Mike Minutes Mastermind 01/30/2024

Yeah.

Everyone, I hope you're doing amazing. Let's go ahead and get started.

A quick update. We made some changes last night on the way upsells are going to work.

In the past, upsells would only be shown if a customer had accepted an estimate. We changed the words just slightly so that even if they decline an estimate, we still show them the upsells. So just in case they do the mowing and they just kind of want to see how it works or whatever and they decline the estimate, they will still get an option for an upsell. And this will mean that you potentially might get drive by estimates for things like cleanups or bush trimmings or whatever other upsells you want. Even if the customer.

Did not want an estimate or did not accept an estimate for mowing. So we just changed the word slightly based on the second page. Instead of it saying that your. Your mowing estimate has been accepted, it'll be basically saying your mowing estimate has been received. And then it says the remaining for the.

For the upsells. So even if someone declines a mowing estimate, they will have the opportunity to submit for upsells.

All right, I think that's all I had in my list for announcements. Let's go ahead and jump in. Starting later this week, the coaching program will be in effect. I'm sure Lee will update us on the Facebook group when that is live, when you can book your calls with the coaches. And that's going to be coming up. Looking forward to that. Jump into.

Here. Give me one second.

But yeah, I definitely want to fill it out just to see what it's like. All right, questions. First one is from Dustin Bernie. Say in the past that when you reach out to someone you want to learn from, you should start by first by offering something of value to them. I'm extremely passionate about a couple of things outside of lawn care. And I've always used lawn care as a way to fund these passions. There are a couple of experts in these fields I would like to reach out to to shadow them for a day or week and eventually would love to have some sort of working relationship with them in the future. But I do not want to be the guy who only takes from these individuals. Two of the guys I want to reach out to have a much smaller following than you on YouTube. One is 64 subs. The other has 224, 000 subs. The third guy got 249000 subs. How would you suggest reaching out to these guys? Would you get Try to get a phone number or stick to email. Go through their contact form. All three of these guys do consulting and charge anywhere from 2,500 to $10,000 per daily consult. Two smaller guys do some of the actual work. They recommended their clients for them and I've already thought about offering my labor for free to attempt to learn from them for a week or two. Other than free labor, is there anything that you would recommend about, thinking about to add value? These guys, Any recommendations are greatly appreciated. Yeah, I don't think that adding a free day of labor or a week or two weeks of labor is very valuable. There's so many people that offer this. It is, it's more of a pain to handle the person, honestly. So every day I get people asking to come shadow me. It's like, what are you gonna do, sit here and watch me do zoom calls? But you know, I'm sure they get some value out of it, but it would be more of a hassle for me to deal with that just to have it on my plate. And so offering pre labor is honestly not enough value to them, typically, unless they have a really small business and they've just been doing this on the side and they have, you know, 24,000 subs, maybe, you know, a couple hundred dollars worth of labor for free is actually meaningful to them. But I would imagine if they get over 50,000 subs, etc. They're getting people offering quite frequently to do this. So I would, I would say keep listening to their content and wait for them to have a problem that you can solve or you can connect with them, with someone that has the answer. So those are usually the people that have connected with me and then like they kind of get in are the ones, like, they know I'm going through something, they have the exact solution. It doesn't come half baked. It's. It's already ready to roll and it's useful for me.

So. Or you go out and you create like something like your own.

Value in the form of brand. Right. So a lot of people that I wanted to talk to, like the hormozies, etc. Is a matter of like, well, now that you have enough people in the brand and they, it's, it's equitable for them to gain notoriety by being with you. So that's like a very long form way of doing it. But sometimes getting any sort of value from these people is very difficult because money is, is less and less of an object. So it just depends how high up you're trying to go like how high you're trying to punch up. If they're really, really small and you think you can learn from them, potentially a day or two of free labor might might be useful. But that is a skill that they can quickly find. Typically you want to solve a problem for them. That's usually what I have found to be the best way to do it.

Or connect with the people that they know. Because you'll gain trust by doing that. Eric, Largo, Florida what is a good SOP for tracking interest or response from clients with bulk marketing text? I was thinking of adding Reply yes to this text for an estimate in lieu of the Click here button on one click Estimate Emails. I'm wanting to follow up back up on an email one click that went out last week. So my original thought was to direct them to their email spam filter. Click the button. If they didn't actually get the email it would be would end in a dead end. My one click sequence automation hasn't been working properly reported ATC long ago so I have I don't have that active M losing out on that notification anyways. Yeah in terms of the texting bulk text, I would recommend depending on how many people you have in your database, not to use the yes thing.

I would just make it more of a conversational like hey, went by your property today wondering if we would like a proper cleanup. We're getting really busy. Want to make sure you're on the schedule before then. That would probably be much better response rate. And then you just go through your email your text inbox. Now if you have 10,000 contacts and you do that, you will get so many responses and you'll just be spending all day going through them. So that'd be the thing to be careful of. But the thing about text is.

You know they just it's just so much make it more conversational would be my opinion. If you say like reply yes they know immediately they have a you have a whole bunch of.

