Mike Minutes Mastermind 02/08/2023

Hey, everybody. Hope you're doing super well.

Don't worry. It's late, but if you're in bed, just go to sleep. Tomorrow morning, you can watch the Mastermind. It'll be great.

Yeah, I'm just late because of the training today and just getting the YouTube video. Sorry for stalling.

Drop it in the Facebook group. Yeah, training went really good. Day. Today was day. What is it? Today is day two. So we are halfway through. Great, great group of people. Our biggest group ever. It's almost 30 people, so pretty cool. It's a little tight in the room, I will say that. See here? Whoa. Just dropped my binder. This is where everyone's at.

So it's a packed house, folks. One bathroom, 30 people. But. But, you know, now we've gotten smart. We have ourselves a scooter here in the studio. So you can go outside, go around the building and go to the public bathroom. Oh, man, it's been good. Everyone here has been awesome. All my GMs are here from North Carolina, so it was great to see them and then everyone else as well. So let's go ahead and jump in. Oh, man, I forgot to open up the tab.

Mike Minute Mastermind. All right, six questions. Let's jump in, baby. Present Share screen. By the way, there are some cool things the media team is working on for other designs. Welcome to the neighborhood Upsells. Those are going to be great. So that way your. Your customer or your employees.

If they see something on the property, they can literally do a kind of instant quote on the door hanger. This is probably going to be most helpful for solo operators or people that have one or two employees and you're out in the field still, because you could fill it out and then upsell existing customers. So it's built for people that are actually already moaning service for. So, okay, let's get started. I've used up my words for the day. It was crazy. We ended at 6pm and I had exactly 6,000 steps. It's great. Okay, this is from the people. Okay, the people. We sincerely appreciate you for being willing to do the Masterminds after very long days of new franchise training. You lead truly legions different. Oh, thank you. Wow. Okay. Well, thank you. The people. You're welcome. The people.

Oh, man. Okay. Kevin Bloomingdale. Would paid time off be paid out at base rate? Yes, it is.

Kyle Tarvin, do you keep physical copies of tax documents this year? I'm really trying to keep everything digital as I have a ton of tax documents, like receipts, 1099s returns etc. I've just been uploading them to my personal Google Drive in a folder. As I get things. Is it okay to throw these things away after they've been successfully added to the drive? Yeah, I do. Let me see. Let me see if I can share you exactly what I do. I know I've shared this before. That's probably why you talked about that. Let me just make sure there's nothing like crazy sensitive in here.

I think I could share this. Yeah, I think I can.

Now. It shows like where I give money and stuff like that. Okay, I'm not gonna share it. But what I do is I have a Google Drive folder for every year and I have different folders. I'll read them off to you. So I have like 1099s. I have end of year loan documents. So those are. That's for real estate. I have HSA and ira, so health savings account and retirement account. And then if I have specific acquisitions, I'll put those in there. I have a Q1, Q2 and Q3. So as I get from command center my quarterly reports, I throw those into the quarter. So if I have any time throughout the year a bank asks for my financials, I already have them ready to go. And then I have a different folder for my tax strategy meetings. When you talk to Brad on your tax goal, you should definitely put whatever you guys your notes are, throw that into there things that you need to change. You can do that twice a year. Great. And I have my W2s and then I have my, my.

Tax deductions for giving. So I have those. And then I have my prepayments. As I do my prepayments, I put those into a different folder. So it's all very organized. I have back to only since 2017 I've been really organized. So the past what, six, seven years it's been really good. And. And when you have the quarterly organized.

It is extremely beneficial for bank document. Anytime the bank asks for something or you do a loan request or anything like that, then you have it already ready to go. You literally just send them a link. It's great. Highly recommend. But yeah, you shouldn't have to keep anything as long as you have a picture of it. Receipts, things like that. Oh and then obviously I keep my receipts in my app is backed up on the cloud. Max Harwood Burnaby Question understanding Low multiple on marketing Last year we spent $26,000 on marketing. Except excluding the wrapping the vans and bought brought in an additional $152,000 in revenue. Has a 5.8 multiple on marketing dollar which seems low. It is very low. Anything under 10 is not good. Our close ratio throughout the year was 50%. The vast majority of our work is recurring. 85% plus. Okay, so that is a big piece of it. Probably Max is.

The bigger the projects, the more projects you offer, the higher your market, your multiple marketing dollars. I still think you can get around 10.

