Mike Minutes Mastermind 01/20/2023

Hey everyone, hope you're doing super well. Let's go ahead and get things kicked off. Go ahead and drop this link over into the Facebook group. One second here. I had several questions come in yesterday. If you didn't see it, Dylan left a good video on the Facebook group and that was if you are trying to get work. January, February for most of us is our slowest months before spring rush because a lot of the cleanup side of things have been completed from the fall already. However, if you're trying to stay busy, one thing they did that was really cool is just run a filter of all the people that last year from December, January and February that did projects going through that list. And you could potentially, if you look at the quote from last year, you potentially send the exact same quote. If.

The service they did last year were just standard like bush trimming, weeding, things like that, you're likely it's going to be the same price for a property cleanup. If you have a small list, you might just mock them all out as drive bys in a day or two and very high likelihood of getting those sold because if they did the same thing last year at the same time, probably good chance they're going to want to do the same thing this year and you could literally drive by their property, confirm that it's about the same, send them the quote over and say hey, saw you did this last year, would you like to go get this done again? I think it's brilliant and honestly down the road I think it'd be a cool idea to have some sort of automation around this and that is people who have been inactive on services for a year and they did a service a year ago that was maintenance based, having some sort of automation to remind you, like to reach out to them down the road. We could definitely do figures, something like that. But for now when you are slower because the problem with that sort of automation is those come in during the spring rush when the majority of your clients are served, don't really help you out. However, if you're able to do a filter of like everyone that did December, January, February, March and even like even into March where it's like hey, it's kind of spring rush. But if I can pull that demand forward and do them in January, February when I'm slower, the value of that revenue is more to you. Because in March, April, May, June, you have so much jobs coming in, you don't really, there's not much value to you as much as revenue now where you could be able to get employees on sooner and get them trained up while doing revenue producing tasks. So just keep that in mind. I think it's a brilliant strategy. So shout out to Dylan and April on that one. Let's go ahead and show this here. Boom. All right, questions first one Forest just set up a performance Max ad campaign. I received an email about conversions attached below and don't know if I set it up right. I followed the steps in your video. Is there a way you can look at this to see if it's. If it is set up accurately? Let's see.

Okay. You do not have your conversion set up. That's why, that's why it says zero. Yeah. To measure your convert, your auto tagging system. Yep. Okay. And then last one image.

Yeah. They're all proved. Yeah. So on, on the. Here, I'll show this real quick because everyone has been having questions about this. So if you go to augustafranchise.com login, we go to edit your webpage. I'm just gonna log into some random person right now. Give me a second.

Okay. Yeah. Corpus Christi. Okay, great. So from here, when you're inside of here, if you want to get your conversions, you can go open up a Google Analytics account and then give us the code here. Google Analytics has been very open about us and GA4 Google Analytics for that. Their information is spotty. They've been pretty clear about this in terms of their traffic stuff because all this privacy stuff and so many browsers being able to block them, it's harder and harder for them to track. But if you go to support.

Oh man, I gotta put this in sick. Let me just make something up and see what happens. It might not. Let me through. There we go. Cool. Here, add something. All right, so we go. Here.

Let me make sure.

There it is. Access to my actual Google Analytics account. Just submit this if you want to get into your actual Google Analytics account. If you're having problems with that. But if you give us the code, if you already have your Google Analytics you got in, you set it all up, Give us the code snippet and we can put that on your page. If you want to try to contract conversions. But trust me, those conversions have been very spotty from Google recently. So. Yeah, excuse me. If you want actual access, you just click submit. It goes directly to the team webgustalongerservice.com and they're going to send you access again. You probably already have access. If you've been looking at this, you can get a snippet from your Google Analytics account. Send that over to webustinlongerservices.com and then we can put it in. So you can track conversions.

But you haven't done anything wrong. To answer your question for us, you've set up your account correctly. It's the conversion side that's incorrect. Just change on here. Go like click right here. Change conversions to like cost per click. I'd be looking at cost per click. I'd be looking at your snap. Now I'm forgetting off the top of my head.

Your conversion ratio.

Not your conversion rate because we don't have that set up. Sorry. You're gonna want. What do I have cost per click? Oh, percentage of impressions that click. So impression count. Because I want to see what percentage of people that see the ads are clicking on them. If it's above 1%, typically it's a well performing ad. So as some benchmarks do, you know, like what? Like good and bad. If you're getting above 1% on.

