Mike Minutes Mastermind 02/21/2023

Hello, destination. Hope you're doing super well. It's gonna get started. I'm just about to head out to go to the Kohler Engine event and speak with them. I wanted to do a quick mastermind and some questions that came in yesterday. Oh, we'll jump right into it. The last. Last time I have to travel for spring rush. That'll be nice.

All right, let's go here.

Honestly partly came here because these Spencer Spencers are here and.

Hopefully spend some time with them. They're really good people. They did something last year that I thought was pretty admirable. Turned down hundreds of thousands of dollars basically just to what they thought was upholding the integrity of their channel and for the community. So I thought it was pretty admirable and I just try to support them as much as I can. All right, Ken, Michigan, you said on Friday that it costs 10 cents per house manually. Does this, does this mean you're paying someone? If so, is there a way for us to do that? Our own terror. To speed up the process? Please elaborate on how this scanning of properties is accomplished. Yeah, so I. Several people ask me about this. Yeah. So as it is all AI, you still need inputs. You can't just like there's no, there's no AI that's going to scan properties automatically right now and give us all this information. There's not what you do. You have to give it the inputs and then use the AI to extrapolate other things. So this is why everyone is so like inner kerfuffle about like ChatGPT and politics and like you know that it's being censored or like that there's. It's because the inputs can still be. Have to be controlled. You can't just tell AI to figure things out. So it can only just guess the next word. It can only guess the next thing. You're looking at what's called an LLM, which is a large language model. The only thing you can do is guess the next step. And so anyways, that still has to be an input. So.

We currently are working on the beta side of things and testing it with Whatcom county, but we don't have the database set up yet to be able to say, hey, hey, if you want to scan your own properties, go for it. I will absolutely let you all do that when the time comes. So that way you can be the first to have your areas scanned. I will absolutely let you know. Just know that if you actually did, probably you'd be lucky to get 20 or 30 done in an hour. Very lucky. Like if you're going extremely fast, you'll get 20 in an hour done. And so that's like two bucks an hour. So.

We'Re currently paying a team in Bangladesh and the goal is to scale that up. Whether or not we're able to fast enough, I don't know. But it's the most accurate way of doing it because otherwise if you use lot square footage there's just a lot of things that can go wrong.

Chad for Valparaiso, Indiana Are we charged for additional work Command center has to do because of mistakes made? For example, a quote was ineraccurate a mulch install quote from last year was sent to the customer instead of the spring cleanup quote I just created. I called and got corrected and all went well. Just curious if that cost of dating business. No, we don't charge you if we make a mistake, right? So when things like this happen, if you submit a yellow slip that's going to come off but if there's just a mistake that we're correcting, we're not going to charge time. The most accurate for us to do it is to actually have the person who made the mistake do like a yellow slip. Like the exact same way we would do a yellow slip on the field as what we do at command center. So they would just go in, they'd be fixing it and then the time would not be being clocked because they made a mistake.

Max Burnaby what is the contact for obtaining the $5 per month yearly user on SA? I couldn't locate it. I've tried emailing support service offline but haven't received a response. No. Okay, let me see here one second.

Let's see if I can just pull up here right off the bat here.

No, not my emails. Facebook. I'm gonna look on the Facebook group and do. No, I don't want to make a post on a search. I'll get it for you next. It's back.

What would have been in November. So I will look in the Facebook group and get that for you.

Nick from Marysville I asked commencement this question about a month ago and and I phrased it in a way that was either yes or no. So I didn't get the chance to hear some real discussion about it because I feel like there's a massive loss that we are overlooking that we are overlooking this. My question is was can CC put clients on a waiting list when we inevitably fill up this spring? This is tough. I'll explain why in just a second. But hey, let me read this question. Whoa. It was a long question. For context, I'll be mowing only March through May and there will be loads of new projects that call that we will not service until summer. As it is right now, CC tells them that we are not currently taking any new clients.

