Mike Minutes Mastermind 01/16/2024

Good morning, destination. Hope you're doing fantastic. Let's kick things off.

Quick announcement. I made note of it on the Facebook group last night, but we did lock up a preferred vendor relationship with Echo and Shindawa and they are offering us 20% off all their tools. And that includes if you just buy one piece of equipment. So like one trimmer, one blower. So we did this specifically to make sure that you actually are able to use it or test out Echo if you've never used it in the past. And you don't have to buy like five of them to get a fleet discount or anything crazy like that. So, you know, save a hundred bucks on a trimmer, 120 bucks on a blower might be useful. We are working on steel, but we've been working with them, trying to get them to join for over a year and a half. The national dealers and the ones that have all these dealer networks, it takes quite a while to like, raise, wrap up actual discounts and meaningful discounts. Like, we don't like when it's like, oh, like it'll be 5% off or it'll be.

You know, 20 off once you buy five or 10 of them. So we try to make sure it's. It's helpful for all of us in terms of the Echo dealership or Echo partnership, If you want 20 off on all of their commodities, things like trimmer line, lubricants, etcetera, you do have to just buy them in case quantities, but most of us buy them in case quantity is anyways. So go to your local dealer. You should be able to get in there right away and have that. I did attach in the Facebook group the actual document from their. Their national salesperson as well as Lee will probably be sending it out later today or tomorrow to everybody in your email inbox just to make sure everyone has that. But yeah, check out the deals page if you haven't for a while. There's new stuff on there. Uh, and we're trying to. We're constantly working on them and these now, the bigger brands that take quite a while to actually close up deals and get everything signed and everything. So shout out to Lee for working on that one. He's been working on it since that one probably a year and a half too, almost. But really wrapping it up at Equip Expo last year.

And then working on it till now. So just wrapped it up late last night, got it sent out. But yeah, we are working on these other brands, the bigger ones, steel, et cetera. It just, man, it Takes a long time, so will keep chipping away and hopefully as we add more locations, it'll get more incentivizing for them.

All right.

There we go. Okay, present.

Let's jump into some questions.

Question numero uno.

From Alison Modesto. Hey Mike, what is the best way to invoice per man per minute visits? In Copilot, we have a few visits outside of initial mows where we use this kind of billing. The problem I am running to is that once the visit is marked complete, it automatically invoices $0. And the only workaround that I have been able to find is deleting the zero line item on the pending invoice in their account and create a new one time invoice with the same verbiage. Is there an easier, better way of doing this? What about for customers who want to be billed monthly and not per service? So I don't do a lot of these billings per minute. So let me just caveat that. Feel free to talk to ATC and actually like show them what you're trying to accomplish. And they'll probably have a much better workflow than I do because I don't do this at all. But what I would probably say is that specific customer where like, because it sounds like there's just a couple of these, go into their settings and change their invoices so they're not sending out right away. If that's how you're doing it, just have it where they create a pending invoice and then you can go in there, edit that line item instead of having to delete it and create a new one. And so if you're having your invoices, you know, obviously the big difference with Copilot is you can have auto send and auto charge and technically never touch your invoices again. The question is, am I doing it my locations? Not yet. I want to see at least one more month because we just finished that feature like two, three weeks ago to where is nail bound. But you can technically like set your invoice settings to auto send, auto pay and never touch, you know, have to send out invoices or anything. So I would just say if you're going to do the per minute permanent thing for other things besides like your initial MO's, I would just go into those specific customers and change their settings so that that doesn't happen because you can change an individual level in addition to the system wide settings.

Eric Largo from Florida. Hey Mike. Last week on Friday, January 12, Forest was asking my efficiency scores being Affected on days with manual adjustments. I've run into the same issue, had the same question, but haven't had many adjustments to make a difference with one employee. Here's a time card from Friday with a manual adjustment as an example. Picks attached. First is the time card. Second is the payroll. Hopefully I'm not missing something, but would appreciate taking a look and confirming. Okay, solo day. They work seven hours. Budget hours for this five. Shop time is 2.78. Great. They got 7.21 budget hours divided by seven clock hours. There's your 73% efficiency rating. Okay. Efficiency without the extra shop time is 119%. Yes. So again, you are 110% correct. The efficiency score is going to be based upon the budget hours. It is not going to take into account manual adjustments.

