Mike Minutes Mastermind 02/14/2023

Facebook group review Recent login Yeah, yeah, yeah, this was me. Okay, great. Sorry guys. I just try to get this YouTube link into the Facebook thing so if anyone's watching live, they can watch it on YouTube as well.

Okay. Facebook is opening slowly but surely.

Okay, What I was going to talk about, and I'm going to talk about is, is reminding you to send out the one click estimate email.

For existing and non for existing customers and customers that are not are just in your database for mowing. So as we headed into spring rush, you're gonna be sending the email out that says to existing customers, hey, we're gonna be starting mowing next week. And you're basically rolling right into it. Or B, you're going to be sending it to existing customers that you're telling them.

For customers in your database but they're not on mowing. Basically send them an email saying, hey, we're going to be starting to mow next week. If you want to get on the schedule, do it now because we're going to fill up quickly. So in the one click estimate email calendar there is two emails exactly for that purpose. I'd recommend sending them a one maximally two weeks before you start mowing. So I know a lot of the, like our North Carolina locations, I've literally started mowing this week. Washington State, we're starting here in a couple weeks. So you gotta be careful with the weather, right? So if the weather is like harsher than usual because like we like to have an exact date that we always start regardless unless there's snow on the ground, we're starting March 1st. Locally, everyone just knows we mow from March 1st to the end of November all, all the time. If it's really bad weather, like if we got snow today, right, I would be waiting on sending out the email. But like we got decent weather, things are going pretty good. I'd probably wait one more week and then send it one week prior to starting mowing and just telling people, next week we're going to start mowing service. Okay, don't send it too soon because people are like, don't just wait on my service. Don't do that. You want it to be. There's some good weather outside. Spring is kind of in the air. Then you send out the email saying, hey, we're going to start mowing next week. Okay? So be very careful about that. Otherwise you're gonna get a whole bunch of cancellations going into your spring rush because you simply sent the email out too quickly and too soon. All right? Also you don't wanna send out too late cause you're gonna miss out on the non customers that you could otherwise pick up because of your one click estimate email. So two one click estimates, one going to existing customers. Actually it's not one click estimate, it's just a. It's just an email email going to existing customers saying hey, we're gonna start mowing next week. Two is going to be the one that says.

A one click estimates to non existing customers. Trying to get them to click into it though email to existing customers. I would only send that if they're not on winter service. If they're on winter service, you don't need to do anything. Just roll right into mowing. If they're not on winter service, that's when you're going to send the email saying hey, we're going to be the next week. For some places they won't even send that email. Those go right into it. Because remember, if they opted out of winter services, they've already agreed to the fact that you're starting in spring. However.

To avoid a whole bunch of cancellations or people getting really mad after the first cut because you didn't tell them anything because they always forget about that email. Three months ago I just send them an email without asking if you want to be on the property, but just telling them, hey, we're start mowing next, next week. Look forward to servicing you at your property this year. And if you're not raising prices, there's a great place to say there's no price increases. If you are raising prices, this is a great place to put here your prices for the upcoming season. Boom. Don't say you're raising them, don't say them. Say that they're new. Just hear the new price here. Here are your prices for the upcoming season. Weekly, bi weekly, and then we're starting mowing next next week. That's if you're raising prices. If you're not, then simply send them email letting them know that you're going to start mowing next week. Again, if they're on winter services, I wouldn't say a single thing. They're going to roll right into the typical schedule for mowing.

Okay, I had other things to go over. One second. I had.

Oversized checks. Okay, so there are oversized checks inside of the dashboard. If you go to the dashboard, you're going to see a design and a tutorial for the oversized checks. There's also a place to get it in pro shop. So in pro shop you get these foam ones. They're pretty good. They're like 40 bucks a pop. They're foam, pretty good quality. But then they also have designs available so you can get it on bigcheckstore.com so you have like corrugated plastic, cardboard. You can have like massive, massive checks.

If you want them.

So they cost a little bit more, but they're available and the designs are there for you to be able to drag and drop. And there's a tutorial showing you how to put in whatever you want.

If you wanted to, you could make.

Them whiteboard and so you could race the check and then give it to someone else. I highly recommend making it cheap enough.

To where you don't mind giving these.

Out to your employees. It's like profit sharing. At the Bellingham shop, we'll probably do this, give everyone a extra. I'm going to Pay, you know, 5, 10, $15,000 in profit sharing. I don't mind spending an extra couple hundred bucks on big checks. I get to write their name on, take pictures with them. They're able to take it home. They're happy. They've never probably received a big jumbo check like that in their life. That's typically safe, like people who win lotteries and prizes. So I think it's a good idea. $40 is the one on the dashboard that you can or so the pro shop that you can order directly.

