Mike Minutes Mastermind 02/12/2024

And we're live. Hello, guest nation. Hope you're doing amazing. Let's get started.

Just put this into Facebook real quick.

All right. If you have not seen the post on the Facebook group about the Facebook ads training, I recommend you check it out. I think it'll be super helpful. It's about 15 minutes of training and walks you through a whole bunch of different things about Facebook ads, how to build them, the varieties and the variations. And so please watch it from start to finish. At the end, I kind of talk about how to share which ones are doing well. That way we can all learn from each other.

The best way for us to figure out which one, which copy, titles, etc are working, if we're all testing 5 to 10, at least, and then we share with each other which ones are working, which ones are not. So definitely check out that training. It is on the Facebook group. There is a link to a document. That document has a folder of images and it also has a video which you can watch and I made last night. So you should be able to check that out. All right, let's go ahead and jump into some questions.

Beautiful. All right, first one up is from Kyle Turner, Augusta Madison. What site do you recommend using for hiring ads besides Indeed? I think you use a different one while you were here in Huntsville. No, I. I just use Indeed.

There's a few other ones. But still. Indeed is still the one I'm seeing perform the highest. And for like the pricing, I know they are really switching everyone over to a cost per day model and instead of the cost per lead model, they'll make way more money. It makes way more sense that they would do that, honestly. So.

But I am seeing good results. Almost everyone that is hiring right now in Augustination is getting a lot of leads and turning off their Indeed ad relatively quickly. So I, I think two things happened. One, I think the market's getting way easier in terms of the hiring. Secondly, I also think that by them taking away the cost per application and making it more cost per day, it eliminated a lot of people that were just throwing up like a ton of different applications up there or spots. And I think it'll be better for their users, like people looking for a job, because there won't be a whole bunch of spammy type applications, job openings and people paying will be. There'll be less of them. So I think it's actually really good. I know it'll cost everyone more, but I actually think it's gonna be a way better product. And this is something like even a Year and a half ago I actually sent them a message about and just be like, hey look like here's why I think this would be way better for your people looking for a job and for employers if you just pay. Let us pay by the day because you'll weed out a lot of these tech companies. They will put.

A ton of application job openings up simply because it makes their stock look good. Cause if they can put that they are hiring 500 different positions. They don't have to hire any of them. And they can, they, they just, but they're, they're saturating the platform with a whole bunch of applic of jobs that they have no intention of hiring for. And the reason, you know that is because they lay off 10,000 people and then they're, they on their site, they have all these open jobs. So yeah, I, I talked to him like a year and a half ago. Especially during the midst of all the craziness that was happening with us. Couldn't people can't show up, et cetera. And if you actually scanned through as a user of Indeed I was just seeing over and over these companies are just spamming the site with a ton of applications because they know they don't have to pay unless they actually set up the interview. And so anyways.

You know, indeed is still the one I'd recommend.

Javier Garcia from Stone Mountain. How would you price one time projects like property clamps to secure immediate work when your schedule is light while also addressing a customer's request for a quote on ongoing maintenance? Should you offer a lower price for initial cleanup to fill your schedule and quote a standard rate for regular maintenance? Reduce prices for both to ensure you close on the job and plan to increase them while you hit capacity or focus on selling the cleanup first and delaying discussing recurring services until after the cleanup to gauge an accurate price on maintenance. You know, I think your, your notion is correct and that is like discount the one time project. I do not want to discount recurring services because in perpetuity. Now I have to deal with lower, lower pricing. I'd rather take the initial hit if I need the work. Great. But what you can't guarantee is that in six months you're not going to be completely overwhelmed with work and the last thing you may be doing is unprofitable jobs. And so if you in the short term need to fill your schedule, do not discount long term services. Because yeah, I just see it all the time. People will discount the mowing side of things when reality what they should do is discount the initial cleanup discount, that initial project maybe by 10, 15, 20, whatever it is, to get their foot in the door. Because look, if, if I have a job that I want to charge 800 for and then I have a mowing job for 45 bucks, I would rather you give the property cleanup away for $600, you know, a 25% discount, but keep the mowing price at the 45. Don't be like, oh, I'm gonna move that down to 35 in the eyes of the customer. Just from a numbers perspective, they're saving 10 bucks. They're not extrapolating out that in the future that basically that is a.

You know, 25, 30% discount on your mowing services forever. So do it on the initial, in my opinion, because you'll, you'll make up for that in the long term with lifetime value of the customer, assuming you can keep them and you won't have to deal with having a whole bunch of busy work that is unprofitable when you are crazy busy.

