Mike Minutes Mastermind 02/11/2025

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Mike Minutes Mastermind. Hope you're doing amazing. A quick announcement. Yesterday the GM weekly scorecard was put into a canva document so you can make any changes to that template that you would like. In the past it's just been the PDF, so now you can make any changes you want on that template. It's on the Facebook group, it's on the Google Drive on dashboard. So go ahead and check that out.

Yeah, I saw Brent Banks made a post in the Facebook group that was really good about like planning your upcoming years worth of text and emails. Get the templates ready, put it on your calendar, make a reminder, highly recommend it so you do not forget. And you already have the templates made. There's not a matter of like oh, I've got to spend an hour each month and figure out what template I'm going to do and then designing it, putting the right picture, just make them. Now assume that your emails you're gonna have to have someone respond back to you with a yes or a response text messages. Have those templates ready to go. Highly recommend doing that now before we hit spray brush. We're literally for some people it's already starting but like for the vast majority of us it's four to eight weeks and we're in the middle of it. So over the next few you have a few weeks to get ready. I do recommend creating that schedule. It's very helpful.

So yeah, we really are leaning more and more into training at like having that weekly GM scorecard, the monthly meeting with a coach and then obviously your quarterly roundtable.

So then there's daily Mike Mintz masterminds. But really those two cadences of like the weekly GM scorecard mean more operationally driven then your monthly coaching call, going over the KPIs, having the coaching dashboard, et cetera. So all right, let's go ahead and jump right in.

Present share screen.

Boom. All right, first question comes from Garrett from Glendale, Colorado. Hey Mike, just wanted to give feedback that I'd love to see an option like you talked about in yesterday's Mastermind on the client portal where a client can prepay for the whole year when they sign up for a service like a traditional subscription where you can be bill monthly or annually. We did this for snow went to monthly due on the first of the month for that month service. For us it reduce attrition and improve cash flow by Getting our money 30 to 60 days sooner than traditional end of month billing with net 30 decreasing churn and improving cash flow are two huge levers, growth and profit, in my opinion. I would love to have this option for the client to pay for the whole year of mowing, fertilizer, snow, et cetera. But understand that it can be complicated to set up in the portal. Thanks for everything you do for us. You've had such a positive impact on my life. Cool. So you could actually do this now? Honestly, just how you set this up. You could have a different option. You could have a weekly, bi weekly mowing price and then you could have pay in full and just rename it so you could actually do this. The thing that I was talking about yesterday is not so much about this as much like prepayment for recurring services as much as taking a big project and paying for the entire thing up front instead of just doing a deposit. So. But you could, you could MacGyver the current system if you really wanted this. I don't think this is, this is going to like. It will, yes, it will reduce churn. It will also increase the amount of refunds that you'll have to give out. It'll also decrease your conversion. And so I'm much more a fan of custom recurring services. Get them in the door, prove your worth, and then down the road you could offer this, say to customers coming back like, hey, if you want to sign up for the whole year, here's this option and I think you just send an estimate and basically just be like, hey, if you want to pay for the whole year up front, click on this link. That link could just literally be a link to an estimate that they click on it and they pay for the whole year and you can make it where the deposit threshold is zero and they have to pay 100% up front. You could do that literally right now if you wanted to. And it actually makes a lot of sense because it's a credit. So all I'd say you could MacGyver as it currently stands if you really wanted to do this. But what I was talking about the other day is going to be much more for project based jobs because the vast majority of collections has to do with projects not collecting.

So you could do this now 100%. Just have to set it up on the estimate correctly and with your deposit thresholds. Mr. Anonymous. Hey Mike, I've been listening to.

