Mike Minutes Mastermind 02/20/2024

Hey everyone, hope you're doing amazing. Let's get started.

Drop this into Facebook real quick.

Couple announcements, get things kicked off. Yesterday there was a question in the mastermind about the email management.

So.

There'Ll be a training video on Academy. I'll post in the Facebook group. Once it's live today, Brian will walk through, um, why the changes were made, exactly what you should be doing to make as smooth as possible each day where things can be found. And they talked to a lot of owners and general managers, et cetera, prior to doing that. So they kind of got a bunch of feedback they'd already gone through a lot of. So he, he will give kind of like, hey, this is what you should be doing every day. Where can you find things, et cetera. And then also Liz and Brian and Rose, et cetera, are going to be on a call tomorrow if you have questions or concerns about email management after watching that video.

It's. I think it's at 11, it's 11am Pacific Standard Time, so 2pm Eastern Standard Time. I will also put a link in Facebook today as well for that. So if you'd like to just hop on and you can share concerns like, hey, could this be better? Or whatever. And some of it might be more educational, some of it might be, hey, can we make this better by X, Y and Z? And then they can give their reasoning or potentially make it better. So obviously we want to serve you guys as best we possibly can. And confusion is not a recipe for efficiency. So that is not the goal. The goal is certainly to make it more efficient for you and more accurate for Command center when doing your emails. So they have a, they have a definite rhyme to their reason and have thought that one through pretty clearly. So watch the training video and then if you still have concerns or like, hey, I think this could be better by X, Y and Z or could we do this? Feel free to hop on the live call that Liz is hosting tomorrow and I will post again this link in the the Facebook group later today. And that call is tomorrow at 11:00am Pacific Standard Time and that is 2:00pm Eastern Standard Time. So feel free to stay tuned for that. Also yesterday in the Facebook group. I'm going to be using the Facebook group a lot. So, you know, if you could do me a favor and just check the Facebook group once, once a day at least to be super helpful. I am going to be sending out an email with about four or five updates that we've been making.

As I'm including some of these now. I'll put these into an email probably later this week because just to summarize it in case people miss it, I know there is a lot on the Facebook group but if you can check it once a day, watch the masterminds, you'll be locked and loaded. The other update is that yesterday we added a WhatsApp channel for Augusta Nation only for ATC support. The support hours are I about half as much as the full support because the full support team is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 109 or 10 people or whatever it is that are in the main support. However, we have a couple people that we have designated to be the liaison between Command center and copilot and so they are not fully trained on Command center that down the road. I would like that so they really understand everything that you guys are facing every day. But they are working alongside Command center in the office right here and if they need help they can walk over there and so they are designated for that. Again, keep in mind if you need something instant like in the evenings we are open until I think like 11:00pm Eastern Standard Time. So if you need something you can still go to the main AGC air traffic control for support copilot and get answers to questions etc. Like I'm not going to answer like how do I find this setting? I'm just not going to.

And so I I'm not atc. I need that being done by them and you know they can absolutely help you Late into the we have crazy amounts of hours for ATC. I think it's opens at 3am our times 8pm so it's 717 hours a day of coverage for chat and then support for zoom calls are almost that much as well. I think it's about 14 hours a day and now we have Saturdays and Sundays for zoom calls. So feel free to use the main ATC as much as you can, as much as you want. But this, this other WhatsApp it the reason I like it is because now instead of having to watch your support channel with ATC you can just text it on WhatsApp and know it's going to get answered in WhatsApp instead of having to go back and check your app or go back and check your email, et cetera. So I'm just trying to make it as convenient as possible. This is for gustination only so please please please don't share that number outside of a gust of nation. If that starts to happen we will have to shut it down because overwhelmed the couple people that we have designated to support all of you through this channel. So please, please don't let that get out. We will have to close it. It's like a number. We can't block people we can't do like it is. We need to use that channel only for Augusta Nation. So your general managers, owners, that's fine. But please don't be giving this out to people outside of Augusta. Otherwise it'll just become diluted and useless because they'll come in every morning and there'll be too many chats outside of Augusta Nation. So that is good. So, yeah, the main thing I like about it is that on WhatsApp, you can send pictures, you can send video, you can send chats, but then you can walk away from it. And it's not like the regular support inside of software where you got to go back in or stay on the page. That's the annoying part, because you got to stay on the page. They might take 10, 15 minutes to figure something out for you. And you got to stay there and wait for them. Make sure you actually answer it back so it doesn't go stale. So hopefully that's alleviated and a little bit easier for all of you. But if you need something more immediate again, more extended hours, more coverage is going to happen on the main ATC. Our hours are just 9 to 5 on the WhatsApp side of things. So any other announcements I need to make?