I'm going to be. We ordered a one or two, I.

Think to actually be able to show you all.

So hopefully in a week or so.

I'll be able to actually show you what those look like before you go buy them on the pro shop. I'll try to put them back behind here and hold them up for you guys.

Those are very cool.

Highly recommend for profit sharing. Highly recommend if you're trying to award someone. I know Vlad gave me the idea originally because he gives 500. If someone just stays 90 days and.

He gave someone a big check, I.

Was like, that is a good idea. So thank you, Vlad.

All right, let's present share screen. See the whole window film. There's 12 of these. Yeah, let's go. All right, here we go. Kyle Tarvin, Yesterday I had asked about how you move more your high level employees like Liz and Lee into different positions within the company while still performing their main task. How do you go about deciding what other business venture opportunity to put them in? So for me, it has to align with the overall vision of what we're trying to do with Augusta in some way, shape or form. And then it has to like Add value to what we're doing. Right. So for example with the property management.

What I learned there is going to be very helpful I think for a lot of you in like five to 10 years when you start getting the seventh stage of growth or sorry the seventh stage of wealth and you start thinking about like diversification, tax incentives for real estate, stuff like that. Like the amount of money. Like honestly for me real estate is more of a, it's a tax strategy. It's not honestly a huge amount of revenue like profitability, like cash flow wise. It's just too slow moving. But from a tax perspective, baby, let's go. There's some pretty cool stuff you can do with cost segregation and lots of cool stuff you can do. So me learning that, I think it's going to help a lot of our franchisees down the road and I can answer questions as you're trying to buy shop space and things like that. So I think it's really helpful. Same thing with me getting my real estate license. So in terms of deciding like it has to align with that number one. Number two, it has to be something that they're going to be able to expand into that is like somehow like the next step for them. Like it's an opportunity that they're excited about. And.

Yeah, it just has to be, it has to be more like I'm not gonna like let someone take a step back and yeah, they have to kind of overall contribute to the whole goal of what we're trying to do and then it has to be being done so they can feel challenged and like they're getting ahead. 2 Kyle Tarvin a while back you had mentioned that you had putting your locations under 1s corp as the owner of those locations instead of your personal names. Are all of the rest of your businesses houses under 1s corp or they individual LLCs with you being personal being the owner? Example, someone wants to start multiple locations. A cleaning branch, auto sales branch, landscape supply branch. Would it be ideal to have one one Corp that owns all these entities or have them their own separate entities with you being the owner? Hope it makes sense. Yeah. The biggest issue you're going to have trying to do what you said here, having like a cleaning branch and auto sales branch, landscape supply branch, etcetera under 1s corp. That's gonna be very difficult from an insurance perspective. So that's what you gotta be careful of is when you start putting a whole bunch of different entities and businesses under one S Corp. It's very hard to insure it correctly. So for me personally, I have the. All the actual physical locations of Augusta that actually mow grass under 1s corp, LLCs under 1 escort. Everything else I do is separated. The franchise is totally separated. Because there's no way that they're gonna like, they're going to insure me as a franchisor, which has a completely different set of laws compared to like mowing grass. Right. So the. The use cases is easier when you start breaking things apart. So, like, the gym would never be able to be in an S corp. Well, I can say never. It'd be hard to find someone who would be willing to insure an S corp that includes a gym and mowing grass. Like, it's just very hard for them to insure. So.

Ken from Fenton, Michigan, wanted to know how to. How best to respond to this. Most of these claims are untrue. They are verbally happy with the service at first. Then they said they took care of it themselves. So we don't need to come back. They never told us to not come back or that we were not welcome. This bothers me, so I'm wanting to know how to best to handle it. Okay, let's take a look at it.

First off, don't let it bother you. Absolutely do not recommend. Okay. This is someone on Facebook. Looks like we hired Augusta for fall cleanup and gutter cleanup. We have approximately 2 acres with lots of trees. Apparently you don't know how to quit a job. You have to review in person. On the first visit, they intended to spend one hour. And we're only going to clean what they could only after a specific crest. Because we only have guests, they spend two hours to address a fraction of our lawn. Why can't I scroll down? I can only go in and out. Okay. Trash work in regards to the gutter clinic spent approximately one hour. You could see no difference because there is a note in our system staying the guys were completed. They extorted us for payment.

We told them they were not invited back to our property, had to hire a different company to clean up their mess. In summary.

