Mike Minutes Mastermind 02/21/2024

Hello, everyone. Hope you're doing amazing. Let's go ahead and get started trying this new thing out here. Let me see if I can't send.

Okay.

See if that worked.

Cool. All right, so.

If you do not like getting a text message.

Reminding you of the three Mike Minutes mastermind being started in the comments on Facebook for this or don't do YouTube because I don't get those on Facebook. On the, on this, on this 3M video, just comment saying no text, please. If you put that, I will put a tag on your account inside Copilot and it will make sure you don't get this text in the future. So I did a poll yesterday. About 75 to 80% of people wanted a text message when I was going live. So I will try to facilitate that. I'm going to test it over the next week or two and see how it does and see if people actually utilize it. And I can tell, I can see how many people clicked on this and go get actually on the live stream. So.

We'Ll test it out for this week and see how it works. And if it doesn't do anything, we'll can it, but we'll test it first.

So there we go. Putting the Facebook now. All right. That will add approximately 20 seconds to my setup each morning when I'm putting these together. I think we are ready to go now. Cool. All right, so first announcement of the day. If you don't want to get a text reminder of the 3m the Mike minutes masterminds, you'll need to put in the tab in the comments on the Facebook post of this video. No text, please. And I will make sure you get an added tag. If you didn't get a text message, it's likely that you don't have your cell phone number on your account for the franchise. So you can change that in your client portal. Just go to your. Your.

Information, customer information. You can change your. Your phone number there. But I did notice that not everyone has their phone, cell phone number in there. So if you didn't get a text message, that would be why.

All right, let's see here. Let's jump it. No, I added another announcement. Okay. So the yellow Swift department brought this up to me at command center, and so I'm taking action on it this week. And that is basically that in Copilot, it's too easy to be able to add a new item and service from. From an estimate, you can just literally type in whatever you want. It'll create a new item in service. The problem that creates, you start getting 4, 5, 6 variations of say mowing because you put in like mowing backyard and all of a sudden that's a new item in service. The problem with that is that at Command center they will type in mowing and there's like 10 options and they will just click one of them. Well, that option was created one off for some one off estimate and now it doesn't have the standard verbiage. You want every single mowing estimate as like the default language. And that's a problem because they think they're doing their job just fine because it says oh, it says front yard mowing. This one says front yard mowing. Well, the, the standard verbiage wasn't copied into every single one of the variations of the item in service. So it's a pretty simple fix. And that is just making sure it's harder to add an item in service. And you can't just start typing and make a bunch of services. It'll be more of a drop down with a plus button if you want to add an item and service. So we are going to get that finished next week. And it's something that I just basically told Copilot like hey, we have to add the time for Augusta because it's causing too many errors. And it seems like Command center is not putting in your verbiage. In reality they're just seeing 10 different variations of mowing and choosing one and so not great. And you might even had just like made off a, made a one off thing and, and put verbiage and out creates that item and service and then Command center thinks oh that's their standard verbiage and they just leave it in there. And it's not even the correct verbiage. Things like, you know, your first visit price, you know, that's year round service. Whatever your standard verbiage is, is not being included. So the yellow slope said it's enough of them happening to where we need to expedite that. So we are going to push that forward. Even though we are in the bug phase for Augusta, we need to get that done before spring rush. So this coming week you can expect that. And then what you can do once we have that in place, you can just go into your items service and delete any of the extraneous items and services that you don't want in there. That will prevent confusion and you can delete those and it will not affect any jobs on the schedule and you will be able to change recurring services that use that item and service as well. So it won't affect. You can go in and delete an item and service, make it inactive and still have those jobs on the schedule just fine. It will not affect those. So we tested that yesterday and a couple owners had also done the same thing because they in the testing phase had create a whole bunch of different variations of certain services. They went back and cleaned them all out. It does not take away any jobs from the schedule. And you can edit recurring jobs that use that phraseology and that item and service and be able to modify those. So cool. Let me see here.

That's all the announcements I had for today.

Get some questions. What, what I do. There you go.

All right. Question numero uno.

Is from Connor Hutchinson, North Carolina. Oh, it's a long question. Okay, here we go. I don't remember this, but I have to. But I have been told you have previously mentioned as locations grow in size, it makes more sense mathematically. Bring parts of the office work in house. CC charges $54 per hour, 90 cents per minute. In theory, you could almost employ two people per hour of CC billing. Of course there'd be billing and utility overhead, etc. Question. If we wanted to scale to 100 locations the next 20 years, how would you design the office structure? Here are the four paths. I see. Okay, cool.

