Mike Minutes Mastermind 01/29/2025

Hello destination. Hope you're doing good. Again, I apologize for any bad Internet and the background noise. I tried to be in the business center today and someone else had a reserve so I can't get in there. So I'm gonna try to do it here in this cafe. So I apologize. This will be the last day that I am away and having to do this in loud areas. But I did see there were some questions in I wanted to get to those couple quick announcements.

In the next week you'll be hearing from Liz. You'll also be hearing from myself via email. If you are in some of the departments that are going to get trimmed from Command Center. We talked about this at conference and those videos for conference recording will be up within the next several days as well. We'll send out immediately. But what we did mention at conference is based upon the surveys of all the owners as well as just looking at the usage of of Command center departments to offer 20 different departments when the vast majority of people want a core five to ten really really good. And so by paring down the service offerings, you can really specialize and focus on those core offerings everyone really wants us to do well at. So all of us say you all have seen the surveys that was directly taken and literally exactly used to determine which.

Departments should be cut out of the 20 or so that were offered. And so there'll be five that are going to be cut out. We will announce which are next week and you'll be notified there'll also be two months. So up until April 1, until those will still be serviced by Command center and the training in for all departments in terms of in the academy for you to be able to.

Watch videos about how to do exactly what they do in those departments. So when we cut these five departments, it only made up 7% of all the time spent at Command Center. So it just doesn't make sense to be spending literally 1% of their time building an entire department with SOPs, training division leaders, etc. So by simplifying this we're able to really focus in on the things that count the most. And it is very obvious based upon the surveys and the usage data of Command center that is, it is connecting, it is sending out estimates. It's those core services that people want to focus on. And to do that effectively, we need to make sure that we do focus on that. You can't have 7% of the very, very few percentage points of locations using these other very niche services.

Derail us from that. So I understand.

Those departments It'll be a bit of a transition. Well, again there'll be two months before actually they will not serve you in those departments. We'll be notified by the email alongside with videos of how to do those exact services. They'll be put inside the academy. But we're also working on like if it's affecting you, you'll get video training on how to do it. So keep your eyes open for that one. We we did some live streams earlier this year and had topics that slick command center to go over and never really no one ever got on live. So it was more of like it was just. It's easier to record it and you all can watch them at your leisure, at your own time. And then questions we answer them because people just weren't showing up to the lives. And I get it, people are busy. It's difficult to take time away for an hour to talk about one very niche topic that maybe you only knew one or two things. It's just better for us to record it, put it in the academy and then as you need it for that specific department, you'll be able to listen to those trainings. So all that say more emails to come. But we are two days away from basically two months from when those will be ending. So make sure there's really good ramp lots of training for those smaller.

Departments. And again, some of these departments are only serving five to 10 locations, but they take a lot of time for training and creating different departments and management, etc. So you'll be notified later this week. I'll be sending an email, Liz will be sending an email and then we'll be making sure there's videos inside the academy to make sure everyone is locked and loaded if those department changes are affecting you.

All right, let's jump in.

Okay.

Got eight questions today. First one coming from Mr. Narmis. What do things look like when we don't find a referral partner? Is command center calling companies like crazy try to find them as leads come in. Is there a point where they give up? Curious how long this looks if we don't have someone in place. Thanks. Yes. So we do have a process in place to try to get partners. So let's just say a lead comes in for irrigation. You don't do irrigation. You don't have anyone inside your system to refer us for us to refer out to. And it goes to the leads program. The leads program is like okay, immediately. What we're trying to do is we're trying to go into your market. We're Trying to look for who's running Google Ads, then we're looking at who's running notepads, who's running Andy ads. And we work our way down and are just simply trying to contact as many people as possible. We email them, we call them. The reason we go crazy is because we that lead will likely go cold within 24 hours. And so the likelihood of us getting setting some up is pretty low. Even if we reach out to 10 people because they have to get vetted, go to insurance with licensing, the background as well as you have to clear them in order to be a partner. And so.

That'S usually a day or two at least just that process. And so we try, but it's so much better if you already have a partner set up. You know who they are and that's locked or loaded. But yes, we do have a process to go and try them. It's not necessarily the person on the phone that gets the call from command center because they need to be charged. With the Augusta leads, you do not get charged for their time on the phone trying to reach out to those partners, trying to get someone set up for you. Again, in the best case scenario you already have people set up because that is a much better customer experience as well as that's likelihood of them a the partner getting the lead accepted is improved. And ultimately if if the lead gets to them two days late, the likelihood of them closing is low.

