Mike Minutes Mastermind 02/11/23

Okay, we're back. Okay, now there's sound. Okay, sorry, no sound. Okay, so this is the question. It's about every door, direct mail. Should you send something twice or should you send it once? I apologize for no sound. We're back. Thank you for letting me know in the Facebook group.

We should be good.

Yeah. So I think if you look this up on Google, you'd probably find both answers. And that is one person saying you should send it 10,000, other person said saying you should send it 5,000 twice.

Personally, I think there are factors that have more to do with your response rate than whether you send it once or twice. Because really, it's been proven that they take seven times in the course of 18 months to get brand awareness. So that's obviously the goal. That's why you would send it multiple times is really for brand awareness. But if you're trying to maximize the initial uptake, there's definitely a case to be had, like you said, for 10,000 versus the 5,000. And so I think that factors, including the weather when it comes to spring rush have a dramatic more impact than whether it's first, second, third, fourth, et cetera. So I think that timing on your everyday order mill campaign is extremely important and underrated. And ensuring that it is a few weeks, no, a week into spring rush is going to do better than a week before spring rush, literally. Because like a week into the grass actually mowing and there being good weather for an entire three to four weeks stretch is going to perform way better than a week or two before spring rush. So the thing is, it's like, okay, if you want, would you, would you have a better response rate a week into spring rush if you would have sent one a week before spring rush? Right. So I think timing is everything on these. And I think you can make a case for either one of these scenarios, either priming 5,000 a little early and then going after them right away.

Okay, now we should be good. I have no idea why that happened. Literally just paid gobs of money for a gigabit of Internet and now it randomly drops out. Okay, we're back.

Where were we? Present? Yeah. So I think, I think you can make a case for both.

But I personally would say if you're trying to maximize one campaign, send it three to four weeks into the spring rush when people's graduates is actually long. That's going to be your best pain point in your weather is the things that are going to be the driving factor. I think if you're trying to maximize inside of a given area. You do a few, like early, right when the spring rush is starting and then several weeks after that. You're going to get the best results then. Because I think by the third one, they've already seen you a couple times. But. But you know, you're sending out one campaign. I would personally wait a couple weeks into the spring rush before there's. And when there's pain and the weather is good, that's when you're gonna get your best responses. Best response rate, I should say. I saw a crazy stat the other day. Some marketing company was saying they have a 10% response rate in every door direct mail. I'm like, go jump off a cliff. That's not true. There was some cool stats. So I was seeing like, oversize. Anything above the size of a postcard does better in every direct mail. What else did I see that was kind of cool?

It's just like, it's tough to take stats from a company that does printing of mail. It's just like they have an ulterior motive. Nixon has another question. We have a higher hourly rate because we have higher overhead that we need to cover. When it comes to P4P, is there ever a case when you would actually be charging clients, for example, 90 hours? The guys P4P is based off the 33% of 75 per hour. They're still making a killing. There's. They still make a killing on a 33% of 75 per hour. That extra $15 per hour simply overhead recovery for the business. I would personally rather pay them like 30% of the 90.

Or 28% of the 90, then give them 33% of a different number. Right. You're just going to have. Yeah, I know, I know. To us, this makes sense. The $15 per hour, just overhead recovery. But that's going to take a lot of explaining. I would. I would rather it be where the guys can do the math in their head. Take the budget hours in their route, multiply it by a given hourly rate, and then they know they make a certain percentage of that number. You've got to make it simple for them. The number one reason why we do 33% is not because it's the exact right number. It's because it's easy for the guys to take whatever labor revenue there is and divide it by three. That's the easy. That's why we like to have that number. So if you do this, I would recommend when you have the least amount of your crew members, whether it be now in the Winter or in the dead of summer, whenever that is. I would. I would say, hey, look, we're going to raise our rate to $90 per hour, and we're going to bring the. The percentage down as 28, 30%, whatever it might be. I would much rather do that. So that way you can always show your budget hours. You can always have open books and show them exactly what's going on. I feel like if you do that $15 per hour thing, they're not going to trust you, especially if you. If they. If you don't tell them up front. Ken from Fenton, Michigan, says most of what this customer is complaining about is untrue. I was there, and I can attest to it. What is the best way to respond? All right, let's go ahead and show this. I'm guessing this is a negative review. Share screen. Here we go.

