Mike Minutes Mastermind 01/22/2025

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Mike minutes. Mastermind. Let's go ahead and get started. Let me pull up these questions. Let's see, we got seven questions today and we'll go ahead and jump right in.

First question, Mr. Anonymous follow up question from yesterday's lead program question. We aren't concerned about the customers that are outside of our service here. Our concern is if someone calls in and wants trees trimmed or fertilizer put down. But we don't offer fertilizer or tree trimming. However, we still can mow the grass, we can still do cleanup, so we can do still. However, we still can mow the grass, we can still do cleanup, so we can still do snow removal. Wouldn't this customer be beneficial to be in our database for that reason alone? Yeah, like this. This is the debate, right? So the question comes down to is it worth having them inside your system and then upselling them down the road? Potentially what I see the vast majority of the time happen they will go find another provider if you're not servicing them. And that other provider, if they offer that service, they will use them. So this is like when we look at unsubscribe, who's unsubscribing, many times the people that you say, hey, sorry, we don't do that service, you know, etc. And then you email them a month later pitching them a service. Those are the people unsubscribing or blocking because they're like, look, you got my email, but you don't even service me. You don't service my property. So the conversion rates on them are typically lower because you didn't get them on the upfront initial ask service. So but there's a trade off because you're right, like if you get them inside your database down the road, you could potentially sell to them. So it is certainly a.

Possibility. I think the conversion is relatively low. But more importantly, I'd rather take the money and go get a lead that actually pays me right away. So, for example, if I'm marketing, I get a lead for irrigation. I don't do irrigation. They mow their own grass, they have someone else mow their own grass. And my hope is that down the road I'll get them for mowing or get them for winter services or something. I would rather get the 40 bucks right today and go get another customer that will start paying me right away. And so I would look at it as like, how can I take that lead, actually make money on it today and then get a customer with that Money for. For that is pay me in perpetuity, like right away. I don't want to pay for ads, Facebook ads, Google Ads, and then just to get people in my database that with the expectation that hopes hopefully one day they'll pay me because the cash flow isn't good enough. I want to get. Customers are paying me today. So. But you're right, this is a trade off. If someone's inside your service area, you get them for. Inside your database, for one thing, and then maybe down the road they'll convert. But personally, I would rather get money today. I would go get a customer that will pay me today for the services that I do offer and then focus on upselling those customers instead of selling constantly trying to sell the first service to that person in my database. But again, you're completely right. And for that reason, you might say, okay, well, if they're. I'm not. I'm going to take the mowing customers, just put no service area and hopefully give them a winter service. You can do that 100%. I would just rather get the 40 bucks, go get a customer that today can pay me. And for the next 612 months, I. They're paying me instead of just hoping that one day they take an upsell, which that is the. The upsell conversion is much lower. If the very first interaction with us is like, oh, sorry, we don't do your service, move on. And then I'm emailing them within a matter of several months for a different service. Rarely is that conversion very high.

Ricardo from Alexandria. Hey, Mike, I wanted to ask about your daily schedule. Your daily schedule work. Okay, sorry, I want to ask, how does your daily schedule work? I've been mismanaging my time and I'm managing that now to get where I have to get to. If you don't mind explaining to me from when you wake up to when you sleep, that'd be great. Thanks in advance. Okay, so let me see if I can pull this up.

So if you're ever interested in what my calendar looks like, you can just go to myandys.com calendar and every six weeks I update it with my new Sprint. So share this tab. This is it. Currently, you can look at it. This is exactly what my schedule is. I try to simplify this as much as possible. This is the very first time I've ever done where I only have one day a week of manager time that's fully on a weekday. I have this Sunday block for five hours. I think I'm gonna have to add a two Hour block on Saturday potentially for manager time. But maker time allows me to focus on the things inside of my Trello map that are most important. So I have 20, 25 targets at the bottom and then what's the targets for the six week sprint? So Q4 collapse workshop, spring Rush rally for Copilot and then Augusta Leads phase one. Those are like my focuses for the next six weeks.