I did talk to the QuickBooks department at Command Center. They are going to make a video about journal entries in QuickBooks for the end of month for stripe processing. So we just recommend this is what they're doing when they do your bank reconciliations and reconcile your books at the end of each month. That's when you do your journal entry. It's pretty simple. Inside of QuickBooks, you're literally going to run a report instead of Stripe. You're going to report and then make a journal entry inside of QuickBooks just to make sure everything balances out. The reason is because they don't charge you, you're not going to have a withdrawal for processing fees. You're going to have money that goes to Stripe. They take their little fees out and then they give you the remainder. And so because of that, you need to do a journal entry. It takes two minutes and they'll walk you through exactly how to do that. So if you don't have Command center doing your books, you can still get that done, no problem.

And last thing is franchise fees and Command center fees, as mentioned yesterday, because we're using Copilot and we are now allowing credit cards for, for payment. But you have to chart, you have to cover the fees. We did that because some people are like, hey, we, we'd rather just have better cash flow during the winter and be able to put it on our card. And so okay, that's fine, you just have to cover the fees. However, in Copilot right now we can't delineate between charging processing fees on ACH versus credit card or based upon individual customers. It just has to be a global setting. And so that is going to be something we will fix later this year. And we also have want to add the ability to do recurring automatic payments on ACH as well. And so that will take a future development though at Copilot I would imagine by this fall we'd have that done. But what we're going to do for everyone that has ACH instead of because we can't not charge ACH processing fees and only charge credit card processing fees. So anyone that if you pay in your bank, which I recommend everyone do, please, you know, get your ACH set up, we will just refund any of those $5 charges that you're seeing at the end of the year. So at the end of the year we'll just reconcile everyone. Hopefully by August, September, somewhere in there we're getting the ACH stuff and the we can delineate between the processing fees of ACH versus credit card. But until then we will just keep track. At the end of the year we will give you a.

A refund for any of the ACH processing fees which are like $5 usually on the larger ticket items. So. All right, I think that's all I got. Let's move on to questions.

All right.

See here present Share screen. Boom.

Alrighty.

Dustin from Champagne, posting for a friend and also wanted some clarification myself.

Okay, this one is in quotes, this one is in quotes and this one's not in quotes. Okay, what's the reasoning behind changing the way emails are files? It seems as though it benefits only CC and they handle much less than what they used to. Also while doing this, owners and GMs now get to check 18 different folders which need to be checked at least once a day, if not more because CC is moving emails into folders. They open them to see but they are no longer show up as an unread email and they're not being changed to unread once moved. I have heard from others about issues with CC as we continue to grow. But okay, so again the video training on this is gonna be out today. I know it was originally sent when we first did the email management but Brian will be making another one today and then also tomorrow join the call.

