Mike Minutes Mastermind 01/20/2024

Foreign.

Nation. Hope you're a fantastic Saturday. Let's get this thing kicked off. Let me just copy this.

Facebook.

On the Facebook group, I put a link to the copilot integration.

With P4P. Recommend you listening to that, walk you through the whole process. All the changes that we made yesterday.

The only thing that that video does not walk through is the mobile side of things and what employees are going to see.

So the only part that didn't really go through. We will add more videos next week of that side.

But for now, let me give you one second here.

Okay?

I have some.

Announcements. Well, that first One is the P4P1. Make sure you watch that video. It's on the Facebook group. It's also in P4P university. It's also in Copilot University. We and walking through the integration, it's like nine or 10 minutes. And I'll walk you through all of that. The other thing is on the dashboard. So just a franchise dot com. There is underneath the forms, there's a spot. If you ever hear Max say something is like a little strange, that his tone is a little off, anything like that, you can submit that form there. Goes directly to Liz and she digs into it pretty deep. So feel free. If you ever hear anything like, hey, he said he. He's a little abrupt with the customer or like he had a little bit of a tone like he shouldn't have. He's even more excited. Like he said the wrong word. He didn't understand what he was. They were talking about when they said a specific service. Anything like that, you hear, please fill out that form. Be super helpful for us, especially if you go into spring rush when there's thousands of calls coming in. We're not gonna be able to screen every single one. So please do that. I really, really appreciate it. It allows us to get into the AI and just like, modify all sorts of different aspects of things. So that is on the dashboard underneath forms. And just to operationalize, instead of, you know, reaching out to Liz directly, that form is there. You fill it out, goes directly to her. She starts digging in with the dev team, and we'll make sure that is improved.

All right, let's jump into some questions.

All right, numero uno and Mr. Anonymous, how are you quoting Bush? Trimming at your locations with the intention of getting them on a recurring schedule, an initial price and a separate quarterly visit. Are you spelling out how often they're being trimmed? If some aren't trimmed? Every visit? Sometimes there are 60 bushes. And I don't know the names of most of them. Are you emailing them the day before you come? See they know you are coming. Thank thanks for any input. We don't often do recurring trimming. Most of the time in our market you only need to trim a bush once to TWI two times a year. Places like Florida, Texas, even Georgia, like the south, there are places you need to trim bushes like in California. Every month you need to turn the bushes.

So in that case you're going to have a much more smaller amount of budget hours over the course of a longer period of time. And so yes, you're typically going to need to give, you know, a hey, I take us two budget hours per time, multiply that by 12, 24 budget hours, divide that by 12, give them a monthly price for essentially if you're doing level billing.

But you know, the easy way to do this is that give them an initial price and then afterwards give them a specific price for quarterly or monthly or however you're doing that. Some customers though, they, they want the price up front and so they don't want to do their first visit without knowing what the, you know, the quarterly price is going to be in terms of letting them know the day before. You could do that and you can just set up that specific type of service to be notified like the day before it's on the schedule. The wait list would probably be your friend, which we're adding next month to be able to just like throw it on a tentative schedule instead of on the dispatch board. So that way you can kind of slot it in when you want.

So we don't do this a lot though. We typically are going to use one click estimate emails. We're typically going to look at who last year had us do a property cleanup. But again, in my market we are typically training bushes once or twice a year. This is much more common in markets where you do have to trim bushes every single month or every single quarter or even weekly or bi weekly in some parts. So. So.

We don't do it a ton, but I would say it's just a matter of like you got to average out. There's going to be some periods of the year that give more. In the perfect scenario, you're able to do the first visit, get a pretty good understanding of how long it's going to take and then give them a price for occurring.