Phone call recordings on local services and noticed that most clients get confused or even annoyed with Max. Have you considered having Max inform customers that he's an AI assistant at the beginning of the call rather than waiting for them to explain their issue and potentially Having to repeat themselves when they get transferred. So the only part, the, the first sentence is the only part they don't know he's an AI agent. So basically how it works is the first sentence. He determines whether he can help them all the way through. And then he does notify them he is an agent, virtual agent. And then if he can't help them, so it's a service related thing, it's they need to take payment, they have a work change order, work order change, et cetera. Then it's immediately passed off to someone in command center in the correct department. So them getting frustrated would only be if they are deep into a sales conversation. So when those come in, if you can give those to us, that's very helpful if they actually get frustrated with them because we're always trying to see like why is that the case. But just know that like he does tell them he's an agent if he continues to take the entire phone call because he says like, hey, I'm an agent, I can take the rest of this phone call for you. Or they can be passed off to an agent in person. But from the get go we know that we can't handle that all the way through the conversation. In terms of a mowing estimate, we're going to hand it off to a live person anyways. Mr. Anonymous, I'm planning on moving some money from a traditional IRA to a self directed ira using a custodian to invest in Augusta Copilot. Are there any issues that you are aware of with doing this with Carta or things I need to need to confirm with a custodian I use as far as the ability to make everything go through. Thanks. Talk to your cpa. That would be my number one recommendation. So a number of people have already talked to Brad about a couple of these things. Talk to them. That'd be my number one suggestion in terms of using your traditional versus your self directed et cetera, the custodian, how that all works to make sure the tax implications are correct. From Carter's perspective, they don't care. They're going to take the money from a bank account. That's really all the part of the transaction they care about. How you move that money around is going to impact your taxes and the impacts of your Roth ira. So that part I would be talking to a cpa, talking to your custodian if they manage your ira, et cetera, about the impacts of that.

Coach Connor, as we build our home office more and more I am wanting my P and L to be A little more specific on the chart of accounts and how we track things. Payroll, why do we not have this under cost of goods sold? Furthermore, why do we not have this split between indirect labor and admin and maybe owner and direct labor as in field techs and most likely GMs. I'm wondering if you do these separate in the current chart of accounts because you want the team to be able to clearly understand the P and L. Yeah. So right now you could totally do this. Just add chart of accounts, the one that we have inside the dashboard that people get started with and we get set up with. You could totally break it down into multiple categories. So inside you just do subcategories inside of payroll. And the thing is, if you're going to do that, you're going to have to do direct labor and put that one in cost of goods sold. Then you have to have the other types of labor. And depending on where the owner is at, either in the field or outside the field, it's going to change. So for the sake of simplicity, I've always said, hey, just do wages on one thing and if you do it under one, it's very easy to from a calculation perspective, just to put it up in direct cost, cost of goods sold, and actually know what the cogs are. That being said, the vast majority of home service business, I'm talking like 90% plus, there is not clear definition because the owner sometimes in the field, they're sometimes doing estimates, they're sometimes doing admin. And so when they start to break things apart, every single time I talk to people about this, they have admin wages, they have sales wages, they have direct labor wages, et cetera. I ask them. So okay, your person in the office, did they only do admin? No. Like sometimes they go out and do estimates. Okay, do you as the owner taking distribution or taking a. In the overhead category, do you sometimes go in the field? Yeah, sometimes, like once or twice a week, I'll go out in the field work. So like it gets skewed anyways. And so I would rather just know how much of my labor, how much cost of my labor is a function of a percentage of my revenue and know that number is true versus break up into five different categories and being inaccurate on those, those categorizations. So you're right, 100%. And as you, as you build at the home office, the perfect world is you would have payroll for your office, you have payroll for owner's distribution, like owner, owner pay. And that'd be underneath in overhead and Then in cost of goods sold you have direct labor. The truth is, the truth is when people do that almost every single time, it's actually not accurate. And usually when I ask them about it they're like oh actually yeah, like sometimes I do this other function. Sometimes the people in the office do EST estimates, sometimes some of my field crew does estimates. Occasionally they kind of work in and out of the field. So I'm not, I understand that I have simplified this but for the vast majority of home service business owners I just want, I would rather them just know what percentage of my revenue went out the door to wages. And if it's in one category, they seem to know that a lot easier. So it is grossly simplified, Connor. And if you want to make it more detailed, you absolutely can do that. As you grow and especially as you're going the GM plus model, you're going to have more specified roles than it works. So I'm not opposed to it. There's several owners, I've seen their penals and they've already made this distinction and broken apart you absolutely can do that. But the vast majority of people when they do this, if they're under a million, I just see it, it's gray, it doesn't do anything. Because when I look at past years it's lumpy the numbers and I ask why and it's very common, it's because like the owner worked more in the field that year, they did more projects, the owner was out doing project management or on the job site. So estimators, etc. Get moved. So I've always, I've always gone towards simplification over make this really, really detailed in the chart of accounts. And then it gets blurry, it gets gray and it gets reasoned away. Anyways, if your numbers can be reasoned away, they don't mean anything. And so if you're doing a P and L and you have 50 categories and those numbers have no correlation because it's so lumpy. Like for example, some people will put like one line item for like an expense that happens once or twice a year. It's like, well, it's gonna be very lumpy. It's very difficult to do chart of, to do accurate projections. You're not going to under memorize the numbers. Like the reason I know my numbers well is because the numbers are simplified. I chunk things down very, a lot. And so that's always been beneficial to me. But yes, you are 100% correct. Technically you want direct rages in your cost of goods sold, which is above your overhead part, separate that out from your admin expense, your sales expense, and which wages are going where. But again, I'm going after the 95% of people that don't know what percentage of their revenue is going out to wages and all of their.