But.

And I would, I would also assume that some of that was early in the year, pre spring rush you might have spent too soon on. But just take that off the table, you should still be shooting for 10. However, if you watch the video I made a couple days ago, I talked about like a 10x multiple on recurring work and a 20x multiple on projects. If you're not doing any projects, and I'm not saying you are Max, I'm just saying this as a general rule of thumb. If you're not doing any projects, that's going to hurt your multiple and revenue just because you simply can't upsell people into other stuff. Right. And again I'm not talking Max here, I'm talking just everyone. In general.

Projects are going to have a higher multiple in the next 12 months. However, that $150,000 worth of revenue, assuming as a 70, 80% attrition, 70 to 80% retention rate means that next year you're going to get another 120 and the year after that, 100 year after that 70,000 from those same customers that you spent the 26,000 mark. Right. So you have a much. I know specifically Max, like you really focus on just simple services. They have 85% of it's recurring. Just keep in mind that most people in their first year 70 to 80% of their revenue comes from one time jobs. Property cleanups and mulch installs and project based work. Just keep that in mind. You will have a lower multiple but you're going to build a business that is just different and more sustainable in terms of less of your time involvement. We primarily advertised on Google search and put A Little on YouTube Next Door Facebook and yard signs. We also drifted at least 10,000 door hangers and knocked on doors. What went wrong? Is this. Is this a natural consequence of focusing on mowing treatments and gardening bed weeding? We do offer property clamps but our close ratio on those tend to be lower and we don't offer any projects. Oh, you don't even do mulch. Yeah, so that's a. For example, if you do mulch on a customer's house, you just increase their annual value by 50%. Right. So that's one thing. Just, just doing the mulch. And then if you do say, I think you guys do cleanups, don't you? We do offer property camps but your close ratio tends to be lower. I don't remember. But if you for example, if you have like a higher hourly rate on those projects, project based jobs, again, it's not wrong. You're building the business in a way and I know specifically with emacs like you're building in a way that you can run without you pretty easily a few years. If someone, if you like, you probably could have gotten a 15% 15x multiple and grown to say 5, 600,000 last year. But you would have been doing most of that like 70% of it, 60% of it even would have been recurring or project based. Only 15% of it was, was project based. So that is, that is a big big deal because you're, you're. When you do recurring you're basically paying for a customer and you're, you're, your goal is to keep them over the course of 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 years and extrapolate all their value. Whereas with projects it's a one time hit. But it's way bigger because if you do a couple property cleanups and a couple mulch installs, you know, $3,000 a pop, you in one week got all the revenue you would get from them for two years on mowing. Right. So you're just building the business in a different way. I do think 5.8 is low but I also think that there's things that you learned in that first year of what worked and what didn't and you'll go into next year just with that information and probably do a 10x multiple even if you don't change your search services.

So. Yeah. Or is it because our service area is really large and it takes more money to penetrate the market? That is a thing too.