Marketing going up versus just making it very personalized and you can make that text message feel that way.

That would be my recommendation.

In terms of the one click thing inside Copilot I know they were working on this. It's probably already fixed if you tried last week. But I will here I'll just make a note. I will report back and put it in the Facebook group because I'm pretty sure they fix this.

All right. Yeah I know last week they were restructuring email links so it wasn't working there. Tim, is it possible to get some new Facebook ad videos, tutorials, pictures for cleanups, bed maintenance, gutter cleaning. Just use the same copy but you use different pictures that are inside. We have folders and folders of pictures inside the.

Dashboard or use ones on Facebook that are more recent, etc. Just change out the Change out the creative Chad from Valparaiso, Indiana For Instant Quote Services can we get snow plowing change to snow service or snow removal. I do removal with a snow blower so plowing is not an option for me. Yeah, give me like two weeks and then I'll open it up for a vote on the Facebook group and like the top three or four will add. We don't want to add like a gazillion because literally it starts to get it can slow things down. But we could definitely add several more in there. So give me a couple weeks and I'll make a, like I said a poll and then whichever the top three or four voted up are, we'll get those added Mr. Anonymous also known as Forest I guess I shouldn't have posted this question honestly so you could answer this better. We are wanting to double our recurring services this year so I can slowly ease off of the landscaping projects. Asset capacity is good to go. Labor Capacity over the winter we have ramped up our training onboarding process and has worked out really well with the two most recent hires. They don't feel labor capacity would be a concern. Personal capacity as far as maintenance goes is to the moon. As for the project work, my personal capacity starts to decline around summertime due to being spread thin with the project. Managing estimates managing crews the goal is to move away from the project, but I do not want to take the hit financially. Over the past two and a half years we have consistently picked up 150 to 170 budget hours per month, year over year. On the recurring side of the business. See pictures attached. We need about 250 budget hours of maintenance clients a month to make up for the landscaping projects. Current Marketing.

Google Local Services Maxed out Evergrow Marketing 1500 should this be increased? Angie leads 700 do you have, do you have any recommended strategies to get more leads? Should I hire one or two two people full time to do door hangers? If so, how should I pay them? Commissions hourly? What's the best pay structure for this position? Let me know your thoughts. Thanks. All right, let's see what we got here.

Okay, so these are your landscaping irrigation budgeted hours in the bottom. All right, this is these are not the easiest to view. I Can't go up and down very well. Sorry. I can only zoom in and out.

Come on.

Okay, but I get it. All right, we got a whole bunch of landscaping. Irrigation, irrigation, landscaping. Okay. And then if I go back to here.

This assume is going to be a recurring maintenance. Yeah.

Okay. So it looks like you know, you're 65, 70%, 60% or 50 even in projects and you're trying to get away from that. So I would say first and foremost 1500 dollars on Evergrowth probably is sufficient like anymore. They're probably going to tell you that it's, it's overkill in terms of like you're probably spending more than you need to.

They would know the best for that because it just depends on how far wide you're targeting. And you obviously have a lot of population, so you might be okay. But I wouldn't spend a whole lot more there. I would really look at before. The number that I'd be looking at here before I can assess your marketing spend is what's your close ratio? If your close ratio is 30%, I'd be focused much more on follow up than I would be increasing your marketing spend because you can double the amount of leads, quote unquote that you convert by going from 30% to 60%. And so if you're going to be spending 3, $4,000 a month on marketing, I would rather in this case get a part time assistant or have command center do religious follow up calls twice as much often. Better yet, the estimator make that part of the process the day after have you set up on automation to make it to do for the, the estimator do a follow up the next day.

So I would religiously go after that before I spend any money on marketing. The reason I say that is because literally I would say 90% of small businesses in the home services industries do not have a lead problem. They have a follow up problem. I have determined this after seeing a lot of PNLs and a lot of close ratios and looking at lots of CRMs internally. Like they have a follow up problem. And if they could f. If they could figure out how to increase their close ratio by 20% more by better follow up, better communication with the customer, etc, they would have a far better result because they wouldn't have to spend money on marketing to get the conversion. It's usually a few more minutes, it's a couple extra steps, it's a couple automations, etc. And so I would scrutinize that first and then in terms of Hiring one or two full time person door hangers. Again, a full time person. By the time you look at wages and then you look at the cost of the printing, you're looking around $6,000 a month. Right. So the question is, are you going to get, are you going to get two to three times X on your return than what you're currently making? I would, before I go hire full time person, I would make sure that it's working at you know, 500 or a thousand door hangers and like test the market, et cetera. If you know it's working, then yes, you could go all in on it. But if your goal is to get away from projects, it's just, okay, here's the number of budget hours, total capacity for all of my crew. I'm going, here's what I am for recurring maintenance. I'm just going to slowly keep moving that up over time and I'm going to put more attention on it during spring rush instead of going after the big projects. I believe Forest, if you just focused on the recurring during spring rush and scheduled the projects like take the leads if they come to you, but schedule them off into the summer. I think if you actually just focused on the recurring during spring rush, you'll probably be amazed at how much higher close ratios because you actually have time to focus on following up on the recurring and your marketing would be focused on it, et cetera. And so this is always, there's a big like, you know, you're now in year three for us, so this is very common. Like your first year you're getting like 80, $90,000 projects. It was like super awesome, but it was making up 90% of your revenue. And so now you're going to that period of like, okay, I want to switch more towards recurring. Just don't make it doesn't need to be abrupt, doesn't mean like right away. Just do it over the course of time. Looking at your total capacity for budget hours, what your capacity is or what your budget hours currently are like you are doing for your maintenance and just try to get that number higher. And then the way to do that is focus on recurring during spring rush and don't allow big projects to be scheduled. Do small cleanups for your existing customers, etc. But those big projects off into the summer and usually that alone will allow you to focus, increase your.

