Mike Minutes Mastermind 02/17/2025

Hello, Augusta Nation. Welcome to Mike Mint's Mastermind. I accidentally just started the live stream, so give me an extra 10 seconds here. I will send out the text messages.

And put on the Facebook group.

On a turnaround this week. Well, four turnarounds.

And then.

I'm speaking at a pool and fence company's our conference for pool fence companies, so.

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All right. Yeah. Today we are. I know we drew drove through Pittsburgh. Right now we're in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. That's where we're at today.

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Okie dokie. 3M alert. Boom paste. Make sure this is today's February 17th and with a G does. All right. Send message.

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Okay, let's get this party started. Today's 0270. Sorry, everyone, I just accidentally clicked live stream on this too fast.

Boom. All right, now we are live. Sorry about that. All right, I will share my screen and we'll jump right into questions. Present. Share screen. Sorry if the wi fi is a little bit laggy. It is at a comfort in. In the middle of absolutely nowhere.

Okay. Finally. Goodness. Sorry. Two minutes. My apologies. First question from iota from Columbia. When or sorry, can we get a yard sign added to the pro shop 18 by 24. Every single one is a little different in terms of what they allow us. But if there's a specific Design that is not 18 by 24, feel free to send an email mediagustalongerservices.com they will then have to contact Pro Shop, which is Vistaprint. And it just takes them a long time to do anything but do. If there's a specific design that that size is not available, just let them know which one and then they can forward that along to Pro Shop something. Pro Shop just randomly doesn't do specific.

Dimensions for some weird reason on random designs. Mr. Anonymous. Good morning. Mike. Do you what do you think about offering the first lead for free in the leads program to show more, show some good faith? Would this be a smart move or do you see any downsides? Thanks. Yep. So we're already doing this for the first three leads. So basically the first few months after our first few weeks of the leads program, we've had a lot of interest, over a hundred applications and it's kind of started to fade off. And we. I know we need. We really need to get around 500 in the program to really get like 70, 80% of our unserviceable leads sold. And so we have done two things. We've reduced the price to be able to fill that to capacity, essentially, and then we'll eventually move it back up to 79, and then we've given the first three leads for free. So the biggest hurdle is getting in the program. Once they're in the program, they're getting a few leads. They understand, like, oh, like these are really good leads. They're very, very good customers. They're not the equivalent of like a Facebook form. And so they stop concurring us against that.

But it's the first, you know, just getting them in the program, understanding it, trusting that we're not going to scam them or something crazy. So, yes, we are already doing this, and I do generally believe in the next three to four months, we'll get enough to where we can.

Increase the price back up. But I'll probably always let the first three lead be free because there's just so much skepticism and understandably. But we'll just have to consistently be good with the data, not, you know, muddy the waters. Give them good reports. And I think it'll. It'll be in the long term, very good thing. Johnny from. Johnny from Denver, North Carolina. Can we get an update on the blue light glasses? Yeah, I mostly wore those the month, month and a half. Two months leading up to conference, I wasn't sleeping very much, so my eyes and head start to hurt. And so I was just trying to minimize the light so I don't wear them. Tons. I have them in my bag.

In my backpack so in case my head's hurting, my eyes are hurting. But it was mostly leading up to conference when I, like, I was kind of cramming because we had a couple people drop out and I was trying to get all the workshop stuff done, etc. So.

That'S why I kind of had to utilize this for about a month. Corey from Bellingham. Hey, Mike. I had a customer recently give the following feedback about estimate requests. He said that he would like a new feature in the client portal where you can click on pictures of plants on his property, which would be taken during the initial estimate walkthrough and submit a request form directly into the portal with everything he wants done. For example, the client selects images from his property with two bushes and two beds and leaves a comment underneath them with an option of uploading new photos for trimming and weeding. With the recent rollout of upsell support, I wonder what your thoughts are on the feasibility of giving this option to Customers. Will the customer portal ever reach a level of technical power? Clients can upsell themselves with this much ease. Thank you, sir. Unlikely. Most because.

