Mike Minutes Mastermind 02/09/2024

Foreign.

Nation. Happy Friday.

Get this party started.

All right.

Day two at a conference, I had a couple notes I shared.

There's a whole bunch of like a workbook and everything, but these are like the things that just popped out to me. So.

One of the things we talked about was a bunch of metric stuff today. So you cannot change results without metrics. And the reason for that is because results have to do with the past. And one thing I thought was really good for, especially if you have multiple locations, something, and that is a lot of times when we speak in terms of changes that we want to made with managers, et cetera, we talk about things that are results. So we say we need more revenue, we need more leads, et cetera. Those are all things in the past and the person receiving that feedback can't actually do anything about it. Also known as a lag indicator versus a leading indicator. So a lag indicator, for example, would be more revenue, more jobs booked on the schedule. A leading indicator would be how many calls did you make, how many times did you follow up? And the thing about leading indicators is the thing that is is that this is not what we talked about today. I'm just kind of expounding on this one line. You cannot change results without metrics. That was stated in passing. And I started to think about the fact that results are really a form of the past. If we ask our managers or we ask our team members to have certain result orientated.

Declarations like we need more of this, make sure it's things that we can control in the future.

And so for example, instead of asking, telling someone, hey, we need to get more jobs in the schedule, instead of that, they eventually like, all right, let's track metrics. Like how many times are we, are we following up? How long is it taking us to get to the client's house? These are leading indicators of the results coming in the form of revenue, more jobs, et cetera. But something they can control. They can control how many times they do follow up. They can control how fast they get to the estimate. They can control.

All the things that go into as inputs or leading indicators of getting the results. And so I thought that was really, really important. If you have multiple occasions, if you have a general manager, if you have someone that works closely with you, is reporting to you, is don't speak in terms of results in the past, but rather make sure whatever you are wanting them to measure and have metrics around the things that are leading indicators. Right? So if you general managers think about all the things that they do that produce the result you want. But instead of just saying we need to make more revenue, we need more jobs, we need to make more profit, which is our results. In order to change that you need metrics. And they need metrics around things that are leading indicators like they can control how many follow up phone calls, they can control how many door hangers they put out, they can control how quickly they get to estimate, they can control their estimator availability. All of which lead to the results that we want.

Thinking today we talked about metrics. So what are levers in the business that you can have a 2x return on? And so a lot of times we will get in the weeds about hey this 10 here, 5% here and 10 here. But really looking. Okay, let's hold that for a second. Can we double this? Like can you take your close ratio from 30% to 60% that would be a double. Um those are the number one thing you'll be focused on anything in the business that any metric. When I start breaking all those things down, like how fast you can get them back, call them back, how many door hands can you put, how many follow up calls, phone calls can you do, how many cold outreaches can you do, et cetera. What are the leading indicators that you can quickly 2x as a way to determine like where do I start? Where, where do I change. Start changing the metrics.

Winners and losers have the same goals. Winners have better have.

What does that say?

I don't know what that says. That I get for writing very quickly. A lot of times the notes I write down, I think they say I'm passing really fast and or I'm putting something together.

Winners and leaders have the same goals. Winners have better. I think I meant systems and scale and skills. Winners and losers have the same goals. Winners have better.

Systems and skills. I think that's what I wrote. All right. The next thing was bipc. This is pretty cool.

What metrics to.

Follow.

And track. So BIPC is behaviors issue, diagnostic process skill and you.

Very, very good. I thought for training new team members, especially sales people. That's really what this was about is a sales training. Sales managers like how to track metrics around your sales.

One thing I was talking with the gentleman today and he, he was talking about when you give positive feedback to somebody don't just say like great job. It was so funny and literally I just did given out a compliment to somebody and I did exactly the opposite of this and I was like sick.

But it's be truthful specific and Positive when it comes to feedback. But the big one that a lot of us drop is the specific. Specific. The specificity, whatever it is. Specificity. There you go.

