Mike Minutes Mastermind 01/23/2023

Happy Monday, August Nation. Hope you're all doing super well. Let's go ahead and get things kicked off. I wanted to go over one thing really quick and that is something that we shared at conference and we sent everyone this email. It's in a link to this email to this drive and this is going to be where you can schedule create a calendar for your one click estimate emails. So again, this was emailed to you the week of conference and whether you be you were there or you're not there in person. Let me just go ahead and drop this link. Sorry, I forgot.

One second. Sick.

What is going on? Sorry. Let me just drop this link into Facebook for everyone on YouTube.

Yeah, just want to go over this really quick. This document here, top left hand corner is going to be your newsletter planner. Going to kind of give you an idea of where you what, what one click estimate emails you might want to send. And based upon your if you're in the warm transition or the cool season, again, very flexible. But the goal here is that you would have a schedule and a planner in place when you're going to send these out. So you can put which version of the one click estimate email. You're using the client filter. So it could be like everyone in your database. It could be mowing existing mowing customers, it could be customers that are not mowing, et cetera. So make sure you just have this filled out. I know as we head into spring rush it's like, well, what am I supposed to be doing right now? Which I'll be focused on. This is something that you can definitely get ready for the season by making sure you have all of this filled out and ready to roll. All right, so definitely check it out. If you haven't Command center, do it. Send this copy of the document to them. If you're doing it yourself, that's fine. But I just recommend you have a schedule in place and so that way you do not get caught just being super busy and therefore not having the time to figure out which one you're going to do. These, these are just screenshots of all the ones that are designed and they are bundles inside of both super and servers Autopilot with all of these in them and they're appropriately named. So they're the vers is correlative with the ones that they are in the designs that are inside of their the bundle. So cool. Let me go ahead and take that off.

Cool. All right, let's jump into questions that came in on the form and then I'll jump Into questions that I see coming in on the chat but there is quite a few on here. Alright, first question comes from Kyle Tarvin. Is the chatbot on the website necessary? I'm thinking about removing it from our site. I do understand there is a significant cost on that. However.

You got to think about from a customer acquisition standpoint if you can get five, 10 customers a month because of that or even two or three, it starts to be worth it. The problem with it is that people will go on there and they'll use it for asking questions. That would take two minutes on a phone call and it will take 1012 minutes on a chat. It is a little more expensive. Yes. And if you want that removed you can do that from your dashboard, your website dashboard. Just go to go go to augustafranchise.com, go edit your webpage and you can remove the chatbot from your site. You can do that? Absolutely. It's going to save you money and maybe during the winter you want that. It is more expensive version of customer service because the time it takes is so much greater than just a phone call. But some people will not reach out without it. It's incredible like it rings all day long of people coming on there and doing chats and setting up service and them doing. They'll do it on over the phone estimate over chat. However over the phone it takes five or six minutes. Over the chat it's gonna take 10 to 12 minutes. So it is more expensive and you probably have 60% of people that will just drop off of chats and we don't ever hear from them again. So it's just more expensive. If you do want to cut it, you absolutely can.

Kyle Tarvin Does CC do full service for your locations? Yeah, I do 100% full service for all my locations besides besides Bellingham because they're over the 800,000 marker and when you start getting over 800,000 I do think it start. It starts become worth it to have another person in the office and then have command center do more. Like we still have them do payroll, answer the phones, manage email, all those things. But the actual like routing, dispatching. You need a full time person just doing scheduling and customer service stuff like that. Once you get over 800,000. Kyle Tarvin is there an automation to remind us to send thank you cards? There is. You'll need to activate it inside of your.

Automations. It's very last one I believe it's called send thank you after project. I think it's the very last automation of the page, honestly.