Your people that see your ad versus clicking on it, that's typically a well performing ad. Again, remember in our industry demand fluctuates so much so it's not like it's a product that is year round. So therefore just keep that in mind when you're looking at what percentage of people that see your ad are clicking on it. But that's the one that if it's above 1% typically means you're doing really well. If it's like under half a percent typically means you really need to take a look at your titles, you need to look at the videos that are playing and it's not performing as well. Again, during the winter that's probably going to be a pretty normal number compared to spring rush where you could probably get one and a half percent in terms of the percentage of people that see the ad. Like impressions that convert into a click. So but typically the text titles are the biggest driving factor of those. Like are they grabby enough? And things like that. So again that's why there's like. What's nice about Google is you can put like five or 10 of them in and then it'll test them. All right, so hope that made sense. Sorry I kind of messed up there. Forest. We did that one. Okay, next one is Thomas Salazar. Can we get an updated tutorial on setting up Google Maps campaigns? The older version available is not showing how to navigate around the current options. I'm concerned I'm going to mess things up and waste precious dry powder. Yeah, I'll do another one. I literally did that one only a month and a half ago. So yeah, they're just changing almost every week they're making changes to it. So I believe that honestly down the road they'll nix a lot of these like Google Ads. The video doesn't make it where you do Google campaigns and then you can delineate inside of it. So they're making changes literally every single week. Unfortunately, it makes it where it's like the tutorials get old pretty fast because I made that one late fall. So I will make that a note though and make it one of those for you. Yes, I'll let everyone know in the Facebook group once that's been updated. Ter Lek Boone's Creek, Tennessee Hey Mike. So last year I worked at 60 hours per hour. Since I started in May, I did not reach capacity. Last season I was up to three days full of mowing. Would you raise hourly rate this spring to 70 to 80 per hour or would you stay at 60 since because I'm not at capacity yet, our rate seems low compared a lot of the guys around me. Completely depends. Yeah, so like you started late last season. Really your site didn't start ranking till like July and August just because you started late in the in the spring. So I do expect you to get pretty overwhelmed with work this year. What I would do though is you can grow to capacity and then raise your prices on existing customers and new customers if you wanted to. What you could do is raise prices on new customer. Incoming only. But I personally just knowing your location, I would try to fill your schedule as fast as possible. So just keep it at 60. You can always raise prices and if you have tons of leads coming in and you're overwhelmed with work, you're not going to have any problem raising prices because you don't mind if people stay away and if your close ratio goes down. So fill the capacity, then raise prices. Raising prices should always become a thought process at capacity if you're way below capacity. Remember about what we talked about like everything between capacity and your rep total revenue. Everything between your total revenue capacity and what you're currently making, that's where all the profit is. So don't restrict that revenue in between there by saying, oh, I'm going to increase prices. No, fill the capacity, then raise prices. So it is a, you know, do step one, fill the capacity, step two, then raise prices.

And yes, that creates a little more pain. If you don't like raising prices on people and you feel bad about that because you will have to raise prices this coming Spring if you're not planning to get another truck and employees and all the rest of it.

How can I train someone to trim bushes if I'm not good myself? I recently got a call back from a client saying I didn't trim his bushes. I definitely did and I wanted a refund. How would you handle this? I have had a helper that used to trim the bushes very professionally, but he was only part time. Also, I really hate trimming bushes, lol. I think partly, I'm just gonna guess on this that you hate trim bushes because you're not good at it. A lot of times I see people saying they hate things and it's honestly not because they're bad at it. It's not. Or sorry, it's not because they don't like the work or they don't like the action of whatever is required. It's because they're not good at it. It's like when people say they're not good at math, it's not because they're not good at math, it's because. It's not because they don't like math, it's because they're not good at math. And so very important to make this delineation when you say things about yourself like this, like you hate trimming bushes. I don't think you hate trimming bushes. I think you're not good at trimming bushes. Therefore you hate them because it leads to client callback and feedback like you just got from a customer. And if you feel like you're below and inferior to someone else, hence why like education in my mind, when it comes to things like math is so set up setting people up for failure because you're comparing yourself to other 50 people and kids in the room. And so if you're not the best, well then I don't like it. I'm not good at it. Well, yeah, like that's going to lead to probably a self fulfilling prophecy when you're comparing yourself up against 40, 50 people with standardized tests. So when it comes to things like trimming bushes or any action that you don't, you are not good at. Just keep in mind that's probably why you don't like it because you're not good at it. So get good at it, right? If you spent a day watching YouTube videos testing it out on your property or another customer's property that allowed you to take your time and really hone in your skill of how to trim bushes, guarantee you'd start to like it more. People like things that they're good at just just just the case of it, right? Very few people enjoy playing soccer that aren't really good at soccer, right? It's a self fulfilling prophecy. So just keep that in mind. I Before you say that you hate trimming bushes, go get really good at trimming bushes and then make your determination of whether or not you like them. Because I have a feeling you've associated negative feelings of the customer thinking you're bad feeling inferior to your previous employee. You've associated those with now trimming bushes. When in reality if you just got good at trimming bushes, you would start to enjoy it again because you wouldn't have the bad customer feedback loop and you wouldn't feel inferior. So it's my two cents.