So instead of just saying, hey, great job today, guys, say great job today, Mr. Jones. Job was extremely difficult and you guys crushed budgeted hours. That'd be more specific. Be truthful and be positive.

I think I, I really fail in this part. The specific giving. The specifics of why I am giving this feedback because I can just give you positive feedback and like, that's nice. I like Mike because he likes me. Or I can give you positive feedback and then tell you exactly why I'm giving you that. Positive feedback also usually leads to that, that behavior being repeated. So.

Wgi, wglo, what good looks like so that your team knows what you want is define it, document it, demonstrate it, and then deliberately practice it. We went over a bunch of that stuff today.

See here what else we got. One thing Gary V. Said, employee continuity is my competitive advantage.

It's amazing because I've talked to several people this week that actually know Gary Vee and I've talked to him personally and it's amazing because like when I watch this stuff now, I just feel like he's a little bit out of touch and has like moved on from more tactical things and it seems a little woo woo sometimes, however they, they are, they do say that in person. When you talk to him and you communicate with him.

He is an extremely powerful communicator and super attentive to whoever he's talking to. And Dan Martell, the leader of this conference I'm at here or this mastermind thing, whatever. He's. He said he was talking with Gary one time and he's like, hey, like, what makes you know everything's possible around you and you're doing all these things and stuff like that. He says, well, employee continuity is my competitive advantage. And he says like 90% of his team just churns out. But the 10% has been for 10, 15, 20 years. And that was important to him. All right, that's kind of some of the stuff I've left I learned today. I'm sure there's a whole bunch more. My workbook.

There's a couple questions that came in, so I'll get to those in just a second. Let's make sure though that I didn't miss anything. We didn't exercise today that we might do at conference next year I thought was really, really good. One thing that I really liked I'm going to do with The Seven Figure Club next year is a lot more small group, like three or four people going over very specific things and then sharing with each other. It was like, very emotional and personal how much we did that this week or the few days. And.

That was really, really good. I want to do that definitely with the Seven Figure Club. I might bring it into conference a little bit.

And taking like, what you would think is relatively easy questions, but really making people think and then share and get their why. And then like, really the challenging question that, you know, people were playing with in our groups today is like the same way we think about businesses. Like, okay, so what are the goals? Great. How are you gonna get there? Fantastic. Why can't you do that the next 12 months instead of 10 years? The same thing is true, like, for your life and for like, hey, like, what. What does success look like? What's like the ultimate dream? And then like, you know, why do you want that? Great. But why can't you do that now.

And then? Then you got tons of excuses as to like, why you can't do it. And it's actually weird. Um. Cause you realize a lot of times it is just like this perception of time that must. Things must happen when reality. If, like, for example, a lot of people will say they want to travel the world. Like, look, to travel the world, you probably need $10,000. Depends on how you want to travel. But you could probably make it happen if you want to go travel Europe. You know, you spend three months doing that like that if that's like your dream and be like, I want to retire so I can travel the world. You don't probably need to retire. You don't need to wait another 30, 40 years. You could probably do that sooner than you think. And then it's not okay. Well, once you've crossed that what's like the next mountain and that is like, you can literally was otherwise going to be the rest of your life getting in preparation for quote unquote traveling the world. You could do that next three years. And then. Then you have this whole new life. You have a second life to go do something else because you did what otherwise gonna take him take 30 years. And now I've done three. So that was really interesting. You can feel free to look them up on YouTube and stuff. Dan Martel, big software guy, but he knows just about everybody. It's crazy. Like, it's insane, but definitely like someone who has gone through the grind of entrepreneurship and then figured out more as they got older in their 40s and 50s like their.

How they wanted to build their life and how they wanted the businesses to be built in a way to serve their life. It's really interesting, his relationship, his admin assistance, his team. So I like just observing those things. So that's some of the things I've been thinking and doing today though, I was honestly very much in and out meetings. We had another.

