Mike Minutes Mastermind 02/12/2025

Hello everyone. Welcome to another Mike Minutes Mastermind. Let's get this party on the road.

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Respond to this. Yesterday Connor said send me a text message. Very cool. He showed a W2. His employee made like 40 bucks an hour on P4P. Let's go. That was very cool. I think I made like 70 grand for the year. So that was very awesome.

Let's go ahead and start.

First question is from Coach Connor. I was doing a coaching call with someone who was about to switch over to over his location to gm. There used to be a video or slideshow where you paid yourself X amount from a location as a weekly or monthly distribution straight off the top from the location. The thought behind this question is wondering how the owner who will be stepping away from the business will get a regular paycheck. I assume that the owner will not have to wait to get paid quarterly. If there's something that should. Is there something that where they should take a regular distribution or on a monthly or weekly basis so that their day to day items are paid for as well. Trying to get some clarification on what if you on that. If you can.

All right. A few different ways you can handle this. So first off, if you're in the business at all, like at all doing any decision making whatsoever, you're showing up at all, you should be taking a salary.

If you're only based on distributions and you need that money to survive, you could do monthly distributions. If you're doing distributable cash, getting profit sharing or you're doing revenue, I do not recommend doing monthly.

I would do it where it's basically just realize that there could be some months where potentially if your cash flow went down for whatever reason, like you have a bad off season that you won't be getting a distribution, but you could just change it from quarterly to monthly for your distributions, that's probably what I would do if I need the money on a more regular basis.

Or you could alternatively just take a small salary and then do the quarterly distributions. But I only like to take a salary if I'm involved in the business. Or if you're an S corp, you gotta take some sort of a salary. So I'll take a very, very minimal amount, like 200 bucks a week or something like that. Just to have checkbox with the IRS that yes, I did take a salary. So if you have an S corp and it's profitable, you do need to take some W2 income. So you could probably just take a small salary and then you Could I would base that. But though how much effort and time you put into that location.

And it's probably gonna be very minimal and. But if you're there once or twice a week or like there for four or five hours a week or 10 hours a week, like give yourself a good salary to pay your bills and make sure that your what you're giving your GM is actually right because you should be taking money out if you're working in the business at all. And then you can move your distributable cash. Assuming that's how you're doing your distributions, you could do it to monthly. Just realize that if you ever have, you know, any sort of off season monthly distributions will. There'll be a month where you don't have any. So if you have any off, if you have very, very consistent profitability throughout the entire year, you could every single month go by and still have quarterly and still have monthly distributions. I think most of my locations I would not get monthly distributions just because the way cash flow works and as you're going down into an off season and then coming out of an off season, like if your revenue goes down at all, you should have a few months where you won't have any. You'd have a month or two where there's not distributions but quarterly. I'll get distributions because I know over the course of the quarter, even if there's like three pay periods on one pay on one month and that kind of tanks one month doesn't matter because over the course of quarter it's a little more consistent. So as long as you're okay with just that kind of consistency of monthly, then that's fine. I like quarterly only because like my goal is always just have consistently pot positive quarterly distributions even throughout all four quarters of the year. It's difficult to do every single month. I'll just be honest. Even if you're solving Q4 collapse, because even if you do like snow or you do.

Christmas lights, a little more lumpy revenue. And so you'll get really good month and then like kind of the month where you take down the lights, you don't make as much money, for example. So that's usually why I like quarterly. But if you, if you were in this case you could just do monthly, so that'd be totally fine. Kyle Tarvin the other day I was asking about business lines of credit, but not able to get one to lend on a business line. Granted I didn't completely exhaust my options, but trying to decide if it's even Worth continuing to pursue. I did get.

It did get approved for an unsecured and no collateralized personal loan.

20,000 four years, 11.3% interest, roughly $525 payment. Based on my calculations, I think I've been paying around $5,000 interest over the life of the loan.

Note you'd be paying two to. You'd be paying like ten grand, like nine to ten grand. I may be wrong though. This is just what online loan calculators are spitting out. I don't need this money. But was thinking I could take out this loan and keep it up separate. So really quick and dirty. If you're paying, you just do 11% interest on 20 grand, right? So that's $2,200. Multiply that by four. So you're at $8,800. So I don't need this money. But the thinking is I could take out this loan and keep it in a separate bank account and just pay off the monthly payments using the loan itself. I don't have anything that I need right now. I don't have anything that I need right now. I don't have anything. Oh, I see. You don't need anything right now. This would be more of a backstop in case stuff hits the fan this spring. We need more capital. The only thing I would I could see we may need to buy is a truck if one goes down or potentially more marketing spend. It could also be peace of mind for me knowing we have extra cash reserves. For context, we have around $55,000 in each location's bank account. 110,000 total. Also, I have no large personal expenses coming up. Everything personal has been paid off and I have a six month personal emergency cash and fund in cash. My plan is to have one location in growth mode and the other maintain around 250, 300,000 until next spring rush in 2026. If you were my position, would you think this would be a good or bad financial decision? I don't necessarily think in terms of goods and bads. I think in terms of risk. And so this is a very, very like. I don't think you need this to be honest. You have plenty of cash. That $525 payment, if the reason is you need it is a truck. You get a brand new truck for a $525 payment because interest on that truck loan is going to be like 5%, maybe 4% depending on your credit.