Joel from Mafia with the instant quote form on the website, what happens when a lead submits the form? Does it show us cho is an accepted estimate in copilot that we need to schedule do we or CC get an email. So on the dashboard, whoever you currently have your estimate request forms going to is also where instant price forms are going to go to. So same exact place whether it be command center or you whichever one you currently have it set up for, that's where instant quotes are going to go to. It does not show up as an accepted estimate in copilot because it's not integrated with Max or the instant quote forms is not integrated copilot. Eventually that is the goal. Right now it comes in the command center just like a normal estimate request form would. But it says that the estimates are accepted and for what prices going to go create the estimate with those prices and send it to the customer so they have it on file and then as soon as they accept that estimate command center they'll click accept. Then the trigger of notifying you for scheduling would happen. Is there a way to see how many people start completing the form versus how many completed the submitted completed form? Perhaps on Google Analytics?

Not really anything for a second. Not really because there's no action happening, right? They're not going to a different URL to submit, they're staying on the same page.

There's probably some tracking you could do, but it's much more difficult because you're not switching URLs. Like they can just start filling out a form and then like switch to a different page or like potentially not submit, right? So yeah like this is the the downside of instant pricing is like yes, you could potentially scare some away. However, if they click decline and then they do submit the dec, then we still do get the form and we're going to treat it like we would a regular estimate request form, measure the property, send the quote, etc. But we don't switch URLs so it's a lot more difficult to like throw behind a pixel or a Google tracking to see that conversion. If they don't submit like click submit. Landon from Tallahassee hi Mike. I'm a little concerned I guess more so let's down going into this year with how many recurring customers I have. I currently maintain 30 to 30 to 35 customers right now for winter services, about 17 services or so a week. I'm not exactly how many will come back for this upfront spring as I have as a lot have canceled have just canceled. I spent roughly 17 to 18000 on marketing this year, which I was hoping to put me a better spot this year but unfortunately did not look the case. My Close ratio wasn't bad. I guess I have just lost the majority of clients that I've won. I'm not exactly sure where to plug the holes. I'm doing the work current myself, so I don't think it's a quality issue and I do plenty of training with my guys. I had but I've had people cancel.

Right now my confidence is not very high that what I built last year due my solo year before Augusta and this year I want that confidence going to this year. But I just know something needs to change and I also just want the confidence that the money I spend on marketing is actually going to come back to me. So any advice would help. Thanks for all you do. So at the beginning of your business you have typically.

More time than you do money. And so unfortunately, especially when someone doesn't want to do sales and I'm not speaking necessarily at you landing here, this is just a broad statement.

We try to solve a problem with money because it is easier than gaining the skills and putting the work required to do it without money. And so sometimes having the constraint of not having capital actually brings out the best in you because you now realize that in the past you were throwing money at a problem that did not require money. Getting more customers does not require money. It requires getting in front of a customer in one way, shape or form. Whether that be a door hanger, whether it be a postcard, whether it be a Facebook ad, a Google Ad, etc. All you're trying to do is create prospects and turning them into leads. And so at the beginning spending money on that is fine until guess what, you have a constraint. And typically when constraints are felt is when.

When progress is made because you have to become creative. And so every form of every stage of business, in my opinion, every time a constraint is met, it is painful. However, it is the thing that unlocks the next stage of growth because you have to get creative with a solution because you no longer can just throw money at the problem. I would also say your second spring rush across Augusta, I'm extremely confident saying is when your customer acquisition cost for us drops dramatically as a blended average because people should start being able to see your website. This comes into play. It's like make sure you have Google Google reviews. If you don't have 30, 40, 50 Google reviews, I'd be focused on that 100% of my time right now. Because having those going into the second spring rush, when you're ranking on the first page of Google versus the third page of Google, when you first got started eight, nine, ten months ago. That is the difference maker between years one and year two. Um, and so the. The difference of amount of leads that come through people's site in Augusta Nation between year one and year two almost doubles. While at the same time, they spend most of their money in year one. To your point, 17, $18,000, because they're paying for every single lead. And all of a sudden they get in the middle of second spring rush, sometimes their third spring rush, just depending on their location, and they're just bogged down with late work, they have to turn off their leads, et cetera. So I'm not making that promise. But the reason that that typically happens is because all the reviews have been garnered, the website is now ranking high. People have seen your work around town. You have a database of customers inside your. Your CRM to be able to send out emails to. And so.

