more important and more.

Tangible to them because they every single day you get to see how much dollars they earned and then it can, it'll literally tell them how much they can take out that day. It's going to be 20, 24 before we have the technology for the one, the debit card. In my opinion, it'll probably be the end of 24 by the time we integrate it correctly with P4P because that is all custom code that no one else is doing. Whereas the thing, the pay per day everyday pay is something that quite a few people do using MasterCard. The part that we have to integrate with P4P is going to be a little challenging. So.

All right, thank you for calling it. But yeah, it's a retention and talent attraction tool. That's all it is.

Next question. Garrett from Glendale, Colorado. Corrections, 27 clients, they are all weekly mowing and have a treatment package and or annual cleanups. I am getting these customers for free. He just wants to refer him, wants me to refer him. Landscape construction work, they are all within a five mile radius, but the chunk in the bottom left, the attached photo are all within 1 mile radius. All right, let's go and open up the floor photo.

Let's take this one away.

There. All right, so these are all the customers. Cool. There's definitely some good route density here. I would like these customers the most because they're closest to you versus these ones that are more spread out and they're further away from you. Okay, but good to know. All right, back to the question. Let me share my screen again. Present Share, Screen, Window, Chrome, Tab, Mastermind, share. Okay, what was your question here? Oh, you're just adding clarity. Okay, so there's 27 customers. Great. They got all these other packages. Awesome. So again, what you could do is send them an a la carte type estimate and say, hey, we don't do contracts. We like to charge you as we do services so that when we're not doing services you have a lower bill. No one's going to complain because right now you're in a low period. So their first bill is going to be probably half or a third of what they're usually paying. So you actually are going to have. It's a good time to do this to switch from annual contracts to buy to per service if that's what you want to do. Again, I would only recommend that if all of your other customers are per cut pricing, don't try to add some monkey wrench in by doing some of these random customers as packages. You're just asking for complexity. It'll make sense for the next six to 12 months and then next year you'll be kicking yourself in the butt because you got a whole bunch of random contracts and then you have some on per cut. And just going to get very confusing. I just recommend stick with one to the other. And if you have, if you're getting them for free, if you have 27 customers, you'll probably lose 10 of them because they want contracts only. But the per cut pricing, you can adjust it to what your pricing is without really having to quote unquote raise the prices. It's just given the per cut pricing and the per package pricing, go to these 27 clients and in one day knock out all of the per a la carte pricing for their treatments, for their cleanups and for their mowing. And you say hey, these are the services you currently have. We do things a little different here. We don't do contracts. And the reason this is going to work well for you now is their January and February bill are going to be like half of what they've been paying. And they're like oh this is great right. So you'll get, get your foot in the door. They'll be able to see your service, see the improvements compared to what he's doing. And then when their bigger bills come in spring rush, they should already be established with the brand and be okay with it. Ken, Next question is coming from Ken. What does the Copilot app look like on the App Store? When can we download it? Can we use it alongside of the regular CRM that we are on to get used to it? What are the prices if any? The prices are on the website already in terms of whether or not you can download the app, you cannot. It's not going to be available till February. I'll let everyone know as soon as it is available. I would not recommend using alongside any of your CRMs right now. I would definitely download it, have the free option, check out the features, get comfortable with it. Middle of the year we'll start training at command around it. October, November we'll start transitioning and then we'll have a hard deadline where everyone has to switch over. I'll switch over my locations prior several months to make sure any sort of bumps are out of the road. What's nice is when there are bumps in the road we can fix them immediately. So yeah, I'll make sure the roadmap is pretty clear as we go throughout 2023 but but definitely download the free version. See the.

Features as we roll them out and you can check them out. I'll be keeping you guys abreast of things pretty much live though. Next question. Vlad from Winter Garden.

We showed up for a one time property cleanup project today after the customer accepted their quote with command center and had a card on file. After arriving at the property.