And so you can say hey this is what I'm doing. Can this be improved? Can we be better? If you have suggestions they can absolutely help with that. I have heard from others about issues with CC as we continue to grow but it seems as time goes on we are paying more and getting less valued support I. E. Agents with thicker accents, less email handling and things just generally getting missed. There are a few I have heard from other earners and some I have personally experienced. I also, I want to also say I no way discount what CC does for us. All my locations would not be where they are today without them. But it's frustrated anytime it feels like we take a step back or make things more complicated than what they were in the past. I also know that most call centers do not do half of what CC does. But isn't that what sets CC apart from all the call centers? I don't want to complain without resolutions. So maybe instead of 18 folder for GMs and owners to look through one big folder that anything CC doesn't know how to handle or they know longer handle can go into and as an owner completes them they can be archived into a complete area. This would might, this would might cut down on going in and out of all the different categories. Yeah. So watch the training video today Dustin, if you have ideas like this, hop onto the call tomorrow. I will say I know there was a ton of deliberation with owners, general managers, regional managers, etc on this whole process for email categorization and management and so they can give their reasonings. They can also potentially give some training as well as take feedback and hey, we're open to improvement. That's the whole reason for this operation. So feel free to be on the call, watch the training video today and what the training video will go over is like hey what should you be going over on a daily basis? But note that this was they did go through a bunch of managers and owners in different locations and get feedback as to what was working. So watch the training, come to the call tomorrow and if there's improvements we're all ears.

Mr. Anonymous there was a talk at January Training about adding one more smaller operation for the instant quote smaller option for the instant quote sizes for those of us who have been yards, who have yards between 100 to 2,000 square feet. Is there a specific department email we just talked about this or is it in the works?

I thought we added it. I'm pretty sure several locations already added this in.

Okay so if you if you want to add this just email webgustalongarservices.com team will help you there. But we do have we did add in a small, small option like micro size type of property. So feel free to email them they'll give you an update in terms of where they're at on your site in terms of making that change. But I do know that several people had asked for in January for locations that have like very very small lawns.

Portion Vanessa do you have any plans on fixing this fetch for myself in my office staff are so tired and burnt out already because it takes so long to schedule and route jobs. It currently midnight and I'm just getting these done. It would it if we could manually route our stops I wouldn't be complaining about this dispatching Respect the optimization sucks. Everything is so much more complicated than it was in service. Output scheduling is a nightmare because we can't filter by service, multiple service or multiple employees. Invoicing for okay so first off it's not more complicated. It's different. And so it's different. And there's bugs in it right now. And so there are things that we have ready to go for the dispatch board including like being able to right and left click on the stops to be able to optimize them that way manually, etc. But we have to wait until the bugs are fixed. We can't do both. We can't keep pushing features like we were up until December.

And expect there not to be continually bugs. So we have to focus on that. And I would hope that in the next three to four weeks we can put these things that we've already worked on like the dispatch board optimization, et cetera into the system. Invoicing for initial mode is going to be a nightmare as well because you can't change the cost of the job on the dispatch board without having to go in and change the invoice as well. Should be able to edit the job and have it adjust the invoice. It may not seem like a big deal ramps up to the cost of same. So like again.

We have done our we're doing our best to make sure that what was in service autopilot is in the new system. But keep in mind like we can't adopt the idea that how we did it before is how it's going to be in this new system. Any software is going to have differences and workflow differences. And so the goal is not like we should not be copying what we did in the past, but rather looking for the best way to do things. I'm not saying what Copilot is currently doing is the best way to do things. I'm just saying that comparing it to servers ALPA is a as a fatal flaw because that is what is we are used of. And so I would just say that in general, I'm not saying that Copilot is better. I'm not saying that the current workflow is better.