There's like, reasons as to why we should and there's reasons as to why we should not include manual adjustments in someone's efficiency score. The bottom line is, when you actually look at the efficiency of your organization, manual adjustments don't bring in revenue, whether it be yellow slips, shop maintenance, etc. So if you actually want to do the efficiency of a team member, you're going to look at budget hours. However, there's going to be times when you have people do shop meetings and if they're like the kind of the scapegoat scapegoat of shop maintenance, it's going to look like they have less efficiency. However, their P4P won't be affected because you the manual adjustments. Like, that's why the manual adjustments are there. And so you can explain it to them like, hey, your efficiency score is going to look less because you're doing work that's not producing budget hours and revenue. But we're manually adjusting your P4P to make sure it's not affecting you negatively. So.

I remember like thinking about this and whether or not we should include manual adjustments inside of this. But it came to the point where, for example, you don't want a manual adjustment for like a bonus to affect someone's efficiency score. There's so many different ways we use manual adjustments. And unless we actually start categorizing like the 20 different ways that you can do manual adjustments and like having all sorts of customizations and stuff like that, it would get pretty hairy. So just so you know, yeah, you're 100, right? Like the reading is 73%. Then you just tell the employee like, hey, budget hours not being produced. It doesn't take into account your efficiency score. But your P4P gets manually adjusted, your actual pay. But you want to make sure that you aren't fudging that number, because otherwise you could be like, oh, I'm super efficient. And then you actually drill into it, and you are spending way too much time on shot maintenance. And so that's why I don't want to include manual adjustments into your efficiency score, because ultimately this. That that number is so important across your whole organization. And you could be super efficient if you were. If you were including yellow slips, manual adjustments, shot maintenance, all this other stuff into your efficiency score. You now all of a sudden have an inflated efficiency score, and you're like, oh, wow, we're doing great. We have like an 80, 90% efficiency score. Or in this case, the difference would be between 73% and 120% efficiency. And so those are two very different businesses, when in reality it's just that the second one has maintenance and shop time included in it and can really be deceptive in terms of how efficient your team actually is and lead you to the wrong conclusions. In terms of how efficient you are, I'd rather you see is the 73%, because that's the real number, like budget hours divided by clocked hours. And it just so happens that manual adjustments, yellow slips, shop time, et cetera, increases clocked hours, thereby reducing your efficiency. Right. So I understand from an individual perspective, it seems that it makes sense to, like, why can't I make sure that their numbers get inflated with that manual adjustment? But in the long term, like, the number you need to know as an owner gets inflated and can really actually hide issues in the business.

Marcus from Redmond.

What are some things you look for in a business credit card? After buying a truck trailer? I may be low on cash, going to spring, so I'm thinking of getting a $10,000 line limit card to have just in case. Also, you think it's a better idea than a credit card?

I don't think I would qualify for a line of credit since I've been in business just one year. Thank you. For context, I have $40,000 in cash right now. Truck trailer purchases will take it down to 20k or so for the spring.

Yeah. So you might be able to get a line of credit if you just collateralize that line of credit with your current equipment. Even if you don't have the two years of business you say, hey, look, I have $50,000 worth of equipment. Can I get a $20,000 line of credit? And I'll collateralize my equipment just for the sake of Getting. You might get away with that, I would say. Also, though, if it's gonna be super short term, you might need it. A credit card might be easier to get and cheaper. In terms of business credit card, typically they have higher limits. Like getting a personal credit card, you usually top out around $20,000. If you're going to, like, a credit union as a. As a, you know, line of credit on a personal credit card, if you go to, like, American Express, you can get it higher, but then now you're paying for that. Um, so in general business credit cards, you can just go way higher. Um, you get hundreds of thousands of dollars on a credit card. That's your limit, as long as you're paying it off consistently and you have a good credit score. Um, so I think you could probably get a business credit card for five grand pretty quickly. Probably over the next couple months, we build that up to 10 or 15 grand as a limit, assuming you keep paying it off, you have good credit, et cetera. So that's probably the simplest, cheapest option. Um, I'd get one through Capital One, get their, like, more premium one. So that way the credit limit will go higher with time. If you get a lot of these basic credit cards, they're not built for 50, 60, $100,000 limits. They're built for five, 10, maybe 20. So I just keep that in mind. Like, Capital One, you'll basically sign up, sign up for it, and you'll immediately get a limit. But usually, like, the limit, they'll give you like, two, three, four grand. And then you got to build it up over time. I always make the mistake of forgetting to unlock my credit, and then I get a super low limit. I get super mad about it. And I remember, like, I have a couple online softwares for like, what's it called? Identity fraud or identity theft or whatever. And I lock all my credit scores. I always forget to unleave them. So annoying.