But you'll need to go in there and activate it and then just go through the triggers. Make sure it's exactly one. It's basically set up currently to remind you if one time jobs are completed and that are not a recurring customer. Kyle Carvin I'm still a bit fuzzy on these over the phone estimates for mowing. I know we should be lowering our prices slightly for our new locations on mowing so we can close more work quickly. Everyone I'm talking to is saying OTP mowing rate needs to be at 60 per but my budget hours needs to be lowered to get my o. No, that's not, that's not true. Everyone I'm talking to is saying my OTP mowing rate needs to be at 60 per hour, but my budgeted hours need to be lower to get my overall. Now that's just manipulation of numbers. Can I just tell command center to lower my budget hours across the board to get a $50 per man hour rate, for example, but still charge 60 per hour? No, you just wrote you just lower your price matrix in this case. So you should never be thinking about like this. Never think about like oh, I'm going to lower price in order to and beef up budget hour. Like it doesn't matter. Like by raising your prices you're moving budget hours up and vice versa. So if you're trying to lower price, either A you're going to reduce budgeted hours or B, you're going to reduce the hourly rate. And if on your price matrix, if you want to hit, you know, bring down your prices, bring those numbers down, it's going to make your budget hours less and or you're going to reduce your budget your man hour rate and that's going to keep your budget hours higher so it don't, don't start manipulating the numbers like in my opinion, figure out your budget your hourly rate needs to be and then figure out how long the jobs are going to take. You want your budget hours to be accurate. And so if that means reducing your hourly rate in order to make that happen, that's fine. But don't, don't get too. You're overthinking this way too much in terms of your pricing matrix. Right?

For example, still charge 60 per hour.

No, don't change on your price matrix. Just bring down the dollar amount per range and it's going to. By doing that, it'll bring down your how many budget hours are assigned to the job and just stick with the 60. Everyone should be at $60 per hour or more. So I would highly recommend doing that. And then over time you can tweak it. But you're overthinking this since the location hasn't even started yet. So that'd just be my two cents. Or on new locations, I should say.

Eric from Largo. Are the new videos we are attaching to estimates available in the Academy for download? I can only find the original one. We change them up at Command center every month now. So we're not putting them up on the Academy. There's different individuals at Command Center. We will update those every month. So next week it'll probably be changed.

If we are offering the gym reimbursement to benefits. Oh, there's Eric Largo from Florida. If we are offering the gym reimbursement benefit to employees, can we also take advantage of this as the owner? Also, how should you categorize expense when reimbursement happens? So reimbursement is still going to be considered a bonus. You're just going to basically tack it onto their paycheck.

And so.

Yeah, in terms of you taking advantage of the owner, you could, you could do this if you're, especially if you're an S corp, just throw it and you're giving yourself a W2. Just again, put it on as a bonus onto your paycheck as a form of reimbursement. Actually, it's not bonus. I think there is a reimbursement part. I'm 99% sure on this. Sorry. There is a line item for reimbursement on payroll. See if my payroll department's looking at me.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure there is a part for reimbursement on running payroll. That way they're not taxed on it.

Garrett from Glendale, what are your thoughts on routing calls during non business hours to a third party call center? Is this possible? Do you think it would be worth our time to set this in prior to Spring Rush? It's something Tommy Mellow mentioned in terms of ranking better on Google and maybe Google being open 24 hours, I would just put all your Google services, Google Business listing to being open 24 hours.

Because you know Command center is open, what is it, 60, 70, 70 hours a week? Outside of those hours they can leave a message and we get back to them like right away in the first thing in the morning. So yeah, I would just Recommend Being open 24 hours, especially with Google Local services that you're actually being shown. Even if it is after hours.

I would not recommend using a third party call center. You're going to mess up your, your CRM, you're going to mess yourself up and command center up because.

It is very difficult to find someone that's going to put in data correctly into your account.