Okay.

Yeah. So again, I would respond this very shortly and I would just say, sorry for your experience. We offered to come back and rectify the situation and you declined. We'd be happy to serve you in the future, but keep it really short. Do not go after their go. Start going after their individual claims. You become very weak and you are the smaller person. If you have to go after someone who's barking like that, if they're using words like that too and like Cursing and stuff. Just like I'm sorry just have no. They look like an idiot. Let's just be honest. So if you want to be play small boy games then you would go after each of those claims and you would refute them with pictures and you would say individual things that were done how long you spent the property. That is small boy games, big boy games. Just ignore it. So I just highly recommend keep it short. Say say what happened that it is. We offered to come back to the property to make sure you are completely satisfied with with the service and you decline that. If you would like us to come back, let us know. Like keep it at that because again you're doing this for future customers that are going to look at that what was said and then yeah and they specifically said like they did not welcome you back. So just be like you could even just say like we did a walk through the. We did a walkthrough with you. You appeared happy. Sounds like there are some dissatisfactions. We offered to come back to the property in order to rectify them but you declined. That's it. That's all you need to say. Plantation. Oh, quick note. Actually I see the word super in here. Super is gonna be setting up a webinar for all the franchisees to hop on, answer questions, get some feedback, etc. I've been pretty pointed with them in terms of what's the things that we are pretty unhappy with. I know it's somewhat temporary for most of you being on there. I know some people are switching over to service hotpot totally fine.

But they are going to have a webinar and hopefully try to have a little more feedback directly with you all and have like one on ones to get some feedback etc. They do know about Copilot by the way, email emailing with Anon this morning. They do know about Copilot. They know it's happening and they still want to work with us and hopefully try to make us happy so you know we'll give them their best shot. Plantation asks, can you talk about the importance of using the dispatch board on Super? I never used it. Now I have my first guy. I want to make sure I'm not doing anything wrong. The dispatch board is extremely important to be able to assign route and dispatch right. So when you're by yourself you don't really need to do those things because you know where all the jobs are out. So routing isn't super important. Assigning it isn't important because you just do all the job yourself and then when you're dispatching isn't important because again, you're going to see all the jobs yourself. So you'll need to start doing that assign route and dispatch the jobs every evening, the night before. It's important so that they they. That way they only see their jobs on their mobile device. Garrett from Glendale, Colorado, happy Valentine's Day. Love you. Thank you for is a Valentine's Day when you put this on here though? No, see, you put Happy Valentine's Day last night, bro.

Thanks. All right, number six, Ben Collins. Arnold. I always get these wrong. Missouri. Yes, Missouri. Hey Mike, could you break down the sentence for me? Well, it was a long question. Okay, could you break down this sentence for me? It's in the GM job offer example requiring regarding compensation, profit sharing.

15% of tax after tax profits on a quarterly basis. One once location is profitable for the year. Okay so I know this is gonna be, this is all about tax stuff. Okay. So the reason I put that in there is because some locations are going to have quarterly, some are going to have annual, and some are going to have monthly sales tax, payroll tax, and a whole bunch of other taxes. I do not take out income tax from my distributions. So just. I know all these questions are going to revolve around this, but we'll still go through them like I don't take what I'm going to pay in taxes out of profit sharing. I leave that in. But when it comes to the reason I put this in there is I want to be very clear. I say after taxes, I can kind of.

It's very clear that like it's after payroll taxes, sales taxes, etc. And those are going to vary based upon location, based on month, quarter or annual. So that's why I make sure I do that. All right, let's go through these questions though.

Does this mean profit shares are calculated after the owner pays his personal taxes on the roll profit? No, we are an S corp. If not, is the GM's profit share on expensable an expensable item lowering the tax? Yes, it is. And it's going to be paid out as W2 income as a bonus on their on their paycheck. Otherwise you cannot take it as a deduction and expense for the business if you do not run it through payroll. Number two, what does the what does profitable for the year mean when factoring debt, loan debt or loan payments? Where do you record this to show overall profit to the employees? I know in most cases the profit sharing starts when all debt is paid off. But let's Say it was offered sooner. How would we display this on a P and L balance sheet? Yeah, okay, this is a great question. So if you have debt and loan payments, right, the question is, okay, If I'm paying $2,000 a month in loans, but it's not on my P and L, do I have this in profit sharing? This is something you just talk about with your general managers, right? So the only business I have to really worry about this is the is the gym. So prior to paying off the SBA loan, there was like a $5,000 a month loan loan payment that we were making on the original SBA loan of like 500 grand when I bought the location. It doesn't show up on the P and L. But I was just very clear with everyone, like, look, every month we take the P and L and we minus what I have to pay in the loan and then we did it after the loan payment. Now if you're doing that, it's going to reduce profit sharing. But you can, you can do that or you can just say, hey, the loan is totally separate. If you're struggling to make it by and the business is not very profitable, you should probably just be open and honest with your team. Like, hey, look what shows in the profit loss. I have to pay this loan every single month. So we're going to take the P and L minus what I have to pay on this debt until it's gone and then.

