Mike Minutes Mastermind 02/13/2023

Hello Gust Nation. Hope you're all doing super well. Happy Monday. Let's go get started.

Announcements. I would highly recommend ordering your new customer flyers and door hangers. These are the things that you're going to giving customers if you are in person the flyers and then if you are doing drive bys or if they are not home when you come to do an in person visit. Those door hangers are what is what you'd be dropping off there. Let me drop this in the Facebook group real quick.

We have some new designs coming up this week including new to the neighborhood. And then we're start working some upsell ones so that we can give you specific upsells when you're at a customer's house and you're out there for mowing. So that is that. I'm just making sure there wasn't anything else I need to talk about.

All right. That's all I had for announcements. Okay, cool. Let's rock and roll.

Go. Present.

All right. Mastermind questions. All right, looks like there is nine Landon Smith hear me land here but all right. Landon has a question here. Make sure it's showing good. Landon says we talk about mowing season a lot if grass starts mowing in March. But anyone wanting weekly mowing would probably wait until April. What what do you all consider mowing season? So yeah, similar in our market it starts growing in March. We start mowing March 1st and we require weekly from day one. From March, April and May we require weekly. They cannot do bi weekly service. The reason we do that is because if we start with weekly during March it gives us the chance to dial in the edges really get the the lawn under control before the rush of like massive growth as well as they don't get their invoice until the first week of April and by then the grass has taken off. So they're not going to stop or go to to to bi weekly service. We just make it a mandatory across the board always weekly. Highly recommend that if you don't down the road you probably will want to just make it. From the beginning of spring rush you just require weekly and if you're doing monthly billing they're not going to see a bill for the first after the know you're going to mow the laundry three, four, five times. And so by the time they want to switch to bi weekly it's like grass needs it and those roll with it. We just make it install all of our estimates of standard verbiage that March, April, May requires weekly mowing.

Bill Thomas Good morning Mike, I ordered some of the of the we're hiring business cards and it appears the QR code isn't working. Goes to a 404 page. I've attached a pic of the card and the error page. Not sure what to do from here. I ordered 250 of them. I figured sometimes you have to kiss a lot of frogs to find the prints. I don't know what that means. Sorry. But yeah, this is what happened. So we are doing this thing on the website. Let me just first and foremost say we will fix this. It's not a big issue, but the reason this happened is we are working on. We have found that there's this thing called not bundling. Blanking on it. It's not bundling. I'm forgetting the name of it when it comes to the way that we do our pages on our website and we found out that Google is changing the way that they look at these not bundles. I forget. Sorry, I'm blanking on the name but the way that you stack pages. So in the past we've always done augustalongerservices.com your territory name, careers and that's where you're probably going to. We've flipped those recently and I only actually found this out because at training we were trying some of the new locations and theirs wasn't going through either. They were going to four or four pages. So what I am working on with the web team is making sure that even though we are using this new. I forget the name, sorry, bundling. I'm just gonna call it bundling way of bundling the pages. We will redirect these URLs to the new one. So what if you could. Vel, if you could do me a favor, send me an email franchise gustalongasservices.com just give me your territory name and say my careers page is not. Is not directing correctly. Please send that to me. I'll make sure you guys get prioritized in terms of making sure that works. Otherwise we're just going to make sure that everyone's pages get redirects so that if you do have an old URL on an old post or something, it will work.

But that's why that has happened. Same thing with the slash estimate page. We found that the way Google crawls sites is changing and so we've been testing it and it just does it faster when we bundle them in a certain way. So yeah, hope it makes sense. A lot of companies are just getting in the wind of this, but it'll become more popular like end of 2023 I think with a lot of other like design firms in terms of just realizing that the way you bundle I'm blanking on the name, sorry. There's a technical term for it, the way that you put your pages inside of a website so it's making a faster load time. However it is creating issues for the S slash estimate and the careers page. So definitely check those and if you're having issues, either of those not showing up, let me know and we'll prioritize yours right away. But we're making sure everyone's gets done anyways so let me just make a note here.