And yeah, I just wouldn't recommend it. Prior to joining us this May, I started Google my business page and a phone number with a call center. 22% of my calls came on Sundays. I would imagine this is because I was the only lawn care company on Google my business open and that would answer their phones on Sundays. If I set up an after call average call center, I would have them take down leads info and tell them we will return their call the next day. But at least we would have all their info and what service they want instead of not getting that lead. You can do that if you really want to. I just have never seen it really convert as much as that 22% number. Like if you look at 22% that's not a whole lot more of a distribution than you know, a seventh, like a seventh of the days would be like 15%. So it's just a marginal increase in number of calls and people are not expecting people to be open and they can leave a voice message. It's just going to come down to cost. Um, you, you're not going to get a dollar nine cents per minute. You're going to get two to three dollars per minute on those. And they are literally just getting lead information, not saying you shouldn't do it. It's just going to be extra cost that I haven't seen convert a whole lot more. Because people on Sundays don't expect you to be open, they're willing to leave a voice message and get back to you on Monday down the road. Command center will have extended hours on weekends and evenings and nights and things like that. But for now there's not, there's not enough call volume. So if there was enough call volume, we keep it open on Sunday. But this is not true. 22% of calls do not come in on Sundays. If it was, we'd be open.

That's not the case. We can see how many missed calls are coming in.

Kyle.

When we are creating, when we are creating notes on our mobile to send a command center to format and send estimate how do we let commencer know specific job note on the work order for the crew? I know we use double parentheses to put hours, materials, etc. But where do we put extra job notes for the crew? For example, back gate will be locked. Knock on the door before starting or pick up materials from X nursery. Yes. I would put those inside of your double parentheses so you do supplies hours and then you could do another one called project notes. And then that way it's in there inside double parentheses it's just for the crew. And then that way when the job is accepted, you know that that's those notes you're grabbing and putting in the job notes for the job.

And the customer is not seeing them.

All right.

Kyle Tarvin, when you talk about closing 60 to 70% estimates when you are in stage one and two, is that for both ot poop mowing and one time mowing jobs or just one time jobs? I would just say it's a blended average of all your estimates.

Over the phone mowing and one time jobs or just one time jobs? Yeah, I would just say it's for everything kind of as a blended average 60 to 70%. If you wanted to break down between mowing and projects, I'd still be trying to shoot for both of them inside of that range.

Kyle Tarvin, would you recommend setting up multiple Google Maps ads for different services or lump them all in one ad? For example ad for mowing, ad for landscaping after clips I'd recommend just doing it in one. I haven't, I've split tested a couple times but because it's relatively smart and figures out which is best, I'm just going to change like once or twice a year. So like spring I'm probably focused on mowing. That's probably switch to projects. Then I'll probably switch to cleanups during the winter and then I'll just make variations of the ad that are a little bit fringe and allow it to manipulate and move slightly based upon whatever is being clicked on the most. Kyle Tarvin, do you have insurance on your location's trailers or just the vehicles? We just have on the vehicles and then we have liability protection on all the other stuff. That being said.

Some states do require you have insurance specifically on the registered trailer. So just every state's a little bit different on that one.

Vlad will coplat display labor and asset capacity along with 3D. It's something we're trying to work on. I have it, I had it my initials, the designs and then I kind of took it out a little bit. Mostly because the input number we depend on the input of how many employees and how many trucks someone has. So the problem with that is if someone just puts a lousy input now the data that we give to them, the notifications is based upon faulty information. So I don't like using inputs that are manual. That's my biggest concern with AI is like if you have a manual input, well then all your outputs are going to be skewed, right? So if they say that they only have three trucks and really they have five, well now all of a sudden every single metric that I'm going to be telling them to do could be skewed if that's the wrong information. So at all, if at all possible, we want to avoid manual inputs, which stinks. We already have a manual input on the cockpit, which is how many employees you have and how many budget hours per week you want them to work, like what their labor capacity is and that predicts how booked out you are. But again, I don't like manual inputs. It could potentially lead to skewed 3D notifications. So we'll work on that in the future though. Mike we had two people leave a review this weekend, but it's not showing up on Google. Do you know why should I contact Google? Let me just see who this is.

Anthony.

If your Google page has been up for a very long time, you might want to contact Google. But if it's new, this happens occasionally. Also, I would wait a week or two. I've seen this happen pretty consistently randomly on accounts where Google or reviews take a while to show up. Make sure you're sending the right link on your Google listing and not from Google local services, which sometimes can hide those reviews. We would need to grow by about 160,000 year over year if we want to hit that 500k mark in terms of E fees. If we were wanting to focus on recurring mowing but still need projects to.