Mike Minutes Mastermind 02/18/2025

Hello, everyone. Welcome to their mike minutes. Mastermind. Let's get this party started.

Let's go ahead, jump right into questions.

All right, first question is from Tim K.

Make it a little bit bigger. Well, one second, one second, one second, folks.

Hold your horses. We need to make this bigger. Very good. Okay, Tesla guys have a brand theme motto that our customers can associate with this. For example, Jeep is associated with the freedom with freedom in their ads. The one I am currently familiar with. It's changed the level of professionalism, landscape industry for the owners. How about for the customers? I haven't been super deliberate in this or sorry, I have been deliberate in not making this a thing yet.

I think sometimes when this happens too prematurely in a brand that's growing, it can you end up having to change it a bunch of times. And so I know that the reason Augusta exists is the change level professional industry. There is some level of customization for each owner as to what they might want to be presenting in ads. And we don't do a branding or marketing co op to push a certain message across the board as a unified theme. The vast majority of us should be pushing a direct marketing approach. And so from a brand or theme part, I believe it is much more a matter of like, if we want to make more money as owners and get more customers, we are going to use direct response marketing. And so most, if not all of my time is spent on instant pricing conversion on the website to get more customers. By doing that by your size, we then key down the road the size and enough to be able to actually focus on brand. And so in your individualized market, focusing on direct response marketing in a smaller area, say 2 to 3 mile radius, few thousand homes that you really want to get into, doing yard signs, door hangers, knocking the door, every door, direct mail and Facebook ads, all in that area that achieves really good saturation and then by having really good route density. Now that those customers see your trucks every single day, even if you only have two or three trucks, they're seeing you all the time. And that's where brand is achieved is through the trucks and through the employee uniforms. So I think direct response marketing is the way to actually monetize advertising. Because if we just pour a bunch of money, like let's associate a word with Augusta to our customer base, that costs a lot of money. And that's why Jeep spends hundreds of millions of dollars and doing branding. I think for the vast majority of us as small, small business owners, focusing on direct response marketing and actually be able to get a return on investment instead of just like ethereal ideology around a certain word is going to have the best return on investment. Now, as we grow in size, that's when we start to figure out, in my opinion, what is the, the association with our brand in terms of word or like a motto or a theme? I think that will become organic. And this is why I've not pushed this, because I don't believe it actually helps our individual owners until we become a household name. The reason we talk about Jeep is because everyone here at my side, Jeep, knows that. And there's a lot of associations that came with that. The vast majority of consumers, when you say Augusta longer, have no idea what we're talking about. And so I believe that down the road this will be more of something, especially when you cross like 6, 700 locations. That's what I think will become more, more of a household name, kind of like Roto Rooter, like that level. But until then, I think it is important to make money on every single dollar we spend on marketing. And that's done through direct response marketing. Direct response marketing is. I'm asking them to do something. Call now, fill out this form, click this link, go to our website, et cetera. Scan this QR code. That's all direct response marketing. And that's where I can easily attribute the success of a campaign and whether or not my marketing dollars are spent well. Whereas a branding campaign about freedom, for example, might promote free more than it does my brand and I might actually lose a net negative on that campaign. Whereas a small business like you just can't afford to do that. You can't afford to spend $10,000 in your market and like not get a single customer. And that's what a branding campaign is doing. Because it doesn't care about the customer today. It cares about the freedom associated with the brand over the next 20 years. For the vast majority of us, we do not have 20 years to convert a customer in terms of just the level of and depth and the budget that we have for marketing. So in my opinion, it's like focus on direct response marketing in a small geographic area. By getting a lot of customers in a similar area and having great round density, you then have trucks rolling around that area all the time. And by doing that, you boil the puddle and then achieve brand awareness because people see your trucks, quote unquote, all the time, when reality you are just servicing a very small area every single day. So this is why consistently, the smaller the location in terms of territory, just almost always when they're starting from zero, the faster they grow because they're able to put all their marketing attention in one area. They get 30, 40, 50 of their first customers in that area and now they're literally in that area every single day with their trucks, their uniforms, and that's the branding that then down the road, people like, I see you all over the place. You guys just came out of nowhere and you got 50, 60 houses. It just so happens that they're all within half a mile of their house.

Johnny from Denver, for the franchise fee, give that program we have to pull, we have to open up the books to staff in order to get our money back or start in a location. How should we track that? We're actually opening up our books to the staff to ensure that we qualify. When that time comes, I will, I will talk to your team members and I will ask them if they know the numbers. And I'm not gonna be like, hey, give me the amount that you spend on product. I'm not gonna be like that. But I need to know that the numbers are being shared with them. They know what the profit.