Categorization categories gets explained away every time I talk to them, so. But you are 100% right, especially if you're going for the GM plus model where location is 1.5 million. You have an office person, you have an estimator, you have an operations or a general manager, and those are very clear distinctions of what they're doing. Then yes, you're 100% right. Number two, because I do have office staff. Is there a benefit to separating command center fees away from franchise fees? My thought process is that CC fees are a subcategory of admin or for office where franchise fees are fixed costs that are straight off the top and are really nothing more than expensive. P and L like insurance. Yes. This is actually one reason why we split the two fees we like three years ago. I think it was just delayed all franchise fees by two weeks. So that way it helps for cash flow. But more importantly, you could just take those two expenses and say, okay, this one's admin related, this one is fixed expense as a franchise fee. Some people will put that in their advertising and that's fine because it basically covers like your website, et cetera, et cetera. So you can talk to an accountant and see if there's like a benefit. Like I know some people amortize their franchise fee because it's over the course of 10 years technically. So it just depends if you're profitable or not, whether or not it's beneficial from a tax perspective. Also, let me, let me know if I need to sit down and try to reinvent the will.

Also let me know if I need to sit down and I'm trying to reinvent the will. No, you're not. You're 100% right. It's just like as you go that GM plus model, you actually can do this stuff. The reason I talk so much about simplification like I mentioned is because the vast majority of people don't know their numbers. And then when they do break apart the numbers in a bazillion categories and it becomes so nebulous and so gray and everything can be explained away. And I hate when people can explain away numbers because like they're right, they're right by explaining it away. But then therefore I have no standing as to be able to make decisions in the business. And if the numbers don't give me any sort of evidence to be able make decisions, they're worthless.

What's going on the business by just looking at their P, L statement of cash flow, et cetera. And after your workshop, I've been thinking a lot about this. I don't want to have a guess if we are going to be profitable. I just want to dive into, into these things deeper and be truly be and truly be responsible for the action of the P and L. Yep. No, you're, you're on the right track, Connor. 100% as you go in that GM plus model. What you're talking about is possible because you, you're breaking people's roles up and it doesn't make sense. And this is why people that are doing 7, 800,000 that try to do this and they try to get everyone into their own individual categories. Usually there's so much overhead you don't make any money. So you're not incorrect at all. You're not reinventing the will. You're totally on track. Just know that that's why I talk so much about simplification is because people do it way too soon and they don't know their numbers. And you like this is exemplified massively at the workshop. And this is like the feedback I got and it's totally valid is like people just did not know enough about their numbers. And the people that were scanning through 20 pages of a P and L didn't know how to be able to like collect their information. And that's like first off, kind of a lapse on my part. I should have had more time for that to be able to collect some of that information for people. But then the second part is it's very scary if you're a business owner and you don't know off the top of your head approximately what percentage of your revenue goes out to wages, approximately how much goes to supplies and materials, approximately how much goes to some contract. There's your cogs. Like we got to know these numbers and so I'm much more in the simplification game even if I lose a few points on accuracy.

With sending out emails for the start of mowing season price increases. Okay, I'd like to test some prepays for the season to help our cash position. What would your offer be for prepay? 5% or 10% off. What is enough to get someone to accept, but not so much it hurts the overall effort to be profitable this year. Great question. So a, you could do a 5 or 10% off. What you could also do if you're pairing this with price increases is just say your price will not increase if you prepay.