So if that's happening yours let me know and but we are going to get them done all done anyways. Like none of you should have to worry about this hopefully at end of the week. But we are redoing the way that we kind of doing the URLs and the bundling of those pages. Kyle Tarvin's Sorry, Kyle Tarvin has a question. I've noticed a lot of your high level employees like Liz and Lee manage multiple businesses for you or have a few different roles in the business. How do you approach them with the opportunity but make sure their main position isn't left by the wayside while they are taking on another role. Yeah, so like for me personally, a lot of the people that I want to work with in the long term I create other things for them. Like I literally am creating a personal training online thing right now because I think that Christian, the trainer they have at the gym is phenomenal and I think down the road he'll be a massive asset to the companies and I need him to move up inside the company and there's just not a lot of room at the gym. We've doubled the size of the revenue of the gym. You can only it's a box like you know, like the gym is a physical space so it's just a little harder to scale. So I want to give him the opportunity to do that. So I'm looking literally hiring his brother to join the media team and the first month is literally just designated to developing a website so that Christian can scale up online. And that's the thing, I'm not really passionate about that. I don't think it's like the most important thing for me to be doing right now. But I can hire someone, give them and then have Christian have something like a side thing that he can work on to make more money and keep him engaged. Because down the road I think I want to do, I want to work with him. So for me personally, and you will hit this when you start getting especially regional managers or good GMs is you make positions for them to grow into not because it makes the most financial sense, but simply because you want them to stick around and you want to keep them motivated and you want to keep them engaged and you want to give them something that motivates them financially to go after something. So like Liz, for example, she's able to do the property management stuff for me. We've cut back a lot in that by selling a lot of the real estate and we've systematized a lot more. However, it allows her to make more money because she likes she can work on Saturday, Sunday, do extra property managers have make extra money. It also allows us to stay more lean at command center and the franchise. For Lee, for example, the sales position obviously gives him the ability to be able to move up inside the company. Even this morning we did orientation at the Bellingham shop. It's great to be like, Dylan was in your seat one year ago and now he's a gm. You know, April was at command center a year ago. Now she's office manager. Lee was in your seat five years ago. Mitchell's leaving Hawaii to go start his own location. Marcus went and started his own location. He was Dylan's position last year. And you know, looking at Nick and Austin and all the other guys and you're able to like bring them up as real case scenarios. It's very impactful for your lower level employees and entry level team members. And so yeah, the ones that are at the highest I try to make positions for. Same thing with Brad. Like there wasn't a role for him to really fit in. And so I made home service cpa. I literally created a tax firm in the whole nine yards. It probably took a week of my time. But now he's running it. He's basically a piece of my business. It's very, very helpful for us as franchisees. It compliments what we're trying to do with Augusta and vertical integration. But I can give it to someone, be like, go run with this. But I'm not doing it for what is the most. I can make the most money per unit of time, like in the next year or two or three. Like it's, it's. You do it for the team member, you want to retain them. And so how do you approach them with the opportunity but make sure their main position isn't left by the wayside? Yeah, like if they, if they were the type of person where I thought that what they're currently working on was going to go by the wayside, I wouldn't give them the opportunity, right? So if I thought by saying, hey, I want to make you, I want you to be able to have a little opportunity to grow, expand, challenge yourself, I'm going to give you something new. If I thought that that would somehow impact negatively what they're doing, I wouldn't even offer them the position. So, you know, for example, like, like Lonnie, she's moving into the P4P side of things. It's the first opportunity I'm able to give her something where it's like, hey, look, now it's like, yes, you get your regular pay, but here's like the incentive program and here's the benchmarks and here's the numbers I want to see and go for it. And like, if you have ideas, if you have innovative things you want to try, it's all yours. And so you can only do that if you can trust the person that they're not going to let everything else on their plate get dropped. Because if they do that, they're not getting any sort of offer. So. Hope that made sense.

Pasql from Mendoza from Iowa. I always get these wrong. I'm so bad at state abbreviations. Like, I have a company offer me to buy their maintenance division. 22 accounts. The revenue is $90,000. 60% is commercial and 40% is residential. Some of them is weekly and some bi weekly. The reason he wants to sell is because he's focusing on fertilization and weed control mowing. I asked him how much he is asking for and he said, make me your offer. However.

