Mike Minutes Mastermind 02/22/024

Hello, guess the nation. I hope you're doing amazing. These are not really announcements as much as education. So let me go to education and then we'll flip back to. I think there's one or two questions. Two questions that came in. All right, first off, actually let me show you a post I thought was really good.

Ryan Payne had reminded everyone in the Facebook group of oh wait, it's a sweet Facebook group. I need to put this link in there. One second. And that is there's a Q and A section on your Google listing page and they're starting to push it more I'm seeing in search. I've been watching it for the past like 6 to 12 months as they kind of rolled out the new Google listing thing. And I'm starting to see them in certain parts they're using it in search. So my, my biggest thing is. Oh, here I was going to show it is what you might want to do is add your pricing.

It's gonna be me scroll down here. So feel free to look at this one. Ryan offered a list of different questions and answers you can give right off the bat as a file. So thank you for that Ryan. Also I added in here potentially add your pricing in mostly due to the fact that it is potentially going to show up in search. And so if you want a file with already pre made questions, feel free to use this. And then I would just recommend adding your, whatever your pricing you're using for instant quote forms on your website, just go ahead and use that also inside your Q and A because people a lot of times will say like what is the price of mowing? And then that's like their search. So anytime they mention price, if you can be the one that has price all in your Q and A, that's the thing that I think they're going to pull from a lot of in the Q and A part of the Google listing. So just make sure you customize it. If you're going to copy and paste or if you're going to use pricing, you're going to have to update it. Otherwise you will have customers show you their phone. Like it says it's $49 and you're telling me it's 79. So be be aware of that same thing with like if you're using, using a template like Ryan gave, like if you don't offer certain services, make sure they're out of your Q and A. So and I would, I would also be careful of using certain keywords that you don't want to re ranking for so if you're like, if you don't do any concrete, do you, you might not want to say like, do you offer concrete? No, because like the word concrete will rank potentially. And so that would just be a word of caution about that one. Also yesterday was.

Different, different thing I was talking with Dr. Kashi about, like ultimately I said like, the main thing I want people to prevent happening is people quitting in general. Like, I just think that most people, if they just could get through the first five years, they would build a successful business. And you know, how many bumps and bruises along the way and whether it takes them three years or five years or seven years, I think there's things that we can change and improve. But like I wanted to drill down even more. So like why do people quit? And when we really started boiling it down, what I ended up coming up with is the fact that it generally takes three to four years to understand the demand curve in your market, to be able to know when leads are going to start coming in, to understand when you need to hire customers or sorry, hire employees, and to understand you need to schedule jobs. That's really what I boiled it down to at the end of the day. Because ultimately, if you're going into spring rush right now, there's two different types of jobs we should be focused on recurring jobs and.

Time specific jobs. So what I would recommend is as you go into the winter, the spring rush. And you know exactly if you have figured out what those months are. So for example, in our market it's March, April, May, June, right? Those four months is your spring rush. March, you can kind of, it's like some people are slower to get their smoking service started, the grass isn't growing crazy yet, et cetera. But really, at least those three months, that's our spring rush. What I would recommend doing is blocking off all non recurring or time insensitive jobs completely. And this assumes that at least 50% of your revenue right now is coming from recurring. If you only like 20% of your revenue is coming from recurring, there's a likelihood that you might not be able to actually fill your whole schedule through the spring rush with just recurring jobs. But the reason we talk him and I talked about this so much is like if something is time specific and it is recurring, it should be our focus during spring rush because the recurrence of that, of that revenue is going to be what helps us from cash flow perspective during the slower season. And if it's time specific, I have to get it done now and it can't wait to two months or three months down the road. And then when we approach customers from a scheduling perspective, it is simply like our policy that, hey, during these months we don't do those services. It's during these other nine or ten months out of the year that we do. We'll do all these other things. And these are time insensitive things. Again, assuming that you have enough work and enough leads to be able to fill your schedule during the spring rush, doing just time sensitive and recurring. Now, time sensitive also includes things like spring cleanups. People are not going to wait three months or even two months to get their spring cleanup done. And by the time you go from quote to actually doing the job, the job could literally have doubled or tripled in the amount of scope. Because spring rush, like, everything's growing fast. So the reason I say this is because when we really started boiling it down, like, when do people quit and why do people quit is it usually takes three to four years to understand, okay, do. This is the date when I need to, like, be ready to go. This is when I need to start hiring employees four to six weeks in advance. This is when I expect leads, like, predictably know that there is going to be a lead spike here. And so, for example, at Command center, we know, like, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the first week of March, it'll immediately triple. Like, immediately the amount of leads that are coming in across, like, the whole system. Now there's some of your markets that are later because of the snow. And that's more of an April 1st situation where, like, okay, everything just takes off. And so, you know, even with Command center, this is now their fourth spring rush. Like, they now know what that looks like. And that's why Liz was hiring a month and a half ago, training everyone up, getting ready for March 1, because, like, it is, like, it's a switch that gets turned. And I still remember our second spring rush when we hadn't figured that out. I literally still remember our first week of March having training.