Year one is you are paying for every single lead. And unless you are putting your boots on the ground and doing, you know, everything by hand. So as I. That's not the answer that no one wants to hear. But any constraint will regenerate the creativity required to be able to achieve the same result just with a different input, which instead of the capital is typically going to be creativity and labor. And so whether it be doing door hangers, whether it be finding a creative way of getting customers, property management companies, et cetera, typically that constraint does bring out the best in the business. I'm finding the same thing with my coflight right now. Like, because I have the constraint, if I cannot jump in and do code, I have to figure things out to scale the business in a way that, like, if I could code right now in the short term, it'd be great because I'd just go in and work 247 and fix problems. That's not gonna scale because after 24 hours, guess what? I can't improve. L. I can't work more than 24 hours a day. And so.

Having the constraint of not being able to do code to the extent that is required, and being an engineer of data and software forces that constraint, forces me to get creative with how I structure the team. Like, I'm working on an org chart, like, this entire weekend. And, like, how an engineering department is supposed to be broken up and titles and responsibilities, what KPIs every single person is responsible for and who reports to who, and all this stuff, garbage.

And that is forced upon me because I can't jump in and fix it. So right now, to your point, Landon, it's like the constraint of not having the capital is going to be the thing that forces you to go get your Google reviews to make sure you're ranking well. It's going to be the thing that's like, okay, how do I go do a thousand door hangers and get three customers, four customers out of that? These are the type of things that will come as a result of you having the constraint of not having capital. Because if you have plenty of capital, what you'll do is you're supposed to spend it, get enough leads to stay busy doing, doing estimates. And that is a fine way to do business as long as you have the capital. But when that constraint is met is typically when I see people like find what actually works in their market because they now have a constraint of capital. When there's not a control of capital, you're really more willing to spend money without getting direct results. Brenton, Utah we are wrapping eight vehicles, a big hit financially, the P and L. We are also hiring managers and a portion of their pay is based on the profits of the company. How should we handle a new manager having to deal with digging out of a huge role financially to get bonuses because of these wraps? Should the company take a hit, should they take a temporary hit, realizing it's for the long term good of the company? Somewhere in the middle? Yeah, I'd probably say somewhere in the middle.

When I'm buying trucks, I usually take the hit because there's a lot of stuff financially I get out of that in terms of taxes. When it comes to wraps, I'm, I'm putting that on the GMs. Their first, you know, quarter of the year. Q1 typically doesn't look great anyways because they're hiring a bunch of laborers that are inexperienced and they're not as efficient. So you could be like, hey guys, what we're going to do for this one year is Q1. I'm not going to hold that against you in Q2. Right. So it's not going to be cumulative. You could do that. Right? You could also say, hey, I'm going to put in X amount of dollars in the business. So. Because again, my first part is if you were doing profit sharing, so if you're giving them a piece of the profits, I'd probably say, hey, I'm not going to hold Q1. It's not going to accumulate in the Q2. So if we have a negative Q1, it will impact your Q2 profit sharing. You could say that. Or you could also say if you're doing distributions, which I recommend you could say, hey, hey guys, I'm going to be putting $15,000 into the business, $10,000 in the business, whatever it is. And I'm not going to hold that against distributable cash. Right. So you could do that too. It really is a matter of are you doing distributable cash for the the bonuses or are you doing profit sharing for the bonuses and then do you want to somehow reconcile that? I don't really like not having cumulative profit sharing. Like I don't like the idea of them being able to just bomb in one quarter and then the next quarter make profit sharing because now all of a sudden you lose 30 grand in the first quarter, second quarter you make $25,000 in profit. And now they're getting 10% of that. Let's just call that they're getting 2,500 bucks and. And you're like, seriously, it's through two, two quarters and I haven't made an actual dollar out of this business. That's why distributable cash is like my preferred method is like everyone's driving not towards profitability for a quarter, but getting cash out of the business.

But there's several ways you could kind of pad that if you want to do Brent.

