Mike Minutes Mastermind 01/15/2024

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another Mike Minutes Mastermind. Get this thing kicked off. Great training week last week. Congrats to everyone that was here. Everyone passed the final exam. It's the first time any cohort has a hundred percent pass rate. So congrats to all of them. It's a good group. Almost 30 people had all the coaches in.

Seven of them. And they had coaching each night with Lee for a few hours. And it was entertaining and educational, I think for them. Entertaining in that they did role playing of real scenarios and it was pretty awesome. So.

All right.

You'Re cool. So hopefully next couple weeks we will get things rolling with the new coaching program in that same transition. We will move everything in terms of the coaching calls onto the digital platform. So we'll keep track of them much easier. You won't have to work with PDFs and it'll be a much easier platform. And then down the road we'll be able to pull numbers in from copilot to save you time on finding your close ratio revenue. All your basic KPIs for your max metrics. So looking forward to that.

Rock and roll here.

Cool.

Real quick.

It is January 15th. That means that in approximately six to eight weeks, for most of us, we're going to be hitting full tilt Spring rush. It'll sneak up on you right now, especially over the next four weeks. It's going to be very, very slow. For most of us, the next four weeks are the slowest weeks in terms of revenue across Augusta Nation as a whole. The bottom line is how you prepare for the next four weeks will likely determine the outcome of your spring rush. And so I highly encourage you to start training team members. I know the Bellingham shop is doing where they have people come in for a couple weeks, they're training them up and their start date is the second or third week of February. So again, trying to make sure there's tons of people ready to go and trained up already.

And making sure you they weed out anybody. That's not going to work out right now. I know Command center today is has, I think I want to say 10 more people starting like training. They start every, I think every one or two weeks for the next five weeks, six weeks, they're training 10 people every week. So it just this is the time to do it. This is the slow time, but it is also the time to prepare for spring rush. Waiting till end of March when it's super busy is going to be the wrong time to try to go find team members because everyone's going to be hiring, so highly recommend it. We are seeing a much better labor market in terms of finding people, people showing up on time for interviews. I was talking to Corey. He said, you know, people show up on time, they're early.

They have prepared, they have looked at the content in the, in the. They know what a destination is about, versus even a year or two ago, just like you can't get anyone to even show up to interviews. So that's, that's a positive. I think he has 19 or 20 people ready to roll for the Bellingham shop.

And so every single market's a little different, obviously, in terms of our economy, our labor market, et cetera. But I know across the board I'm seeing a softening, which obviously is not good for our overall economy and for the demand side of our business in terms of people wanting to spend money. But from a supply perspective for labor, it makes it much easier to make sure people show up to interviews, they want the job, etc. So I know in most of our markets, most of our markets are in pretty good areas, but across the board as a general whole.

People are laying off, getting laid off. The economy is soft. And this is a lot of just a year, year and a half now of having money being extremely expensive in terms of capital, interest rates being so high, so people can't spend as much, people can't borrow as much. And so.

There'S just a lot of layoffs. Even if you look at the big tech, people are laying off left and right. So Google just laid off a couple thousand people just across the board. So I think especially after we coming out of the holiday rush, whether it be Amazon workers, delivery workers, retail, I think there's going to be a ton of people being able to come into the labor market. And if you can prepare yourself now and get them before the spring rush, when everyone else is hiring, that would be extremely recommended. So.

All right, I would say in general, it usually takes like at least two to three spring rushes for you to really figure out what that demand curve looks like in terms like, you know, your start time for spring rush, you know, how many team members you're going to need, etc. But I can just guarantee you across the board, as a rule of thumb, spring rush will be hotter and heavier than you ever anticipated, and the next four weeks will be slower than you had ever anticipated. And it hits, it literally will hit in a matter of a couple of weeks. It flips so fast. And those. Whether or not you're prepared for it in the next four to six weeks determines whether or not you can capitalize on that spring rush when your customer acquisition cost is the lowest time of the year. Becca Garretson from Oswego.