I didn't even think about that. Yes. Yeah. But yes, you're right. There aren't many actual competitors. Mostly just chucking a truck owner operators who don't market. We do however have at least 300000 living in our main service area for mowing. Yeah, like that. I, it didn't cross my mind but now you mentioned it. Yes. Like where you're at with 300000 people in your service area and it just extremely like there's just a ton of people. It's easy to just get very, very diluted and that's why like in, if anyone's living in a market has hundred thousand, three hundred thousand, five hundred thousand people, a couple of our locations have like almost half a million or more. I would be focusing very laser like on a certain area. So wherever you're putting those door hangers, I'm assuming it's like your target market. Those are the areas that I'd be focusing on. The problem is when you do things like YouTube and Facebook, you can kind of do it, but it's, it's hit and miss with, with, with data protection now the way it is in terms of hitting those exact areas. Right. So I think number one, you're going to get, get be above 10x multiple this coming year simply due to the fact that you have figured out what works and what doesn't and been testing this whole year. Secondly, you're going to your spring second Spring Rush, so you're actually going to be ranking. Well, these things that you're all mentioning, you're mentioning in here and are all actually going to help you. All right. Because like going into last Spring Rush, you had just joined Augusta. Like I think it was December. October. I forget exactly now. Sorry. I think it was December. I forget now. Sorry. But yeah, second Spring rush is when you're going to see that number go way up because now you have the, the brand awareness, you have the, all those reviews actually have gotten to a higher point in terms of SEO and so your marketing will just go way further. But further you learn. You learn when to spend, what to spend it on. And you've learned this part here at the bottom. Like, you can't try to boil the ocean. Go after the puddle, dominate the puddle, be the big fish in the pond and don't worry about the ocean. All right, you're learning. This is anonymous. I thought the decision was to not sell more franchises until successfully managing a Spring rush. Was that a misunderstanding or they feel something has changed in your confidence of handling Spring Rush? No. So last March, April, May, last May, I said we weren't going to do any more sales for six months and we didn't do that. So we didn't do any more training until last fall. And so that's what kind of made this one a little bit hectic is just like there's been way more people waiting to get trained up and then we're stopping. So this is the last training. First, we're not going to do any trainings during Spring Rush, which also made this one bigger because everyone wanted to get here before the Spring Rush. Started last year. We did train. We did, we did trainings in March, April, May. I think it was our March, April, May, maybe even in June. I think we might have done one in June. And each of those we had like 10 to 15. One of them, we had 20 people coming. The problem with that is we're onboarding a whole bunch of new locations during spring rush. So that's why this is the last one this week is the last one before spring rush. And I will not onboard anyone in spring rush until we nail a spring rush. That is for certain. That's why this year we're not doing any onboarding in March, April, May or June. We're. Which is when we would typically get a lot of. We could easily get those filled up like we did last year, but we won't. We want to nail the spring rush and last year we didn't sell for six months. So. But I'm much more confident just in terms of the way that the systems are at Command center in terms of having departments now having a switchboard and yeah, there's ramping up over there as much as possible.

Landon, if a customer declines an estimate and we want to give them a scarcity call to close the job, do we have CC do that or just use our personal phone? It's completely up to you. If you're going to use tactics like around scheduling and pricing and especially with scarcity, like giving them 10 off if they use a certain date, I would probably do that yourself because Command center is not going to be authorized to give data discounts like without your direct permission.

So I know some people are like, well, can center just do that for you? It's not going to be as impactful as you as the estimator doing it. And secondly, if they come back and say, well, what about 12% off if you do it, I'll close the deal right now. Well, now we don't know what to say. Right. Because you ultimately are making that decision to do a price discount. And.

Yeah, I don't want to be put in the position of like them having to haggle on your behalf. So if you're going to use Scarcity, I would be calling like, hey, I'm the estimator. So we talked the other day. I got a spot coming available next Thursday. I can put you on the schedule. It came available and if you go ahead and take it now, I can give you 10 off. Right. If you need, if you need to go to that, the discount. Sometimes just getting on the phone saying you have a spot available is enough for them to get on the schedule. You don't, don't just default to giving them a discount.

But.

Also if you're a solo operator, you can use it as a way to sell like hey, by the way, they came up a spot next Thursday and in fact I'll be able to do the job myself personally. If you get on next Thursday and they're like oh yeah, that'd be great because they've already built a rapport with you especially for project based jobs. And so then you can get in that way if you're a solar operator, if you're going to be on the property yourself. A great way to sell more jobs too. All right, hope you all have a fantastic day. Week was it Tomorrow is Thursday. So just wrapping up here. It's 11:15pm so have a great day and whoa, what's this? When can franchisees. There's only one person live. So let's see who this is. There's only one person live. Thomas Hickey. You're in Washington state, so it's not too late when conferences start testing copilot and learn the system. Not a total switch, but if we wanted to learn it, if you want to learn it, just wait till the end of February when you can directly sign up and just do the free version and you can kind of see what it looks like, things like that. And I'll probably be like as things are ramping up in March, April, May, I'll probably in the masterminds be showing features we're working on and what we're doing in terms of trying to work on Command center stuff. So we already have built like a.

Working prototype for how Command center works with Zooper, they built that thing that was really cool. We really liked it and tracks all the users inside the software instead of just, you know, one user from Command Center. So things like that, the timers, it tracks all the time, what pages they're on, things like that. So we've kind of built a prototype already with that. As that starts rolling out, I'll definitely be giving updates here. But if you want to do a free account, definitely do that 100%.

Coming up in, you know, end of February, beginning of March, when you're able to sign up and just go right inside the software.

All right, on that note, have a fantastic Thursday, have a fantastic Friday, have a great weekend. I'll see you guys tomorrow. All right.