And so the maker time a lot of goes into like, okay, how does, what does the spring rush rally going to look like? And like you'll hear about what that's going to be in the future. Essentially it's whoever during spring rush generates the most revenue or has the most year over year growth is going to win at Copilot similar to what Alex did with the school games. We're going to do for the spring rush rally at Copilot. So that's going to be launched here in the next few weeks. So we're working on creative how's that program going to work? And then Augusta Leads launched a big ad campaign yesterday promoting it to my audience, et cetera, making sure everything's refined in terms of system. So I'm just like if you can do one, two or three things every six weeks and this is these three things will be my only focus for that time. This goes till March 1. Six weeks is a month and a half. So like from March 1st to then April 15th will be the next sprint. And so what's determined to go in that sprint is based upon Trello. And I have like what needs to get done, what I'm working on and what gets finished. And so what gets done also has a chopping block and then a deleted or trashed. So it goes left and right. So center I'm not going to show it to you because it does have a lot of stuff that I'm working on down the road. But like basically think of it like if you have an idea you think is really good, you put it in to do list. If you're like it's good but not priority, it's going to go in the chopping block. And if I ever like okay, that's not a good idea anymore based upon just sitting on it and talking to other people, it goes into the trash version and then it can go the other direction to the right which is to do. And then it would go into in progress which would go into a six week sprint and then it go into completed. So the list for to do gets long. And then every once in a while you're okay based on more data based on surveys, based upon testing or beta test, like this is not a good idea and it would go into trash. So. But then your day is going to look very different. I always think of this as worker mode, manager mode, and, and maker mode. And so until you're hitting over a million, most of your days actually be worker mode. And so you could probably replace this if you went down one notch to being where four days a week is manager time, one day a week is maker time. If you went down another notch in terms of just size of your business, you'd probably look more like four days a week is worker mode, and then one day a week is manager mode. And you would not have any maker mode where you're actually like really like thinking through it about the systems of the business, thinking about strategic hires, looking at your hiring ads for your general managers, etc. So I say this because your schedule should not look like this. I genuinely believe until you are up to a million dollars, most of your day is going to be worker mode with some manager mode. As you scale past middle million, it's going to be mostly manager mode with some maker mode. And then as you scale past 10 million, I would expect that's when like maker mode is most of your day in your schedule. And then manager mode is the have to. It's like you got to get meetings, you got to get, you know, other, other more operational stuff done. But just be very clear, this is not what your calendar should look like. It's very dependent on your size of your business. But you're always asking yourself, what's the highest return on my time? And when you're first getting started, if the return on Your time is $100 an hour, you should probably focus more on work, doing the work for $100 an hour. As you begin to get four, five, six, seven, eight employees. Now we're starting to think, okay, most of our time is actually spent on managing them manager mode. And then as you start to get managers that manage managers, then you have to start thinking about, okay, I need to make the systems, I need to find executive hires, et cetera, and that's maker time. How do I create the systems? How do I, how do I create frameworks for people to be able to be successful, how do I go into a meeting to other people are managing and give them ideas to be able for them to implement? So I don't recommend this for everyone, but this is how I kind of handle it. I'm playing with one thing right now that I Haven't put in this and that is trying to do a workout midday to give myself a little more energy later in the day. Given now that I have another person I have to be accountable to in the evening consistently. Like I need to make sure that I have better energy because I do sometimes come back after work, et cetera, after eating a big meal and I'm just like, I just want to crash with my laptop and that's not necessarily great. So I'm, I'm probably going to move like where I start work earlier and then work out midday potentially. But that's just like something I'll probably test and see if it actually helps with my energy levels in the evening.

So that is that.

Nick from Marysville Will we have a dashboard to see our leads partners and where they service? Can we set priorities on certain partners to receive leads first? So it's a matter of you will get notified when someone has been accepted into the program or sorry, I should be when they have applied to the program and you'll be given, you'll get an email saying hey, do you want to veto this person? Essentially? And if you don't, you don't have to respond. If you don't respond, they'll get into the program. But if you do want to veto someone, you'll get notified 24 or 48 hours prior to them getting, getting into the program. In terms of seeing where they service, we can't give you the exact addresses. It's a conflict of interest in terms of sharing that data. However, what we can do is share you reports of like hey, just FYI we sent X amount of these leads to this person and this is where they serve. We can do that down the road. We can't do like on a weekly basis or something like that because it's a substantial amount of manual work. They get a report inside of their.