That's the end of it. Instead why can't we say we are not currently accepting new clients until dates specified by franchisee? Would you like to get on the waiting list? Then they say yes or no and CC takes their info and then shared with me. Google Doc puts the date the client was added to the waiting list with a description of the general services. They aren't waiting for someone. Something we don't even provide. You all know the pro. You all know the pros. Lowest cost per lead, more value to clients, manage lead flow and upselling during slow time, et cetera. 50% of lead flow for the entire year comes in spring. I lack the perspective of how this would be difficult to implement system wide. What would it entail? We are totally sleeping on this opportunity. There is no. There is so much scarcity around our brand personally for my location, our reputation brands here here is so strong. I know people wait for us to service them. Nobody even come close. If I was them, I would wait too because I wouldn't trust anyone else. Everyone looks at the reviews, word of mouth etc. But we are not capitalizing that. Last summer we had a four month drought and there was nothing to do because I reached capacity in spring and have lots of people up to upsell because we shut down leads. Even though I could have paid and kept them open. It's not servicing at that time. In fact that happened over the past few years. I have essentially missed out on five months of peak season leads the last couple years. We would have captured so many on these back end if we had a waiting list. Can you explain what from CC perspective as to why we can't implement this long question. Saved it for marathon Monday. Yeah. So I know in our minds we have confirmation bias and so we think that people are willing to wait two or three months to do a project. They are not. If they're. If they're calling in the spring rush. The reason is because there's. That's when pain is. So they will. They will not wait two months for a project to be done. And again this is not for the project to be done. This is for you to come even and come visit their property. Right. So in my opinion you'd still do your estimates throughout the Spring rush. You would schedule them though, because once you have a locked in estimate that's accepted, they are okay with, with like you said, being booked out month or two months, potentially out down the road. But there's no way in the world they are giving the command center their client information and saying, hey, in a couple months we'll get back to you. They will not, that will not fly because in the customer's mind, until a pro, until they have a scheduled date of service, the problem has not been solved. And so if they need something resolved, they are not going to be okay with, okay, it's March 3rd, it's March 13th in June or July, we will come back to you and we will, we will respond back to you and get an estimate on the schedule. That's not going to fly because the vast majority, they haven't done business with you in the past, are not going to wait until June for you to contact them to solve the problem they have today. That's not going to happen. So I would highly recommend that you still be doing the estimates, which might take, you know, an extra little bit of time, but don't do the actual work, right, get you the estimates, get them scheduled for the two months up. Because then once you have them on the schedule in June or July or whatever, for example, it's off their to do list, they're not going to keep looking. And what's also going to happen is when you start getting this list, if you start doing this, I guarantee you more than 60 or 70% of them will have already found another provider because they're not going to trust you that two months down the road you're going to contact them, they're going to need that problem solved. And they might give us the information over the phone, but then they're out, they're going to go find someone else to do the work. So.

You'Re going to end up wasting a lot of money by command center getting all this information, getting all this set up, then you going out doing that and they're like, oh yeah, it's our, we did this two months ago. We got taken care of two months ago. They're going to have moved by then, they're going to have got another provider done. They're going to change their whole landscape by then. So I highly recommend, if this is what you're trying to do, which is put projects in the summer, go do the estimates right, get the jobs closed and schedule them off into the summer and you should be fine to do that because in terms of like your timing because you're not doing the projects themselves, you're just doing the estimates so they get accepted. And then deal with the 10% of people that might have a problem with being six, eight weeks booked out, which is less than you think if you give them an exact date because everyone else in the spring rush is also booking out in this into June, July, August. So.

You just, you just end up spending a lot of resources and time for the vast majority of people that will go figure out a solution to this problem.

Just curious what coding language is being used to develop Copilot Man Marcus and Nicker had a hard hitting question this morning. A balance of PHP and MYSQL so we don't use any Ruby right now or anything like that.

In terms of the front end, it's CSS and a little bit of HTML. Your name or location? Name. Oh, okay. Kyle Tarbin, what are a few good business finance channels you regularly watch on YouTube? Honestly, I don't know. There's probably 40 that just come into my feed and I just kind of go through them. Let me see if there's a couple new ones. I've said these before. See if there's any new ones though.

Let's see here.

I don't think there's any new ones. I've said these before so I just want to see if there's any. Oh, this one's pretty good Patch. His name is Patrick Boyle. He's like the most boring guy in the world to listen to. He's like super monotone but he used to be on Wall street and he's like a legit financier and he has a pretty cool YouTube channel. He talks about a lot of like geopolitics and macroeconomics. What else we got here? Let me see if I can get one more new one for you. Oh, this one is the one I had put pitched shown the other day. Franchise City, pretty cool. Has lots of really cool stuff with like big name franchises and stuff. That's a pretty good one.

