Mike Minutes Mastermind 01/24/2024

Hello, a destination. Hope you're doing amazing. I'm at airport flights getting delayed and canceled, so I'll be flying overnight. Let's see here, we got.

All right, let's get things kicked off.

Happy birthday to Liz. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you.

Happy birthday to you. All right, there we go. Happy 50th birthday to Liz. Let's go.

Sorry I missed it, Liz. All right, let's go ahead and jump in.

All right. Oh, we have a number seven today. Let's go. All right.

Over there. All right. From Chad, from Valparaiso. I'm considering working with a local fertilization company. They service one of my customers into the best looking lawn. I maintained what would be the best way of approaching this and getting the rest of my customers on board.

I think usually the easiest way to do this is just approach the fertilization company like, hey, I want to refer every one of my clients to you. Would you want to just swap people as they come in? Because what's going to happen is they also have people asking them to mow grass. So if you can basically be like, hey, you refer the people who want to mow grass over for the people who want to do fertilizer, that's usually the easiest and simplest way of doing it. And then obviously you're able to kind of see like are they sending you a lot of leads? Because if they are, great. If they're not saying you anything, maybe you find someone else that can do the, that could do fertilization that could be better at referring over to you because what's happened to you is happening to them. And so it's usually the simplest form of doing like a back and forth referrals instead of trying to be like, hey, like I'll give you a certain referral fee and like you gotta keep track of it and all this other stuff. Typically, as I've seen the easiest and best relationship and it doesn't complicate it. This is from Mr. Anonymous. Would you recommend a home equity loan to pay off higher interest rates, credit cards, etc. To free up capital for business expenses?

I would. In general because it's going to be significantly lower, like it's going to be less than half of the interest on a credit card and high interest other debt.

And so also there's a good chance that your interest rate on home equity line of credits may go down like one, one and a half percent this year probably too. So assuming it's a variable, which most of them are. So.

I would probably do this? Yes. Obviously this comes down to the fact that you are leveraging yourself, but you already have that much leverage. I'd be a little bit more concerned if you're like, I have $20,000 of credit card debt, I'm gonna get a hundred thousand dollar home equity loan on my house. I'm also guessing this is a home equity line of credit. This is different than refinancing. But I'm assuming you're doing a heloc, a home equity line of credit. And in that event I would probably say yes. Just remember you are collateralizing an asset and if something goes wrong, that asset will be seized.

Which is honestly, if you have other debt like your credit card and stuff, you know you're going to have to declare bankruptcy. They're going to have to come after assets anyways. Kyle Tarklahoma do you have any tips you can give for GMs and avoiding burnout? Is this something you are even concerned about when you own your locations?

I'm always concerned about other people burning out at my expense. That takes the largest toll on me. I would much rather burn, try to burn out myself.

Than, than even think that someone else is approaching it because of my business.

How do I avoid it? I would say if they can't handle it to some degree.

They should move on. Not because they're bad gm, like they're not good for that role. They're probably a great person, a great worker, that's why they got the job. But there's potential that if someone can't handle GM role, especially a working GM where you don't have 10, 20 guys, there's a good chance that maybe they should be in the field. So I had one GM.

Fantastic, but he was super self aware and he's like hey, I need, I need like more experience. And he's like I'm gonna actually take a demotion which rarely works but has worked out fantastically. I'm taking the motion for six to 12 months. I need to learn the industry more in terms of field work and then I'll come back and be a gm. And that has worked out tremendously. Shout out to Chandler. So.

I would just say communicating with them if they feel overwhelmed, if they feel burned out. Why is this something that can be fixed? Is this something that you can fill in for a moment or season? Is this something that they need more training on?

And ultimately when you're hiring, if you hire someone that has has management experience, they probably won't burn out because they know what that looks like. But they might physically burn out because they're not used to the industry. Or if you a someone who has experience and they have manager experience in the industry now you might be having other issues besides burnout, which like is you them telling you how they should how they want to do things and like trying to change the systems and you know, they start thinking quote unquote out of the box which can get you into more trouble than anything so.

Kyle Turner from Madison, Alabama Mike, have you ever thought about implementing a weather app that is attached to our location for Command Center C? I think it would be helpful if a customer calls about scheduling and it shows rain all week on the weather app in Command center to let the customer know they might possibly be weather delays because rain, snow and ice mainly see this issue. A lot of our clients that live out of state but own rental property here.