Allison Modesto in essay we were able to subtract a down payment from a final invoice for projects in Copilot. I'm not finding a way I can do that. I've mentioned this as a port, but they do not understand the way we do things at Augusta. What would you recommend doing? Well, because having to subtract a down payment from a final invoice is a very clunky way of doing things, and that's what we always did in service. Autopilot in Copilot have a deposit threshold. So that way the credit is applied to their account, and then you can distribute that credit however you want. So you can move that credit to that invoice and either a, this is on the roadmap or we've already completed it. You can, you can decide where. If credits are automatically assigned to existing invoices, I think it's already a setting, I'm pretty sure. So again, talk to air traffic control, and instead of saying, hey, I want to subtract a down payment from a final invoice, say, hey, I want to do projects. I have a deposit up front. How do I set that up? So that way, when I send the invoice at the end of the job, that is already deducted from the final invoice, and that's super easy. The deposit threshold makes this way easier than having to send an Invoice doing the 50% as a line item on service autopilot and then resending it again. This makes it super simple. And it's like all in one, one thing. So feel free to, you know, have a call with them. They'll walk you right through it. But again, instead of thinking about, how do we take what I did in the past and I do it the same, think about what's my end goal? Which in this case is like, I need to get an invoice paid on a big project that has an has a deposit already. How do I get that paid? Start with the end goal and then work your way to it. Instead of trying to be like, how do I have the exact same path?

Because, you know, honestly, like, the way we used to do projects is. Was pretty clunky when it came to deposits.

Mr. Anonymous. Efficient score is different. You didn't look at the photos attached on Friday's Mastermind. Let me take a look.

I need to zoom in.

Whoa. Oh, oh. Okay, let me see here.

7%. 79%.

Adjustment approved.

Adjustment approved.

57. These are different time cards. Your timeout is changing here. So sorry. There's a picture that is being shown. This is the other picture that's being shown. These are two different time cards. Look at the timeout. So this one's 5:57 to 2:30. This one is 12:50, 12:54. So your shift length is changing from 6 hours to 8 hours. That's why the efficiency score is going down.

If you think there's a problem, like, as to why that's happening, feel free to reach out to support on P4P. But based on my quick analysis, I am seeing that all things are held constant besides just your shift length. So, yes, your efficiency score will drop because you have more clocked hours.

I think that's all the questions for today. Is it? Is it? It is. All right, everyone, I hope you have a fantastic day.

One cool announcement. I have, actually. I know it's not. I'll mention this tomorrow morning too, because I know I usually announce at the beginning. I am getting a full time person on the media team. It's going to really help bolster the social media on the Augusta pages.

It's very difficult to create social media to make it vanilla enough for all of our locations. However, we do think we can do some really cool stuff.

Think in terms of employee interviews, some more video stuff. You're gonna see one of those coming out this week. But it's just. It's very difficult to make good posts that are vanilla enough for all of us. But I am gonna be getting someone full time to start working on this problem, both for my personal brand as well as Augusta. We don't really have the. I'm just using the media team's money essentially to do it because we don't have it for a full time person enough for a full time person to be working on just the three posts that we make for you guys every week. But they'll work on my stuff and then I think we can really improve Augusta. So probably in like by end of February, you should see a marked increase of creativity on the posts that we make for you on your automatic posts on Facebook, Google, et cetera. So looking forward to that. All right, everyone, hope you have a fantastic day.