Logan. I've been working on the growth plan for Grant island and I've got this spreadsheet put together.

Came to this or copy this for context. My goal for grand island is to grow as quickly as possible. I'm aiming for 70% close ratio on recurring services. I want to do 200k recurring and have 100 to 200k in products. Good work. I'd like to be close to the 400k chart because it allows me to purchase assets to better set up year Two. So keep in mind what I would be shooting for if I was everyone in their first year is shoot for a growth rate.

Because if you're, if you're starting spring rush, say in like March or April, the chance of getting to 400k means you're gonna have to hit like 50 to 60k per month by the end of the year. I would rather you shoot for like say, okay, we need to get to 35 or 40k per month because that's gonna put us on a 300 to 400k run rate for the year. So I would focus more on your monthly revenue because if you're trying to hit 400k in your first year, you will literally have to do 60 to 70k in one of those months. That's a lot. Like you're going to have to buy so many trucks and equipment just to get there. Whereas if you just look, hey, I only need to get to about 30, 35 because that's going to put me on a run rate to 400k. I'd focus on that if I was you because people get disappointed when they don't hit this number one. In reality, if they would have actually started from day one, like January 1st, they might have actually hit that number because they would have been on good growth rate. Their rate of growth would have been there. So just keep that in mind. My goal is also to implement a working GM into Grand island next year and I would move on to location 3. Is a difficult goal to obtain, but I believe with proper plan execution is very possible. With these goals, I know my sole focus needs to be sell job to start. Then focus on a solid team and build someone GM worthy. Please critique me and let me know how to improve it. It's not done. Looking at the marketing plan, objectives, revenue sheet, 200k, 300k and 400k reach out to Connor Hutchinson who built the back end for the projections range. Yeah, for everyone wants to know Connor had put this in the Facebook group as well.

Okay, let me zoom out a bit. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this because I do have to run here, but let me look at what you're doing here. Budget hours per month. Whoa. Oh. Per month. I was like, per week. You have 700 budget hours in the week. Okay, cool. Yeah, there you go. This is cool. Very good. I like this.

This is good. I don't know why you'd have 175 in the middle of summer like this. Maybe you projects that which is definitely possible.

Okay. There's your growth plan. I like this.

Yeah. So the problem that I'm seeing, not the problem, I shouldn't say that there's like the thing that you're going to run into is the fact that because you're running a 10% profit margin target due to the fact that it's all being run GM and you're just assuming lower profit margins you're going to run into the fact that if you're starting to try to start a third location next year it's just going to be a completely. I can't. How can you deprive yourself in terms of like being able to spend money on marketing and like getting started next year you're just going to need more cash. Right. So I know your first location. If that one's continuing to spit out really good cash flow though because you're you know increasing prices dramatically that would definitely help.

This is your Marketing spend for 220 for 2023 is your one click estimates. All right. And then amount of money you're spending on marketing so your total spend will be 17,000 for the year.

Okay. Your 200,000 so kind of base case or worst case? Base case I would assume and 400k. This all looks very good.

Expenses total revenue capex after initial outlay. Yeah this looks good.

This is a cool chart I'd seen him make. This is cool. If anyone wants this chart by the way Connor has available on the Facebook group from a couple weeks back.

Okay so I'm guessing like 35. Yeah there's nothing like red flags jumping at me but I'm literally just glancing at this right now Is the name of investment stuff you would need to buy.

I'm assuming you don't need any mowers or trucks because those are the big expense items I don't see in there.

New employee purchases, small equipment.

Gauges come.

Yeah so I just don't see the big piece of equipment but I'm assuming those you've already taken care of that so. Yeah, no that was great. Honestly I will never look down on someone doing a lot of planning so great job there.

Let me present, present this to here. Well I gotta keep rolling if I gotta make it through these questions.

Forest, how much do you mark up materials on estimate calculator I'd recommend 50 to 100%. So that means if your.