Kurt Kyler Plainfield, Indiana Mike, I know I have you been. I know you have been asked this question a few times. I have a longer company contact me about buying them out. All residential mowing clients, 115 clients. Most of their clients are in my service area. I just want to buy the list, nothing else. How do you come up with the buyout number? The lowest price customer is $30 and the highest is $85. They said they gross $85,000 in mowing for 2023 season. So again, assuming that like out of 85, let's just say assume that like 50 to 60,000 stay with you because just change of the season as well as change of service providers.

So assume that first and foremost assume that at $30 minimum price, there's probably something we're going to have to raise.

I like, the only way they're going to be able to sell this business is either as a package or they split up their equipment and their list. So I would personally do, I'd go to them and like, hey, I'll give you.

Ten grand for all the contracts, all the contacts, everything. Not just the 115 clients, but a whole database. I'll give you 10 grand. I know that's super low. Ideally you'd be able to go sell this business with as a complete package to somebody else. But I'm willing to give you this or these contacts and that'd be extremely high. Like, I'd probably be much more happy with 5,000 because you're probably gonna end up keeping 60 to 70 of these clients. So at like a hundred dollars a pop, that's like six or seven grand. And I don't think they're worth a whole lot more than that, given the fact that you know they're going out of business. Right. Like this is that if a company's going out of business and they're basically a solo operator size, there's a reason. And usually it's around pricing, it's around the way that they do their billing, it's around their efficiency, it's about their route distribution and density. And so there's a reason why they're failing. And so what you want to do is you want to give them a golden parachute by saying, hey, look, this is not optimal, but I'm only really interested in your contacts and then your recurring services. Here's what I'm willing to pay. It's not a great offer. Ideally, please go take time, Go sell it somewhere. Here's the thing, they got like a few weeks to figure that out, and no one's going to buy this business as a package. And so what you'd say is, hey, look, if you have to, I'll take the contacts, I'll take care of all the customers, and you can sell the equipment separately on Facebook or Craigslist or whatever. That's usually what's going to happen anyways. But I would assume that 50% of these clients will leave you based upon the fact that you're buying out a solo operator. And.

Between the brand change, the season change, the fact that they're probably underpriced, the fact that they're probably super inefficient, you might be able to keep 50 of them. So like top dollar. Let's assume you get 50 of them and you paid 200 a pop. Top dollar, I'd say, is like 10 grand. And like, I'd be shooting more for like 5 grand. Honestly.

Ken from Michigan, I need your input as a franchisor on this. I've been giving my opinion practice for what has worked for me and others in Augusta. In some Facebook groups, about 10 have been met with hostility and aggression. Not just disagreement, but says you says but says the said but says that you, Mike, are a predator. Augusta is a scam. I shouldn't be in their group because I'm part of Augusta. Got got me kicked out of a group and I left the other. I want to respectfully defend myself and Augusta, but when I do, they get more aggressive ad hom attacks, etc. So at what point do I stand up for what I believe in and my fellow fellow brothers in Augusta or just let it go because they are the one in the wrong. How do I balance the two? I would like your personal opinion, but also your policy as a CEO. Just ignore it. There's. There's no time and there's no reason to give it any oxygen whatsoever.

They don't pay attention to this stuff. It's noise. The fortunate part is that if you want to stroke your ego in any way, just keep in mind that the Internet keeps great receipts. And so if you really want to screenshot it and come back to it in 12 months, then you get the permission to be able to respond. There's no reason to defend yourself. People are going to have opinions. The Internet keeps great receipts. And so when I am mad, I will screenshot things I will put into my little vault on Google Drive and I have permission to respond to it in five years. And usually by that time it's so obvious that it's just like you just laugh. So, yeah, it's absolutely not worth any of your time whatsoever.

All right, Papa Pain. I've always agreed to pay more permanent for a live person answer call. At this time, all the agents were in the U.S. am I paying an inflated price now for my customers to get foreigner instead of AI that defeats the whole reason we pay more for our customers to get someone that they are comfortable with.

No. So the price per minute is the same regardless of who answered the phone. And, and the reason we're able to keep the price where it's at is because of the fact that we are able to get the.

Cost down by having people overseas. That being said, I would, I would honestly put up any, any of our agents in the Philippines or virtually in the US against our local team in terms of quality. Like, they're all taught the exact same way. Furthermore, they're English most of the time, they're expatriates, and they're coming from the US And Canada, and they're over there with their family.

And that's the majority of who we hire. And they're all like super educated, etc. Furthermore, the retention on the team over there is probably three to four times better than our in our local market in terms of just how long we can keep them, which allows us to keep the price down again at Command center. So like I just left a call center place for, for the turnaround, you know, they're charging three to four dollars per minute and they don't go into people's CRM they just fill out a form as like a ticket. So we're, we cannot get there otherwise. Like we never want to get to that price point because if we do, it'll be where at 200,000, 300,000. It makes more sense to get an in office person and that becomes basically useless in my opinion. Right now it makes sense to have command center doing most everything until you're above about 800,000 to 900,000. Then it makes more sense to have someone potentially in house for all things besides reactive things like phone calls and web forms and then just have someone in house doing all the payroll. Why is this trying to reconnect? Did I lose my Internet?