And it was when, like, the DZ's were here, so Ashley and Casey, several others were there. And I just remember them specifically. But the. It was crazy because, like, we. I still remember being like, crazy. Last week was like, super manageable. All of a sudden, everything just immediately switched and, you know, crazy amounts of leads pouring in and everyone behind and everyone being overworked and blah, blah, blah. And so it usually takes three to four years to understand what your demand curve is and then adjust all of those things. What you're going to do for customers like your scheduling and what you're going to do for your employees like hiring them up and creating the capacity for your spring rush. Because if you're going to grow, you'd rather go buy the truck and equipment now that you know what your capacity is and you can fill to it throughout spring rush. You don't want to be buying a truck in July or August when spring rush is over. Leads are not pouring in. It's going to be harder to fill excess capacity during that time of year. And so these are things that usually take at least three to four years. I see typically more like five to six years in a lot of industries to understand that spring rush. And that's why people quit. Because the hard part about all of our home service industry is the spike of leads followed by the drop off and like I don't have any work and that constant roller coaster of I'm booked out six weeks and I can't take any jobs and everyone's walking up the job to I can't get a single job in the schedule and there's no revenue coming in, I can't cover my fixed expenses. That is the roller coaster of our industry that many people ride. And if they do that four, five, six years and they can't figure out how to level it off just a little bit, that's why people want to quit. And so the goal, the way to get that to level off is take all non recurring and time insensitive jobs and push them off into the future to in a time when you know that you're not going to have mowing and you're not going to have spring cleanups. And so even if you're only at 30, 40% of jobs are recurring like ie mowing, you can still fill all of your scheduled during spring rush because spring cleanups. And a lot of times what I see is people are not able to capitalize on the massive amount of revenue for spring cleanups because they fill their schedule in March and April to where it's six to eight weeks booked out. And all of a sudden someone wants a spring cleanup in April or May and they can't fit them in or they're going to overwork their crew. And so I just would really, really recommend as you figure out what those months of the year are. And this is why talking to other members inside of Augusta Nation that are close to you if you're new is so important. Like figure out exactly what that window of time is and then okay, leading up to spring rush. Here's what I do for my employees and here's what I do for scheduling. Because what happens otherwise is, let's just say March 1st is the start of your spring rush. The first three weeks of March come by and now you book yourself out, say three or four weeks, and that's fine. The problem is now you can't do time insensitive jobs or time sensitive jobs. You can't fit someone in for an overgrown growing MO because you're booked out and leads are starting to pour in. And now April, we're four to five weeks booked out and we're falling behind. And then when someone leaves, an employee leaves, and now you're overbooked, and now everyone's overworked, and now people start to leave more and starts this vicious cycle. Then you turn off your leads. So what I recommend, and I'm trying to actually formalize this more, is all non recurring time insensitive jobs should not be put on during spring rush. All right, Again, you usually only figure this out after seeing the pattern of spring rushes over the course of several years to be able to know what kind of leads are coming in. But it's not. It's usually not your first month of spring rush that gets affected because you're just building your backlog. It's the second and third week of spring rush, sorry, the second and third month of spring rush, once your backlog has been built and now you can't afford to put in time sensitive jobs or overgrown mows and you lose out on all that revenue for the rest of the year. So I would just keep that in mind, just something to think about because I genuinely believe that's why people quit this industry. It's difficult due to the fact that you have, like, crazy highs and crazy lows. And the only way, in my opinion, the fastest way to level that out is to make sure you do a. It's a scheduling issue. It's like, oh, it's an industry issue. It's like, you know, scheduling. You can even that out by at least a few months. Like, you can push a lot of these jobs forward and then focus on the ones that really need to be done during spring. So hopefully that's helpful for someone. I know that's extreme to say, like, nothing, but I just see it over and over and over again. And still last year, the majority of Augusta throttled leads at some point during spring rush, so.

All right, let me go ahead and not share this screen, but rather share this one.

All right, Tim, could we Possibly get emails of customers on an estimate meeting. I used to verify there. I always. I used to always verify in person estimates email and that now cannot view it Seems like this would be important as they. That's how they receive the estimate.