This morning, the project was already completed by a different contractor. What in the world? I did confirm we sent a welcome and thank you email informing them that their project would be not would be completed Friday, January 13th. Is there any way we can charge the customer for the lost wages since we did not perform the property cleanup today? He attempted to call the customer. We attempted to call the customer this morning and we left a voicemail. We do not have anything stated on our quotes about cancellations. So this is why having the 50% down is so important because that is non refundable. If they cancel and you can put that in your estimate, there's really no recourse if you don't have anything in your estimate that says because in a court of law what's going to happen a consumer rights will stand up for them because the services that you pitched in the estimate were not delivered. So therefore it'd be considered fraud to charge their card. So a chargeback will always go to them in this case if you charge their card and they did a chargeback because the agreed upon services were not delivered. So there's no win on this one. Unless in your quote you are literally saying cancellations you cost 50% or whatever that is or you say there's a non refundable deposit and at 50% I would recommend doing that in super to be able to have that where they have to pay for the 50% down before the project is accepted. But again a threshold of say 5 or $600 which it sounds like this is what it is. It's very petty sometimes to ask for that from a customer.

So in copilot like the goal is to be able to have it where when someone clicks accept in order for them to accept they have to have that 50% down deposit. And I would probably say because it's going to be much more seamless with stripe just to be able to have it where it is on everything. Like look, if you have any one time project where you're we're going to get 50% down and then by having that card on file we know that we can pay that, we can charge them again and they can't go in like on service autopilot like take the card off. Once they put the card into stripe it's on their profile. In stripe you can see the card, you can see everything. So yeah, it stinks. It's happened to us before too. It's these small property Clamps where you're not requiring 50% down and you get burned. And sometimes the customer just forgets that they accepted two quotes. Honestly, I know it sounds like I'm just being optimistic but sometimes people do, they just forget like hey, I accepted one quote and then so and so came by and said they can do it today and I had them do it and they forget to cancel with you. So don't take it too hard. I wouldn't like change your lose sleep over this. It's going to happen occasionally if you're not collecting money on the upfront for anything. I think down the road we just got to really nail the deposit process and make it seamless as possible. So that way it is extremely easy for the customer to go put that deposit. It's clear that it's non refundable and then that way if they cancel, it's easy. Even if it's four or five hundred dollars. You say your last name.

All right, next question.

I have signed up for Twilio but can't find the access token. Bottom of bottom of Update Twilio settings page on Zooper. Do I need it by chance? You will need the access token.

I'm assuming you're watching the tutorial and it's not where it's supposed to be on the video because I showed how to set up the Twilio account and connect it to Zooper. So if you're having trouble with that and you cannot see the access token, definitely reach out to supportuper co and see if they are seeing this across the board or if this is something that you just need to wait on. I have seen sometimes when you set up your Twilio account it takes a while for the access code to be visible. But it used to be instant like in that video I made in the tutorials. It's instant. So reach out to Zooper support, see what potentially might be going wrong. Especially if you've already set this up a few days ago and it's still not showing up. I'm assuming you're watching that video on the Academy and it's just not reflecting what you're seeing in the video. Okay, let me just quickly see who this is.

This is Anthony. Okay.

Okay. This is for Anthony. Mike, we are trying to do more Insta quotes, also known as OTP over the phone estimates this year rather than marketing and Google Ads. I know you spoke about something like this at conference. Should I just focus on Insta quotes or both? Okay, so just remember Insta quotes is just over the Phone estimates. It is not a marketing mechanism. It is simply the format which we the way at which you give the estimate so over the phone estimates is once they get the marketing, once they get the Google Ads they're calling in, that's when it's being done over the phone instantly. Alright, so insta Quote is not necessarily a marketing method. It is simply a way of getting the estimate done.

Will you ever, ever implement all locations having cart on file for every customer for work to be performed or keep it open ended for each owner to make the decision? Once we have Copilot we will likely make it where some some information has to be on file in order for service to be completed. But what's cool is you at your CRM level will be able to make that distinction. Where was service Autopilot? You can't do that right now. So I would recommend having a card on file for all clients just for them to accept a quote, just to have something on file that has been pre authorized.

But right now we have so many people that cannot get into service offline. Set up an account correctly. It's a, it's a hurdle that potentially might lead to a lower close ratio. So we haven't enforced it. But down the road we probably will once we make it super easy for that process to take place.

But Copilot will be where we can control that process a little bit better and give you the functionality to make that a seamless deposit for the customer and a better experience for just putting a card on file.

All right, I think that's all I got. Next time you'll see me will be Monday and we'll be in the new office. Moving day. Here we go. Have a great Friday everyone. Have a great weekend and we'll see you next week. Take care.