Why is it saying that? That's weird.

What we do at the Bellingham shop for example, is most everything is handled by command center. But then Corey takes a few things of his that he wants to handle. And then if you had something like a full time office person because he's not full time office version, they'd probably do all the back end stuff like bookkeeping, email, et cetera, et cetera and then let the command center just take the calls.

But the bottom line is having someone overseas reduce our costs about by half. And it takes significantly amount more management. And so that's why like the cost isn't super different because the management is so much more when someone is not in the office. What the benefits are is the retention. We can keep people, like I said like three to four times longer on average is currently what we're getting overseas because they have higher rates of unemployment there and they really, really value the job. And so during spring rush for example last year, the people who like really, really stuck it out with us and like started working extra days all, you know, start working crazy hours, et cetera. When we needed the most, it was our team overseas. And so it's not to devalue any member of the team. It's simply to raise them up in the fact that like they, in terms of quality of what we, when we do call recordings, et cetera, they are at or above our local team. And so when we, when we hire overseas, we require certain tests in terms of English education, et cetera, that we will never be able to do locally and be able to retain team members. And so you know, I just think that it is, it is equivalent service regardless across the team. And then if it was ever.

If it was ever like an issue, you can always submit it to yellow stuff if you wanted something like reviewed. And if we have let, I think one person Go in the past where I was like, hey, like this is, this is, this is not clear enough. Like this is like an English speaking person. And like we just had to let them go and during training. But how about the agents being worse or better? It's about them sounding like a local agent. I've had a great overseas agent, but that's the very experience for me. Normally it's just awful. Street, not our agents, but every other major company. It's a fact that that close rate is higher when the agent sounds like they are from area. Certain areas you just know Texas, Louisiana, Boston, Deep south, et cetera. Tennessee. Yeah. Keep in mind that when it comes to hiring for a office position, like we have even the local agents, a lot of them come from these types of nationalities. So it'd be like saying, you know, let me think, like there's certain nationalities that will be attracted to certain industries. For example, if you look at.

Dry cleaning, for example, like certain nationalities will be attracted to that, like spas. Certain nationalities are attracted to that. There's a lot of lineage behind that. And so even though they might be local, like next door to you, they're still going to be of that nature. So when we put hiring ads out in this local area, for example, we still will attract a lot of those type of nationalities anyways. So in the past we actually had someone that was in house or two people that were in house from India. And we had some people saying like, oh, like they have a really thick accent. They were local in the office. And so.

I understand that, you know, that apprehension. The bottom line is if we required everyone to be, let's just call it, you know, Caucasian local to us, we would, we would literally have to be around $2.20 probably just to break even. And, and our retention would be brutal. Like it's just, it's not even comparable. Um, and that was what kills us during spring rush is the fact that retention drops in a, in a local market because it gets stressful and people leave. And so, you know, we've been monitoring this over the past like three years. If we tested it, failed, retried, it did virtual, local and national. Then last year really tested it again. Like, and we just consistently see the ones that like when, when everything's crazy and like leads are just pouring in like hundreds by like just craz. The ones that rise the occasion are our virtual team that have been trained well. And that's what I'm looking at as someone who has to like figure out who we hire from. It's not just.

What they sound like on the phone or their training or like things that you mentioned here. It's not that it is like, who sticks with us when everything gets really, really heated. And that's the hardest part about Spring Rush for Command center is the fact that it literally can go from like right now to what it's going to be in six weeks. It'll 5 to 6x the amount of capacity. And some can't take that. Like, they just cannot take the heat. And if there's 10 other jobs that are hiring down the street, we have a lot of people leave. And it's been the same thing in when.

Most parts of the US where I've looked at when it comes to these, and I've talked to other people that run call centers, etc. And they will actually run ads in their local market against people of certain descents that have come from those cultures because they know what they do and how they. How they operate.

And so it's this weird fine line of like, it's not about being like, choosing between races or like cultures, et cetera. It's like, look, we have a. We have a position. Whoever can operate the best is who I want to hire. Whoever can stick with the team the best, whoever has the best skills. That's the only thing I'm judging it on. And there are certain commonalities between nationalities of what they're really, really good at. And. And so that's what we've seen. Even, even when we hire locally, the same thing is true. So hopefully I answer that question. Is there any more? Number five. Cool. All right, everyone, I hope you have a fantastic Monday, a fantastic week upcoming, and I will see you. Yes, I will see you tomorrow. Take care, everyone. Bye.