Mike Minutes Mastermind 02/03/2025

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to the Mike Minutes Mastermind on this beautiful Monday morning. Got hit with a little snow up here in the PNW Pacific Northwest. We got the coaches in town today for training and then the rest. This week is owner training. Next week is also owner training. Very, very good. Okay, so let's get this party on the road. Couple quick announcements. Wait, did I send it out? Oh, one second.

Update this. Sorry, got all excited.

Boom.

Boom. Bold. Okay, post couple quick announcements. On the weekend, I made four new videos. I put them in the Facebook group, but I know.

Sometimes I get buried, so don't worry about it. Every three to four weeks, you can expect an email from me and I kind of break down the actual announcements that I give here. So, yeah, as always, in case you're new to the three Mike Minutes Mastermind, the three M, I'll do my the announcements here first on the the daily. So that way if you need to log off, you get the announcements. Also, I will send every four to five weeks a email summarizing those announcements as well so you don't get lost. I wanted to give a quick shout out actually, while I'm thinking of it, Connor stead text me. He said he did his second highest month of revenue ever, $92,000 a month in January. Let's go. While at conference that week. For a week too. So congrats to him, Congrats to everyone. Crushing Q4 collapse in the off season by doubling down on the different tracks. So shout out to Connor. I know Connor probably wouldn't put a win inside the Facebook group, but hey, if you're making a win doodle, what it's called brackets win inside of it. And that gives you the permission to be able to go ahead and brag a little bit inside of Augusta Nation chat. Let's go. Okay, announcement. So I made four videos. Three of them were for Command center, but if you have, I think most people would be interested in watching them, so feel free to watch them. One is like a general update about spring and the initiatives that we have at Command Center. Kind of a recap of some of the stuff we talked about at conference, focusing on instant pricing and the things going forward that are impacting the admin side of the business.

The other one was about the Augusta leads program, and then the other one was about a 10 out of 10. What makes a 10 out of 10 call. So if you have staff that you have in the office, you have your own home office and a few locations that do. I highly recommend watching Those videos, but it's also there. I put them up there in case you would like to watch them again. I will link to those in the academy on my next email, but when I make them live, I'll usually just put them up in the Facebook group so people that want to see them right away, they can. And then I'll make sure in those emails that they're in the academy locked and loaded. In terms of videos and what's cool is now all those videos inside the academy are searchable in the database via their transcripts and AI. So very cool. Not this week, but next week in terms of academy, we'll be getting updated all the initial owner training. So every year we will redo that whole thing. The upcoming one is going to be good. We're going to keep the size of the amount of trainees low, probably around 10 to 15. And then we're going to have like three camera men, camera people, we're going to have live streaming switching happening. Really good quality video. So the reason we do that is in the event that a general manager goes down in the middle of the year and you can't get them to training for another few months, they're able to kind of catch up pretty quickly by just watching that. So that's the main reason we do it also. It's great because then all of the searchable database in the transcripts is all updated information. And so I've redone the entire training system for this one. On my vacation last week, that was what I was doing. We did all four days, all the slides, um, and I think it's much better. So we will constantly keep improving that. So every year we will update that. Those training videos inside the academy. So very good.

The la. The fourth video that I made on the weekend that I also put in the Facebook group and again will also be in the email down the road.

Was.

About how to make training videos. So if you are making training videos, if you enjoy making training videos on Loom and you like to make this for your team, for your staff, for any of your other businesses that you might have, I do recommend using that training video model.

And if you are wondering why there is poor quality, it could be because there is poor training. And so I tried to create a system for how to make training videos and I think it'll be helpful. It's been. It served me well. And over the course of the next year, Command center and all of the training on academy will move in this direction to. It's like very systematized you know what to expect when you hop on a video. It gives the background the why, the problem, the solution, the details of the the training. It should be much more systematized and a little more dialed in. But I think it's useful for all of us that are as managers, whether it be general managers, owners, people are, if you're a leader to be able to see behavior change inside of the organization, the people that you're leading, you'll need to convey your thoughts in a concise, an organized manner. And so I try to create a 10 step process for creating a training video. Whether you're doing this for someone out weed whacking in the lawn and their initial training as a team member, or you're talking about someone in the office or you're talking about engineers, following that model actually work pretty decently. And then you'll actually notice in the video that I made I follow that exact I followed the system while training the system. So those are the four videos. Like I said, if you missed them, they are in the Facebook group. But I will link to them in the academy on my next update email that I do periodically when there are updates for.