Cohort of new joint command center. So I do a talk with them at the last day of their orientation when they're getting started in their training. That was good. But then, yeah, like obviously you guys saw this. I did with Copilot today. And then we actually fired a couple developers that we have reason to believe are creating some of these bugs. Not, not necessarily on purpose, but for several other reasons. Just in terms of quality of code, working off of a different tech stack that could potentially cause some issues. So anyways, all that to say today was I was kind of in and out of a lot of these meetings, but I did feel like I learned a lot. And I think that most of my learning actually comes in the form of over dinner, over lunch, over breakfast, while I'm working out with these people. And.

So yeah. All right, let's jump into questions. I think there was two when I left last present. Share screen.

All right. Oh, someone asked me the other day. I forgot to answer them back on. Text me about it from Augusta. Okay. They wanted to know how much I pay to be here. It's $5,000 a month and it's for I come. I basically have a few days away with everyone for three days for three times a year. So yeah, it's crazy amounts of money. It's insane. It's not the dollar amount, the ticket. It is that keeps a lot of people out as well as the fact that the revenue that you have to be producing has to be eight figures. They verify it and then you have to also go through the application process, improve how you can give value to the group because they are looking for people that want to actually contribute and can have something to give. So for myself, I don't have as much technical ability as all the rest of them and experience in terms of building massive companies. I do have though, is what most of them are all trying to do. And that is the social media side like webinars and Q and A and how to do YouTube and stuff like that. I can teach them about that. So a lot of them are all trying to do what I've done there and I'm trying to do what they've done in terms of technical side and systems and teams and things like that. So. All right, numero uno from Dustin Champagne. So I think about three years ago, almost all of your videos on YouTube were pretty much just you standing in front of a whiteboard and you started adding more reels and shorts and it seemed like that is when this huge increase in followers started joining. Now in the last six to 12 months, things have changed to long form movie or TV show type content. How much of this is from the media team, added your path or the way you see content going? Have you seen any change in growth because of the long form content? And would there ever be a reason to slow down growth on the media side?

Definitely no reason to slow down the media side. We will continue to grow the media side. What it needs to do though is it needs to be built in a way that requires less of my time. That's what we've been working on the past few months. And so like these turnarounds really it takes about three hours of my time with the owners. And if we can make everything efficient to where I'm traveling with a couple people, I can have someone driving for me.

And everything is done efficiently. It won't interrupt my, my schedule too much. So what stinks that I. It's exhausting to travel the way we do. And that is like fly in the morning of. Or sorry, fly, get there late, show up the next morning early on a different time zone, which typically we're three hours ahead and pound out a video. You're talking the whole time. And like I try to be very present. So like I'm very locked in and I'm trying to get through things with them. And then you race to the airport and you get on a plane and you get in late, 11, 12, midnight, past 1 o', clock, the next plot and then you do the same thing three times. And that's exhausting, man. That's. It's not so much my time because I actually get a lot done on flights and now like it's so much better now than even like five years ago in terms of wi fi on planes. And so I can get a lot done when we're traveling. Actually I don't miss very many of my meetings. Pretty efficient. And the team media team needs to be built in a way that like we can send more people with me because then I have to do less. I shouldn't have to be like thinking about where we're going in the airport and driving and picking things up. So they do a Great job, like getting all the rental cars and all the tickets and all the hotels and like ordering all that stuff. So in terms of, would there ever be a reason to slow down? No. Like we need to scale it up. So it's very, very difficult to find media people be mostly due to the fact that like I want them to be professional. And so for example, we just, we've hired 1, 2, 3 in the past two months. And so.

You know, we, we had to let someone go the day and it's just, it's simply a matter of like, you can't just call in, you can't just decide that you want to work the rest of the day from home. You can't.

And.