Amazing asking, right? Should I just switch back to Service Alpa? Are things going to be better in the next week or two? I'm honestly looking for honesty, Mike. I know I'm not the only one feeling these pains or issues. Yeah. So again, like I would say this forest when you first started service AutoPilot, it took three to four months and the same. If you go back to Mastermind, you can go back and see all your frustrations around adopting a new software. I'm not saying that Service Autopilot is or Copilot is better or anything like that. I am simply saying the switching to another software is always going to be difficult because two softwares are not the same. They have different workflows. And right now because Copilot has bugs, it causes more pain. And so if you go back to the Masterminds, our messages together. When you first started with Surface off, you were pulling your hair out and you're extremely mad and we had lots of late nights, the same, exact same thing. So I'm not saying, I'm not, I'm not using that as an example of to sweep your concerns on the carpet. I am saying it takes a while to adapt to the new systems and we're not going to take what's in the past like, oh, we must make it this way in the future. With Copilot, it's like a lot of the things we did in service output were somewhat of a workaround. Things like collecting deposits etc, and so the goal is to actually create a better system and a better workflow. And so I don't want that to come across as like what we currently have. Copilot has that. I'm not saying that. I'm just saying in general, when we look forward into Copilot, it's like it's a different system, it's gonna have different workflows, there's going to be a learning curve. Even if it was perfect in terms of no bugs, there would still be a Massive learning curve and trying to take what we, we've done in the past and like, oh, it must do this as well. The exact same way and the button must look the same, it must say the same thing. Must do the. It's not going to work that way and there will be a learning curve. And so we've just completely exacerbated the learning curve by having the bugs at the exact same time. And so for that I apologize. And for that we are focused on fixing those things. So that way when then you can just focus on, hey, there's a new workflow, I'm going to learn it, I'm going to make sure it's the same and move forward. So.

Okay, so this is, I'm assuming from Boris as well, missing features on go by filter by service on multiple services filtered by multiple employees. Let's get jobs. So some of these things you can do, some of these, you can move this on this dashboard.

Filtering by multiple employees, you could do this as a crew.

I'm assuming you're talking about this from the dispatch board.

This one. These will not be available in the next 30 days. A set route to order is, is ready to go but again we are waiting until the bugs are completed. Adjust initial moves without having to adjust invoice as well. Yeah. So like again, regardless of what software you use for us, you're going to have different workflows. I'm not saying that we aren't going to do these things. Most of these things are either in the works or ready to go. I'm just saying that to expect them all the next 30 days, to expect it to look exactly like service all PI is not the goal here. Any software you change to will have different workflows, it'll be different, etc. So.

Just keep that in mind.

And just, just remember like when you first start with service profile, it took me, took you a good solid 6 months to not have times where you're, you know, you'd call me all the time about like things not showing up on the dispatch board or like they're not showing up on my phone. Like it was things like the dispatch status and like there, there was a massive learning curve. So I'm hoping that the learning curve with Copilot is significantly shorter, hopefully two months instead of six months. But that happened. And so changing softwares is going to cause that. So.

Nick Davidson, given the unique challenges our business, which includes a longer sales cycle and a higher rejection rate for commercial accounts compared to residential ones, how do we more effectively Measure our close ratio for these two distinct segments. Should we aim for the same close ratio targets for both commercial and residential accounts, Considering that a single yes from a commercial account often offsets multiple rejections? Additionally, would it be beneficial to use separate CRM systems or methods to track these sales processes accurately? Or is there a more integrated approach to manage these differing cycles and expectations? Also, how does Copilot calculate lead response time? Yeah, so first one, I would say like.

Yes, the, there are, there is a higher prize when you get a commercial job. The value is higher and but I think the close rate is still something that you could measure blended because.