So first off, just, just keep in mind the reason this is important. This assumes 100% productivity. And that's the part you're attacking. Because in this, yes, technically you could get two people's gross weight, gross wages. It wouldn't include like their taxes and all the rest of it. Because if you're paying say someone, say 22, you're probably paying $30 per hour in actual, by the time you account for everything.

But you're assuming a hundred percent productivity. And that's why I usually say once you get about 100 800,000 to a million, it usually makes sense to find someone that can be in house in addition to command center. Like for example I would do likely is have them take all the, the reactive stuff. So command center can take calls, incoming estimate request forms, for example. And then the person you hire full time at say a million can handle all the scheduling, all the billing, all the email, all the payroll, all the things that are like you can do on your schedule. Because then you what you avoid. And I've seen this before, people have million dollar business and have three people in the office simply because you gotta, you gotta staff for the peak of phone calls. And in the spring you can literally have 15 to 20 times as many calls as in the winter. And so that would be my little caveat there. All right, question if we wanted to scale. Okay, got it. All right, so I see you got four different options and you want me to say okay great, you're curious my thoughts. But you think number one is the best make small office teams for each region. So for the five Charlotte locations we would start with two to three office staff and let them do tasks for all locations despite their size Every time a new region starts, we would run one to two years with full CC support and then begin building out that region's office team as revenue past 1 to 2 million pro. This would help create redundancy with a slightly larger team in case anyone needs time off, quits or is fired. 2. Do what BM tried last year with one office helper for that single location to help GM. This will require the location be large 1 million plus to support overhead Pro. This would be more personalized and that the office person could learn the area, clients, team members and much more on a personal basis. 3. Replicate CC so that any location ever opened could instantly use our own office staff office team. This does not sound fun or even achievable in the near future as I've seen the pain you've experienced trying to build a call center pro maximize redundancy with a large size team of the four options, possibly slightly easier than what you experience as you can control all SOPs from the top for locations that would use the office where you cannot control all SOPs of all franchisees. 4. Don't build an office anytime because the near future of technology with COPA and Max AI will make an office team obsolete in a few years and the cost of CC will be justified even on a mass massive scale. I think number one is the best option but curious in your thoughts. Thanks. This is. This is the whole the entire premise of this has changed by saying 20 years because number four is the correct answer in 20 years 100%.

And that's why we're trying to invest so much into Command center and have is because I do believe in 20 years it will make number four the option that I would recommend. And if you talk to most technologists people in software they'd be saying like it's insane even next 12 to 24 months to be having people answering phones and things like that. I know I do disagree with them on the short as short term as they are saying in terms of AI etc. However, let me think about this for a second. I Would not recommend doing small office teams for each region. Here's why. The whole economies of scale gets lost when you start having multiple teams. And the same way it's difficult to have multiple locations of a location, like operation for mowing, et cetera. Having multiple offices of command center is very hard, like extremely difficult. The same way as like having multiple locations for your mowing team and having team meetings, et cetera, and safety meetings, it's like it becomes exponentially more difficult. You lose though your economies of scale. So for example, you will spend to get a decent sized office and utilities, probably about three to $4,000 a month by the time you pay for the rent, utilities, triple that, et cetera. On a lease, let's say you have six to 10 people inside of there. As soon as you go get another six to 10 people and you start another office, you've now doubled your overhead. Like the six. Like the six. Now you're, you know, six, eight, $10,000 a month in, in, you know, for rent. So for example, like this building, we can house about 60 people. It gets a little stuffy, but 60 people and we can work paying $5,000 for rent plus triple net. So it's like six grand, a little over six grand a month, usually for rent. So you're looking at $100 in rent per team member. If we got a second office and we said, okay, we're going to do groups of 10 people now I need six offices and yes, my rent would be smaller because the footprint would be smaller, but I'd probably end up spending 12 to $15,000 a month in overhead. So that would be what I would be careful of. If you're trying to do multiple locations like that. I do believe that the, if I was starting 100 locations as an owner, I would be thinking about how can I take one location, get an incredible manager and scale it? That would be the answer. The nice thing is, Connor, is you're not going to go from 0 to 50 in one year. You're not going to go from 0 to 100 in two years. If you're doing this over 20 years, you could build this slower, right? And then what I would personally recommend is let the things that you know are going to be handled by AI just let them be handled by command center because that will be the part that's the hardest to staff up for. So, for example, like calls, estimate request forms, the things that are being done by instant quotes, let them handle all of that and then you handle all the back end like payroll, the Things that you can be done on your time because for example, like phone calls, you can't just be like hey everyone, let's work overtime and like get them done after work. You can't do that because it's reactive. You have to do it in the moment. And so that's the part I would just like probably recommend. And again, this is all hinging Connor on, on the fact that you said 20 years. Even if you said 10, that'd be like the same answer. If you're like hey, in the next two years then it looks a little different. But again if you're signing a 10 year long or 5 year long lease, you want to think about these things because the amount of people that you would need for a hundred locations, you start either A having five to six offices or B a very long term large lease like we have here. And that's what I would just be careful of. I'm a big fan of allowing of once the location gets over a hundred thousand, anything that is not reactive, which means like it's not time sensitive, it can be kind of done within a few days. It's not a big deal. I'm a big fan of having that being done in house because at a million plus you can keep someone almost full time and during the winter you're willing to lose, you know, several thousand dollars a month extra. You know that they, you don't really need them, but it's worth it. Okay, there are 25 people live today. They are usually five to 10. So apparently the text messages thing worked. All right, Devin from Red Deer. Hey Mike, we have a five month mowing season here and I was thinking hitting it big for five months every year with a bunch of trucks, then moving to Mexico for seven months in the winter. How's that sound? Maybe start a non profit down there or something. Just do, do one step at a time. Devin. So like again, stages of wealth. The reason I made that is because it's easy to jump forward in what you want done. And then I know the feeling of like, hey, I want to get things done faster and I want to move forward.