Augusta. All right, let's jump into some questions folks here on this marathon Monday we have eight questions. Let's jump in. First one's from Joel from Lafayette. Thank you for the snow removal instant quote form. A couple questions. Could we get the ability to edit the terms and details like we can for the mowing IQ form? Yes you can. So there is when you fill out the form Joel, if you're not seeing it, let me know or email webgustalongersurfaces.com but in that form at the bottom you will see you can edit the verbiage just like the mowing quote to add in like triggers or any sort of other information. Obviously the instant price, we want it as quick as possible. But yes, especially with snow there's going to little bit more variability and so that you can add your own text at the bottom there. If you're not seeing on your end Joel, please let us know webustalongassurf.com we'll make sure we get it added in there for you. Number two, why isn't there a large option? I know every location will be a bit different and we can't fully customize the form. However, most of my houses are two car width like the medium image or a three car width like a potential large image. I currently have the form set up. Small is my medium price and medium medium is My large price. I'm concerned most people with a two car garage would think their house is the medium based on the picture and think that the price is too high. Could we add a large option like the mowing form? Send this in Joel to webgustalongsters.com as well as a request. We were trying to keep it even more binary than mowing to keep reduced like too much noise. Because when you start thinking about two, some people will think about their, their driveway as a two car garage. Therefore it is a two to car width. So we were trying to keep like just one or the other like basically it's really small and small or large. That's really what it comes down to a small, medium and large. So that we did that. So that way people go to the medium one if they think it's.

Anything above small. But if you send that to web August, I don't think this would be difficult. We just have to add another picture in there. So send it in there. Maybe CC franchise at Augusta longer sources on that request and that would be good. They might wait on this one Joel, because we did test this so it'd just be a matter of conversion. But I don't think this would be too difficult for us to add if you want it. We just saw as soon as we added three, three varieties of driveways people kind of lost their mind. I don't know. The conversion dropped. So go ahead and feel free to ask it, request it and we can probably put the form in there if you want. But again the especially on something that is like.

Is so blurry you want to reduce the optionality for them to improve conversion. But again I see your point 100% put this as a request and then we could probably make it happen.

Why do we have to select from a predefined list of prices instead of entering our own prices like the mowing form? Great question. This came down to simply the tech that we're using for the form. If we wanted it to look really nice with the text, with the numbers, we had to have some. We had to pre make every single image. And so if we allowed like full customization we would literally have to make 40 images and it would take twice as long for us to update when you made a change. So we're trying to keep it to that, you know, every $10 limit. If that became a huge issue, we'd probably make it where it's like every five.

So if this is a big problem, let us know when you make this email to they just request it and then we will keep track of it. For now, we're probably gonna keep it this way. It's mostly from a support perspective when people ask for price changes. So, like, we get hundreds of price changes across Augusta Nation every week. And so it's like we. We can bog the entire support team on the website down with just simply like, hey, I want to change this. My small and my medium and my large. Or I want to take this one, my square footage up and. Or I want to like add this little. Like there are hundreds every week that we are going through. So we wanted to try to constrain that, especially because we see people change their prices a lot during snow events, and so we would be behind the curve. So I don't want to happen is you want to change your price by a little bit, but because now we're two, three days backlogged on changing people's pricing because there's a snow event now, all of a sudden it's. It's behind it. Just it's way slower. Whereas we can do these very quickly because we only have say 10 or 15. So it's more of a support backend thing. But if this is a big problem for you, please do request. And we kind of keep track of like how many people are requesting and we could probably go like say $5 increments, but feel free to put that as a request. Could we do the option to show per visit or per month with the price on the images? I know the details section say per visit, but you can't see that until after you click on one of the images. There's plenty of room on the images square to fix this text. Fit this text.

Yeah. So you could put this as in your details part and put the dollar amount. But the per month part, we don't have those currently as the images. So. Here, one second. I'm going to.

Joel, I've been saying send this to Web at Augusta. I'm going to do this for you. Give me one second.

All right, Joel, do not email them. I will do that for you because I have a little bit of inherent knowledge on some of the stuff we tested and what would potentially work here. So these sort of customizations. Very good. We try to roll out something that is well tested and basic and then we will add the functionality and the customizations. So give us a little bit of time. I know for some people they're still in the middle of snow season, so like they're trying to use it right away. But. But my intention really was to get lots of data, roll out what we knew was going to work and then we'll constantly update it and improve it. So I will take this feedback, see what we can do and these this sort of feedback, super helpful so we can dial it in before, you know, sales season for next snow season. So thank you.

