Mike Minutes Mastermind 02/14/2025

Hello everybody. Welcome to another mic minutes mastermind. Let's get started. Happy Friday.

Yesterday I did put on the Facebook group as well as email as well as text video for the upsell feature inside of Copilot. I've seen a lot of people, not me, I'll use it. And I asked several people why. It's just as a matter of creating the templates. So we created about 10 different services and what the template I recommend you use for those services. Feel free to edit it but it's very simple text. It's very, very personal and I think it'll work really well for text and or email for the upsell feature. So that video will walk you through how to set that up inside of Copilot. If you have any questions whatsoever, talk to a coach, talk to Nick and make sure that's set up. Now it'll take you maybe 20, 30 minutes to set up, customize it the way you want and then allow you or your team the rest of the year to really dial in upsells. So highly recommend follow the email once you have it set up. If you have an incentive program around doing it as well. I just generally believe that a business that really focus on upsells can easily increase revenue by 20 to 30% by just simply making that a focus. So you could also grow your business by 20 or 30% by spending 10, 15, $20,000 on marketing or just you you sell more to your the customers you already are buying, they're already buying from you. So I do recommend.

Using that approach of not a lot of text or not email pictures and text and links inside the email taking much more of an a very personal approach, simplified text and really short. So feel free to check that out. It is in the Facebook group, it is on your email, it is in your text. And then in the later today there will be a bundle inside the Copilot marketplace. They'll be able to download all of them. If we did the document though so that you could if you wanted to, you can customize it like download the the Google Doc and edit it you in there because some people wanted to add more text et cetera, that's fine. So feel free to do that. But within the couple hours inside of the co pilot marketplace there will be a bundle of all those those templates for text and email. So you just click with one button and have them all in your account. So that'll be later today. Look on the Facebook page or Facebook post I made yesterday in the comments. I made that screenshot with the password for the Copilot Marketplace. So you can have those.

And make it a little faster if you want to just use the template I had. So let's go ahead and jump into questions. Looks like we've got quite a few 11 of them today. Uh oh, which one did I have? Is this one? Okay, good. Okay, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. All right.

No, wrong one. There it is.

Happy Valentine's Day everyone too. If you forgot, this is your reminder.

Number one from Travis from Jonesboro. Curious question. As inflation happens over the next 10 to 20 years, do you see the stages of growth changing? For example, 500k will become 800k to get out of the wilderness, 800k becomes a million, etc. Yes, that will happen over the course of time.

Mr. Anonymous, do you think there's any benefit in an Augusta owner getting coached from an outside source? Yeah, like there's always, there's always benefit of coaching. It's a matter of trade off. And also looking at like what your highest leverage coaching is, I do find that most people get more coaching instead of doing the one or two things that would actually move the needle for the business and coaching is they get too much coaching. So like, I really do believe that if you focus on one or two men, maybe three things a month after your coaching call, like, that's why like the action steps, I usually keep pretty small on a lot of scorecards in Augusta because you, otherwise you could create like a paragraph or like a page of all the things we need to change. I don't, I don't think that's effective, honestly. Like, if you can change one thing a week, you're like literally a rock star. I think it's more like one to three things if you actually do it well.

And so in my opinion, the vast majority of people, once they get into coaching, they see the power of it. It's good. They, they sometimes will overcoach themselves instead of just doing the one or two things that are required to make a difference in the business. And so it is a more of a distraction.