Their, the professionalism, what I told them is like, look, if we expect the let change level professionalism for the industry and we are creating the content for all of those people, we are going to be professional. So if you don't want to show up on time, if you just want to be casual about things, it's just not going to work. And so a lot of creatives push hard against that, but that is kind of the standard I have. And so we, we did, we still have the two new folks and so now we have a team of five. And so our hope, our hope is that starting next Friday we will be able to be weekly on the turnaround shows in terms of producing. So.

Yeah, hopefully, hopefully knock on wood every week instead of every other week. We'll be able to start launches on Fridays and there's more industries being added. So on this last one, for example, we did a really interesting business model, a food scrap disposal and recycling. Very interesting. They get like, you know, 10 bucks a time they go to a property but it takes one minute to do it. And it's like super basic and simple. But then there's obviously science of how to recycle that and how to turn it into compost and how to sell the compost, etc.

Very interesting. And.

The other other service was our call center, which is also very cool. Um, and going through the different model with them. So for example, like I told them, hey, we know you guys, they, they stink at doing customer service. They literally are a glorified voicemail. And the fact that they follow a script and they collect the customer's information every time someone calls in. They charge anywhere between $1 and $4 per minute and they're losing money on their like losing money hand over fist on the $1 people. They make money on the three to four dollar per minute people, however, that's only 20 of their clients. So I said, look, all your customers are mad at you because you guys can't handle customer service. You can simply just take customers information and then tell the owner that they will call them back. I said, don't charge for those calls, charge only for the new leads. So that way you sell yourself as a lead gen service instead of a phone service. So you'll see that one come out. I thought it was really interesting. I explained how like they will always get kickback because they, I listen to some of the calls that their customer service is horrible, but they're pretty good at selling and they've trained their whole team to be salespeople. Yet they're trying to do like answering the phone, which half of their calls, more than half the calls are simply customer service.

But that's all they do. They don't do anything else. Like they can't. They don't go into the CRM for their clients. They don't like, they don't take payment, they don't accept estimates. It's simply, they fill out a form. Right. So it's not like from a command center where command center can do things for you inside your account like put notes for the customer, cancel or pause a job, take payment. Like all those things. They can't. And so it's like don't sell yourself as like a phone service because people are going to be mad about your customer service. They turn through people like every two or three months. It's like sell to sell the lead. So this is the thing, like I hope that as we turn around people pick up on ideas from other industries because there's a lot of good ideas that I've got from completely different industries. And so.

What was the question? Yeah, that's basically just the media kind of where it's going.

In terms of what content we're creating. I want the content to be stuff that I feel is unique to us and that no one else can do. Anyone else can do a whiteboard video. Anyone else can do like a breakdown of a business like a big brand and why it's successful, like why Apple is a $3 trillion company and break it all down and, or go to certain brands and companies. And those are interesting, not taking away from it.

But a lot of people could do them. And so I think I'm in a unique position where I can make sense of traveling the country and doing the turnarounds and it's interesting content. And like cnbc, the profit was like my favorite thing ever and they haven't done an episode in three years and so I really wish they would have continued. Like I thought that was awesome and I have a feeling Alex is going to do something similar but I know he'll probably go in the direction more of info products. And so the difference info products is you have high fixed cost, low variable cost. In our industry we have high variable, low fixed and so there are big differences between that and so it's interesting. Oh man.

Next week I will have the results of what I've been working on with Dr. Kashi with the Facebook ads. I'm really looking forward to that. So we created a bunch of stuff for the instant quotes, a bunch of stuff for the 247 answering the phone and then we're going to create a framework for your ads in general to be able to create your own.

So I'll share that next week and I'll make sure it's in done for you ads. I'll make sure that we have a separate template inside of the dashboard. Also, I think Zach, he might have just submitted them to the Pro Shop today, but they might be available Monday. And that is the four new designs for the Pro shop to be able to do new designs for print marketing. So those should be ready next week. Sometimes this print just takes a long time to get their stuff together, but he made it where you can edit a lot of the information and the text. So that'll be really good. All right, next question comes from Brenton, Utah. As about the message in copilot about features being delayed around February 20th is one of my areas. We start fertilizing and doing other services. We intend to using the waiting list for in beta. I've not moved a lot of jobs over from SA yet. Waiting for new features is the beta delay too. I just want to know what to plan on. I can figure out how to make things work in the meantime if needed. Thanks. Yeah, thanks for understanding. I appreciate it. We are delaying this.