Goes for basically everything including things like eating habits we are trying to get our Google Ads performance maxed up and running into some challenges. Is it normal hard to get set up and live? Is there anyone you could recommend we reach out to make sure everything's correct? We're going to make dump some money into advertising for the spring rush. Okay, Sounds like a lot of people are having problems. Performance Max. I will redo the tutorial. I've redone that one like three times in the past six months, which is abnormal. But they are changing literally every single week. So thank you for letting me know if this happens. Always. Just let me know. I'll make a new tutorial. It'll be great. So if not today, this weekend I will have a new Performance Max tutorial set up and make sure it is running and ready to roll. If you run into these problems, please let me know in the mastermind because I'll just make a new one. I'm not actively making new ads every single day so please let me know and I'll just make a new one. And I've been testing a bunch of video and tech separately and seeing how they compare against Google performance max. But I haven't been actually recording my tutorial setups so if I need to Totally fine.

Hey Mike, you mentioned it would cost $80,000 to open up a new location. Can you break down the numbers a little bit and where that money would be spent? Yeah, I don't have the exact document. Or maybe I do. One second. Give me one second. I know we have a document with budget and that is with.

Chuck and he has that folder on the drive for everybody but I'm trying to find the original one where we started like sketching out kind of the budget but essentially let me go off the top of my head. $15,000 per truck, that's 30,000.

Plus equipment for the trucks. So 48 inch stand on push mower, weed whackers and blowers. Then we get one dump trailer. We have a ramp rack on the one truck and the other one's going to be for the trailer. Let me see if I got this. Let's see here.

Random notes.

No, I don't need that. See here? No, I don't need that. I don't need that. I don't need that. I don't remember what this is. Okay, all right, it's on Google Drive. However, $15,000 for the trucks per. You're looking at about $12,000 if you're gonna get a zero turn. 12,000, $13,000 probably. For the equipment side you got a dump trailer looking like 8 to 10 grand depending on what you're gonna buy. We do 6 by 10, I believe.

6 by 12, 6 by 10 dump trailers. And then we keep about $15,000 set aside for advertising plus another $20,000 for working capital. All right, so by the time you have that and the franchise fees, that's all your money. Right? So $30,000, 10,000 equipment.

And then working capital, marketing and franchise fees, that's kind of all of them. So.

We will have a very good breakdown of the budget and more importantly, not just like hypothetical budget but like here's what we spent on all four and here's the breakdown on all of them. So I put $80,000 into the account. That should be enough for all the costs and expenses and the working capital for them to get to profitability to where then it's self funded. Right. But yeah, we will absolutely be providing pretty in detailed breakdown. I know Chuck watches these, so if he doesn't have that already already up inside of that Google Drive document for the regional manager side of things, he will update that. And it's already for everyone in the academy. Just go to.

The academy. You'll see there's a folder for all those documents in terms of hiring GMs, questions that he's asking and all that good stuff.

Cool, awesome. Cool. Alright guys, have a great Friday. Have a great weekend. Tomorrow morning, 10:00am My time, 1:00pm Eastern Standard Time. I'm doing a live stream about Copilot. Nothing really new is going on there, but if you have questions, definitely hop on there and it'll be good. I'm just trying to answer as many questions because there's a lot of DMs that I know I could just answer for everybody versus doing all this one on one garbage. So definitely hop in there if you have questions, but probably better to be answered in here. I'll give more information on these than I would publicly. So hope you all have a fantastic rest of your day and a great weekend and we'll see. See you on Monday. Take care of.