Instead of actually getting further benefit from additional coaching. So I've seen that like a lot, especially when I started getting into coaching and I needed a lot of help in like late 2023, early 2024, I had such a skill gap. I got into some groups and I realized that there are people in those groups that were learning what I was learning, but they had learned it 10,000 times because they'd been in a bazillion different masterminds, coaching programs and they spend so much money on it and their business has not grown. Like if your business is not growing and you're getting coaching, there is a problem. Not with the coaching. Many times it is a matter of implementation, execution. Because there's also people in that room that would be in that coaching program or the mastermind for two, three, four, five years and they would double, triple, quadruple, tax their business. And so it's not the coaching that's the problem, it's the implementation. And many times people get more coaching and education and ideas and thoughts in their brain instead of just taking that time and just go implement like go do. Like for me personally, I have not listened to a lot of books recently. They take a lot of time and I know it needs to be done. Like I have a pretty clear roadmap for 2025 and there's a lot of stuff I gotta get done. I don't know if I'll be able to get all of it done. So like I need to spend my time on getting stuff done instead of figuring out what to do next. And so that's like the part you want to be careful of. It's like going to a bunch of different doctors, they'll all give you different bunch of different bunch of prescriptions and all before you know it. Because everyone had a slightly different take on your diagnosis. You all of a sudden have 50 different pills when reality maybe you needed one. But when you talk to so many different ideas and thoughts about your business, etc, instead of just being like, okay, I'm gonna get healthier, like let's really boil the, like boil this down. And it's like I need to raise my prices, I need to increase my close ratio to do those things. I need to do X, Y and Z. I need to go to capacity, I need to do follow up calls and like stay basic. The same way that when it comes to health, it's like you need to lift weights, you need to eat meat, you need to sleep better, you need to drink water. That's what people try to get away from. And so instead they go to a bunch of different quack doctors or just let's just say good doctors and get a whole bunch of different pills. And so you start chasing the symptom with all these different ideas and how I should change the business. I need to have this marketing strategy, I need to do this funnel, I do this on Google and like the reason I'm not growing is because of this. And you start getting all over the place versus like let's boil this down like in order to make more money you need to raise your price. How do I raise my price? I need to get to capacity. How do I get to capacity? Either reduce my my current capacity of assets like selling off my trucks or I need to go get more customers. Well, if I need more customers, how am I going to debt? Well, I need drawer hangers. Like these are basic concepts but most of us don't do them. And so then we like coaching because the pill, everyone wants the pill.

But the vast majority of us are just not willing to put in the work required to do to lift meat. Lift meat, lift heavy things and eat meat. In other words, the simple basics of business that is required to run a healthy business. Unfortunately and I put myself in the same shoes, it's just so much fun more fun to think that someone else is going to have this opinion on my business that's going to unlock this future. And we will take antidotes of different entrepreneurs have said very helpful things to us that have been unlocked for us and like oh man, if I just have another one of those, it'll solve all my problems. Really. The vast majority of us actually know what needs to be done but when we go to the next doctor instead of just doing what is required to stay healthy, unfortunately.

David Willis do you anticipate when the individual owner website pictures on the site will be updated with the new truck graphics, etc.

Individual owner website pictures. Individual owner website pictures.

What are you. Sorry, I'm just not tracking. All the pictures are changed.

Yeah, all the pictures are the new graphics of the truck. Okay, here, one second. Like I'm looking at it right now. This is what I'm looking at. If you see this, if you don't see this, this truck somewhere, please let me know.

Maybe I'm not looking the right page.

Okay, feel free to clarify if I'm missing this, but I to my knowledge, individual owner website pictures.

Sorry, I'm not tracking. I do apologize.

Yeah, sorry. I don't know.

If there's maybe these a page you're looking at. Please let us know if the truck is not being shown like that. Thank you. Brian Connor from Georgia. What are your thoughts on hanging on the mailbox flag instead of on the door? My team thinks that this is the most efficient and everyone goes to the mailbox now everyone uses the front door to go into the home. I am all for added efficiency, but I do not want to pick up efficiency over a higher but I do not want to pick efficiency over a higher Conversion. My initial thoughts are that it seems that more professional, more effort on the door and most people pass right by the trash can on the way back on the mailbox. Do you think that hanging on the door versus hanging the flag.

Will lead to more conversions?

You're probably going to get people mad. It's also against the law. Like anything on that mailbox is technically you're not supposed to be doing it. So.

I think that you're going to get a lot more people unhappy, honestly, if you do on the mailbox because they will see that as against the law. Now I could be speaking out of my hat here and not knowing what I'm talking about because maybe you're allowed to put things on the flag, but usually I know that if you touch that mailbox you're gonna get call from the usps.

So. And then they might just start taking them. But again, every single, the USPS is so like fragmented in terms like different regions, how they handle stuff. So maybe you'll get away with it, maybe test it, you know, test it on you. You would get twice as many doors done. That would be the good thing. At least double, you probably get triple. So maybe it's worth it too. But to, to me like from, if it had a equal opportunity between the both, I would probably say I'd want them one on the door because it's breaking the pattern from the other chunk of garbage that they're picking up out of the mailbox and throwing in the waste bin. And I don't want to be lumped in with that. I would rather be on the door. They have to specifically go there for me and I'm a one off piece of, of mail, quote unquote, if everything was equal. But if you're able to get three times as many out, maybe I'm okay with a little bit less conversion.