Then you get then profit sharings after that. This is also mostly most aligned with looking at, okay, I like to do profit sharing based on how much money did we make in cash in the business from month to month, for example, or quarter to quarter annually. I want to look at the ending bank balance, right? This is the same thing I look at, like when it comes to tithing, for example, it's like you take the ending of the bank balance of the month and then the next month is like the difference between that. That's my real cash profit. And so if you're going to do profiting, just be very open and honest about what you're doing with the, with the debt. Because it's not going to show up on a P and L. It's only going to show up in your balance sheet. But if you're going to do that personally, like when we did it at the gym, I showed them the loan payment every month. So I took a screenshot. Hey, like this actually is going to the sba. This is an actual payment. It's just not showing the P and L because It's a balance sheet item, but it's still fine. And they were fine with it. They just wanted to explain like why did we get the loan, how much interest are we paying? It's getting very educational and beneficial for them to understand that stuff. But you don't want to be doing is sending out profit sharing, quote unquote. And in reality you're, you're spending a whole bunch on debt payments and actually not actually making any profit. Right? So keep that in mind when purchasing big equipment like a truck or mower. How does this impact profit sharing? Since these are non expensive item on appeal, same exact thing, right? So this is why you want to look at profit sharing more as like end of cash balance between the two periods, right? So if you're doing quarterly profit sharing, what was the bank balance at the beginning, at the beginning of the quarter, what was the bank balance at the end? That is the part I want to be paying profit sharing on, right? So if they're buying a truck with cash and it's $20,000, typically you're going to throw it in the balance sheet and you never even see it on the P and L. However, what I want to do is put it in the expense line item so they can see the impact of that on that quarter. That way otherwise your crew will always want bigger and better equipment because it's never going to affect their profit sharing. Whereas when they actually have to take into account the fact that having this bigger, nicer piece of equipment is going to cost them all their profit sharing for the quarter, they might think twice about asking for an $80,000 truck. They might be okay with a 20 or $25,000 truck because that means that this quarter they're going to make an extra thousand dollars in profit sharing, right? So you've got to let these what otherwise be balance sheet items affect the P L because otherwise they could just keep buying assets to wazoo. You're losing money like crazy and they're quote unquote profitable. So you do not want that to happen. Profit sharing should be based upon the extra amount of cash flow in the business. Like if I could rephrase it, it'd probably be like cash flow sharing. No one would know what that is. We don't, we don't call it that. But real profit is like money in the bank. It is not financial manipulation and arbitrage. And that is what is typically done when it comes to balance sheets and all the rest of it. So the same thing goes though, for example, like the headquarters bunch of expenses on that. I take all of those off of the P and L, even though they're considered expenses right now because they're going to go onto the balance sheet, right? So just be very clear about what's on and off the P and L with your team. The biggest thing you got to have is communication.

Special request. A YouTube video on how P Ls work in conjunction with the balance sheet and large purchases would be super helpful. I know several other owners were wondering about this too. I would recommend, if you haven't already, sign up for mbaforantrepreneurs.com it's free for everyone. The code is on the deals page of the dashboard. I walk through a balance sheet and how that works in terms of loan payments, cash, how it affects the balance sheet, and how it affects the P and L and all of that stuff. I use it on a smaller level. I can dive deeper into it. But basically, when you think about it from a balance sheet perspective, being assets and liabilities, if you have debt and you have cash, those are going to offset each other. Either a, you're going to spend an asset that is cash and turn it into a piece of metal. It's still an asset. So an asset on your balance, like a truck, just used to be an asset in the form of cash, right? Now, if you get assets, you also need to get liabilities. So if you get. If you get a truck and you buy, get on loan, right? $7,000, you get a loan on it, that would mean that you have a $7,000 liability. But then you just buy a $7,000 asset in the form of a truck on a balance sheet. The reason it's called a balance sheet is assets have to equal liabilities. So if you buy a truck with cash, you're basically taking a $7,000 asset cash and turning into a $7,000 piece of metal. So there was no changes to the liabilities, but still assets equal liabilities. Whereas if you go out and get debt and you get a liability, however much that liability goes up, let's call it $7,000, that's going to not change your cash position. Like, you didn't get less or more cash, but you are going to have an asset now, right? So assets always equal liabilities. But again, mbaforantrepreneurs.com, everyone inside of Augusta Nation gets it for free. There's a pretty detailed sequence of balance sheet talk there.