And that'll be my main focus. So I understand the first couple years are a little bit sometimes intimidating to switch over to open book management. But like at training we talk about, you know, whether you are making a lot of money or if you're not making enough money or not at all. Like the ability to be able to make changes in the business come because your team understands the numbers. So when you like pivot because a certain service isn't making money, but they all like it, for example, you need them to know the numbers, otherwise they just think you're just making their job miserable. But if you actually show them like we aren't making money, this is negatively impacting all of our jobs, all of our, all the business. And here's how. And like here are the numbers, then you can get some buy in. So I've seen owners, it's a lot of times when they switch away from big projects, it is sometimes difficult because your, your crew likes those jobs and you feel like, man, if I do that then I might lose them. The only way I've seen them not lose really high quality people when they switch to simple services that otherwise they thought was going to leave. Because the different services mix is the people that open up their books and say, this is why we're doing this. Here's all of the extra insurance we pay, all extra storage, all the payments on all this equipment. Here's all we spend on marketing for it to get these projects. Here's the ups and the downs. Here's a job we lost 30 or $40,000 on which now makes all these other jobs we're doing basically just to get back to break even. Here's all my time that goes into these jobs and all the project management and all the things that are required. So that's when you can actually make changes in the organization. Same with paper performance.

Paper performance is significantly more effective when you're opening up the books. So I've always said it's like.

Your goal. You have to marry the two together to really see the benefits. Kyle Tarvin Moore, Oklahoma with the price of Augusta leads going down, will our existing leads partner set up at the $79 price be notified about the price decrease or are we responsible for notifying them? They'll be notified as soon as a lead comes in. It's just going to have the new price right there so they're not going to get the higher price or anything like that. You don't need to notify them. We will notify them all. Whenever a lead comes into their service area or their is going to them, it'll just tell them immediately. It's all through. Copilot.

Mr. Anonymous Hey Mike, I have a P for P question. Base pay is $20 an hour. Labor rate to the customer $60 budget hours per day 6 budget hours. Okay, great. If a crew finishes in 6 hours instead of 8, the hourly rate increases, but their total take home pay stays the same as if they work the full eight hours. I get that some will be motivated by finishing early while earning the same, but how do I motivate those who want a higher total paycheck? Would increasing budget hours beyond 30 per 40 clock hours per week be the answer? If so, wouldn't that risk overload the team if someone leaves or takes a vacation? I know raising price in the future would help, but how can they earn more now? Yes, you're 100% right. There's two ways to do this. Ultimately, if someone's working really fast, they're going to be able to complete more than 30 clocked hours in the week or sorry, more than 30 budget hours in the week. And so a you can pull jobs forward from the next week, which can be a little bit annoying because they're always being like if they're completing 45 like one of my locations, they can they consistently are getting 40 to 45 budget hours completed every single week. So there's two ways to look at this one is you just pull jobs forward. Two is you could raise, you could simply raise your hourly rate so that way you have less budget hours in all the jobs. So I want budget hours to be accurate. That's the bottom line, especially when it comes to mowing. I want, when they go out and do the jobs for it to be accurate. Now if there's, there's one employee just crushing it and they're just way faster than ever else, then yes, the question, like what you're talking about is valid, which is you either pull jobs forward, I'm usually going to do that. If it's like a one off, they just crush a job. It's like 50 budget hours and they give them 20. It's like they don't really want tomorrow off. Great ultras. Pull a property from next week, pull it into this week. Most customers are thrilled that the job gets done sooner if they're, if they're staying with them. You can consistently do this every single week. Then, yes, you're probably going to start putting more on the schedule. And I've seen this across several locations, especially when they're in profit mode and they raise prices quite a bit. That guys are crushing budget hours. And they are consistently putting 40 to 45 budget hours on the schedule. But remember, the reason it's 35 or 40 or 45 budget hours per week is because you've raised prices and you've kept your hourly rate the same. And so what you can do to adjust this, if this is consistently happening across all of your, all of your company, not just one employee, is just raise your hourly rate. And by doing that, don't raise your price to the customer, just raise your hourly rate and therefore reduce your budgeted hours. I want budget hours to be accurate and I want as an average across the team that I'm getting 30, 30 budget hours per 40 clocked hours in a week. I don't want it to be where everyone just knows that like their efficiency score should be like 120%. That's why your efficiency score is a little bit nebulous because it really just is based upon actually your hourly rate. Because I can reduce your efficiency score immediately by simply reducing your budget hours. How do I reduce your budget hours? Just increase your hourly rate that you're charging. So if your entire team is completing 40, 45, 50 budget hours a week, I would recommend increasing your hourly rate. Don't raise your prices necessarily. Not saying you shouldn't, I'm just saying, like, you don't need to raise your prices to do this change, raise your hourly rate so that then your budget hours come down and it's more accurate with what's actually on the job sites. I see this, I'm seeing this more as people are entering in profit mode. If you raise your prices to the customer by 25% and you don't raise your hourly rate, you essentially are giving 25% increase in budget hours to the crew. So now it's way easier to hit budget hours. It's way easier to get like a 9500%, 100% plus efficiency score. So if you're across the board on this, I would adjust your rate. And if you, if it's one off one employee, just absolutely always crushing it, then you're usually going to pull jobs forward or you're going to put more on their schedule with yes, there is the risk that they leave and as you grow you'll reduce that risk. Because now if someone does leave and you know you always were putting five or 10 extra budget hours a week, but you have five other employees now, everyone needs to bear the brunt of like two extra budget hours a week. This is the nice thing about having more than three employees is someone dropping out. You can kind of bear the load at least for a while if you aren't overbooking everyone's schedule. So.