So we use copilot, they can log into their customer portal, they can see all of their charges, etc. So that's something that when you get your quarterly check you will likely have a report of all of those leads. So it's something we'll have to refine over time just because like the amount of of effort to get reports to the partners the part and then we have to get reports to owners on your quarterly basis with your check. So we'll refine this. It'll get better and better with time. I can guarantee that like your Q1 check which will happen at the end of March, you can expect to see you have a check and then here's all the list of the leads. It's not going to give their addresses but it's like who did they go to, etc. That would be coming down the road. So we'll make it better and better. Just, just know that it'll get better when it comes to reporting. But a lot of it is still a lot of manual checking service areas, checking service types, et cetera. Oh, I think there's another question in that. Can we set priorities on certain partners to receive leads first? No. So this is when it starts to get to where we got to do this somewhat democratically. So if someone applies to the program you want them in, they offer certain services that you don't offer or outside of your service area, for example, if that happens, they would then be in place inside the leads. Inside of the leads program, they're kind of first come, first serve, assuming you accept them in. So I think it'd be a one off basis if we were like, hey, this person's not as good as this other person wants to be in the leads program and I would prefer them we, that we can address that down the road. But for now it just, it's just a matter of the partner that gets in first, gets accepted, gets through the state, the vetting process, insurance. Like right now like yesterday, about half of the people that get are applying are not getting through between their, you know, insurance not being valid, their licensing being outdated, things like that. So like it's a pretty stringent process but if you ever veto someone, that's fine. But if they get in, I think it's a bad experience for the partners if we get, let them in and say, oh by the way, now you're not getting any more leads. I would only do that if you as an owner is like, hey, there's been a track record, this person is no longer doing a good job. We're getting some people saying some stuff or like in the local community they changed owners. We want a different partner. That would be something we can, we can address certainly down the road because ultimately we want to make sure that the customer is being taken care of by a reputable company. Tyler from North Bend Issaquah, following up on Thomas's question from yesterday. While the companies are growing quickly, we have sales, operation and administrative split up. Thomas is in charge of growing the sales department. His wife Julie is in charge of the administrative department. I am in charge of operations. We are growing separate teams for these roles due to how fast we are growing up to this point. I have been training crews for projects in construction. At this point these crews are self sufficient. I need to allocate 25% of my time to ongoing training and site walks. I am concerning how to best use the rest of my time. I need to cultivate the field management which we can deploy to new locations.