Just I really recommend just like focus on the next stage of wealth and that's it. Put all your attention to that one thing. Instead of like nonprofit. I'm going to move out of town, like focus on step one, step two, step three and just move your way down. I would recommend that. That's why I made that.

Maximum Burnaby. FYI, Please let me know if I should redirect in Koba if The services pause while a visit is being performed. The visit will disappear. For example, today I was today a crew was aerating a lawn and the client called into pause future services. CC paused service while the crew was still completing the job. This caused the job to disappear from the crew schedule and there was no invoice created. I only caught it because my crew message at the end of the day and I went into the client's account and manually created the invoice. Seems like we need to limit the pause function so any active visits are not affected unless the generator voice. Okay, I agree. I think what it would what is thinking is like hey, if it's not completed, it's not getting invoiced and that's how the system is set up.

The thing that I would say is like I think someone would also think this is a bug if they don't complete the visit that they're currently working on and they're like well we didn't want to invoice for that and they don't want that. They want that gone like they don't want that added to the invoice but it has to be completed. So feel free to submit this as a bug port. But it will be debated because I think someone could argue the opposite direction just because they were at the job and they didn't want it invoiced and now all of a sudden the job is sitting there and they have to go in and they have to manually delete it. So I don't know if this will be added because it could very well be like if you pause a job, it's not completed, we want it taken off. Otherwise just kind of hangs out there. It's like an incomplete job and you've got to go and delete it. So I think you're either a gonna have to go in and delete it manually or you're gonna have to add it to the invoice manually. So either way there's gonna be a manual process there if you actually pause a visit while it's active.

But if you feel strongly about that, feel free to submit it and they'll debate it. I think it could go either way to be honest with you. Corey at alcs. Welcome.

General question about large team management. I've seen you speak in pieces previously about your conflictions with being unable to maintain more hands on relationships with your teams. Do you have any guidance and pitfalls advisors in regards to maintaining a healthy balance? Up until now my approach has consisted of high frequency, high intensity discourse about healthy Work development. I'm okay with changing my style, but I'd like to continue and know your opinion on maintain that approach with fewer available slots, more based on necessity. I'm not sure what critical indicators or flags to look for that would signal a specific person needs to receive that attention other than metrics. When so much of my approach is luring out development through long exposure, how do you maintain a balance that works for you? Yeah, so, yeah, so Corey, this is great, great question and obviously I know a lot about you specifically, so you do a phenomenal job at the first part that you just mentioned. And that's like the high frequency, high intensity discourse. And that's why you have such a strong team and why you've turned the culture around in the past six, seven months. So kudos to you for that. The thing is, now you are scaling the team up to where you're going to have like 20 plus employees out in the field. And that is going to be a difficult thing to do from a time management perspective.