Make the higher bids wins. I'm really interested to buy it, but I don't know how it's worth. How much should I offer him? Based on what help? Please see images below. Okay, let's go ahead and open up these. For some reason on this computer, I can't share a window here. One second, Let me try something because there's a bunch of pictures. So let me just see if I can somehow tear this one out. And if I can show this as a window, I should be able to scroll through these pictures. So right off the bat, this isn't worth anything, hardly anything. I can just guarantee that I'll show you why in just a second. Okay. Now I should be able to click through these pictures and everyone see them as I go through them. Is that right? Yes. Okay, so you got a bunch of weekly accounts, mostly commercial. The reason commercial. Commercial does not usually stay through a transition because they are looking at.

I mean, a transition of brands because that's usually when they're going to just go get more bids. And they're very much bottom line focused. They're not really focused on like the relationship as much. They don't really care about the trucks or the employees. Like they just need it. They're looking at property management typically and they're going to be less inclined to think about that stuff. So those 20, 22, 22 accounts $90,000 in revenue. And I would assume you're going to lose 30 to 40% of these when you, if you bought them, I would probably max out at $5,000. Like that's a, that's a 370, $380 customer acquisition cost. So like you could, you're literally paying a triple premium, 3x premium on getting these customers and buying them versus just going out and spending the money on advertising. Like just ask yourself, if you went and spent 5, 10, they're probably asking like 20 grand on marketing, you would get way more than $90,000 in annual revenue and you would have the risk of them leaving, which I, I know for a fact that commercial leaves way more when you transition brand and change the name of the company. Nick from Marysville, what's a good rule of thumb? So to answer your question, sorry, I would probably offer the maximum $5,000 because you're literally just getting contacts and then you're going to go try to switch over to Augusta. And based upon some of those numbers, I don't even know if they're priced well. But even if they're priced well, like five grand tops. What is the. Okay, what is a good rule of thumb when it comes to how much rent you should pay for your location? Is it just a matter of whether we can cover the fixed costs or is there some correlation to business size? What is the Bellingham shop paying? So I have context. I'm trying to lease some land from the city or county. So if you know anything about doing that as well, please let me know. You're trying to lease from the city or county. There's probably a lot more red tape. I've always been much more of like, find some land, go talk to the owner, ask them if you can do it, and then they have like a one page lease. So like the Bellingham shop, for example, we only pay $1,000 a month. However, I spent $120,000 developing that land. So take that into Context. And you're not going to get a loan for that. It's going to be cash because there's nothing to collateralize. So massive thing to think about, that same same shop space will probably rent for three to $4,000 once we move out, since all of those capital improvements were made on the property.

Yeah, just. I don't think there is a rule of thumb in terms of percentage. But I would say though that again, your dump fees should be the thing covering your rent expense. So maybe you need to bump up your dump fees a little bit. But even, even if you charge $50 per dump fee, you very likely can cover the cost of your rent by just your dump fees. And so if you look at it that way, as you scale and grow the business, you're gonna have more dump fees, allowing you to afford more shop space. So your dump fees should cover your shop space and your fuel, and then your E fees should cover all of your command center and franchise costs. That's how you determine. Exactly. That's your overhead recovery right there. Right. That's the goal. Because if you can have all of your overhead at command center and like admin side covered by your E fees, and then you have your shop space and your fuel all covered by your dump fees, your overhead recovery is on point.

Nick Marysville, Camino Islands. Ads show up in my area and above my listing. When I'm not advertised. When I'm not advertising. I talked with Alex. Our zip codes don't have any overlap, but we can't seem to find out why it shows up. I've seen this happen with other franchisees. I know it's not the end of the world. People in my city will click the city names. Anyways, I'm just wondering why this will happen if he isn't paying for the ad and he's still being shown outside his zip code. Pick attached. Yeah. So. Oh, let's click on this. You guys can see it. Cool. Mano. Okay, so he's running an ad. Yeah. So what, what's happening here is.