Wait. Nope, wrong one. Michael, come on now. Stop screen. Present. Share screen. Picture. There we go. Okay. Absolutely do not recommend because person is posting on Facebook, they see a bunch of stuff, they're extorting money. Oh, wow. Okay. In summary, terrible service. Don't waste your time and money. My property looked better than they showed up. Second, they spent one hour doing the same. Again, trash work in regards to get a cleanup. Okay. So they're obviously trashing you.

Okay. I think this Stephanie Hayward person said some negative stuff on the Bellingham Facebook group Facebook page, too. I just remember seeing a comment. I don't know if it was her or not. I remember the word Hayward.

Yeah. So if someone says something crazy and it's just not true and it's on Facebook like that, I would recommend trying to be as professional as possible. There is a document on the academy on the dashboard that has how to respond to negative online reviews. And in this case, what she is saying is, is not true. So there's a specific review response on that document that I would recommend. So check that one out. But, yeah, you just got to be. You got to remember that you are not doing this for Stephanie Hayward. You don't want her as a customer ever again. So you were doing this for every other customer that's going to read this prior to doing service with you. So focus on that. Do not focus on getting caught up into they said this. And now I'm going to respond to the whether or not the gutters were done right or whether the bushes were trim. Don't go into that. It's a mud slinging contest. Everyone gets dirty. So just make sure. I just recommend going to the dashboard, download the negative online response, negative comment, negative review response guide and take the one that has where what they're saying is false. So that would be my recommendation. Copy and paste, baby. That way your emotions don't get into it. All right, present share screen. Boom. And make sure you make sure you respond as your business page, not your personal account. Kyle Tarvin, you talk a lot about what the wealthy do to keep and invest their money. Are there any good resources you use to see what a lot of the wealthy people are currently doing with their money and how we should be protecting ourselves from this coming financial crisis? I'm more worried about the continued inflation of the dollar and possibly bank collapse similar to what we had in the last few recessions. I have been following a few people that talk about gold and silver. You talk about owning private business, et cetera. Not sure what info I should be listening to. Thanks. Yeah, so you got to keep in mind whatever people are telling you, there's typically, there's bias and there's motive behind it. Like obviously I'm going to say owning private businesses because that's what I do. There's going to be people that say buy gold, silver. Keep in mind a lot of them have like gold and silver trusts and they have ETFs that sell gold and silver. The same thing about Bitcoin, everyone that a couple years ago is saying buy Bitcoin because they were going to have massive inflation, you know, all of a sudden you don't hear from them right now because Bitcoin's way down. So it just, you know, ultimately you have to obviously educate yourself on why the collapse is happening. That's my opinion, is the more valuable topic here. It's not about what to do during a collapse because during a collapse everyone's going to get impacted. It's understanding why a collapse happens and then avoiding those behaviors. So if you look at every bank collapse, if you look at every scam, like this whole thing of the Dani over in India, for example, with their company, it's like a massive publicly traded company that is now basically being all this fraud over leverage. Always a bad problem. Over leverage is a part of almost every single quote, unquote fraud, bank failure.

FTX over leveraged. So this is why I know that that can be used. Well, I know that I use a lot of debt with real estate and the businesses I do, but I'm never going to be a proponent of going to debt because.

That is literally the link to between every single massive bank issue recession that we've had is over leverage. So.

