Mike Minutes Mastermind 01/23/2024

The party has begun. Hello, everyone. Hope you're doing great.

Let's get started here. Just drop this into.

Facebook group real quick.

Why is it not live in here? Come on.

All right, make sure you remember this Thursday, not to tomorrow, but the next day, 5pm Pacific Standard Time, 8pm Eastern Standard Time will be the round table.

For all of Augusta Nation.

On the Facebook group. There's the link to that.

Facebook or, sorry, that zoom link. So looking forward to being able to share there. All right, let's get started on this wonderful Tuesday. There's some questions on the road, but I hate getting behind on these, so let's jump in. First question. Oh, wow. Now it starts in the summary. Where should we go first? First question, all right, is from Mr. Anonymous. Are you requiring team members to use their own phones at your locations or are they provided for them? What pros and cons are you seeing with the use of their own phones?

We require them to have their phones part of the hiring process. There are definitely pros to having your own devices because you can make sure that location services are always turned on. You can see them live on the map inside Copilot. You can never have the excuse of my phone isn't working or it's full of data or full storage or something like that. Those are all pros. The cons is obviously expense, the ongoing expense of having to pay for data plans. And then the bigger part for me is the liability that comes along with them having company owned devices. So anything they do on that device potentially could come back to you. So also the care of those devices is usually something that I see not super great people actually taking care of the devices and them not being thrown around and broken, etc. So instead of making another thing that my general managers have to think about, it's like, look, part of your hiring process is you must have a phone, the same thing that you must have a.

A driver's license. Just more things to track every single day. Eric from Largo, Florida, with command center and franchise invoices being moved over to Copilot, is the growth model invoice we received through QuickBooks not the best way to purchase the territory now. So yeah, for solo operators that have the outstanding invoice still, you can still pay that through QuickBooks. That's totally fine. If you would prefer for some reason to pay through Copilot, you can reach out to the email that sends the invoices. But we still have the account in QuickBooks. We still have all of that set up. We still all do all of our bookkeeping and payroll, et cetera for Command center through there. But.

New invoices going forward in 2024 will be obviously through Copilot strike. But feel free to pay those still from last year if you received it. Mr. Anonymous, does command center offer a service where they will train an office admin for us based on the Augusta systems? For larger locations, this may be a good option even if it requires a yearly in person training over the winter. We don't have this right now. We're not, we're not planning on doing this. We do have all the training videos on the academy and between Copilot, Copilot University and then all the training on inside the academy, I think that'd be a good starting point for an office person.

But we, we certainly don't have any plans on offering this mostly because a lot of what we do is based upon servicing 150 locations. So there would be.

Some training around. Like obviously things that they'd be helpful and useful for them to do, but they'd be learning about like how to do connect team, how our departments work, how to be able to do service areas and when someone calls in, like, how do you do deal with a lead that is in between service areas and all these other things. And furthermore.

Like, they have a very regimented training program now at Command center and they have nailed it. And Liz is going to talk more about this on Thursday, but they have this year more than halved the amount of time it takes to get someone trained up at Command center, which ultimately is extremely important for all of us because if it takes six to eight weeks to get someone trained up at command center, it means that if spring rush just goes nuts, we're not able to stay up with it fast enough. And so.

I think there's 42 or 46 new team members joining in the next three to four weeks. And they'll all be trained up and ready to go before March 1st. And that's when we're opening up Sundays to be open. So they have a very regimented way of training. And like there's just. We're not going to interrupt that. Like we literally are going to have 50 plus people being on payroll before March 1st. That will not make a single dollar for Command center until then. And so everything has to be like buttoned down to the T to make that economically make sense. Otherwise we will, we will. We would just. Everyone would have to be paying a lot more. Command Center. And so we look at every dollar goes into Command center as Making sure it's as efficient as possible.

Kyle Tarver from Oklahoma. Is there a rule of thumb on when a business would be better off getting debt versus paying cash? From my understanding, if your interest rate is lower than the rate of inflation, you should always get debt is correct or am I looking at it wrong? This assumes that whatever debt you're going to use, you're going to have be productive, right? So yeah, like in the perfect world, anytime that the inflation or your interest rate is less than inflation, technically you should take the debt. Assuming then that you're going to be able to pay off the principal using the productivity of the cash garnered by having the debt. And so essentially all you're trying to do, you're paying a fee to take cash in the future and bring it forward to today. And the hope is that by having it today I can, I can make more money in the meantime than what I have to pay on interest. But remember, you still have to pay the principal. And so I would not say that if you get. This is what everyone ran into, like in ZIRP, which is zero interest rate policy. ZIRP during 2020 and 2021 is everyone has got tons of debt because interest rates are nothing. So therefore I should get as much capital as possible. And then they forget that not only does inflation need to outpace your interest rate, but furthermore you need to pay off the principal because you still have this debt leaving over you. And this is why we're, you know, we have, we're having all these, you know, debt limits are increasing, not just our country, but like personal credit card debt, etc. The same thing is going to happen for a lot of these houses that are currently everyone's been purchased at high inflated rates and they're waiting for interest rates to come down so they can refinance. If interest rates come down, say one and a half, 2% this year, maybe another 1% next year, they might not be able to hold off long enough before they have to refinance. And so they'll be in a bad spot. So I would not say that if interest, if your interest is lower than your inflation, that you should get debt. I would say that is true with a massive asterisk that says assuming that whatever capital you are raising, you're able to make productive and be able to afford paying off the principal. Indecisive term required. Right? Because if you have a 24 month term, like that roofing company that came out last week, he was going to take $300,000 of debt on a two year term and his rationale was okay, I'll clean you up the hundred thousand dollars I owe everybody vendors, short term debt, etc and his payment was going to be literally less than what he was currently paying on his short term debt. However, you need to go get $300,000 in principle to pay off in the next 24 months and I did not see that happening.

So yes, that would be my answer to that question, although it is probably imperfect and a better answer could be made. But that would be how I look at it. Well, that was a short one. I'm going to have time this evening to get caught up on other things. Okay, fantastic. I look forward to seeing you all on Thursday. The Roundtable. Lots of good information. 5:00pm Pacific Standard Time, 8:00pm Eastern Standard Time. This Thursday I'll be speaking. Liz will be speaking.

Lee and Liz will both be speaking. Liz will be doing updates at Command center and a whole bunch of things that they're doing. Obviously March 1st is when they're opening up for Sundays, which is massive. I know it seems like a very small thing, but being at Command center during Spring Rush, I just know how crazy it is on Mondays and it causes a lot of burnout and burnout for them is all is bad for all of us because we need people that are willing to really, really grind during Spring Rush and Command center. And so having Sunday will kind of ease out that Monday there'll still be a rush there because we're not doing full service on the week on the weekend. However, to be able to have simple services and not have any voicemail and not have any max tickets and not have any estimate requests coming into Monday will be a very, very solid thing. But Liz will be going over some other updates from Command Center. Lee will be going over coaching updates and looking forward to rolling that program out and a brand new platform for your coaching calls which will be fantastic. So make sure you're there on Thursday. I look forward to it. I hope you all have a fantastic Tuesday. I'll see you tomorrow. Take care.