The client selects images from his property and leaves a comment underneath them. Like, this is the thing. The likelihood of someone going into the portal leaving pictures and asking for a quote is far less likely than using the path of communication they use all the time, which is email and text, if they're going to send photos. So it is very, very rare the customer goes into the customer portal asking like wanting to submit photos for an estimate. It's just very rare. So they can do this from the regular estimate request form, if you have it, where they can submit digital media like videos or pictures. But in terms of this happening, often it doesn't.

And.

They can submit a work request. Right now there's nothing like from the customer portal. And down the road we will improve the form aspect of that. But in terms of them submitting photos like this is not a, a path that is used commonly for customers to go into the customer portal, like login or like go through an estimate or invoice to get there. And then they're like, oh, I want to submit an estimate request form with pictures for. They're usually email those pictures usually. So right now it's not super high priority. Definitely when we get to the work request form portion of the estimate or of the customer portal, that'll be something we think of a little bit more about is like the media, the digital media side of things. So there's a lot of things around media we want to do better. So that way down the road, when we do it, Augusta, with estimate videos, you make that on the video. You don't have to use WhatsApp. You can just stay on the estimate and convert into a job. The video comes over and that file management kind of follows all the way along. That's definitely in the works. So. Dave and Vanden Brink, St. Matthews. Is it possible that hiring an employee with a bad driving record could cause a commercial auto insurance premium to increase? Should this be a factor in hiring?

So yes, it will. It will typically increase your commercial auto policy. I've had sometimes where.

They will not insure a policy. They'll simply say, as long as this person is on the policy, we are not going to insure them. Insure your company. So keep in mind, if you are going to, you know, every single employee, if you're going to submit that over to them, that's when you're gonna run this issue. We, we would not do that. Mostly because especially during the spring rush, if you like submitted, waited for all of them to come back with a clean driving record or whatever, and waited for all that process, you could be waiting a couple weeks depending on your insurance company. So typically we, we don't do every single person submission. I'm usually going to wait and periodically do it throughout the year. And if there's someone that is new that's been on the comp, been on the team for a few months, it'll then flag the insurance company and then they would. I've had it before where they're like, hey, we just won't insure this policy as long as this person is driving or this person's really, really risky. We're increasing the premium as long as you have them on staff.

So I've had that happen before. But just to be clear, to be perfect and transparent, I do not send every single driving record to the insurance the moment I hire them. I'm usually doing it quarterly, maybe semi, annually. I know some people, most people actually do it annually during their off season because ultimately the insurance company is covering the vehicle and so they are assessing the risk based on the drivers you submit to them. And so the kind of. And like I work for state farms, so I kind of know how this game works. We usually would have to do an annual audit of our insurance policies for commercial auto and we ask for all the drivers. And so if you want to reduce the likelihood of this, technically when you do, when they get asked for an annual audit, you submit during the off season. That's just the truth of it. Because you have the less likelihood that the people that you hired a whole bunch of might not have a great record or something. You didn't pull up on a background check. Um.

And.

Yeah, because they're. Because the insurance company is covering the vehicle and as long as the vehicle is covered, you're going to be covered. So I wouldn't say like, don't, don't evade audits, don't do that, don't lie on audit. I never did that. But I'm not going to willingly volunteer every single few days when I'm hiring new people between the companies.

New people on the insurance plan. I'm going to submit when they ask me for an audit and we'll give all the information of every driver. And once in a blue moon, yes, they would return back and be like, hey, this person's high risk premium is going up and, or it's going to be.

We won't ensure the policy. Sometimes.

Morgan Latimer does the crew split the review bonus. You can do this however you want. We did it based on who they mentioned in the review. And so if they mentioned both people in the review, we give 25. 25. That's how we did it.

Like, you could do something where it's like, hey, you get 25 if someone, a customer that you worked on the property leaves a review. And then we met $50 if their name was mentioned in the review, which means they would have had to ask for it. It's very easy to track that because now literally it's in the customer's review. So that might be an option. It's like, hey, two tiers. One tier is like, hey, if you just get. If the customer leaves a review and you were on the property in the past 24 hours, you'll get 25 bucks. If they mention your name, you get 50. You could do something like that. Jason from Knoxville, do most of the Augusta locations that are run by GMs have them do the estimates. Is there a revenue size where this gets hard for us to keep up with and keep everything else running smoothly? Thanks.