Yeah. So we have this on the deep roadmap for Copilot. Instead of trying to make it just for Command center and having it right where it has to track locations, I'm thinking just connecting it to our API that currently we use for chemical tracking, which tracks the wind speed and directional that we have the back integration for this.

Things like this. Unfortunately, although this could probably be done in three or five days of development, it's just so.

Back burner right now. But yes it is possible and yes I have thought about it, it is on the probably 2025 roadmap.

Mr. Anonymous, will there be a list of applicants for a GM role coming from corporate this year?

Good question.

Probably not.

Usually when I do that I do a post they are GMs for myself.

And then last year when I did one for like all of Augusta Nation, only about 10 people applied and to my knowledge no one got hired.

So when I say that they're working for me, there's there's a level of like people will apply more for that role and a few of my GMs came from those posts. So I tried last year. It didn't really seem to get a whole lot of traction so I probably won't. And I most importantly I did follow up on some of the people who got interviewed and they weren't great. So that'd be my two cents.

Tim.

All right, I did one quick mass quote email Monday 1st on copilot also failed, seem to get sent but went to Spain. Check my test accounts today and they were in the dug folder. Got 0 leads from this one click when looking for the email that went to junk when I clicked on the bottom of the quote just came up with an error and said Safari can't open this page. My question is what is the best route to get this one click out, Wait till bug is fixed, resend installer batches have CC test email before sending again. I'd say number three because you sent this on Monday.

The webhooks for mass emails will be done tomorrow. We have the transactional one finished today.

So tomorrow likely when the mail looks all the in order, keep in mind that this is a new email that you're sending these bulk emails from. And so like in service autopilot we usually have a 50 to 60% of our mass emails will go out.

And so currently I can actually show you.

There's like 91% of ours are going through for mass emails. So this is sendgrid.

These are like the numbers for today for example.

So this has been going up every single day as we keep adding more and more things to the back end. What currently is not getting through for certain is.

Icloud they are the most stringent spam filter. So we're getting through on Gmail and Yahoo etc.

Which are also pretty stringent but icloud I know we're not getting through on and then.

The yeah but keep in mind these are first first one click estimate email from a brand new, you know we literally put out last week. A lot of them potentially are going to go to spam now you get your customers open up some of your emails, your transactional emails etc this is your first month inside copilot so they haven't opened up anything from you that that will improve in terms of not going to spam as well as I would lean on the text messages side of things too if needs be until that time. But I would definitely test this again on Thursday or Friday. Command center test to your point on number three.

So I was wondering they didn't all go through and didn't show up on airlock. Yeah, keep in mind a bunch of people are saying the text I'm going through when you send out a text message and to all of your customers there are a lot of people that don't have a cell phone on there. So it's going to try to send it to all those people and it's going to fail on the home phone numbers or people that put any sort of non cell phone number. So just keep that in mind.

So yeah, I feel like right now ask command center continue to test it, test one out yourself prior to sending another one full out to have confidence in it but tomorrow the webhooks are for bulk email will be done. The day we did the transactional email ones, which is through mail Done.

Tim, I wanted to get some different every door direct mail flyers. My question is about the QR code on them. Was there no place to route the QR code to our website? Does the QR code even go to anything? Just want to make sure I before I order, I'd have to see which QR code you're talking about. QR codes that we put on.

On the every door direct mail campaigns.

Are vanilla enough for you to send them to anybody. You could scan the QR code on the on the preview and see exact word goes. I don't know which one you're talking about, but we all. We made all of the QR codes.

For Augusta go to places that like, are generic enough. Show certain information. If we actually put the QR code on there. Unless you're talking about the cams on ones which you can edit however you want. And you could, yes, put a new QR code over top of it, send it to a different spot, etc.

All right, I think that's all we had for today. So tomorrow evening we have the roundtable on Zoom. I'm gonna post again on the Facebook group. Actually, I'll probably just pin it to the top. And then Lisa, an email today as well.

So feel free to look up for that. And Zoom, it's gonna be at 5pm Pacific Standard Time. That's 8pm Eastern Standard Time and probably 15, 20 minutes. I'll be doing some talking and presenting several things and then I'm open up to Q A afterwards. And I look forward to seeing all of your wonderful shiny faces. I'm looking forward to seeing what hat Evan Fairburn will pull out on this round too.

You guys all take care. Have a good one. Wish me luck on this crazy flight. Hopefully get takeoff.