Even though it has a higher, you know, win, it takes longer to like, it takes more investment to get to get the proposal to the customer. Typically you're meeting with them multiple times, it's a longer sales cycle like you mentioned, you're back and forth, etc. And so you know, to say, well I'm okay with a lower close ratio on those compared to residential, I, I don't think that's necessarily a good move because it's still a matter of you put more time into the ones you're losing. So if you only have a say 15 or 20 close ratio on commercial, you actually probably like you have just as much effort being expended because it's just a numbers game. Like you either have 10 commercial jobs and they take way longer, like five times as long as to get out like prepare or you have 50 residentials that are quicker and faster to turn around and simpler in terms of sales cycle. But ultimately if one just takes 10 times longer than the other, the distribution is, is technically the same from a close ratio perspective. So I don't think it's a necessarily a bad thing to have a blended average of a close ratio. It would definitely be worth tracking and using, you know, your estimates filters as a way of determining okay, which services are in these etc to be able to determine close ratio between commercial and residential. A lot of times it'll also help too. Like okay, if I only have a 15 close ratio in commercial and a 45 close ratio in residential, how much is it actually costing me to get a proposal to a customer in commercial is something that you want to track because now all of a sudden if it cost you $100, well you multiply it by seven is like literally it's costing you $700 to get a proposal to custom to a commercial customer. Potentially worth it though if your average ticket size is a thousand bucks a month. Right. However, if it's costing you 10 or 15 to get to a residential customer and you're closing 50% of them, therefore it's only costing you 20 or 30 bucks to land that customer. And then they're making $200 per month in revenue. You just have a 5x in one month of return on that. That cost of getting that proposal out versus taking, you know, maybe a 1x like what you. The cost of getting that proposal out is what it costs a month for commercial. Just something to keep keep in mind. And tracking isn't, you know, would be definitely a good thing to do in terms of lead response time. When you're creating an estimate, it asks you when the lead came in. And so it can be like today, you can do an exact time. You can do two days ago. You can like set your exact date and time. It defaults to being today and six hours ago. That's what the default is. So if you don't touch it ever, it's basically your lead response time will be six hours. But when you're creating the estimate, it asks you when did the lead originally come in? That's like when did the estimate request form come in from your website? When did they email you? When did they call you? And then if you click immediately, that's when it's like I'm on the phone with them right now.

Max from Burnaby our one click asset working properly. I sent out a couple days ago to 1300 clients. I see the tag has been added to a number of clients thankfully. But there have been no emails from cc. Not a huge issue because I can work from the tags and manually email these clients. I wanted to see if there was a known issue. Let me know if I should submit something to ATC.

Emails from cc.

I guess it kind of depend on.

What.

I'd reach out to Command center and just ask. You can also see if the emails did go out from copilot to Command Center. But if the link is being clicked and the tag's being added, the only thing that would potentially cause the issue there I guess is if tag is added, they're not getting an email.

Like if they're not getting notified. But you can check that in the email history. So you could ask them. You can just ask them directly at command center and then you would know right off the bat.

Yeah, I as of like today, right now, I believe they're working. I know that they sent a whole bunch out last week at Bellingham Shop but I haven't tested this specifically so I'm not sure if it's working right now or not. But I would, I would ask command center if they got those emails. If they did not, then we need to check your automations to make sure that's actually set up with the tag. Send an email to command center and then if that's the case then there would be a problem. Nick from Hudsonville, Is there any chance you could text or email the nation shortly before you go live? It's so much better to watch live. Thanks in advance. Oh mercy.

That would be difficult. I think.

For now. No.

Yeah, for now just really the alerts on your Facebook.

Yeah, I know that's not like the best answer but like that's probably like the push notification is probably gonna be the best anyways for that.

The texting.

Stuff in automation. Oh, you know, I could do. I could use it in Copilot. Ooh, that's not a bad idea.

Okay, I'll think about this, Nick. The fact that now we have everyone inside of copilot. I could technically text everybody. Just add another step to my setup. But.

Maybe it's worth it.

Going live now then just have.

I could just send it out with a link to the YouTube link.

That could potentially work. Okay, let me think about this. I know we moved everyone to Copilot so potentially we could do this. So.

I. It's just that last year everyone asked for the audio files and then literally one to two people were asking for or. Or actually watching it. But I'll take a look at it. Text from CP to owners.

Okay. I don't want to annoy people any either. Like part of the nice thing about the Mastermind is you can just watch on your own time. But I know some people like to be on it live and I'm not the same time every single day. Bell Thomas Nocatee, Florida I had some. Someone looking for an estimate came through the website form. After they put in the address, they were prompted to submit a walk around video. After they did that they were told they were out of my service area. Unfortunately that upset them and now they left me a three star view. They thought the process was cool until it wasn't as they started stated in the review. My question is, is there a way for the address to be verified before the video step? There's not. Like on a web form, it would slow our site down tremendously. We actually had a validation step in there where we had to like check that against a map.