It'S just look at the commonalities, look at the fact that usually in those organizations, when that happens, there is opaque organizations and there's lots of hierarchy and people at the front lines don't know what's going on. When Wells Fargo had the massive scandal with selling accounts, dead people and stuff, a lot of people didn't even know about it. A lot of people in the branches didn't know what was happening. But ultimately there was an incentive program that was put in place that was a perverse incentive which was to give as many to open as many bank accounts as possible. Well, if you give that incentive to people, guess what's going to happen? They're going to open more bank accounts, but they're going to find their dead relatives and their cats and their dogs to open up bank accounts for. And so I think learning from what causes all of these is important.

Over leverage, perverse incentives.

There's so many frauds that happen and there are so many bank failures that happen simply because the people at the top have a different incentive structure than the people at the bottom. That's why getting people on P4P and your managers on profit sharing is so helpful is because that eliminates that. You do that and you take away debt. And I shouldn't say just take away debt like over leverage. Like when you have FTX leveraging things like 100 to 100 for every dollar they had, they had $100 worth of debt. Like that's not going to work out in the long run. All right. As soon as you have any sort of economic disruption, you're going to fall apart. So I would always just keep that in mind. I'm not really a tinfoil hat guy. Like you know, banks are going to go down and you need to have gold and you have silver like stashed underneath your pillow. People said that 50 years ago and gold has underperformed the market massively. It's a non productive asset, it doesn't create anything. And if we find more gold, the value of the gold you have goes down. You could say the same thing on the dollar. However, there are things in place to keep us from finding a massive amount of gold.

From a massive amount of.

You could potentially find a bunch of money I guess, but their government keeps track of it all and it's all artificial. And yes, that's why it could collapse and it does collapse is because of that. However, I would much rather just look at like what causes these massive bank failures, what causes these organizations to allow Fraud to happen and then just doing everything in my organization prevent that. So open communication, incentive structures that align with that of the business and for the consumer.

Not having opaque organization where the top and the bottom of the organization don't know things that the other person does know. These are the type of things that typically lead to that overleverage is the number one reason why all of these bank things happen. These banks get greedy in times when times are good and so they leverage themselves massively. For example, when you, if you look at how much like a bank is allowed to lend $1 out nine times. That's the FDIC regulations. So if you give a dollar to the bank, they can lend nine different people a dollar. That's insane. Which, what that means is if they, if you give them a dollar, they can give you, let's just call it 3% interest. If you like a CD or something, 3D, 3% interest. They can then take that dollar and lend it out nine different times and charge 10% interest to every single person. Great business model. Until. Until people don't pay back their debts. Because now you've leveraged all this stuff. You've bought all these houses and cars through the instruments of loans and debts is going to people. And now when it's a bank run, the reason why people always fear bank runs because everyone comes to the bank is like, okay, I want my money and there's no money to be had because it's all been lent out nine different times to people. So personally I feel like that's kind of a bad policy that we've made in our country because. And the reason we need that is because we have so much debt in our, in our country we need that nine to one ratio.

But yeah, like over leverage, bad incentive programs, those are the type of things that I would try to stay away from. I'm sending seasonal quotes to existing recurring customers which I was trying to schedule early. If they do not accept or deny the quote and let's say in spring decide to jump on it, then do I honor that quote or raise the price? It just depends really at what point you are at. Like if you are completely smashed during the spring rush, I'd probably give them a price bump. And especially if you can see that they open up the email, it's like, hey look, we warned you, we can go ahead and put you on the schedule. It's going to cost more now because it's during our spring rush. That's fine, I think that's fair. But if they contact you during spring rush and you're only a week booked out. Put them on the schedule, no sweat, just keep rolling with it. But the likelihood of that happening is low if last spring is any indication what's going to happen this year? The majority of us are going to be three, four, six weeks booked out and you're going to be like okay yeah I can put you on the schedule but you're going to be six weeks from now and next year when I tell you in February to book your spring cleanup, do it then. And they're like oh snake sick. Yeah okay I'll do it then. So whether you raise the price it's just going to be determined on whether. Adam, how busy are you and how bad do you want the work when they accept the estimate and do want it done. Alright guys, hope you have fantastic day. Have a great weekend and we'll see you on Monday.