Mulch is $30 per yard I'd be charging at least 45 all the way up to $60 per yard on your estimate calculator do your GMs at new locations make P4P. When working in the field, do you give them quarterly profit sharing just like the other team members since they're working in the field. So the GMs in the locations, they did not make PvP. The reason for that is because there's a lot, like a lot of their day is spent on. I can't have them just focus on work. There's gonna be like command center stuff they gotta deal with. They gotta be hiring, interviewing estimates. Like there's a lot of other things throughout their day. So trying to do PvP for them, they'd just be frustrated cause they constantly have had manual out, manual time, manual adjustments. So I try to make it as simple as possible. They either get salary, salary or hourly. And then they get. Their profit sharing is separate from the crew out in the field. So it is separate. They do not make P4P. They're either an hourly or they're on salary. And they are then getting a profit sharing based upon the profits of the business. And it's separate from the guys out in the field. Kyle Tarvin curious to know how many people watch your videos versus actually apply and accepted via franchisee. We're kind of seeing like this thing right now. Like we get about two franchises for every thousand subscribers. Kind of what I'm tracking. But what's more interesting, and I was really hoping to do this at conference in part to kind of push back at someone that said some stuff about me last year, but so I decided not to do it because I was doing out of spite. But someone was basically saying like there's no value in joining Augusta because.

You can just get everything on that. I, you know, I teach online for free. Or you can just buy it, right? Like P4P, Landscape Business Course.

The website, lawn care, bookkeeper, whatever. Right? Here's the thing. There is still more franchisees to this day using P4P than every other than everyone else combined. Like that's just how it is. There's so few people that can implement P4P because the systems, their business aren't built around P4P. They're doing weird stuff with their crews. They have drivers and non drivers. They have a lot of their jobs we've done by the hour. They have different rates, they have some like this random stuff. So to this day we still have more franchisees inside of p4pssoftware.com than all the public combined. Okay, so literally out of my entire audience, there's literally less than a hundred people outside of Augusta using P4P. Then you take out those hundred that are actually using lawn care web design, you probably about 10. Then if you just literally take one other product like Lawn Care Bookie, HomeServer, CPA0. So the bottom line is like the vertical integration of all the systems and systems procedures and software like then you got another copilot CRM next year. There's just, there's just not. You can't and in my opinion when you have systems and processes, taking one thing out can eliminate the effectiveness of the entire system. So that's why when people like P4P doesn't work, it's like yeah, you don't do open book management and you don't do profit sharing. And without those two things P4P will fail because people will not trust the trust the numbers you're giving them on P4P. If you're not doing open book management and then if you're, if you're doing just overbook management but not profit sharing and you start making a bunch of money, they're going to now see that and they don't, you're not giving a piece of it. So.

Yeah, I don't know how I got that question. But anyways.

Dustin from Bloomington, we have a customer that didn't pay their invoice last year in May, went through collections process and I don't ever expect to see the money. Luckily it was only $160. But his invoice still is showing up as past due on service autopilot. I don't necessarily want to avoid the invoice, but how can I write it off my past due or what would your recommendation be? Just leave it or. Yeah, so you can write it off as bad debt inside of service autopilot. You'll want to do that for your taxes regardless. So usually in the year I would go through which invoices are past due and see if you want to write them off as bad debt. So that way you're not getting charged taxes on receivable. You just basically take receivables off your books. So talk to your accountant at the end of the year to do this. I'd be more concerned about that than whether or not there's a past due invoice inside of service autopilot. I'd probably just leave it until you get paid. Until it's like years old. Then maybe I would. Last couple questions. All right.

Plantation.

Is there a way where CC can track the how the client finds a check. Our company finds a check. Our company, far as if it was referred to us by someone else or if they found something on Google, etc, is this possible? Yeah. So they're going to ask where the customer heard about us. But again, 90% of customers don't really know the answer to this question. They will say, I saw your trucks, when in reality they saw your trucks like the past year and then they saw a Facebook ad and they just called you outside of the ad. Right. So I have very, very low.