Brent from Cedar City, Utah. How might we determine when we have capped out profit mode? When we are winning only about 35% of estimates, it is when you are winning too few of estimates to replace churn. So when you're in profit mode, you're raising prices significantly, you're going to have a lower close ratio. Now the only reason that I would ever think that you have capped out is if you have to start marketing and advertising heavily to replace your churn. So if you have 25% churn a year, that means that you still have to get leads coming in and you still got to sell jobs. But if your prices are too high and no one's accepting the jobs, you're not, you're your capacity, you're going to slip slower and slower, slowly away from capacity because you simply aren't closing enough jobs to replace your churn. So that is the benchmark. And so I don't want you have to spend a bunch of money in marketing in profit mode. And so if your natural lead flow does not replace your churn, you'll have to go market. Now there's a good argument to say that just raising Your prices by $5 across the board and have to do a little bit of marketing is still a good deal. So just be careful with that. Don't take me out of context, but if you're spending gobs of money on advertising just to replace churn, it's probably a good idea just to bring your prices down, increase your close ratio potentially. So that would be the balance though is when you have to start marketing heavily, especially during spring rush just to get back up to capacity because your close ratio is so low.

Marco, my brother is a barber and cuts 100 plus hair people's hair. A lot of them seem to be blue collar workers between 20 and 30. What are your thoughts on myself? Exhausting his client base by offering job opportunities to them before even considering advertising on deeds. They all know him, he knows them, he knows their current job, et cetera. So I feel like it's a huge opportunity for us to get the proper hires we need this year. Thanks for your input. Go for it. I'd give him an incentive and treat him like an affiliate. I would Say, hey, for every person that you refer over to us and they scan this QR code and they fill out application, I'll give you 100 bucks. If they sign up and work for us for six months, I'll give you 500. Something like that. I'd rather pay my brother than indeed Kyle Tarvin from Moore, Oklahoma. The other day I was asking you about leads partners joining the program. I mentioned we have not been notified of partners joining and you had said we wouldn't get notified if they're outside of our service area. Is there a way we could get notified of partners joining in our area? I'm just trying to keep track of everyone that's actually signed up. I have a current partner that is needing to update their zip codes and service areas. So it would be nice to know who is actually active in an area so I can keep them tabs on them, follow up with them, them on joining the program. I feel it may look bad if I'm following up with a potential partner to join the program. They have already, they are already inside the program and I had no idea. I hope this makes sense. Yeah, so, you know, we're, if, if they touch your service area, you're getting a notification.

Prior to them joining and you can veto them. And we, we actually have them in a holding period in, in case you reach out to us. So if you get that notification, you don't have to do anything and if you let it just sit, that's fine. They'll get inside the program. But it gives you the opportunity like, no, this person's not good, etc. So.

That being said, if we started notifying you people that were like 50 miles away, 100 miles away, it's just going to get, you're going to get inundated with just a bunch of emails. Like we have 100 plus people now. No, it's 961 second, almost 100 people that have applied. So you just start getting a lot of emails of people you don't even know. So, and we're talking like 100 miles away. You don't even have a good pulse on them. So if it's, if it's in, if it's touching your service or in your proximity, then you're getting notified also you will, on your quarterly report, Kyle, you'll get to know who those leads are going to. So you, this would be another way to be able to make sure, like, okay, I didn't know that one. Well, it could potentially be 150 miles away because someone just literally typed in lawn care and they had like their location services off on Google and you popped up. This happens quite frequently, honestly, especially as things like Safari, they lock out their location services. We are getting picked up in SEO from places a long ways away. So the reason we do this, Kyle, is because every minute, every minute that a lead stays cold while we verify that partner, especially their first couple, is a bad, that lead goes cold. And so if we're waiting a day, two days for you to respond to every new partner, it's a bad experience for the new partners because the first lead they get, we, we usually are now waiting an extra couple days to get approval. So we do that for people inside the service area. We make sure you get approval and you approve of them. But like we're just not going to wait until I'm 200 miles away from you. That called through because we need that lead to get them as fast as possible. Because if that lead goes cold and they're paying for something that's not a good lead, it's a bad look for the program. So I'm actually going to be testing this over the next couple weeks because there's a good chance I will. We will give the first couple of leads away for free. We said we need them to have a good experience, close, a really solid job and then they're locked in and loaded. They're like, okay, great. These are really qualified leads. These are really, really good. I'm going to go ahead and commit. That's what you want. So.