What do you think it looks like on a day to day basis to be doing this? I lack experience or understanding on setting up middle management. Yes, you're transitioning from worker mode into manager mode. And so what can many times happen is you feel like you're not as you're not getting as much done because you're used to actually doing the work, being on the job sites, et cetera. As you move into manager mode and you eclipse the million dollar marker, now it's a matter of you're going to be doing more manager mode stuff. So like what does a manager do? So it's a matter of like any sort of issue with a job site. I'd be like breaking it down. What are the systems? Where did we go wrong? What's wrong with the training? Do we need to change the training process, chain of command, communication? Why did we go over budget hours in this job? Keeping people reporting back to you after every single like doing a recon of projects. This is the type of thing that you'd be doing as like a head of operations or a crew lead when it comes to project based work. And that's just, it's just going to feel weird because if only 25% of your time is actually on job sites, the other 75% is likely going to be looking at system failure. Looking at every single project, seeing very visually like where are all these big projects? Because you're probably doing two, three, four at a time and so managing all of that is going to be like the different focus. Which services do we focus on? Do you order materials and rent equipment prior to the job? So like I'd be looking forward into this calendar. How do you set up your crews for success in terms of making sure the materials are there, making sure the trucks and equipment are ready to go for every single job be the focus of that size. Kyle Tarvin more Oklahoma I'm planning my growth for the season but struggling to figure out a good schedule regarding being in the field and doing sales and marketing. I have two locations under 500k. My goal is to get one up to 4 to 500k and keep the other one stable around 250, 300,000 until the next season. Well, I can turn around and grow that one. My original plan was to be working at one location doing door hangers and sales primarily. But I don't want to be completely lose my shirt on the labor aspect since I wouldn't be in the field producing revenue. Maybe this isn't something I need to focus on right now and just put all my energy into growth. Now I'm thinking I should be structuring my day like this morning. Focus on closing estimates, door hangers and follow ups. Complete most important tasks to actually move the business forward. Not in field labor. Midday wrap up anything not completed in the morning regarding sales and marketing. Afternoon complete two to four budget hours of infield work to help the crew finish up. Would this be a sustainable schedule in the fall? In the spring that would allow me to grow but not completely. Is my shirt in the payroll costs or should I just not worry about payroll? Grow up to grow to $500,000 at all costs for the one location. Note, during summer I will switch to doing more infield work. We have about $110,000 in the bank between the locations currently for spring rush. Also plan on using credit card lines of credit for more marketing spend on door hangers and Google Ads. Okay, so you have a pretty good cash position. If you were more strapped for cash, I would actually look at this as one location. This is why I don't recommend people starting second locations until they have one location in profit mode. So I know this is like Kyle, you started the second location before we had really established the Augusta model. So I apologize. That's why we really focus on 2024 looking at instances like yours. So like, for everyone listening, I don't recommend doing this and I recommend getting one location unless you have significant amounts of capital to dump on marketing and scale very quickly. I would get one location into profit mode above 500,000, turn it into profit mode and then start your second location. Now in this event, if you were cash strapped, I would recommend combining the two locations, you being a working GM and turning this thing immediately into profit mode. If you were cash strapped, because to combine you're probably on 600,000. You can then take the $600,000, raise prices, you're the working GM over those locations. I would combine the two, grow them organically throughout this year and then next year split them back apart and put a GM over one of them and then grow from there. That's what I would do. If you're cash strapped, you have a significant amount of capital here. $110,000 is no small chump change to be able to scale the business. You have two solid months worth of revenue basically in the bank. So I do think you can go pretty aggressive here. I would really nail down your door hangers strategy and try to scale that and hire someone to do it so that you can focus on sales mostly. Now, if you're going to scale as fast as you you think you're going to. I don't think you're going to have a lot of time to actually do infield work and you're going to scale pretty quickly. If you actually scale something like door hangers or put a lot of money in marketing. I would be careful with this type of growth just based upon knowing what's happened in the past. Because you're going to need to hand this off to a general manager. I think secondary to growing these two capacity, I would be also thinking about like who's your general manager next year and how do you make sure they're trained up from June to January of 2025 so that next spring rush they're ready to go. It's very important because you don't want to hand this off to a poor general manager that is not going to be operationally sound enough to be able to run it once you hand it off. I would be looking at this though like as right now you are the working GM of these two locations. You're going to pour money into marketing trying to get them to capacity and when one of them gets above 500,000 or let's call it 40, 50,000amonth in revenue, hand it off to an operationally sound GM and then go focus on that second smaller one and just dump all your time and energy. In terms of sales, there's with that amount of capital, I don't think you working in the field is the best use of your time. I think sales is a higher leverage opportunity and you're not cash strapped. If you had less than $40,000 in the bank, I would say what your strategy is is probably right. But you have the capital to be able to scale. I would focus a lot of my time in engineering how do I do door hangers and ads and spend say 20 to $40,000 getting both of these locations above $500,000. It is possible it is going to take all of your time and attention on sales likely to grow that quickly. But if you do so, then you can throw them into profit mode, put an operationally sound gm. That's why I think that's your next constraint will be that very quickly that's why I would really focus on getting somebody that is operationally sound wants to move in the general manager. Like looking at your current team, seeing even if over the first six months you find that person that wants to move in that role over the next nine months going into spring of 2026. So I do believe right now the constraint is getting more leads. You have plenty of capital to do so. So therefore I think it's going to be doable. But ensuring that.