Coach Connor, is auto charge a functional feature in Copilot? Would you go into detail about auto charge and what it is? I like to switch to weekly billing. However, if auto try to work our charge works. We're assuming it is when the job gets charged. As soon as the job is completed, we would almost never have to put time towards billing except to double check Items, initial modes, etc. Yeah, so like it works. There are quite a few locations actually that do use auto charge, especially if they want to do it daily billing. You got to be careful with this. I've seen some people do this around initiative modes. They let auto charge happen and then they should have charged $200 for initial mode and ends up charging 50. So be careful about that. This is why I personally have not enabled auto charge in my locations. Does the functionality work? Yes, and we see most of the time people are doing daily billing. Like basically you charge, you get completed and then usually they check everything at night and then it dulls at midnight. But feel free to set up a call with ATC as well. They could walk you through this if you have any specific questions or like hey this is what I wanted to do. Can you make sure my settings are set up that way? They can absolutely do that. So it certainly saves you time.

It's more a matter of if you forget the likelihood of losing a couple hundred dollars now all of a sudden make up for the extra few hours that it takes to just quickly go through them every month. So it is pros and cons, but if you're trying to really minimize your admin time 100 I would use it especially if you're doing daily or weekly billing. Kyle Tarvin from Moore, Oklahoma what are your thoughts on cold calling our database through voicemail bombs? I believe Send Gym does this, but other softwares two Looking for better outbound lead strategies along with war hangers. We've done some of this specifically through.

Cowboy something Callboy Call Cowboy or Voicemail Cowboy. I forget we use this. We saw very little results. The cost is more than text messages and significantly less response. So we did try this out at the Bellingham shop for several thousand people and did not see it as much as good results for the cost that it did incur. But again, you know, try it out. There's nothing wrong to say that this video didn't start work well at Bellingham Shop and the test that I've done in my location, it's not going to work for you.

Mr. Anonymous, can you share the quote you shared on stage about the entrepreneurs Lonely journey? We are different. I would love to copy and paste what that somewhere. As a reminder.

Can you share the quote you wrote and shared on stage of the company about the entrepreneurs Lonely journey? We are different.

I don't remember which one you're talking about. Sorry, I'm guessing you might be referring to.

The quote of People measure your when people say you're unsuccessful, they're right because they're measuring your success in days and you're measuring decades. That might be the one you're talking about if you give me more specific so I'll probably remember. Can you share this quote share out stage about the entrepreneur's lonely journey? We are different. I don't remember. I don't know. I don't recall what you're referring to. So give me a little more clarity, maybe the topic a little bit more a piece of data and I I should be able remember it.

Mr. Anonymous, what services you need from Command center would like to know so I can plan for that. Yes, we will be notifying everyone within over a couple of days. We just want to make sure that when we do, all the training is ready to go inside of the academy and so once I'm back, Liz has updates already. They're ready to go. We've been doing a bunch of videos and training for each of the departments so we'll be notifying everyone next few days and it'll be two months. So April 1st until it actually goes into effect. So.

Next question. Hey, we received email from Aidan talking about a bunch of stuff though, so you can able to send text through Copilot. Does every location need to throw information out or is Augusta handling it for us? Yep. So I addressed this in yesterday's or the other day's Mastermind. You do need to fill out the form because it requires info. Once that form is filled out, that's the Google form. It's coming to Copilot, Asia, Apple Control, there's a port and they are going to do all, all of it for you in terms of inside of Twilio. So you don't do anything but you do need to fill out the form. So do follow along these instructions. I know it's a lengthy email because we want to explain exactly why we are doing it, but just fill up the form. It'll take you five minutes and then you're good to go. We'll do the actual backend Twilio setup for you. Mr. Anonymous, can we when can we expect an updated done for you as it's worth for Google and for Facebook by the time they are a couple months old, Google and Facebook has changed so many things it's hard to.