So I just haven't ever done it because I've always avoided the mailbox. So I can't really speak to this.

Oh, by the way, Connor Hutchinson put a really, really good document together. The media team's gonna make it look pretty. I edited some of the wording so it's more vanilla for everyone. And we will make a really cool document about all the stuff he's learned about door hangers. I think we'll be like four pages when we're done with it. So thank you for Connor doing that and we'll make sure it's good and then hopefully next, next week we will get that up for everyone. I think there's like 11 or 12 things he's learned after doing 20,000 door hangers. So that along with Brian Connors Conference Talk highly recommend.

Mike Morrison, Panama City Hey Mike, do you recommend doing group interviews for your guest to long care hires or do you prefer one on one? I was considering group hires to reduce no shows and save time, but I can definitely see the pros and cons of both options. How would you approach it if you did? Thanks. I used to we did these for a couple years way back when we were hiring three, four, five people at the same time.

I would rather honestly just stack my interviews close together and then know that they might be waiting on each other. But I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing for them to get there. And like there's someone getting interviewed, there's someone that comes in behind them like wow, there's a lot of interviewees here. And then they know you're serious about getting a hire. Especially if you're in an office, a place for them to wait for a few minutes.

I traditionally like one on one but I'm not against group ones. You're going to need some presentation. It's sometimes very difficult to ask very good questions. They're not going to be open up in front of a group of people about why they left their last job or why they got fired. So it can be usually I like it as a screening mechanism and then they're going to go into another interview process. So if you're getting like 50 applicants a day, well then yes, I would probably do a group interview. Ten people show up and then you schedule four of them for one on one interviews the next day. That would work. Just realize sometimes you will lose out and really get higher because they go get job offers that day. So just be careful with that. Depending on your market. If you're a new owner with low cash reserves, how many door hangers on average could you do per day? It's really about a per hour basis. Watch the Brian Connors video from conference from a few weeks ago. Super valuable. He talks about the breakdown of the math on this, but it's going to range anywhere from 50 to 120 usually per hour. And it's how many hours do you do? It also depends. Are you knocking on the door? If you're knocking on the door it's going to be way less. If you have really tight neighborhoods going to be on the higher end. Kyle Tarvin from Oklahoma I'm creating a postcard that would be sent to new homeowners that move into Our area.

Oh, real quick, quick announcement. While I'm thinking about, I didn't have this written down, so give me a second. I'm just going to switch back to announcements. I'll come back to this question. We are going to be doing some new stuff with the media team. We're hiring a bunch of people on the media team. We're going all in on stuff. So the one thing that we want to do is go out and visit.

Businesses that are really big, that are really doing well, but they feel like they kind of plateaued or they just have a bottleneck and they want to get to the next level. And so it's not that I'm like super smart or anything. It's a matter of I can having a third party set of eyes on things sometimes super helpful. So we will give precedence to owners inside of Augusta Nation. And so if you, you, you, you have a good business and you're doing over 800, 000 in annual revenue and you're doing good, like, you're crushing it. And he's like, I just want eyes on this too. Like, how do I take this to the next level? How do I do my next location? How do I get my general managers, like, anything like that? We will be launching that in the next couple weeks. So please enter. Please apply for that if you would like and we can showcase your business. We can. We'll do coaching, but it won't be a turnaround. Like, a turnaround is like a struggling business. This is going to be much more a matter of like, you're doing well and you just want to, like, unlock and only to kind of like the next level of growth. And so.

I want to be able to highlight Augusta owners that are really, really doing well and following the systems and growing. And then how do we, like, go to the next level? So keep your eye out for that. We can't get to everyone, but we will definitely. If we're in your, like, state, we will probably prioritize Augusta locations. And yeah, it'll be a lot of fun. So keep your eyes. I'll post it on social media and I'll probably let everyone know here too, just to make sure. All right. Kyle's creating a postcard to send new owners and move into the area. What type of offer would you be willing. Would you use to push lawn mowing services? Look for advice to capture the client's attention. I'm thinking this card would have a QR code to get instant pricing. Go to the website.

Yeah, like, your offer could be Your first one for free or like welcome to the neighborhood. Like that sort of situation.