Kyle Tarvin. I'm trying to get our copilot accounts to where anytime an estimate is accepted, a customer calls in email, CC accepts the estimate. On the portal side, there's a that pops up to the user, whether it be myself, the customer or CC that says a card is required to be placed on file and won't let the estimate be marked accepted until a card is on file. I believe our account is already set up for when a customer goes into the portal accept the estimate. But recently had a customer email or call CC and accept the estimate and there was no car that was put on file. I've tried talking to adc, but they keep telling me this feature wasn't available. I thought you mentioned a flag would be thrown up anytime an estimate is marked. No, I was saying if the customer goes in and tries to take their card off a file, then there'll be an alert that pops up there that says they would take a card off file and they were warned that they, you know, removing of the service. So that part from the alerts perspective is the part I'm talking about there. Not sure where else to go here because I don't have to want to do double work by calling the customer back to get a car File when CC should easily done that when they're on the phone with the customer to begin with. Do you know what setting I need to change? So submit this to yellow slip augustalongash services.com and they can take a look into this. Because when a estimate is accepted from internally, there's a pop up that specifically states this requires a card on file that command center has to get through. The one way for a customer to get around that is is if they email you accepting an estimate, which happens very infrequently. But the reason that it's tough for command center, I could see where they'd be in a weird spot is like, okay, the customer accepted the estimate. They, they emailed us, they want to accept this quote. I have this in front of me, I need to take care of it. I don't want to like make it a ticket and something like that. So I'm going to mark as accepted. I'm going to get this pop up that says, hey, they need a credit card. Well guess what, the customer's not in front of me. I don't have them on the phone. So the only way to actually get that is to call them. Well what happens if it goes to voicemail? Am I just going to like not mark the accepted? When they specifically emailed me that and asked like hey, yes, please get me on the schedule. And like they're expecting that I could see that be potentially an issue. That's really the way that they could get through. But when they, when, when command center ever marks an estimate as accepted, it does have a pop up. If you have the setting done correctly that is going to say a credit card is required. And so the only way that potentially this could flip through the cracks and not be a yellow slip is, is if the customer is not in front of them like on the phone, in the chat, on the web chat, but submitted to yellow slip. And they'll do all the digging and figure out exactly what happened. But that's how I can see that happening. But do submit to yellow because then what we can do and what the team will do is they'll audit the entire thing and see where potentially people can get through these, through that process. But just know that if you mark an estimate accepted from inside the system, there is a pop up that literally says like add a carbon file. It has a button to add a carbon file. So either you know, someone was extremely dilatory and just like ignored it and kept accepting it over the phone, or they were in a juxtaposition of like the customer was in the chat, then left the chat after saying they wanted to accept or I emailed them and now they can't get the card information. But they don't want to leave this, this estimate in limbo because it's weird. It's like well what do I do now? Because I'm not going to sit here and wait for the owner to get back to me. I'm not. If I called them and they can't, they won't pick up their phone. Like where do I do, what do I do with this estimate right now? And that's a tough spot for them to be in. But that's the type of thing that during an audit of Yellow Slip they would, they would figure that system out.

Kyle Tarvin Vince, our coffee drinking, maple syrup eating pro hockey player, nicest guy you will ever meet. Says a lot, Wears a T shirt in the 20 weather. Canadian franchisee made a post on this the other day. How do you come to the conclusion on if you should give the customers money back when they ask for it and not charge them for a service? We did a service for a customer this week, sent an invoice and now they are saying you never showed up when I know we did. They're contesting the bill. I initially got defensive and told CC to build them anyway since he did the work. But now that I am thinking back, I need to start playing the long game. Give the customer a break now, but keep them as a paying customer. The long term. How do you go about making the decision on whether or not to give? Give into what the customer is asking for?

Yeah, there's a time, especially when you're super busy like I just say, okay, command center, handle this for me. Call them and come to a conclusion. And I support whatever you think. And then they could call, try to talk to some reason in them, etc.