Change. So following them is difficult. Yeah. So there was just a new one last month for Facebook and I believe the Google ones is coming up here or was actually done last month also. So every six months Nick is doing one of these for both Google and for Facebook and he uses accounts of his or mine to actually show you real life data and real life real ads. So it was last month, it was recently updated. They change up literally every week so we can't be doing them every week. But usually with every six months it's close enough for you to follow along with and if you hit a challenge, definitely reach out to Nick and he can definitely walk you through it if there's something randomly changed in the past few weeks.

Next question from Vince from Medicine Hat. Hey Mike, I've been reflecting the impact of last season's price increase online services and would love your insight on how to approach budget hours this year. Last summer we raised prices by $7 for weekly modes under 49 and by $12 for weekly modes. $50 and over with 1.5x increases for BI weekly services. However, we kept our mowing rate at $80 and adjusted budget hours according to reflect the new pricing this spring. If I raise our hourly rate to match the last year's price increase, our crew will have less time per property for their PPP should remain the same. This would lower their efficiency score while keeping PPP unchanged. Promoting Crew's efficiency averaged around 80% last season. I see room for improvement and plan to address it through better training and more hands on involvement to identify inefficiencies. Did I make a mistake by not increasing the hourly rate last season? I'm concerned that reducing budget hours now can lead to a sense of accruing to rush to complete their work. We need to decline quality which has already. Which was already a problem last season when I that I need to address this year. Given that we're in profit mode this year, should I keep the hourly rate and budget hour the same or should I adjust the hourly rate to match last year's price increase and reduce budget hours? Let me know if more content would help. I appreciate your time and input. Thanks in advance. Okay. I don't believe this matters. It's not adjusting their, their, their pay. And you last year you moved their budget hours up. So really all you're doing is like correcting them by raising the hourly rate. So the fact that you raise prices, let's call it $7, you probably raise prices, you probably end up raising price around 10%. Right? If I had to get like 10 to all these ones are probably like okay, these are like 20, so you probably raised price like 15. So if you raise prices your hourly rate to say $90 an hour, I think that'd probably put you in a good spot. They're still gonna have more budget hours on the schedule at $9 per hour at these new prices than they did early last year. So I would just do it across the board. Tear the band aid off. Remember, you want budget hours to be accurate. So like if you were going to raise prices, remember that is unless you adjust the percentage of on P4P, they're going to make more money. And so whether you change the budget hours, that is simply a function of being able to accurately know how long the job should be approximately taking. And if they were an average 80% efficiency last year, that's pretty good, like 75 to 80%, you're doing okay. And so that tells me that budget hours is correct. Is approximately correct. Right now so whether that 80% was after or before the price increase, only you know that if it was after, I'd probably just leave it as is because that's telling me that most of the time they're budgeted hours a little bit of waste in there. Like it's achievable now if by doing the price increase and increasing everyone's budget hours at the end of the year they were making, they were doing 95, 100, 120% efficiency scores. Now I want that budget hours to go down by increasing the rate which will not affect the P4P to your point because the actual labor revenue doesn't change. So good question. But I don't think this like I genuinely believe you probably be better off just leaving it as is if you are 80% efficiency score towards the end of the year because it's not affecting the P4P it's simply making sure that this is somewhat accurate so you can correctly schedule and so your crew isn't deflated or unmotivated by unrealistic budgeted hours.

Mr. Anonymous.

The public facing franchise page.

The public facing franchise sales page doesn't need to update. The constant improvement graphic is way old. Echo isn't listed as a partner. And why does it say that there's a discount for Copilot. So there's. There is no discount for Copilot. I don't believe it says that anywhere. It says that there is.

What'S it called, dedicated support for copilot through the WhatsApp group.

Echo should be on there.

Yeah, I know the. They are going to update the constant improvement graphic. Basically it was just like from 2023 and 22, 2024.

The updates that were made. So let me see here.

Yeah, so we've only got through summer 2024 in terms of constant print. Like all the things have been added. So we will update that pretty soon. Also I'm going to update some of the performance metrics because like it says 23.6% oh here.

That'S now 27 growth. This is higher. This higher. So we will update this stuff we usually every year like this is May 2024 and that's approximately like when we rebuilt the dashboard, stuff like that in summer. So we usually every year we go through this and just make sure everything's brand new and updated.

Copilot co pilot, co pilots. Oh I'm guessing it's because it's preferred vendor.