Can you tell me more about the fact that I get half of all the business value? I hear this came up at trading. I should have been there, but my boss wouldn't let me go. Oh, that's so funny. Yeah. So John Garretson came to training. I have now this little slot at the end of training where I talk about making sure your significant other's on the same page. And I say, hey, look, you join Augusta because you want business and you want money.

As like as a root of it all. And so.

In the best interest of your business, I don't want you to get divorced since whoever is your significant other gets 50% of everything and usually causes financial and business hardship. So we were having a couple good jokes about that. So apparently Becca's been using that over John's head. You know, it's a good negotiation tactic. All right, Connor from Evansville. Of course I'm joking. By the way, when you take an owner's equity or draw, will this show up on the P and L or is this a balance sheet question? For example, you're an S corp, so you take a basic 500 per week salary and then you take another 500 per week in distributions. Does that negative $500 show up in the P and L because we do cash accounting or does it stay on the P and L and then we are given employees an inflated profit share because an expense, so it should affect cash? Yeah, so distributions are not a P and L expense. Wages are. So whatever you're taking in your salary, that's going to show up as wages on your P and L profit, loss statement.

Owner'S investment and owner's distributions are a balance sheet activity and should not affect profit and loss. So that's why you should be taking a fair salary from the business, because that's what's going to be based upon. However you're working in the business, you should be taking that and that makes it fair for your team in terms of profit sharing. But in terms of distributions, owner's investment, etc. That's all a balance sheet activity and will not affect the PNL of the team for profit sharing.

Iota, NFPA can or will copilot have a feature that employs has a clock in clock out separate time from time on the jobs. I had an employee lost his phone, so I had to manually Add time for the day as general work. Can we have a way to clock employees into work? Yes. When they. When they get in the app, the clock in, clock out button, the main one is like, their general work for the entire day, but then every single job they're punching in and out of that keeps track of, like, budget hours versus actual hours, but it still keeps track of, like, their entire day's worth of work. So if you need a hand with that atc, reach out to them. They can walk you through this. But it's a matter of, yes, like, general work is all clocked hours, whereas clocking in and out, every job is in between that general work, you know, throughout the day.

Yeah, it definitely does.

Cool. I think that's all. Make sure there's no other questions that came in. All right, Fantastic. Well, I hope you all have a fantastic Monday. And again, I just cannot overemphasize. The next four weeks are your slowest weeks. Expect it four to six weeks, potentially depending on your market. This is the time to prepare. This is the time to go hire people now, train them, interview them, et cetera. And then even if you like, you have a couple weeks where they don't work for you, but you have a start date, that's fine. Now you're going to be able to control your team members. They're going to start the spring rush trained up because you're going to spend the next week or two. You'll have a lot of time with them. This is the time to do that. Don't wait till spring rush. Then you're out training guys. While you're also getting tons of leads coming in, you will not be able to capitalize. You will turn your leads off. And when we say crush the rush, the goal should be that you don't have to turn off leads. And if you have to, that is like a business decision you have to make in the moment. You know, people leave unexpectedly. Crazy stuff happens in life. But the goal should be able to do as much planning as possible, because in my opinion, crushing the rush means being able to extract as much value and be able to spend as much money as you can on ads and customer acquisition costs during spring rush, because that's when you'll be able to grow the most. And the way you do that right now is you plan for it. You have the team members in place. You have them trained. You can spend way more time with them right now because you don't have a gazillion leads coming in. And. And so I know the most capital efficient thing to do is wait until like the day you need them. Well, the day you need them is not when they're going to be there. It's same thing like getting capital from the bank that when you need money, they're not willing to loan it to you. When you need team members, that's when every other business needs team members and it's going to be harder than ever to find them. So I highly recommend have a training program in place. Have the two week program if you guys, if you want to make videos of what you're doing on the Facebook group to get some ideas flowing, great. Use the, the checklist that we have inside of the.

The dashboard. Two weeks. They have to have a trainer and a trainee sign off on each task over the course of two weeks so you can get them fully trained up and then they can come back in three weeks. For example. I highly recommend it can't overemphasize that enough. And if you really want to take advantage of spring rush and grow, it is going to become, is going to become as a result of planning right now. So I wish you all the best. I hope you have a fantastic Monday. We'll see you guys tomorrow. Take care.