So if, if the truck is the reason you're getting the loan, I just go get a truck. Loan, you pay half as much interest and probably on a five year term instead of four year old. Um, so that would be my personal recommendation on this one is I would not get the loan. Like. Cause I, I don't like. I don't say things are good or bad based on what I would do. I would not get this loan. If you needed a truck, I'd go buy one. If you need to get debt on it because you don't want to tap into your cash reserves, that's fine. You'll get a 4 to 5% interest rate on a 5 year note. You'll probably pay 4 to $500 a month even if it's a $30,000 truck. So I don't think that this would be something I would personally do. Is it a good or bad decision? No, it's just a very risk off move and I don't think you need it with that much cash on hand.

And given the fact that one of your locations is going into profit mode. Coach Connor we started sharing Project estimate videos with customers back in May to help with close ratio. Customers love and we have have less callbacks and less follow ups due with the customer to accept the job. Long story short, I'm requiring crews to send project completion videos to be sent into our local office to close the loop. We will then have before and after videos to add into the customer profile in Google Drive. This is in addition to the customer walkthrough by the crew. Is there a feature in copilot to where this is? We could do a client signature pad. Just trying to close the loop on as much as possible so you can create visit forms and then you could have your crew have to do a checklist and one of them could be like take a video and then on that you could have them sign off on it like a signature pad. It's not smooth. It's something that we are thinking about for next year in terms of having a much better client signature pad. But it works. Some people do use it especially for big projects. Some people use it.

The thing is the reason I've always tend not to do the client signature after a job site is.

There are like the smaller projects. I don't want the customer, the crew have to wait for the crew or wait for the customer to get back home. Now if you're doing a $5,000 job I yes I'm definitely doing a walkthrough. A video sounds great. I'll get a signature if I need to just for peace of mind. But like on a $400 cleanup. I don't want the crew waiting around an hour because the customer's not home yet. So it does exist. Some people do use visit forms. You can create these inside of Copilot and then just attach them to a job and then the crew sees the form that they have to fill out before the job is over.

I I usually just have focus much more on like do the do the walkthrough. I want them to do that. If you do a video awesome. But the client signature part requires them in person.

And many times I just like I'd rather custom like the cruise on a smaller product. I don't want them waiting around so. But it's definitely another layer of protection. Dustin from Bloomington Champagne when we toggle on upsells for employees, do we need to create individual services for them to upsell with automations that will auto send if there is a project or someone at CC that can set this all up for both accounts so I don't mess these automations up. There is no automation that's all built into the system. So it's not based on automation. It's based upon just the upsell. Now we're using the same technology in the back end to make the upsells happen but you just need to simply create what services and then do you want a text or an email or both and then which templates for those and then do you want to be auto sent to the customer or do you want to have to manually approve it so it has nothing to do with automations. No automation need to be set up. You just need to create the email and text templates for each service and then determine whether or not you want it to go out automatically to customer or if you want to approve them before they go out to customers. So no automation work required. Really the only project like setup part is like what do you want those emails and text messages to say? I would make them very just text like don't use a bunch of fancy stuff. So like I generally believe you could do this in a couple hours for all your services. I would do no more than four or five for your employees to see so they're not overwhelmed. I would change it based upon the time of year. So I'd probably have what are the four or five services in spring, what are the four or five in summer? Whether four or five in fall. Like what are your season specific offers for season specific services? I would create those. I would make it all text based. No logos, no pictures. Email and text probably say the Exact same thing. So they know you're just doing both. And it would just be like, hey, Mr. Jones, the crew's at your property today. They noticed you might need some extra bed maintenance, saw some weeds growing. I can ask them out to tomorrow. Is this a good email address to send that to do that and then just literally change out the services.

And modify slightly what you're saying. But you always know the crew is at the property, so you can always say that. It makes it very personalized. You can put your name on it. I would not use any images, I would not use any links. I would just simply ask them if they want an estimate. You'll get a higher response rate. And then whether or not you make that automatic, you can make on each user inside of Copilot. So if you had like a crew leader, for example.

But oh, no, wait, do we have that now?

I think in permissions, you're able to individualize it based on the user. But all that say most. Most users that use upsell feature, it's either like, hey, I want to approve them all, or I want them just to go out automatically. I'm a fan of kind of approving them. You don't want a customer being annoyed because every single week you keep sending them the same upsell feature and they keep declining it. Like, it could get annoying. So it's not a bad idea. I like to have it for solo operators where it's off. So you know out in the field that as you're clicking the button, it's sending out texts and emails. Like, trust me, if you're a solo operator out doing work right now, turn you will. You will double your business if you just use this feature and you just. Every single job, what are the four or five? You can now do more because you're not going to get confused. You could do eight or 10 different services and just every single one you're going through, like, you're going to sell so much work. So if you're out in the field doing these jobs, like, this is such a slam dunk. I'd be doing it all the time. And if your crew's out doing it, just make sure that it's manual review and it comes to you and you can check it. And then at the end of the day, when you're doing just, you know, dispatching jobs for tomorrow, you're looking back on the dispatch board, seeing which ones have the upsell and just approving them. I highly recommend, like, yeah, it's free money.

All right, everyone, hope you have a fantastic rest of your day. See you guys tomorrow. Take care.