So you could do this. And, and so I would probably do in this, this case hatch is like downsell into a, a year total. So what I mean by is like, hey, here's your new prices. No, nothing is required on your end to be, you know, to change anything or whatever. If this is a problem to you or you've had material impact on your finances over the past year. We understand and we want to work with you. If, if you're willing to prepay for 225, we will keep the rate at the existing price. That's what I would do. So you're going to lose the 15 or 20%. Technically you're giving the 15 to 20% discount. So that's not great. So it's actually a better offer than what you're offering there. What I think this is going to do is reinforce your price increase. And I actually think that's the killer deal there. From a cash perspective. Yes, you want to be able to collect the cash. So ideally maybe 10, 15 people take you up and they actually do prepay for the whole year because they are trying to go after that discount. The reason I say that is because if you raise prices on all of them, you're probably going to lose those customers anyways because they're unhappy about it. So instead of just being like yes or no, it's like yes. And if you don't like it, you can keep your current price if you prepay. So it's like a downsell. I think that would work.

It is a bigger discount, but I think you might lose those same individuals if you otherwise don't do that offer. And then what's cool, if you say have 10% of your customers that do that every year, you could eventually raise the prices on them. But for now it gives you the cash at the beginning of every single spring rush that you might need to just fund operations. So not a bad idea. I personally don't think a 5, 10% is going to a huge deal, especially doing it with a price increase. But if you do it with a price increase and then your downsil at the end and you actually, because now you're usually a downs, usually the offer at the end, which is like, hey, if this is going to really impact your we want to work with you kind of thing, let us know. And like 1 or 2% of people will say, hey, like I actually don't have a job. Could you guys work with me or whatever. That's fine. Now you actually want them to see this part so you could even bowl it like. We do not want this to impact your, your, your services. We are willing to keep the price at the same exact rate if you're willing to prepay for 20, 25 and then make that bold. And so then really you shouldn't really lose anyone. It's like either A, you take the price increase and you never contact us or B, you contact us and we get you for the whole year and then there will be some people like I can't afford that either. That's fine. And then those would be the people you leave. So I, I think that's a good idea.

Mr. Anonymous, how do you teach ChatGPT to know Augusta language terminology and systems so it can better help with t asking for advice Also what give it about my specific location? Few things. So if you're throwing chat into chat, you could throw your P and L as a PDF. You can also train it on everything with Mike Andy. So we've created a Mike Andy's brain for the coaches for them to get help too. And it's a specific model. It's been trained on like my, my books, my videos, et cetera. But it's, it's not as powerful. But if you use the public chat DP and you just say like do this according to Mike Andes, it'll use all my terminology, P for P et cetera. Pretty good. We have we if you train it, in other words actually create a GPT and like download my book into it, upload a whole bunch of videos, transcripts, et cetera. That's helpful. It's quite a bit of work. We've made one we're testing with the coaches. Maybe down the road we'll give it to a gust nation. But it basically answers in everything that we talk about. So for now I'd probably just search on the academy given the fact that everything is now text based and you can search transcripts. So like this week we're recording all of the Gus all of the new owner training. So smaller groups that we can have. We have like three or four cameras and switching. It's going to be really, really nice. Instead of like the traditional not so great recording, it's going to look really good. Switching between slides, different angles, you're going to see the audience's faces. That will be really good for the academy and the transcripts to be able to search in there.