In any event, and this is the part where you probably need to call them because command center is not going to have all the information about the job and what was said on the job site and all this other stuff. Like a lot of times when you have something like this, you can figure this out with a phone call. And when I say figure out, I mean come to a resolution that is agreeable for all parties and just be honest with the customer. Like hey Mr. Jones, here's the thing I value as a customer. I want to be able to continue getting services to you. I want to make sure that if you leave us that you think positive thoughts. When you think about Augusta Lo and care. I care about our brand. I care about our. You know, there's a whole lot of other people behind us and I want to make sure I do right by you. Here's the evidence that I have that proves we were on site and why we should charge you. Do you have any other events to prove otherwise? Because I want you to feel good about this. But I, on my end, do feel like the services were rendered. So please let me know. I would do this on a phone call or in person. Even better. Again, it depends. Like, how big is this estimate or invoice? Do you even want to, you know, put your time and energy into doing this? But I really do believe a phone call like that being super reasonable. And they're not reasonable back. Like, you don't want them as a customer. Right? So then it's like, who cares? There's other things that play in the calculus of this. This is like, are they going to leave a bad review?

Are they super loudmouth in the community? Stuff like that. But more importantly, it's like, have a conversation with them, show your side of the story. And if you're super reasonable, typically people are too like, hey, you know what? I don't believe you were here because X, Y and Z. And so then he's like, okay, well, what do you believe would be fair? Well, I want all my money back. Okay, great. In that case, I'm going to give them their money back and never do business with them again. I'm going to mark them as unsubscribe and copilot. I'm going to put a big office that says, never service this customer again. But typically, if someone's reasonable, they'll be like, okay, this person, this business owner called me, stated why they believe that they're super logical. They are super. Like, there's no tension or emotion in their voice. They're just stating the facts as to why they were here. They might say, hey, I don't think it was. You were here because X, Y and Z reason this wasn't done. This one. Okay, great. And then you can say, what would you believe is fair that you would feel good about? And if they say, hey, like, can I give you. What if I give you 50%? And then you just like, you go from there. Right. But don't be emotional when you call them. That's the biggest thing I would say. Jeff from Sandwich, Massachusetts, Mike, do you know if this folder is in the drive? I'm not seeing it. Please see attached for folder in question. All right. I am Checking out the folder. Currently.

Yes, this folder is here in the drive.

I'm not sure what you're saying, Jeff. Is it not linked? Because I know it's there just through a different medium, I think. Oh, you know what? Somehow you're getting this might be. Oh, I know what you're talking. Okay. You're watching a video. That's what it is. So this is in Google Drive. It's just not where you're watching on this video from last year where I was talking about this part, but it is in Google Drive.

It's just the reorganization of that is now differently done. Let me pull this up.

Boom. Oh, I know it's in my drive, but I don't know if that's the one here. You guys have. Jeff, if you have struggle finding this, let me know. But if you go into templates and downloads on the current dashboard, you should be able to search it and find it pretty easily. If you cannot, please let me know in the Facebook group, just in a post or in the comments of this video and I can have the media team take a look at it. They basically downloaded every single item inside of the old dashboard and put it and organized into the Google Drive. But if you're not finding it, let us know and I'll make sure that they get that in there.

All right. Is that all? There's seven of those. Delete.

Boom. All right, well, I hope you all have a fantastic weekend.

The. Oh, that's what I was gonna announce. Okay, there'll be an email going next week, but we are.

Going to do the master. The mastermind, the round table. January 25th at 5pm Pacific Standard Time. That's 8pm Eastern Standard Time, so it should be late enough for everyone to get their work done for the day, etc. So there'll be an email go about this, but this is gonna be a Zoom live call. Again, this is next Thursday, January 25th, 5pm Pacific Standard Time. That's 8pm Eastern Standard Time. Roundtable on Zoom. We'll be sending out the video link and all of that information that through the email. I'll put it on the Facebook group, et cetera, probably on Monday. But that is the plan for next Thursday evening for the next Round Table. All right, everyone, have a fantastic rest of your weekend. We'll see you on Monday. Take care.