Jeff, Sam, and that's why in Copilot you can adjust individual users to have a different budget hour capacity. So you could just change one person to say 35 or 40. That way like your total hours for the team are still within the limit. Jeff from Sandwich, Massachusetts. Mike, what side of population do you like to see inside of territory? Are there any other metrics you're looking for at inside a potential territory? Thank you. Yeah, I would say first off you're thinking about territory and you're talking to Lee. Like we now do a very like a 30 page document analyzing the territory. We look at demographics like age, income, income distribution. We look at different industries that are in the area.

But in terms of population, I don't like massive population sizes. It's very difficult to rank well on Google in a market where there are people with thousands and thousands of Google reviews and have been a business for 30 years. Like they have tons of traffic, they're driving huge amounts of of leads usually through paid advertising. So you're going to be bid up on that. And to get on the top three spots in Google listings, you will literally need some. In some markets, 500 to 1,000 reviews. I would much rather Go after a market that is under a hundred thousand people that I know. If I get 30 to 50 reviews, I'm probably on the top list of listings. Within the first week or two, we're on the first page of Google. Within the first couple of months, I can be the top spot of Google. I would just rather be a big fish in a smaller pond. My ad rates go down in terms of what I have to spend because I'm not competing with big people that just literally will throw money at it. I'm usually competing with other small mom and pops. And also my differentiation of being a national brand is more differentiated because in that smaller market there is no big players. And so being professional is not something that's common in the area. So I personally kind of like that 30 to 80,000 population size and, you know, 100,000 is my top. I don't. It's just hard to start marketing to that size and getting any sort of branding without spending a lot of money. And so what I've done in some of my markets where it was bigger, I just focused on a mile and a half or two miles. And so when I started marketing there, because I don't want to go after the full five miles if the full five miles has like 150 or 200,000 people in it. So we've been better as we've seen this over and over and over. Just like trying to reduce the size of territories and get it to a closer, like under a hundred. Because everyone just thinks that they need a bigger territory. Everyone just thinks they need more people in it. But those are our slowest growing locations, especially when you're starting from zero. So we just see that over and over because it's just so much harder to get brand traction and get any sort of awareness. And the reason is because you need to hit someone multiple times, they need to see the brand typically multiple times in order to make a buying decision. And so yes, you can do instant quote door hangers to kind of accelerate that because you get them past all the awareness phase, right, the buying decision. But still, if someone has seen your business multiple times and then they get that door hanger, the likelihood of that scam and acceptance is higher because they get over the know like and trust part.

Price. I'm from Colorado Springs. Mark and I were talking earlier about print media to get reviews. I know we have a door hanger review door hanger on the pro shop. Would it be possible to get one with a QR code? A spot where we say give the tech X dollars and then a spot for them to give their leave their name. This is actually. This is a business card right now. I believe leaving these every couple mowing service until they finally do it would be highly effective. Just reach out to the media team to make this request if they approve. Was that timeline like, just wondering if I should make some myself for now. Yeah, I'd go ahead and make some yourself for now. If you're trying to do like flyers or something like that, there are business cards that have the QR code on the back to leave the review. You could just put different text on there if you like. Keep in mind if you're gonna be there and give it to the person. That's really the only way that like saying, hey, the crew will get 50 works. It sometimes comes with a cost a little bit weird if the employees are like, hey, I'm gonna put door hangers on everyone else so I get a bonus. That come across a little bit strange typically I've seen. But if you're putting them out like while you're on a route, for example, could be effective. So I'm not against it. You can absolutely use the business card that's there. Add text if you like. You can also download the PSD Photoshop files if you want to edit them yourselves or make them on Canva. But yeah, I don't think there's exactly what you're looking for in terms of like print media around it. But there's the door hanger, there's the business card, and then I would lean much more into the more scalable part around the digital side because they're already on their computer, they're already on their phone when they see the email, when they see the text message. And so I would just lean more into that, honestly. Not to say that it's a bad idea if you get reviews. Do them however you can. I do not care how they come in.

All right, everyone, I hope you have a fantastic Tuesday, a couple more days of turnarounds, and then on the weekend I'm going and doing a conference for a pool fence company, so I might record one of those keynotes. But that is that we have a lot of good things coming down the pipe and I'm looking forward to sharing it here in the next few weeks of stuff we've been working on.

Anyways, hope you all have a fantastic rest of your evening. We'll see you tomorrow. Take care.