Again. I've been talking about this in training. It'll be on the recordings. Like we. I see so many people marketing, I say so many people. I don't mean Augusta as much as much as other businesses marketing to everyone as if they're new customers. When the vast majority, let's just say you're 55 years old, you decide, hey, I made enough money, I have enough, you know, going on in my life. I want to be able to hire out my lawn care of my landscape. I'm just going to stop doing it myself. There's one decision and very rarely do, like when they're 15 years later, they decided when they're 70 that they're going to start mowing their grass. So if you're going to market them like, hey, save time on the weekend, get your weekends back, play golf. And so like you get that customer once the rest of their life. They are hiring based upon the fact that they've already had landscapers in the past. So I really recommend even in this case scenario.

To market to them in a way that is like here's what sets us apart from the competition because they are going to choose a landscaper. Like they're, they're not deciding whether or not if we want golf or not. They're playing golf. So it's a matter of like we answer our phone 24 7. We, we, we've come in professional trucks and our guys are uniformed. Everything can speak English. You can put your card on file like these are the things that separate you and you were backed by 170 locations.

Insured. Like focus on that because.

Remember, it's just so easy to fall in the trap of marketing to new customers when the vast majority of our customers are actually repeat from other other providers and they need convinced to switch. They do not need to be convinced to start the service.

Hey Mike. I plan to operate from a storage unit this year, but I know Google won't allow that for naps. When I search lawn care locally, some companies show their home address while others hide it. Yet both still have visibility. How much would it hurt my conversions or visibility if I use my home address behind it? Or should I really push for a physical business address? Thanks.

Use your personal house if you need to. That's totally fine assuming that it's in Panama City, but you will blow the doors off the people with SEO if you can get your address on there, whether it be your home and it's in Your territory or doing a business address. I know Pete out in Virginia beach was just here yesterday or last week for his second location and he just goes and gets like a $90 per month.

Co working space like a little cubicle just so you can have an address for Google listing. So that's a possibility. You don't need to go get a big shop space just to get it. You could also just convince you know, a friend that has a office to throw up your sign, throw your truck in the front, do a quick video and hopefully get verified that way. So either way, get the address. Do whatever you can possible to make sure that address is confirmed, whether it be a home address or business address. I noticed the mowing every door direct mail template can't be edited for services. It lists several services I don't offer. Do you think this would be an issue or should I just buy them and move on? Am I overthinking it?

You could wait for some of the ones that we're going to be doing around Canva with the instant pricing door. Oh this is every door direct mail. This is going to be a little later. I would probably just not worry about it. Also if you have partner stuff inside the guest leads program for those services, if they call in for it, we can always just hand those off to someone else. So especially if these are like miscellaneous services that are on there. Way back in the day they didn't allow for much editing inside Pro Shop. So we had to make two different sets of like say door hangers, ones that mentioned sm, the ones that didn't. Those are really the only customization between the two. As we're making new ones and a lot of stuff in Canva we're trying to allow you to have the customization. The problem with having Canva is then you gotta order it and print it. So you gotta download a PDF, upload it into another platform and then you don't get discounts of Pro Shop. So it's just kind of a bit of a balance. They don't have the best platform for editing. Usually you can tell it was edited and it doesn't really look great. But we try to block that fine line of making it as simple as possible to order but then also customizable. So.

Mr. Anonymous, we just had our first big snowstorm. Are we not able to bulk upload pictures when servicing clients? All of the pictures we took before and after snow removal are not available in the client portal or when we go to look individual accounts appears. The last picture taken is the only Picture that was actually uploaded. Is there a way to work around this?

I actually don't know this for certain. I know when I was uploading photos to my account I was able to choose like at least two or three. So I'm wondering if you're going like if you're selecting 10 or 15 maybe that's causing a problem with the storage side.

Well, I would also say is try doing this at your office and see if there's a connectivity issue.

If you just like upload the first one and like timed out or something.

Maybe. But it could be that you have to do one at a time because I know that we have it's 15 megabyte limits so also I've seen some people, they have like prores on their phone set up so like each phone each thing is like a 20 or 30 megabyte photo. So those ones could be screened out too. So there's a lot of different things there. If you have the commonality you're able to make a video, submit it as a bug report and then they'll dive into it and they'll be able to see pretty quickly you know what's going on.