You have an operationally sound GM to take over next spring is actually, I believe that the constraint here because not capital, so it's not liquidity. Once you fix the leads problem, unless you have a labor problem, it's going to become leadership. Like, it doesn't sound like you're complaining, not finding labor. So, like, I believe it's going to be you have a leads constraint. I think you can figure this out because you have plenty of liquidity, but then it'll become a leadership problem end of next year. So I'd be just thinking about that a lot in terms of your operational gm. And it might be someone that you don't even have in your team now, but you hire them now, they work the next six, seven, eight months in the field. You get both locations up around that $500,000 marker. You prepare at least the first one to throw it into profit mode next spring and put an operational gm. And then maybe next year, you're now just the working GM at the secondary, smaller location, getting it to the same, do the exact same thing. So I think this is a 25, 20, 25. I'd be getting that first location up above 500,000 as fast as possible. Dumping money because you have it into a strategy that's been proven in terms of door hangers or like, you know, your customer cost nailed down during the spring rush. Get that one, about 500,000. Get a GM working there that's operationally sound in spring 2026. Then you focus on being a working GM at the secondary location and do the exact same thing. So I think in 20 to 24 months, the business can look very solid. If you do that, take one, get it about 500,000, throw it into profit mode, raise prices, get a working GM next year for that location. You become the working gym at your secondary location and do the exact same thing. And in 24 months, the business looks very, very different.