Do you mostly guess locations that run by that are run by GMs have them do the estimates? The answer to that is yes. That being said, once a location is in profit mode, the vast majority of the estimates should be coming through instant pricing or over the phone estimates. And so like my goal for my location is a 75% reduction from even like four years ago and then now of estimates that are in person versus.

That now don't need to be done because it made over the phone or instant pricing. It's only gonna happen though, as you simplify services and you focus more on recurring jobs. At the beginning, when you do a lot of projects in your in growth mode, that's when it can sometimes bubble over where you need. You're doing 5, 10 estimates per day in person. That's where it can start to bubble over into like them needing a little help. And I've seen like even the Bellingham shop we. We would get in spring rush, 15, 20 estimates in person a day sometimes. And that's a lot. And so you have to kind of help step in, help the gm. So sometimes what we do is we have our. Some of our best crew members. We pay them per drive by estimate to go out and help the GM for those few months, like even just a few weeks sometimes where that just an influx of leads are coming in. But you can avoid that by just pushing as much as possible. In profit mode, towards instant quotes, towards recurring revenue, but in that growth period, that's when it would. Yes. The answer to this question is yes. When you're growing quickly and you're more than 50% of your revenues come from projects, it is going to be hard during the spring rush to stay up with that. And is there a revenue side where it gets hard for them? I don't think it's about revenue sides. It's about what percentage of your revenue is coming from projects. And based upon my experience.

And this is like very, very broad, so please don't judge me on this.

An estimator can do very easily in addition to all their other responsibilities. So if a general manager has more than $500,000 a year in projects, as a rule of thumb, that's when I start to see them overwhelmed. So if you take 500,000 and that's projects, but then they also have $250,000 in recurring revenue, that person's gonna be pretty busy. That's 750,000. They're probably having six to eight employees out in the field, et cetera.

What I see work better is when, say, products are, say 250 or 300,000, and then even if they're at 750 now, they're more than half of the revenue is made up from recurring work. So this gets easier. The higher percentage of your revenue comes from recurring work. And so usually that happens in profit mode when you start shifting towards recurring work. It also is when you stop trying to grow as fast as. So that's why usually your first couple of years that you're in growth mode, 60, 70% of your revenue is coming from projects. That's when it can get very difficult for an estimator, or, sorry, a general manager, stay up with the estimates because so many of so much of their revenue is coming from the project work. So. Great question. This is why I sometimes actually see a locational struggle to get all the estimates done. They're like, man, should I be stepping in, helping my GM do the estimates? And then the next year, once they've switched into profit mode and they like cut out a few services, they reduce service area a little bit, they really focus on recurring. All of a sudden they're like, well, there's not as many estimates. And simply because you do not have all those projects and the higher percentage of your revenue is coming from recurring work. And so the only other thing that will cause stress to a GM too is just high velocity of increasing recurring work. Because if every single day they're getting two, three, four new mows. That's also a lot of pressure on them for their scheduling. It's like, oh man, where are these all going? Oh my goodness. Now all of a sudden, Wednesday two weeks ago is fine. Now it's way over scheduled because I've added 15 mo's to it. That can happen also to a fast growing location.

But in general, recurring is a simpler lift for a general manager. And a business that's doing 750,000 in straight recurring looks very different, very different than a business that does 500,000 in projects and $250,000 in recur. And recurring revenue, like the general managers like, looks totally different. The higher distribution of it is recurring, the easier it is for them to go get the other estimates done. And that's when I see them not having that stress around the estimates. But if the more higher percentage and the closer you have a 500,000 or close to or above 500,000 projects in addition to all their other roles, that's when I start to see them being overwhelmed. And so when that was happening at the Bellingham shop, before we paired things back, we would have the crew members help and we'd give them a flat dollar amount on Peter P. Per drive by estimate. So we just route them in like, hey, you're gonna, you're gonna do five drive assets for property cleanups, make a video and just email it to the general manager. He'll still make the estimate. That'll save the trip out there. And so that's how we were able to get through like that three to four week period where estimates in person and drive bys were so high and take a little pressure off the gm. All right, everyone, that's it for tonight. I hope you have a fantastic rest of your evening. I might just not do one in the morning since there won't be any more questions probably. But I will definitely be here Wednesday and throughout the rest of the week. Love you all and we'll see you tomorrow. Take care.