Recurring budget hours. Lexington, South Carolina Down Portillo. I have credit card debt in the amount of $20,000. I have equity in my home. Would you recommend a home equity line of credit to alleviate the high interest payments. My goal is to have this debt paid off by the end of the first year. This is my first year in the Augusta franchise.

This is like there's a lot of other things that play into this, especially if you have family. It depends also how much, how much equity you have in your home. Like if you have $100,000 in equity, would I do this? Probably yes, because you're going to go from 23% interest down to probably 8 or 9% interest on a home equity line of credit. And so yeah, I would probably do this is probably going to save you a couple hundred bucks, 300 bucks a month just in interest. So I would probably go ahead and do this. But again, it depends on so many other factors in terms of like what your wife wants. Is she going to kill you because you took a home equity line of credit out? But I think it makes a lot of sense to me to do this because you're going to reduce your interest rate interest spend in basically half, if not more Nick Davidson from Hudsonville Cleaning up our services list in Copilot, we created many services names with customer names as part of the service name due to initial issues with the dispatch board back in April. In 2023, we were working off the calendar view rather than dispatch board and made it quicker to see service and customer. Now we're using the dispatch board effectively and want to streamline our services. We have way too many services named in Copilot. Should we delete the extra for example Mowing Barry Hudsonville and stick to more generic ones like mowing, moash, trim and mulch. I just want to delete all services in Copilot except snow services that we are using now and start from scratch. Bad idea. Will we use critical data? No, I think this is a great idea when you're going to see a video come out from me when we have the dropdown for items and services because I feel like probably 30 to 40% of people in Copilot need to do this because it's so easy to create items and services right now and a lot of people love it and you'll see all this hate come. Like people will say all sorts of horrible things when I make it harder to make an item and service. But the reason is because of this it's too easy to make items and services. It needs to be a dropdown like in QuickBooks where you can create like you can add a new category. In QuickBooks you need to have a plus button and you add a New item and service, it should not be. You can just type whatever you want and it creates a new item and service. It's too easy. And so when we change that to a dropdown, I'm going to make a video how like how you clear out the old ones and how this should work. But I would highly recommend this. Nick, before you get started with mowing 100%, keep it as broad as possible. Like mowing, mulching, weeding, etc, I would keep it as like, you know, broad as possible. That'd be my recommendation for sure.

All right, I think that's all we got. Fantastic. All right, everyone, I hope I have a fantastic. Donald, we got. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. We got. Someone had a question. All right, one second here. Question from ADI.

The Conscience A Bridge Too Far, Part 4. Whoa, whoa, whoa. What? The battle between two systems. Those who occupy and who journey from this life to the next. One of many narratives in the book of Genesis is the shepherds and the planters. As the journeyman here as an ambassador of time, talent treasures. If you me you can borrow up to $125,000 in a cash out refinance, or you could just do $50,000, what would you do and only need 15 or 20,000 of that, what would you do? Like the idea of getting too much debt simply because it's available, I'd be careful of. Especially if this is a revolving line. So.

You'Re doing a refinance, I'd be more careful. Right. So a refinance means you are taking the entirety of the equity and you're converting it into debt at 7.1% interest. I'd be a little more cautious of that. What I would potentially be more inclined to do is.

Do a home equity line of credit on the extra $150,000 of equity. I'd rather do that because that you can pay off quickly. There's less fees associated associated with the initial cost of getting it set up as well as it's a variable interest rate. So if as interest rates go down over the next couple years, you'll go from 7% to probably 5% and then you don't have to go out and get $150,000, 125,000 when you only need 15. I'd probably in this case be looking more at HELOC. Go get. Hey, I want a $50,000 HELOC. You'd get much faster. Yeah, you'd pay, probably pay 8% or 9%. However you can pay it down when you have the money and you don't need to go out and get, you know, 125. You can get 50 or 20, right? I'd be more inclined to do that. Garrett, are one click estimate emails good to go in copa? I believe so. Garrett, I am going to triple confirm that and I'll let you know in the Facebook group. I'll make a new post on it. I just don't want to speak out of turn. I know they were rehooking that up to the new mail service last week. All right, everyone, have a fantastic day and we will see you tomorrow.