You need, if this is happening, you to need. You need to run an exclude on your Google Ad. Okay. So a lot of times happens, someone's doing a radius and they are hitting the people inside someone else because they aren't doing exclude. And this can happen randomly. It also is because sometimes if you've traveled to Camino island, for example, it will still loop you into the algorithm of being there. Right. So sometimes that's why if you travel, you'll get ads as you travel as you go through areas because it's just looking at your location. So if you've ever been to Camino and Stanwood it might be for the past 90 days depending on the cookies it might say, okay, this person has been in Stanwood for the next 90 days. We're going to advertise them as if they are in Stanwood. Right. So keep that in mind. It might be your device only, but then secondarily to protect against this because most importantly Alex is paying for someone else that's someone that is not in his market to see his ad. So you don't want that run exclude if this is happening consistently in your market. So obviously run like a radius but then run an exclude so you can run another radius and then click the little buttons that exclude and then and it'll make sure that no one inside that market sees your ad. It's like a double way. It's like a re emphasizing saying it twice of to Google. Like do not advertise to people in this area. So but it's likely, more likely that you've been there at one point Nick like drove through Stanwood and it cookied your device. And for the next usually 60 to 90 days it'll still run ads against that spot for you. Kyle Tarvin I have a potential GM ready to go for one of our locations next year. Do you think you have to be 100% sold about them being a GM or would you give someone a shot that you think might be able to rise the occasion but not 100% a positive they will crush it in the current moment. The problem is I've already told this person they would be the GM of this location. I guess I'm just getting cold feet on them right now. I think this person is really great, shows up on time, has a great attitude, works well by themselves, etc. Just not 100% sold on them being a GM? Any advice in this situation would be great. You're never going to know if a team member is going to work out. However, if your intuition is telling you that there's going to be a bunch of red flags, I'd follow the intuition. I also have an open conversation with them about the things that you're concerned about and the things that they would need to improve on to actually win your trust of becoming a gm. Just be open and honest with them and cut them very quickly. If you put them in a you give them a shot. If you give them a shot and they try to get them to rise to the occasion, just be Very quick to fire. Especially a GM position because it costs a lot to get a GM trained up, ready to go. You send them to training, they fly out here and all the rest of it all fine and dandy. Do not allow that. To have like sunk cost syndrome is a big deal. That is because we put money into something and because we invest time and energy into something. This happens all the time with employees, businesses, divisions, services. Oh, because I have a big dump truck, I'm going to keep doing this. Because I have an excavator, I'm going to keep doing, you know, a certain service. Because I've trained this person up for three weeks, I'm going to keep working with them. Don't have the sunk cost fallacy. Don't have the sunk cost syndrome. Fire. People make decisions in the business based upon what's happening in the future. You cannot change the past. So I would just say if you're going to give someone a shot and see if they rise to the occasion, just be very trigger happy because usually your intuition wins out there.