And so now it becomes what systems are in place to allow for high frequency without the high intensity. Right. So for example, do you require people during their first two weeks to check it within the end of each day? Do you have the trainers have to check in with you? Do you make this more of a checklist for the trainer to be able to make sure every single day for the first two weeks they are brought up to speed?

I made a video really quick the other day. It'll come out in a few, in a couple weeks. And it's basically like.

Attracting, attracting training and then retaining team members. And the things that go into that is like communication, compensation and.

Culture. Three Cs. And so at every single one of those stages, attracting.

Training and retaining, you're going to have to really focus on those three elements. The communication part gets difficult when you start having where you have 20 people that report to you, that's difficult. But in a seasonal business you can't afford to only have a manager for four to six people because otherwise you'd have four GMs essentially at the Bellingham shop during peak season and you'd only need one during the off season. And so that's the challenging part is like handling that spike in team members for most of the year, but then having three or four months where you don't need, you don't need that much management. So you have to lean more on systems. And you know, I would say that as a, if I. If you have 20 people reporting to you, you're going to lean more on your one on ones and then you allow your systems and your metrics to handle the frequency part right. So you can you either index on high frequency or you can index on high intensity. Doing both with that many direct reports, very difficult. So I would recommend is go okay, once a month I'm going to have a high intensity, 20 minute one on one. I'm going to go over these things with them and I'm going to connect with them intensely and deeply. The frequency part is the part where it's like okay, team meetings, the training program, making sure the trainers sign off on things, et cetera. That would be the frequency that I'd be leaning on because you're not going to be able to be that frequent when you have that many team members reporting to you. And so personally, if I was talking to you like in a room Corey I would say is I would make sure your training system is nailed down for those first two weeks because that's the time you need the most frequency with team members is when they're first starting out. Make sure that's nailed down. You have a system in place. Lean on the systems for frequency. I'd make sure your team meetings are like tight so don't let them go 20 minutes. Like try to keep them 5 to 10 minutes really bam, bam, bam. Like no gaps. Here's what we're doing, let's go. Moving on and then index highly on creating one on ones. Here's what's cool inside of copilot. You can text your team members and so this is something that we are actually just creating workflows at COPILOT and ATC and they'll submit it probably later this week inside of the Copilot University and that is setting up one on ones for your team members down the road. We need one more trigger inside of the thing but you can text your team members. So for example, you could set up a meeting with your team members and then remind them of that meeting and it can be on their schedule at a certain time. So you could literally just go into COPILOT and schedule all your one on ones and then they're assigned to your team members and you can do that now but in the future you'll be able to remind them leading up to it because we don't have the one trigger that we need for that and that is, you know, one day before in sequence automations you could do, you could set this up in legacy automations but in sequence automations we don't have that one trigger yet. But what's nice is you can text team members or email them. And so I would just say like put it into your calendar. Like put, put your team members one on ones into the calendar and just know, okay, I'm going to do one every single day. Well, if you do one every single day of the month, that's 20 minutes every single day. You are going to have to do one on one, but that's 20 working days of the month. So if you did one every single, every single day, you'd have the entire team done every single month. So essentially it's like if you have one 20 minute meeting every single month with each team member, you'd have the high intensity, like the deep discussions and then focus on the systems to really. And it's systematizing the training, the team meetings to operationalize the frequency side of things. So because I know like with a smaller team you have done both of those things. Well, it's from the frequency side I would lean on systems more and then let your one on ones really be the thing that allows the depth. So the text message is awesome. Is much appreciated. Chad Fuller when is the QR code tech coming to Door Hangers? Just wondering if I should wait to order all my marketers as they come soon. No, so I said late spring. I don't want to add that as another factor in terms of seeing the, the success of Max AI and Instant Quote Door instant instant pricing on the website. So I'm waiting till the end of the spring rush and just there's just so many things we've already changed on this offseason. I just want to kind of let things settle a little bit for the next few months. And like I'll tell you, I'll be honest, this is what I, this is my hope for. All the pain I've created with Copilot over the past six to eight weeks is that it's made up for in the fact that Augusta has is overwhelmed with leads during the spring rush. Well, I know everyone else is another Facebook group. Like there's way less leads than normal. No one's asked, no one's accepting. Everyone's price sensitive and I want it to be where we're all just flooded. That's like my goal. Like as much as I know I'm causing pain for people right now, like I keep leaning on the fact that I know I've built infrastructure over the past eight months that can, can do that, has the potential to do that and that I want like more than anything. It I believe if I can do that it'll cover what mistakes I've made over the past six weeks and the pain that's going to be continuing for the next couple weeks. If we can just like make it where it just crushes. So did you say.