The bottom line is this. Anyone can submit an estimate request form on any website in the world and Be outside someone's service area. If someone freaks out about the fact that they do that. I don't know. Like unless, unless on your website you're saying a certain city name and they're in that city name. I can see that being a frustration. But like literally you could go to any website, home service business, any business and submit a request form for an estimate. You're not going to get address validation mostly because it's expensive and it's going to slow down the site tremendously. And for the, for 95% of people that you do want the estimate request form, it's going to slow down them getting an estimate.

Instead of just doing what it's supposed to do. Like you want to, like you just be adding another layer of friction. For the 95% of people that do submit estimate request form and you can serve, you'd be, you'd be adding more friction for them. So I know when you get a review like that it can be hurtful. But that's really, it's like any website you could go go to on online and just submit a form.

And so in the they have the option to submit a video. And so obviously I could see how like because they put more effort into it, they'd be a little more frustrated. But ultimately it's like.

Every site's like that. And to do that where we validate against a map would suck a lot of time of processing from the sites and slow them down a lot. And then again, you're slowing down the 95% of people that are good.

Audie subject title harvesting our customers in years two and three. This is where Karen and I are now and we need to start harvesting. We have incrementally raised prices each year for the last three seasons. Our service area is around 22 mile radius. We like to get this down to about eight miles or less. What would, what did we do wrong the last three years? You're not gonna hurt my feelings. What can we do to fix it? Like, I understand when you're first getting started, serving a large air radius is attractive.

From what I can remember, Audie of your area, if you're serving 22 miles away, like that's me very difficult to be profitable. And so what I would do is just make sure that your marketing and where you focus in terms of all of your attention should be inside the 8 mile radius or the 5 mile race or less really. Like you have plenty of people in your market and Plano's massive population. Like a five mile radius around where you're at has hundreds of thousands of people. And so going wider is going to be very little profit just because you have to keep driving further and further. So I'm not saying that you should go raise prices on everybody or that you should cut them all out. I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is focus on your core and then as you hit capacity and determine what that number is, like how many customers can I serve, etc, how many budget hours can I do a week? Once you hit capacity, then you start raising prices dramatically on everyone outside of that radius. And I'm talking like 25 to 30% increases. And if they leave, they leave. And if they don't leave now, it suddenly becomes profitable enough to go service their property. But anything less than that, there's a price increase, is not worth driving that far away. Like, you're just not going to be profitable until you have a minimum, I would say, of three to 500 clients. So your drive time, because you have such a high concentration even inside that size, is decent enough. You're stolen. Driving a few, like three to five minutes between jobs, maybe you can make sense of it. But when you're smaller, driving that far is like a recipe for not making money. And that, that, that would be. I just focus all of your attention on the core area. And then, you know, anything besides that is going to get either cut or price increased until they're cut, they leave once you hit capacity. But you got to hit capacity first, right? So it's like, okay, we're going to spring rush. How many budget hours can you complete per week? Once we hit that number, we're raising prices on all of these customers that are outside of our service area. And we're going to do it immediately, right when we hit capacity. That would be my recommendation. And do it with violence in terms of raising the prices. Because I know that a lot of those customers, your first year, when you were getting customers, you kind of took a lot of anything in terms of pricing. And even if they were cheaper and they're too far away, you just took them. Now as you start hitting capacity, that's when you got to get weird to those people to actually make the business profitable. And so that would be my recommendation. Just like to your point, harvesting, you got to pull the weeds, right? Like you kind of throw a bunch of seed out there and you get started, you see what grows, but then you still got to pull the weeds. All the little stuff that comes around those weeds. And that's what, like, as you grow the business, you hit capacity. You start removing the jobs, customers, the services that are outside of your target market, and. And get rid of them. So, all right, everyone, have a fantastic day and we will stay in touch. See you tomorrow.