Couple questions. How many Augusta locations have their Facebook, Pixel and Google code on their website? Like, how many owners actually track lead costs? So last time I checked this, around 50%. That was a few months ago. I need to check with Tory again. I know I pushed pretty hard at conference and they got a whole bunch of people putting those tracking in there, so very good. And then number two, how many owners don't use P4P? There's not a lot that don't use P4P. Usually within 12 months of converting Augusta there, everyone's using PvP. I can see like how many are outside of Augusta. It's like 120, 130. And then inside of Augusta is somewhere around that same number. And a lot of the ones that aren't are all the new ones that it takes them a while to switch over, adjust their pricing, adjust their way they do their estimates, adjust their budget hours. So I would, I don't have an exact number, but I would say it's 90% after 6 months are using P4P inside of Augusta. Mr. Anonymous, couple more questions. How are leads from outside service areas credited between nearby locations? It's all who gets the lead. So this is what's nice. It's very easy for us to be able to track where the leads are coming from because it's either coming from your website, it's coming from your phone number. That's why every single number or every single location has a different phone number. At command center, it costs us like 5,000 plus a month just for all the phone numbers inside of Augusta. Nation from RingCentral. The reason we do that is because it's very easy lead attribution. We know where every location is, where it's coming from. So if you do the marketing, you do the advertising, or even if someone sees your truck and they call your number, you're getting the lead, getting the, the kickback on the lead. Number two, as they guess the leads department phase two dials in the best creative and text combination. Are these going to continue getting shared the franchisees done for you that want to do this for themselves? Yeah, 100%. Yeah. Like every six months or so we'll be updating the done for you ads as they currently stand. 100%. It'd just be a matter if you want like, hey, I don't even want to set up the ad. I don't want to track it. I don't have to optimize it. That's when the phase two of the Augusta Leads program in 2026 will be able to help you. But it by no means would replace the done for you ads that we make for everyone's templates. Because, like, if you, if you Use those, you're probably gonna beat out whatever cost we have to charge. We have to manage everything. So if you can do it yourself and it's going well, like keep doing it 100%. Mr. Anonymous leads program question. What happens when someone calls in outside of our service area asking for service that our neighboring Augusta location does provide? Will there be systems in place to protect the neighboring Augusta location to get the lead? So keep in mind, if that lead comes inside of protected territory of an Augusta location, it's going to them no matter what. So the same way that we currently have in terms like, hey, when a lead comes in, the first thing we're doing is looking at territory. And so even if someone calls your location but they're in someone else's territory, they're getting the lead. It's always been that way. It's only when it. Then it's in no one's territory with, okay, they called this location, it's in no one's territory. Now it's gonna go into the GUSA LEADS program. And if there's someone there to be able to absorb that lead and buy it, we're good to go. Now, keep in mind, if you don't have partners set up in your area, you likely will still have leads being lost. On our end, we're trying. When a lead comes in, if there's not a partner and you want it to go to the GUSA LEADS program, we are trying to find someone. But if we can't find someone literally within 24 hours, that lead is usually cold. And so this is why it's very important over the next 10 days or so before the program launches, to get partners set up. I can't overemphasize this enough. The Augusta leads program, I know it's going to happen after the first quarter. There's going to be some locations that will get 5, 10 partners set up around their area. And they're going to get thousand, $2,000 checks at the end of the quarter. And there's going to. Other people are like, well, I didn't get anything. And it's because we don't have any partners for you. And it's very difficult. We try. Like, we have a whole protocol of when a lead comes in, if we don't have a partner for you, we're trying to call them, we're trying to email them, we're trying to, trying to get them set up in the partner program. But if they don't do it within 24 hours, the lead usually goes cold and it Leaves a really bad taste in their mouth if their first lead, like, yeah, I already got someone else. And so it's a cold lead. So we have to be very, very fast on it. And it's difficult to get someone who's never even heard of us. And we're a third party, not a local provider like you guys that know the competition. It's more difficult for us to call them and try to set them up. And hey, we need your insurance, we need your business license. And yes, we're a competitor but like it's harder for us to explain. So like I highly recommend over the next 10 days to do this, get five to 10 partners, people that are outside of your service area, people that inside of your service area for the services you don't offer. Very important. Yeah, like this is going to be the difference between the people that in, in June are getting a couple thousand dollars back to them versus people who will get like 20 or 30 bucks or 50 bucks or whatever. It is the difference between if you're doing the work now to set up partners, we can't set up 6, 700 partners in the next couple weeks and call every single one of the people around your location. Also it's because we don't have a lead, people won't do it. So the only reason people will listen to us is usually when we have a lead, we're like, hey, there's a lead on this street. Do you want it? If so, you need to sign up custom leads. We try that and it's decent. But if they don't get on it right away, that lead goes cold and it's no good. So this is why I really, really recommend use the templates. The video I made on Monday walks you through those templates. Text and email. Your local comp competitors try to get as many people to sign up for the partners program as possible. Even if there's several that do the same service, it's totally fine because it's going to come in. Whoever signs up first will get those services. You'll be able to get. You'll be vetting them. So you're like, I don't want them to be in the program if someone slips through, etc. Just highly recommend this. It is the difference. It's going to be the difference between who gets thousand dollar checks each quarter versus just nothing because very difficult for us to be able to keep a lead warm and then go get a competitor to sign up within 24 hours. So, Mr. Anonymous, if a company gets through Augusta leads is There any checks and balances for keeping them in the system? My concern is follow up quality, et cetera, isn't good and we start getting negative feedback or reviews for referring them. Yes, if this ever happened, this would be where we can take them out of the program. So first off, you're going to be notified if they when they get into the program. We're going to do all the background checks in terms of insurance, license, etc. About half of them are not getting through right now. And then furthermore, if this happens for whatever reason, you let us know we will be pulling them from the program. Especially if you have another partner behind them. Okay, this other partner is overlapped. They can also do this service and irrigation or whatever. Let's get this other person out. We could do that. We would probably give them a warning. Hey, we've had some negative feedback. This needs to get corrected or else you're going to be out of the program again. This is the whole objective here is to govern lead flow in the long term for our entire market so we can elevate the level of professionalism because we determine who the leads go to. So if they're not doing a good job, if they're not professional, if they're not doing high quality work, we will nix them from the program. They will get less leads, therefore giving the leads to more reputable companies. So that would actually absolutely be something that we would address down the road as it comes up in terms of your local market.

Boom.

I rarely do this, but I will say There is a GoFundMe if you want to check out on the Facebook group for one of our OG members of Augusta Nation that has gone through a lot this past year, wasn't able to make a conference this year and is going through quite a bit of legal things around around making sure that he can keep his his kiddos during a divorce that's been a little bit messy. So highly recommend Nick Daniels Beck put together. Check it on the Facebook group. I would recommend it. If you know this person, he's given a lot to the community and so I would recommend that over the next couple days I think it's going to be open and appreciate everyone that has supported him and given him so much in terms of support, even just kind words and things. So I appreciate everyone for doing that and as always we're together, we are stronger. So appreciate you all. Hope you have a fantastic rest of your Wednesday and we'll see you tomorrow. Take care.