We can really hit the deadline of March 1, but as stated in the video, we are focusing on the stabilization prior to that and it'd just be stupid to release it when there's this many issues in the system. I would say this Brent, in terms of timing because I didn't give a definitive time on it on purpose. I would say when you hear me say that we are restarting, we are getting back to work on the features. Start the clock now. So for example, let's say it's February 10th. If you're watching this tomorrow if in two weeks, February 24th, I'm like, hey, things are more stable and we're going to start working back up on the chemical side of things. That mean that it'd be a two week delay and so you'd be looking at the middle of March, March 14th. So we have a lot of the stuff for specifically waiting list actually completed, but we still haven't had the email. We're going to roll out all at the same time, the waiting list, the estimate signature for estimates. So if once someone accepts, if you want them to actually sign something and to all be integrated and then the chemical side, it will all be just like one big drop. So we are delaying all of it, including beta, because otherwise we do beta and it's like, well, why do beta? It's like we're fixing all this stuff in prod and we can't actually solve any problems that the beta group has or wants to make changes. So yeah, I'm going to guess at least two weeks tops. Four weeks that says my range, but I think it'll be pretty obvious. And that is like when you start seeing the, the stability in Copilot. Next couple weeks you'll hear me talk about the fact that we're restarting the chemical feature development and then start that clock from now in terms of how long that's going to delay us. So I anticipate two to four weeks is what I'm currently expecting. So thanks for your understanding on that, I appreciate it. But yeah, if you need to do like your first chemical app for example.

And then do that as like a one off job inside of Copilot and then wait for the waiting list and then do the rest of them and that'd probably be the best for now if you're trying to just get like that first application, I know that's not ideal, I'm sorry, but that would be part of the workaround for now.

All right, I hope you all have a fantastic weekend. I have one day more day here and then I'll be back in the office on Monday. And yeah, that's all I got. So yeah, next week I do have those Facebook ads. I want you making sure those are ready to roll. The print marketing that should be hitting up in the pro shop as soon as vistaprint checks off on that. And then.

The thing I've been talking about with the review system, the app that we have working for that, it's a completely different team than Copilot. So on the website and so they've been working hard because that review app, we, they just, they just finished texting, which is really cool. That's going to be free to Augusta. I'll probably launch it to the public for 99 bucks a month. It's not going to be a big money maker, but it'll be enough for me to pay for one dev to keep maintaining that for us Then the other thing that they are working on, which I'm not promising anything right now, is that we potentially might be able to put card.

Stripe integration with our instant price forms before we have to integrate with Copilot. There are no promises because this is a lot of compliance stuff, but we think we might be able to use Zapier to pull that information.

On the forms and at least get their card information so that way there's no loopholes. Because loophole someone can accept an estimate in surprise form and they don't have to put their car information in. And so that's the one way people can get in that way. So. So we're working on something. We think we have a solution. We're making sure it doesn't slow down our site. Cause like that's been such a high priority for us over the past six months and also just making it compliant, making sure that it isn't going to be a problem once we do integrate with Copilot.

It'll be so much better when someone fill out instant price form. If we have integrated with Copilot and the estimate already is created, it already gets marked as accepted, it already does all of that part, then command center doesn't have to touch it. And as all, you know, had their cardinal file etc. So that will be positive. However, at least what we're trying to do, what we're trying to do right now, I'm not promising anything. What we're trying to do is that we can at least capture their credit card information on the instant price form and then enter that into their client portal. But anyways, that is coming down the line. All right everyone, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your weekend and I'll see you on Monday.