Yeah, I'm testing that to see if we actually need to do that. But especially that first lead, if we're waiting an extra day or two for approval from an owner for someone that they don't even know, it could be really a bad experience for the partners. And again, if the partners don't have a good experience, we don't get money. So yeah, that's the main reason why. It just adds more admin and like slows down the process. But you will be on your quarterly report of the leads that you're getting paid for with your check. You will get, you know, who's, who's, who are these going to? And you could vet them then if you needed to.

Morgan Latimer, number one, is there a pre training best practices list for new owners?

The emails that Lee will send you this week will kind of lead you up to that. We are giving people access to the Facebook group sooner. So I know a lot of people that are new are coming in and they're watching like old Mike minutes, masterminds. Those are helpful, but not really. If you watch Copilot University, it probably puts you a little bit ahead just to make sure you're super comfortable with that workflow. If Your season starts March 1st and you're currently with Jobber, what steps would you take to rip the band aid off to move to copilot, bringing about 150 to 170 clients for mowing and recurring? What steps would you take to rip the band aid off to? Me, yeah, I'd watch Copilot University, get familiar with it. I would say the vast majority of owners moving into Copilot right now are coming from Jobber and they're coming from service autopilot. So there there you there's a lot of people there. And furthermore, Morgan, ATC Air traffic control can actually move them all over for you. So we will do that and we just part of the setup process. It's a pain in the butt. We will do it for you. We also have training on how you can do it if you want to do it yourself. So I would say to rip the band aid off, I'd be really comfortable with Copilot University. I would have the setup call with command center and then after that probably March 1st. I'm guessing set that as the date like we're tearing off the band aid. All of our recurring services we're going to set up for spring starting March 1 inside copilot and that's the easiest way to tear the band aid off. We'll go over this too in your training.

Number six. Mr. Anonymous. I am thinking of selling my house this year, moving into apartment and using the equity $125,000 to grow the business. Last year I did 220k and hoping to double this year. If that happens, I'm looking to put a GM in place, switch to profit mode and then start another location right next to my existing one. If I don't sell my home, I will have to stay as the GM for a few years before starting the next location. This would not cause any problems in my personal life and would be less responsibilities. Interesting. Okay. I also feel like the paycheck on this investment will be more versus waiting a few years to start the second location having no having to use debt. Just looking for your thoughts on this. So I'm not opposed to this. Every time you sell a home you're going to lose about 10% just because of closing costs. By the time you pay realtors, you pay for fixing the place up. By the time you pay for the title transfer, et cetera. So what I recommend is to potentially not. What I recommend, what I would say is think about potentially getting a home equity line of credit because you might be able get 70 or $80,000, so a percentage of the equity that you do have in the home without having to move.

So and meanwhile you keep the asset because the asset will likely over the next five years still go up in value, potentially more than the interest you will pay on that home equity line of credit. So something to think about there.

Because you're going to have, you're having a closing cost, realtor fees. You know, usually there's some things you got to fix on the house in order to sell it. So I'm not opposed to this. I'm, I'm pro getting 125 grand. Investing your business. The question is in the next, let's just call it five years, maybe the equity, the home goes up another 50 grand, right? If the market continues to go up very quickly, you're probably another 50 grand in equity. Will you make more than 50 grand if you spend 125 grand now on the business in five years, that could be a double the doubling of the size of the business and better cash flow equity would be more than 50 grand that you build in the business. So I'm pro this, but I would first look at what are your options in a home equity line of credit because it might actually be the move. Now the bigger thing though you mentioned is you're downsizing. So that downsizing that savings, it'd be more than like you have to add that plus the interest on your home equity line of credit and then compare against your asset value increase in terms of equity over the next five years. That becomes a meaningful game. Like if you're downsizing by 500 bucks a month, what? Okay, great. Now all of a sudden selling the house is actually even more net positive for you. So I would also consider this. If you're willing to downsize into apartment, potentially you rent out one of your current rooms in your house that pays the home equity line of credit. So instead of downsizing and getting an apartment, you just rent out one of your rooms for, you know, 800 bucks a month or whatever it is, depending on your market, 500 bucks a month that pays all the interest on an $80,000 home equity line of credit. And all of a sudden you got yourself, quote, unquote, free money to be able to work on the business. And then you pay that home equity line of credit down while having Someone in your house, and in five years you've paid that off, they're out, you kick them out of the house, you got yourself a house, and you have the business without all the debt. So just a thought.