West Hampton. When going about a customer complaint from a job that was done over two months ago, how would you Respond. Just depends on how things went down. If you tried to rectify things, that's what you really want to stress. If you did a walk through and they were happy, if they complained that you tried to fix it. Now if it's just a matter of like out of the blue two months ago, you guys determine, is this your problem or not? And then just be honest with them.

Like if they're talking about bush trimming from two months ago, I'm sorry, but like the bushes, you know, news alert. Bushes grow, right? Grass grows. So it just depends. Like if they're out of town, for example, they just got back in town and this was like a mulch job. But even like two months and so much changes in two months out and grass and mulch and bushes. Excuse me, Frankie. Northwest Raleigh. Going to my first spring rush. Would it be wise to accept weekly mowing customers during the month of March to August? I am only focusing on mowing during that period. Currently have 35 budget hours for mowing. Great. So you're basically filled your schedule with mowing. Very good.

I wouldn't necessarily do March through August. That'd be a very long spring rush. If you start mowing in March, I would assume that your busiest months are getting March, April, May and maybe June. That's when I would require weekly mowing. A weekly cuts. Right? Because if you, if you do have like a July and August really hot and you're like, oh, you have to be on weekly, you might lose some customers. So personally, at our local shop, we just start everyone, March, April, May, they have to be on weekly. And then after that, if they want to switch, they totally can. Typically going to June, no one does it. Like when they get their bill the first week of June, the grass is still growing pretty quickly, so they don't do anything. Then it's really July and August, those two billing cycles that we try to get through without having a whole bunch of people switch to bi weekly. And again, we would have way more of our clients switch to biweekly if we were billing every month or every week. And the biggest reason why we personally in our market do monthly billing is so they're not reminded four or five times a week or four or five times a month during July and August that they are on weekly service because most of them start on weekly and never stop.

Number nine, Logan from Columbus Grand Island. Oh, that's a bit of a flex there. I'm just saying, a little bit of a flex there. Logan, you get back from training for your second location now you're putting two titles, two territory names in the title of your question. Very nice, very nice. All right. Performance Max campaign. At training we talked about my performance ads not working. I deleted and re set up a new ad and after a week the new one isn't working either. I called Google Ads about the issue and they told me it's an internal issue and they're going to try to fix it. Man.

Hey look, this is the thing when someone's innovating there's a lot of issues but I have just consistently seen the past three to four months so many things at Google falling apart but it's because it's all their new products. So like the Google listing thing, it's because they switched over out of Google my business. This is the new performance maxings. It's a great product but there's consistently issues with it. I'm supposed to check back at the end of the week but she says it may take two to three weeks to fix it which is less than ideal. Has anyone else had issues? Yeah, I know a few people have. Logan, it's somewhat random. What can I do until the Max campaign? I would recommend doing a search ad. That's where the bulk of that's where all your intent based customers are coming from, is the search. Whereas like YouTube is going to be less search based. They're not looking, they don't have intent to buy. I would just do a regular ad underneath search until the time that they allow for the that to open up. And it's definitely not a bad idea for everyone out there to have a search run, a search ad being ran and then a Google Maps ad and looking at the Google Maps and like hey, this is going to be a little bit wider of an audience. I'm going to hit people that potentially aren't looking for the service and then have the search ad running to actually capture the people actually just looking for the service. So that way when you're really busy you can turn off the Google performance Max that might go a little bit wider and just keep on the one that is more specific and people actually have intent to buy and vice versa. Right. When you are as busy you put a little bit more into the Google performance which shows discovery like banner ads, YouTube video pre rolls, things like that.

Josh Lee from Lufkin, Texas Is there a way to change info on the items in Pro Shop Vistaprint like on the door hangers, say core aeration, snowplowing, which we do not offer. So there is an entire section of the pro shop that has all the designs without the word snow plowing. And if you want to take things off like core aeration or very specific other services, you'll just need to go to the dashboard. There is a Photoshop file and you can. You'll need to download those and then do it on your own. I personally have. There's just very few amount of people if as they're going through a services list, they're going to look at something that correct.