A short Mike Andes 'Mike Minutes Mastermind' livestream (02/15/2023) where Mike answers viewer questions about running a service business. Major advice: handle difficult clients by either raising prices (to encourage departure) or diplomatically firing them while expecting possible negative reviews; prefer commercial auto insurance for business vehicles and use high deductibles (Mike cites $2,000 deductibles) to lower premiums and avoid small claims; renew insurance in winter when staff counts are lower; and ensure social-media automated posts are connected and usually begin posting within one to two weeks after setup.
Chapters
Hey, guess nation. Let's go get started.
Just a couple questions that came in, it looks like on the form, but let me just go and grab the YouTube channel.
Pop that in here.
All right, Paste.
Yeah, let's go ahead and jump right into questions. You got one?
It is Anthony from West Hampton says, hey, Mike, I have a client who is about half a mile from the shop. He is never satisfied and always wants more for less. Every time we go to the property, I always have a phone call that day about something. I feel like I speak to him more than my wife. I want to raise the price to where he does not want to sign on anymore. Do you recommend me firing me as a client or raising the price to where he does not want to do business with us anymore? I just do not want a bad Google review from him. Yeah, so this is the thing, like, if either way here you're probably going to get some sort of negative backlash.
I would probably incline to raise their prices because if you know for a fact they're going to leave a better view. If someone leaves because of a raised price, that's an easier counter than saying that. They can come and say like, this person refused service to me because of X, Y and Z. And they, you know, say you're prejudice or whatever, that that could be much more damaging. So I would potentially use the review unless you have, you can.
Somehow politically correctly just let them know that you're not a good fit for them. That is definitely an option, but it just depends. Like, if you know they're going to leave an online, really bad online review, you might go the raising price route. Honestly, you don't want to work for this person. That's probably the best thing. But how you do that is going to be important if you're concerned about them leaving a really bad online review. So you just got to pick your poison in terms of which one you want them to do. Either A, it's going to be because you raised prices, or B, it's going to be because you refuse service. So you got to kind of pick your battles there and then once they leave a better view, how do you deal with it? But I would probably raise the prices significantly. If they leave, then the negative review saying about, you know, cost going up is an easy one to refute. And there's no sort of them saying that you're doing it for whatever type of reason that people come up with.
And that's an easier one to publicly say, like, look, we cost of everything's going up. We have to Raise prices and then you can leave it at that. And most people would accept that. So that's that one. We got one other question though.
Let's see here. I can share present. Let me open this up. Okay. This came over on my, on my email, but I can just share.
Here. All right. Hey Mike, I'm post on the Facebook group you said you used to work at say, farm, if any kind of explanation would be helpful to let you know. Well, I've finished the business insurance and now I'm getting auto. So now I, I'll be getting personal car insurance for Kaylee and I'll be getting the commercial auto insurance for the business. Do you have any suggestion on what kind of plans to get based upon your experience? Yeah. So this really comes down to your, your risk tolerance because honestly, you can almost half your auto insurance by simply taking less coverage and higher deductibles. I'm a big fan of low, of higher deductibles because I don't want to use my insurance for small things. Like if there's a $500 repair on a vehicle and you use your insurance, you're likely going to pay about $2,000 over the course of the next five to 10 years on your insurance. So I literally never want to use my insurance. I only want to use it if it's like I've ran over somebody or like someone got hurt and it's like hundreds of thousands of dollars. Dings, dents, broken windshields. 2Not use your auto insurance for it's going to come back to bite you. And so personally it's like, look, if I'm going to pay for everything, like that's like 5, 600. Why would I have a 500 deductible? I put as high deductible as possible. I think I'm $2,000 on all our auto because just by doing that, you massively reduce the amount of your premium. And obviously that makes sense because the insurance company knows you're not going to use it for little dings and dents. And that's what they're afraid of. That's why low deductibles cost so much more. So personally, I like really high deductibles. My auto insurance. Same thing with general life. Excuse me? Same thing with general liability. Like, are you really going to submit a 200, 300, you know, scratch on someone's fence that you have to repair? You shouldn't if at all possible because you're going to pay a whole lot more than 2 or 300 when you go to renew and they bump up all your prices. And if you do two or three premiums or two or two or three claims, they might drop you all together.
So I'm a big fan of like high deductibles. Good coverage, but high deductibles. And so definitely, if you, if, for those of you just getting started, definitely have commercial auto insurance, you, if you do have a claim and you have painted your truck or you have decals or you have been found that you are doing an estimate in that vehicle, even paid, potentially your insurance company could get out of it of having to pay out your claim because you are doing business in a, in a personal vehicle. It's also what's really cool about commercial auto is anyone driving that vehicle is covered.
If they are employed by you, they are covered. So this is something important because one thing I always remember, we talk about Safe Farm is like, technically, if you hired two people today and you got insured for yourself and two people and then you hired eight more people over the next few months and a collision happened with one of these new employees, four months from now, they are still covered. Even if they're not on the actual policy, they are covered. The vehicle is covered. So every time you renew, they're going to ask for updated auto insurance and who's on the policy, et cetera. Highly recommend you do your renewals in the winter. You have less people on the policy, you're going to have less payroll, which typically auto insurance doesn't look at payroll, but in general, you have less employees and you're going to have a less likelihood of having someone with a bad record and potentially bumping your premiums massively. So when you're new, here's, here's our employee list. Here's all of our drivers. Submit. Okay, Next year rolls around, it's the winter again. Submit them all again because those vehicles are covered all the time. Okay? So personally, we do not move in and off, off and on drivers, every single time they're fired, because I know that vehicle is covered no matter what for the entire year. So then when I renew, I submit my new list of employees. That's what I would recommend doing. We do not move on and off, on and off, on and off, because I know that vehicle is covered no matter what. It's a pain in the neck from an admin perspective, especially get more employees that there's so much turnover and you're moving people in and then two weeks later you're moving them off and then you get them on the policy and then all of a sud. Your. Your insurance is like, oh no, they've got, they've got to have to. They can't drive. You got to have a written thing saying they're not going to drive or whatever. When I know that vehicle is. Is covered as long as they have as I have a policy on it. So that's the advantage of commercial auto and I would lean into that. Especially if you are getting from like two employees in the winter to like eight employees in the summer. Keep that in mind. It has to be within reason though. You're not going to have two employees in your policy and then like 15 trucks. They will, they won't allow it. So keep that in mind.
Hey Mike, German here. How long does it take for CC to post feed in Facebook? I see Augusta a couple weeks ago and I still haven't seen them post there. Thank you. Every week or two we do refresh on our software on our end. So as long as you've made the connection on Facebook and added us as a manager on your page.
Every week or two we'll increase that frequency because we're heading to Spring Restaurant. A lot of new accounts joining. But as long as you follow the video and added us follow the video called automated social posts on the Academy. If you follow that and we're a user on your account, usually within a week or two we're up and running. So we'll increase that frequency. I'll let the media team know to do that more on a weekly basis. But we just basically have to delete all the accounts and redo them every time. So we'll make sure we get on top of that each week. Cool. I think that's all we got for today. Hope everyone has a great Wednesday. We'll guys, you see.