If you're trying to think, also comparing that with downsizing. Marco, if a location is at $800,000 now and transition to profit mode for the next five years, how much annual profit would you estimate that location has per year five years from now? I believe that if you are in profit mode and at that 7 to $800,000 marker, I think in three years you can get it to on 800,000. $200,000 in profits now $200,000 in profits. If you're giving it away to a general manager, your team and a regional manager, you might only be actually taking $100,000 of distributions. Keep that in mind. That's very, very doable in my opinion. It comes down to what Brent was talking about before. Do you have enough leads coming in to replace your turn? Because if you don't, you'll end up spending a bunch of money on marketing or you'll slowly go from 750 to 720 to 700,000 in annual revenue. So be careful about that is what I would say. But assuming in the vast majority of locations, when I see them after years three in terms of just organic leads coming in from their website that have no UTM tracking for like Facebook, the people are just coming to their website most of the time. If you just closed 30 to 50% of them, you would be able to replace your churn. So that's where I came up with like the, the amount of leads I knew that each location would need to have to replace churn at a 30% close ratio at around 7, $800,000 in revenue is where I knew you could go into profit mode and stay there for three years. That's what the math behind the model is. I knew that at that site. So for example, if you went to $3 million in annual revenue and I said, okay, now you're in profit mode and you raise prices, you cut your marketing, et cetera, now all of a sudden you might need way more leads just to break even or to.

Stay close to capacity. And so this is why if you go really, really big, and this why I didn't really talk about this at conference. But if you go to the 1.5, let's call it $2 million marker, if you turn off marketing, you might not have enough organic leads coming to your site because you simply have way more customers and so on. Now on 500 customers, a 20% attrition means 100 new customers I've got to get every single year versus say 20 or 30 or 40 based on a smaller size business. So that, that's kind of like the math behind it too when it comes to knowing that the vast majority, when I did the math, if I remember correct, like 80% of locations would get enough leads to replace turn after year three. So that's where like the math like grow as fast as 500,000 over the next three years. You're going to keep your prices, keep raising them as you hit capacity is I know you have enough leads coming in to be able to stay at capacity and that's the real bottleneck there. Mr. Anonymous, when you're holding company, it's our holding company. Let's go. When our holding company goes public, I believe you said you would like some capital to go towards technology and robotics. Will you explain more what you're picturing? Yeah. So right now like software is relatively expensive because engineers you're getting but when you go into hardware it gets even more expensive because you have manufacturing costs, etc. I do believe that the technology was significantly cheaper and better in that eight to 12 years before we go public. But I do believe there'll be an injection of capital required to customize things for us to be able to actually scale it. We don't have that kind of money right now. And so this is why there are companies doing robotics products that have have literally gotten tens and hundreds of millions of dollars like Scythe sky, the one that was.

Vel Thomas I think was posted on the Facebook group. Really cool technology, big fan. The problem is they have spent hundreds of millions of dollars getting there and because of that their cap table is crazy. Like you have venture capitalist private equity of a little bit for the founders teams. Like there's so many people on that cap table, it's very, very combobulated. And so usually their exit is a, an acquisition just to clear the cap table. So I think someone like Scythe might, Sky, whatever the name is, might end up being purchased by Kotoro or John Deere or something like that most because like they have so much capital invested for them to actually like manufacture, build and then scale themselves out of this with a profitable machine. Could take so long. People get like venture capital is looking for a return in the next five years, maybe seven years. And so I don't believe it's going to scale fast enough for them to Actually manufacture, distribute, create a brand and have dealerships in that whole model before the investors like, hey, we went out, we went out. So I predict something like a sky the next five years will get bought out simply to clear the cap table. We, on the other hand, my hope is that we have the distribution.

But then we need that capital when we go public, that I can sell a ton of my shares to be able to fund what we need in terms of robotics. So that would be. That's kind of like the. The overarching goal is that we will need another capital injection, but I'd rather do that and liquidate all of us to be able to get our equity at the same time when we go public. So cool. All right, I have my marching orders. Thank you, Joel, for your feedback on the snow form. I will communicate that to the web team, and we will figure out a solution, if not immediately, definitely before next snow season. We just want to. When we make changes, we want to keep it the same way for a while, because we want to test and have data to know, okay, what did the impact of the next change actually cause for conversion, et cetera. So that's kind of why you see me slow down a little bit. It's like, I want to have a data set at each step to actually know when we make a change. What was the impact of it? Not just like, oh, we thought it was good. All right, I love you all. I hope you have a fantastic week, and we will see you tomorrow. This week might be a little choppy in terms of Mike Minute Mastermind, because we do have training as well as next week, but I'll make sure I get them in as soon as I can. Thank you all.