Kyle Tarvin Moore, Oklahoma. I'm working with a few lead partners. I'm finding people are skeptical with the program and are wondering if it's a scam. Is there anything we can do? Such guarantees offer testimonials to make people feel more open to the program. After speaking to other owners face to face, they typically let their guard down, but it's getting over that initial contact which is the hardest. Thanks. Yes, great. You actually, I just changed this. We had a testing on this over the weekend and then yesterday we rolled this out. I was going to send an email out in my next update, but what we're doing for this, because this is 100% an issue right now, and that is we, we get tons of partners. They're just usually a little too far away from our owners to actually get leads. The challenging part is when a lead comes in, if you don't have a partner set up, we've got to get someone within 24 hours or else that lead is cold. And that's been also very difficult, you know, not, not the fact that like they actually know Kyle Tarvin in your local area. So when you reach out, you at least have some rapport. We are calling from like a third party essentially. And so they definitely think we're a scam like half the time. So what we're doing is we're the first three leads. Once they're in the program, they still have to go through the whole vetting process, et cetera. But if they're in the program, they will still, they will get their first three leads for free. We think this is going to convert much better to be able so that when they get that first one, they're like, okay, I'll just sign up, I'll get this one and I'm out. We'll give them a three. The reason we're doing this because the alternative to giving it to them is they don't get used and that lead goes cold, which you don't want. So we still, we've had like 100. And right now the number of partners. One second. This is top of mind for me. I have it on my phone live. So we have 128 partner applications. I mean, so I'm advertising, pricing my ads. I'm spending a lot of money to try to get better penetration. And I'm tracking like how many percentage are we able to sell every single week. And so my goal is to get above 70% at least of leads being sold. But to do that, we have to get at least 350 partners. In my opinion. So I'm working on it. It'll just be a matter of time. I think it'll be all the way through June, really building the number of partners. And then what will happen eventually once you get saturation is people will want in the program. And my goal is that once we get enough partners and every like, we're more like that 95% plus of leads are getting sold, which is down the road. But if we can get there, that's when we could do a price increase. It's basically like, hey, if we have a backlog of people wanting in the program and in this market there, there are three partners that we've never given a lead to and they're willing to pay more and we just make it more of a, you know, we can get people up to 99, I think pretty easily down the road. But yeah, all of that stay. Yes, the offer is the first three leads are free. And so you're going to see this in my ads, you're going to see this in the partner program. We're changing the website here next couple days to make sure that's the emphasis because otherwise that lead goes cold. It doesn't do anything good. And if they don't get a good experience in the first couple, then it's not good. What they're, what was, what is happening is they're getting three free leads and they're all solid leads. And then that's when they really like, okay, this is legit. I'm getting real customers and they're really high quality and that's great. So good question. Thomas from Clinton. Twice now in the last couple of days. Sorry, Twice now in the last couple of weeks. I've had customers put a cardinal file and submit a 50% deposit, but not click accept an estimate even when they clearly mean to. Is the customer facing refresh going to fix this, Prevent this? Yes, 100%. This is the biggest problem with the current, current workflow. And late late February, everyone's account will have the new workflow. So yes, when they click a deposit, it should, it should just inherently know that that means accepting the estimate. It doesn't right now. So as long as you're watching that you want a deposit randomly comes in knowing, okay, that person meant to accept. You can do it yourself. You've already caught a couple yourself. It's not perfect. And so yes, the change though will make sure it's one click. It's like when you fill out this and you click it's. You're paying the Deposit and you're accepting the estimate. So, Mr. Anonymous Mike, I think I made an oopsie. Oh, the new QR code door hangers. I didn't add my location email. I did add the location name and phone number. Would I have to toss these and reorder new ones with the email?

Basically we need to have your location name on that door hanger. Now if you put your phone number we might be able to. We will likely be able to figure it out. But ideally the reason we actually need the email there is because it needs to say your location name because that's the only way we know where that door hanger is coming from outside of a deep dive on like area code of the phone number which isn't always accurate, diving into the address, etc. So there are a few clues that we can look at but it makes it really easy for us if you put the email on there. So I don't think you need to throw this away. Like if you ordered some great, unless you order like 30,000 but assume you ordered a couple thousand of these, I think you're probably okay. And it just, it's going to take a command center a little bit longer to dive into like the address, the area code of the phone number and validate that because we don't know really where that lead is coming from in terms of location because the form is everyone's going to the same form. It doesn't change. It's all one form. And then we're looking on that picture for the name of the location. Really good questions day everyone. Really good.

There's just so much man like that is like so close to being done. Whether it be a co pilot stuff inside I guess to like what we've been working on. I know some of it we, we talked about co pilot or at command at conference and things. So I'm really looking forward to it. There's a lot coming out I'm really trying to push. So much before spring rush. We kind of look at spring rush like really launching April 1st. A lot of locations depending on your market starts March 1st. Some of them started last week. Looks like some of the markets are pretty warm so. But really like several of those things I want to get pushed across the finish line. So we're kind of like right at the end of so many different things. I want to get the training redone and so it's revised in the academy for everyone to be able to search. Just a lot of things kind of coming together over the next four to eight weeks. All right. I love you all. Hope you have a fantastic rest of your day. We'll see you tomorrow. Take care.