So.

Preferred vendor. Yeah we have we basically all the brands in here.

I think there's a limit that we can put on this carousel. That might be why. Because there's a whole bunch more that's even. That's in here. Yes, Echo is obviously in there. If you go to the dashboard, you can see all the, all the preferred vendors, not just the ones that we have their logos on.

Okay, one quick thing that was pretty cool. I was looking last night, I had a call with Tori.

And we were going over a bunch of the web design stuff. So really cool stuff around instant pricing. Man, it's just so cool.

Because we can see like hundreds of other sites outside of Augusta. We can track the conversion rate. And one thing that is just so interesting. Like, check this out. Okay, so instead of long care web design, the average contact form that has no instant pricing, there is a 30% drop off when you ask for your address. Well, we all must have the address to the customer. It's one of those things you can't get around. You need their address.

In, in a regular, instant, regular contact form, when you ask for the address, there's a 30% drop off on that form. And it's the pricing. It's 3.5% across the desktop. And the reason for that is because when you're doing, when you say, hey, we're going to give you instant price, it's assumed that you need to give your. Your address. Interesting. Right now, the downside of instant pricing is that they see your price and they might drop off. And there's about a 30 drop off there. And so when we ran all the numbers for the 20, 24 and we've been going through a bunch, analyzing some of the aspects of how the forms are set up and stuff. But what's interesting is you have about a 30 across the board. Across the board, about a 30% drop off from the time that they see the price to the time they accept. But here's the thing. The difference of is this is crazy. If you put the same amount of people into a regular contact form and an instant pricing form, the same number of people convert out the bottom, the exact same one you lose at the very top, which is regular quotes.

Regular contact forms, 30% of people drop off at the just asking for the address, whereas the 30 drop off at the bottom or the of the instant pricing when they see the price. The difference is the people who convert at the bottom. Like the number is actually very, very similar. 1 the difference is one is still a lead. The other is an actual accepted estimate and accepted pricing. What we really want to do and what we're working on I believe we'll be able to get this year is that even if someone drops off once they see the price, we still collect their lead information. There's several ways to do this. There's several reasons we haven't done it, and several. Some of it's technical limitations and like engineering stuff. But also some of it is.

SEO stuff and load page time, page load time and other things. So we've been working on a bunch. I'm really looking forward to obviously getting the credit card information on those forms, but when I look at conversion of the sites, we geek out about this stuff. And so the way that we put the form together, which pieces of information are asked first, etc. Is like we can really see what, what gets people to convert the highest rate. But one thing that we are really going to try to do this year as well, I'm going to talk about a conference, is even if they drop off once they see the price, to be able to capture their lead information and put them inside the database. Here's why. Two reasons now. One, that they don't like the price of your one, service. You get them in your database and you might be able to sell them down the road. Two, if they're a lead that's decent, they just didn't like your price. You could still sell the lead through the Augusta Leads program because they just didn't accept your price and they still want your service. It's still a lead. You, if they're outside your service area, you could still sell them. If they're outside your service area, they're inside your service area. You put them inside your database and you upsell them down the road. So.

Yeah, that's what we're working on. It's going to be something that later this year we will continue to tackle. We want to really improve a couple aspects of the instant pricing forms. And so we've been looking a lot at the data, but again, hopefully next couple months we can. The first thing we're focused on is getting the credit card information inside of that form to then be able to lock it into Copilot's customer portal. That'll be focused for focus number one and then focus number two after that in the second half of the year is gonna be how do we capture the client's data before they even if they drop off the form. So that's what we're kind of looking into anyways. Hope you all have a fantastic rest of your day. If you missed the announcement at the beginning, the next few weeks or a few days there will be myself and families about what those departments at convention are getting dropped. They're right making sure all the training is ready to go inside the academy, and that will be completed before as well as two months of a transition time before they actually can't deliver those services to you. And and again, it's impacting a very small fraction of Augusta alone care, so we'll probably be a little bit more pointed and.

Focused about who you reach out to and make sure you have the training videos for each department you might be might be affecting you, etc. Anyways, sorry for the background noise. Sorry if it got a little blurry. This is the last day it would be like this, but I want to make sure I connected with everyone today. Have a fantastic Wednesday. I'll see you tomorrow. Take care.