Shave it off? Just took it way down. Come on now.

Cool. All right.

Cool. Yes. This is new. There was a.

Poll I put in yesterday. Love the text. Just got 10 minutes in the stream. Not complain, just FYI. Yeah, when I send out mass text it's going to be.

It throttles it going out per minute. I think, I think we get 20 per minute. Yeah, it's like 20 per minute.

The idea with having teams per region is avoid losing a key employee if the office may have been for a million dollar. Yes. Okay, great, great, great question. I'm guessing this is from Connor. So here's the thing. If you take the savings in being having it regionalized, like bring it in one house Instead of having five offices, you have one, you would probably save 10 to 15 grand a month all of a sudden. If you spent 10 to 15 grand a month instead of spending on rent, you spent that on your key team members. I have a good feeling you get better people and you'd retain them.

So that would be my 2 cents on that. And then as you grow you're going to have like assistance to your, your key people to where like if something happens, they get hit by a bus, whatever. There is redundancy, there's systems in place that can make sure that things still run. But I have a feeling you'd be able to find a better team and a better even management.

If you take that money that you would save on the rent and the overhead which is like cannot be discounted. Like take whatever you find in rent and double it by the time you look at utilities, insurance and everything else that goes into having an office building.

And again that's a fixed expense. That would be my concern too like during the off season because now you're. You've switched from command center which is variable cost to. To overhead structure and so you. That'd be very difficult.

Brian is asking the hard hitting question.

Oh man, you guys are too much. Russell Thompson just noticed last night when checking payments were striped, their customer had left the tip. I would not normally notice that. Is there any suggestions or tags that would give me a notification? If you go to invoices, you can see there's a tips column. You might want to just need to turn that on. There is a video on The Academy and I'm going to make it it's the exact same as service all by because we use the exact same email plugin. But I'm going to remake the video so if you want to add a PayPal link to paid invoices, they'll still be able to leave you a tip there because the tip is currently only present if it's an invoice that is not paid. So it's great user experience because the customer can just add the tip and it takes one transaction. Fantastic. The downside is if you're sending an invoice that's already been paid, there's not the option to do that. So until we actually make the feature that would allow this and we have it on the roadmap where they can leave a tip easier from a paid invoice receipt. Until that time you could just do what we did back in service Autopilot which is have a button created on the email that goes out for the paid invoice receipt that links to PayPal so that video isn't in service Autopilot on the Academy it's the exact same thing. But I'm going to remake it in Copilot just so it looks so people know it's the same thing, but it literally does the exact same process. If you want to add the PayPal button to the invoice receipt email. So cool. Well, I have to say it is a lot more exciting having 30 people almost live. I'm just gonna say it so I will continue to send the text. If you do not want to text, it's annoying you which that was my biggest concern. Just in any, any Mastermind on Facebook on the live stream, just post like please no text or no text please. You know, just if you put that in there, I will add a tag on Copilot to your account and you will not get a text message. And yes, it will be delayed because there's 20 text messages that go out per minute by a couple minutes. So what I will do in the future is before I start because I have to do some pre work to set up a live stream, I will send out the text message then and so you might get it slightly before or a couple minutes after just because there's 150 plus of the messages. If you do not get a text message and you want one, it's a very good chance your phone number is not in the Copilot client portal inside of there. And so feel free, just go through one of your invoices, go into your account settings and you should be able to change your phone number. If you can't it means they would have turned that off in the settings and disabled the ability to do that. And you can just email help ustalongage services.com they'll make sure your text messages or your phone number is correct inside there so you get the text messages. I'll continue doing that for now and again if you are annoyed by that just let me know in the comments. That was my biggest concern because I do this all over the time zones and everything so I don't want to annoy people at 2 o' clock in the morning of a notice. So how about this, if it's a weird time I'm not going to do a text message, I'll just do that. No one wants to be notified at one in the morning of a live stream. So yeah. All right, thank you all, appreciate it and we'll see you tomorrow.