Evansville what are your thoughts of using your line of credit for spring marketing? I was curious to know if that would help with the stress side of cash flow in the springtime since we have training, a huge influx of customers, lots of onboarding steps and marketing. Do you think about, do you think using your line of credit would help with that? A very, very capital, intense time, or is it just tit for tat and just use a credit card assuming it will be paid off within one to three months when that money comes back in or lower interest rates versus credit card rates. Or is it better to just do it on a cash basis? Yeah. So you know, that's why you have your line of credit is for spring rush because that is when you don't want, what you don't want to do is getting to July and August. Like man, we were really busy but if I would have had more money, I could have doubled the business, but I didn't have the capital to spend on marketing. And we are, we had plenty of employees, we had plenty of trucks. Like our labor capacity and our, our, our asset capacity were really, really high. And we had leads coming in but I had to throttle them because I didn't have any marketing dollars. And so if I could just spent some money, money in marketing, if I could have bought one more truck, I could have doubled my business. That's when you use a line of credit. That's why if ideally everyone has set up their line of credit in like the fall, because you have lots of cash on hand and you're good to go, that's the time to set up your line of credit so you can use it during the spring rush. Right now a line of credit is probably going to cost you somewhere between 7 and 10% of interest, depending on your situation versus a credit card is going to be like 18, 20%. However, it's super easy to use, right? So if you know you're going to pay it off within one to three months, just use the credit card. Simple. It's easy. I've never paid a dollar interest on credit cards because I know the interest rate is so high and just like, I can't morally do it, I can't like fathom it. I'd rather like sell stuff honestly at 20% interest. Like, it's just, it's insane the amount of interest you're paying. However, one to three months, I'm okay with that. If you can't get a line of credit, you don't have one now, and you go into the spring rush, you're going to be tight on cash, you're not going to get a line of credit. Potentially use your credit card, that's fine. Only use that credit card if you know you're going to pay it off within next few months and make sure that the things that you're putting on that credit card are going to actually lead to growth. That's when you talk to a coach like, hey, this is what I'm thinking of using the credit card for. Is this actually going to lead to growth? Because I can tell you it will. If you're up against capacity of trucks and if you buying one more truck allows you to get to this spring rush and be at $50,000 in annual revenue instead or in monthly revenue compared to 30,000, that's a great move. Take a little bit of interest payments. You might pay 500, $600 in interest over the next few months, but you're going to literally take your business from 30,000 to 50,000 because you need that truck to increase asset capacity. Green light.

Just don't do it with like, oh, this is my first spring. I'm really expecting to grow. I'm going to go into credit card debt. Bad news. Your second spring rush and onwards, I would give you the green light on your credit, on your credit card because you know what spring rush entails and your second spring rush, I'm very confident that there's going to be a lot more leads and, and a lot more word of mouth and you're going to be ranking much better on Google. And that rush, that's when you typically will need the extra capital injection to facilitate increasing your asset and labor capacities. So, yeah, answer your question.

Terrell from Boone's Creek. I have been getting intermittent results with people leaving Google reviews. What I mean is about 25% of the time they don't show up after someone says they left it. It will screenshot it and it shows that they posted on their end. But on our end, nothing, not even after days. Thoughts? So I don't know why exactly if these are friends and family, however, if this is other lawn care people or your family, there's a very good chance it's going to get flagged and taken down. Augusta Lawn Care. Let's see here. 44, 48 reviews. Great. Love it. This all looks very, very good. So you have 48 reviews. So just what I want to see here is newest I know Tarot from his previous work. Two reviews. Travis. Okay, this is a franchisee. I don't know if that's a franchisee.

I'm just trying to see if there's a lot of franchisees in here. I don't think there is. Caleb. So you're getting quite a. You're getting enough. Yeah. Jeremy Gomez. So you. I would guess I'm just. Yeah. Kurt, you got a lot of Augusta lawn care people in here. So just keep in mind that if you get a bunch of franchisees from all over the country reviewing your local business, they're going to get flagged. If you get a lot of you that are sending reviews to other franchisees, they will stick like 2% of the time, maybe 10% of the time. It's not worth trying to get from other franchisees. Get it from friends, get from family, get it from people that are in your local area. Those are going to stick much, much better than trying to get franchisees. They will likely not not stick. If you get other franchisees to leave your reviews and like, hey, you give me your view, I'll give you a review. Literally 10% of the time they're actually going to stick. So just keep that in mind. Are we going to be able to switch to COPA as soon as you launch? Are we going to wait until 2024? So my personal goal is that we are ready to switch by.

Conference in October. That's our goal. And there's a lot of features that we need in terms of, like the integration with Ringcentral. We want to do other really cool stuff in terms of this, like deposit threshold tipping. Like we already have tipping, we already have deposit threshold. But there's several things that I want to improve on.

For example, one click estimate emails. As of this week when we launch, there's no way to just send one click estimate emails inside of Copilot. So there's things that we have to do. My goal is October and then we would have everyone train at command center and then like January we'd probably say like, look here we're going to pull the plug on everything else. Service autopilot, super. And then everyone has some time to switch over. But by then we would have all the features nailed down and we'd have commands that are completely trained up and ready to roll on it. So there'll be lots of heads up, lots of heads up of as we go towards that point in time. So awesome. All right, guys, have a great week. Take.