Confidence in someone's answer on the phone. What I go for more is when people, they volunteer information. Like, I see you guys on Facebook all the time, and that is the type of notes that command center will put for you as the estimator. And that's the best qualitative data in my opinion. Because the quantitative data, I've seen people track this before and then they're like, oh, like, man, my, my Google Ads are just crushing it because people are saying they find me on Google and I turn off their Google Ads and they don't have a single lead go away. Because the reality is people are seeing their trucks, they're going onto Google and searching, you know, Augusta lawn Care and then clicking their ad. And so that's why, like, even with tracking on Google, it's just like, look, did people really find them on Google or did they just search their name because they saw their truck or they saw a door hanger or they saw a yard sign and then they simply clicked on the ad. Right. So this is why qualitative data in my mind in that is you as the estimator talking to the client and like, hey, what'd you hear about us? And like, did they hear about you from a certain neighborhood association? Did they see your yard signs? Did they do. What do they mention? I know it's like a horrible to say from a marketing perspective. And like, every marketing agency in the world would be screaming at me because they want to track everything. But I've seen this because people will track it and like, oh, this is what's working really well. And I turn that off completely and their leads don't change. So just be careful with that. I'm not against tracking it. Absolutely not. And if people mention things on the phone, we're going to put in the notes for you, an estimator. But I always looked at the best way for me to know was talking to the customers and hearing what they say when I say, how'd you hear about us? And not just from a perspective like, oh, I, I saw, I found you on Google. Okay. It's like, well, I know. What, how did you like hear about us? Like, did you just search for us on Google? Like search lawn care on Google? Like, so that in person stuff is like pretty valuable, honestly.

Landsmith, is there, is there? This is my first invoicing month for Zooper. Is there an easy way to export credit cards on file from our old software Lawn Pro for me and import into Zooper? There is not an easy way. What you can do is set up. If your Stripe accounts are the same, you potentially could contact Stripe and say like, hey, how can I attach these on the back end? But I just don't think there's a super easy way. Like you're going to have all your customer data, which is nice because if something happens you can say, hey Mr. Jones, I have your card on file and you can do something there, but you still need it connected to Zooper. So what you might actually want to do, Landon, is contact supportuper co and say, hey look, I already have Stripe. Is there any way for me to connect Stripe? My Stripe account, my Stripe customers with the customers inside of Super? Because I know there's a way. Whether or not they've created a system for this, I don't know. Most companies don't. This is why I'm not like a huge proponent of saying like, oh, you should stick with Zooper until we switch to Copilot. Because like you'll have Stripe is the same. Yes, you'll have their customer data, but like the connection of those two things is not necessarily always easy. So connect Zooper, see if there's a way. Definitely. If there is, reach out and let everyone know. Because I'd actually be super interested to know this. But I don't think there's an easy way to do it. I think it's gonna be still a very manual process. Even if they tell you that they can, it's still like, okay, you gotta find them in Stripe and you're gonna find them in Zooper. Then you connect them with a code, like a customer ID code, et cetera. I don't know if they do. And then secondarily it's gonna be a very manual process. So for larger companies that are gonna switch to Copilot, obviously you're not gonna wanna do this for thousands of people, right? So I still think it's gonna be easier to send out a good, a well crafted email asking for the cardinal file. And because we don't need to have five security questions and login information like they do for service autopilot, it's easy to get that information really quickly. So. All right, I gotta run.

Boom. I hope you all have a fantastic day. I forgot to put the link in the.

Thing.

Okay, I gotta do these real quick. Sorry. Nick Reed, you never wanted. You never want to say you are not taking new clients like a doctor who's not taking new patients. You can. You can say your schedule is quite full right now. Still do bids. I recommend this even if you don't have time to do the work. Book out far. I don't know who is saying this. One second.

That's Liz. Okay, Josh, I'm using Zebra. Currently. My emails are going out correctly. I connect to Stripe and the links work. My issue is I input the credit card information. The page gets locked in a processing screen. This is very likely that your API key is. Is. Is slightly off. The links work. What do you mean the links work? But it's still processing input. The credit card and page gets locked. Yeah. So it's still probably something with your API. So definitely reach out to support at Zooper Co. If your API key is off, sometimes this will happen. Like the link will work. But then when you're. When someone actually inputs their card, it's not getting connected into. Super.

Okay, very good.

And if you don't hear from support, there's a On the Zooper page. Our direct help person at Zooper is on our Raghav. Raghav at Zuber Co. His emails on there. I'd actually email him right away. Honestly, Josh, do both of them. All right, guys, have a great day. Gonna go do this talk thing and I'll see you tomorrow. Take care.