But it might be where you have to do it one at a time. I just don't know. 100 with a certain. I know I uploaded multiple photos when I was in south park even last year or so. Mr. Anonymous, my wife and I got no strings attached ten thousand dollar gift from a family member the other day. Hey, it's a good day folks, whoever this is. Mr. Anonymous, Happy Valentine's Day. Is it. Was it submitted today? A 8 o' clock on Valentine's Day we got ten thousand dollar gift. What a day. What a day to be alive. It was pretty unexpected but has happened in the past and like this one was unexpected. Wow, that's a great family member. I need more family members like this. All of our personal needs are met and we don't really struggle for anything and live comfortably. A location is in gross met and I'm curious how you would deploy these funds in a location to get the most out of every dollar. We also have capacity to fill with our current equipment so really no need to go out and buy a truck or mower. There's a horrible problem to have. We have money and we have nowhere to spend it.

Just joking. This is great. So it's just a matter of like if you have no need for money as long as you're. It's not like you're pretty conservative with your money, you're not like trying to spend this like on a big vacation. You just want to put in a place where it stays safe until you do need it because you will eventually either A want to start another location, B, want to grow to the next level and stage of the business and be able to speed through. Having ten grand is enough to be able to usually get you from one stage to the next. So whether it be from you know, stage of 200,000 to 500,000 or from 500,000 up to the 800,000 level or from 800,000 to 1.5, 10 grand in marketing will usually do the trick to get you to that next stage. And so I would probably say that you'll put this in something very Safe. S&P 500, even a high yield savings account get 3,4% until you need the money. There's nothing wrong with that. We don't need to play every single dollar. That's that we have. Also keep in mind you might be getting dinged 20, 30% on tax just depending on what your tax bracket is. But you might, you this will probably get taxed depending how they are. Your family member is reporting this. So just keep that in mind too. But you know, I would just keep this money set aside until you do need it and the business will eventually need it, whether it be going to the next level and stage the business, whether it be another location, whether it be unexpected thing happens to the truck, et cetera. So I would probably just keep the money safe until you do need it. Mr. Anonymous, in line with the inflation question regarding the business stages, do you think the 508 and 800,000 could look different in high cost areas? I can charge a hundred dollars per hour easily in D.C. yeah, you could, you could definitely look at it like that. I try to keep things simple and the vast majority of Augusta lawn care is between eighty and a hundred dollars per hour, like the vast majority. And so I'm pretty confident that those numbers are still pretty accurate. So.

Yeah, but yes, there's office to flexibility. If you're in rural.

South Dakota and you're, you're only able to charge $70 an hour, $75 an hour, it's going to look different than if you're in some of our markets where there's $120 an hour, it's going to look different. But as a rule of thumb you'll see also in the stages, each stage we talk about the number of employees you're going to have. That's probably the more accurate benchmark. But the reason I don't use that is because then people like, I'm in this other stage of business, I should be doing this. It's like your pricing is so low, your revenue is really low. And also the reason I use revenue is because your number of employees can fluctuate a lot throughout the year if you have a lot of seasonality. So that's why I use revenue instead of number of employees. Number of employees more accurate. But in a seasonal business, are we using our lowest? Are we using our highest? Are we using an average? And so it's just too much volatility.

David Willis, if you go to augustalongshows.com the truckload on the web page is the old truck in the video. Is that ever going to be updated? Oh, in the video. Okay. Yes, the video. I got you. Let me check this out. Custom longer services dot com.

Ah, that one. I see what you're saying. Yeah, we'll update the video. It's also a matter of we having like all the seasons that we show in the video in a video with the new trucks. So it's actually a really good point. Noted. Noted. This is actually a really good task for some new editors Edit new video homepage. Thank you for bringing that to my attention. Also, we didn't want to do it last year because I remember we had this conversation middle of last year because we still looked like the vast majority of trucks were still the old design since we'd only been like six months in the new design. So great point. This is time to edit this since the vast majority of us now have the new designs. New video on home page with truck. Beautiful. Thank you. Thank you. Very good feedback. Thank you very much. Okay, let me go back to here. All right, folks, that is it for the day. I hope you all have a fantastic Valentine's Day. We are wrapping up last day of training. It's been two weeks of training and then I am going on for a turnaround show for businesses next week. We have an Augusta location in there. Let's go. It's going to be great. Multi unit operator. It's really, really good. Looking forward to it. I love you all. Hope you have a fantastic weekend. We will stay in touch. Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What do we got? Oh, we got Mark saying, happy Valentine's, everyone. Very good. All right, take care, guys.