Could you just tap on the name of the customer and verify it from there? Like if you click on their contacts and if you can't do that you might want to look at your permissions to make sure you have the ability to be able to see the email and the contact information of the customer.

But yeah you should be able to like click on the customer's name and immediately goes to their profile. And if it's not then we can fix that. Papa Pane Right now Command center subtracts driveways and patios out of the overall measurement along with the house to get the lawn square footage to put into the price matrix. I'd like to really look at why we do this versus the alternative of only subtracting the house. I understand we don't mow grass in these areas. I'd argue those areas take more than more time than riding a mower because we have to walk down both sides of a driveway by foot to edge it. Then we walk it twice again to blow it. We are responsible for cracks and weeds in those areas. If they. If they. If we didn't touch them at all the customers wouldn't be okay with the driveways and patios looking terrible. Our guys get paid to work in these areas. Then you look at the command center side. It's faster to only remove the house. It's less steps, less room for error. It's faster. So it saves franchisees money. It could. It would give everyone an instant couple dollar price increase going forward. So back to the question. Why do we move the concrete? Can we stop doing that? That makes sense to me. 100.

Let me check in with commander and then I will probably put a poll. I see this completely. 100.

Makes total sense. But like, like to the point yesterday Ryan on. On the other mastermind we we talked about something else. A feature about Gopali or something is on these calls. On these live streams I am seeing this question for the first time. This makes perfect sense to me. So I can't really answer this last part like can we stop doing it? I would have to check in with individual department but this makes perfect sense to me. I will check in with command center because obviously it would save them time. It's easier for them saves time on the phone. And to your point it's going to increase prices by a slight amount to accommodate the fact that concrete takes longer. So. But I just try to avoid on these calls because I can create chaos on these every single morning. If, whether it be copilot or command center, I just am making decisions on here without getting them involved. So this makes sense to me. I will bring it forward to command center and then what I'll do is I'll probably put a poll on the Facebook group because again, there might be people that are like, this is horrible. So I think this makes sense, but I just want to proceed more carefully, both for the internal team and for the sake that there's other owners that might have a serious problem that I am overlooking.

All right. Hey, Mike Marcus from Alamo Ranch here. Are we going to get new ads for Google like the ones you did for Facebook? I thought you had mentioned new ads for Google and Facebook, but I've been mistaken. Google really hasn't changed a whole lot in the past six months in terms of ad platform. They did a ton of changes in 2021 and 2022. Um, so I. I don't think there's need for. If you. If you're doing the D done for you ads, though, from the Google perspective and there's some big changes, let me know. I haven't seen anything crazy, but I can redo them, no problem if needs be.

Going into my second year, I'm definitely still learning my demand curve. Do you think tracking the number of leads per week or per month would be beneficial to track? I do think so. I would also say definitely reach out to another owner that is near you that potentially has seen a few spring rushes. They will likely be able to tell you pretty closely what those months are. And then I know it's scary to like, hire people up for it and change what your scheduling is on your wiki for that time. I understand that. Especially when you have no jobs and it's six weeks prior to. And that's why people go into spring rush. They're excited. They get all these jobs. Now there's two, three weeks booked out. Let's go. And then now the leads keep pouring in, and then they're five weeks booked out, and then now they're behind. And so that. That would be the thing. But I would reach out to other owners, like, this is the why. This is why Augusta Nation exists. Like, talk to someone else that's been in business for two, three, four years, and you'll likely save yourself a year of pain.

I'm probably going to do it week for the first few months. So I can pinpoint exactly how the ramp up is. Yeah. Yes. To answer. Answer your point. I'm guessing this is Greg. Yeah. Tracking leads per week is great idea. And if you have last year is a very good chance that with that maybe not to the same number of leads will come in this year, but it'll usually come to the same scale. Right. So if you had 20 leads last March and this year you had 30 in March, there's a good chance that you're up 50% on say April and then May and then June. So it usually scales. The challenging part with your first years also is the fact that you're growing. And so sometimes it's hard to distinguish between growth and just natural demand. Right. Because like last year I only had 30 leads. Well, all of a sudden this, this month, this month you have 50 because your second spring rush. So like second spring rush always throws everyone through a loop. And that's why we usually don't trust ourselves when it comes to planning for spring rush is because like, okay, first year was okay, second year was nuts. Like I don't know what third year is going to be. And all of a sudden then we start to see like it starts. That's why third year starts to get a little bit better is because you see like second spring rush is always crazy because we just consistently see that's when people's leads start pouring in and they're used of them having to pay money for ads all or pay money for leads. And all of a sudden that switches to where they have some brand awareness and leads start pouring in. And that's great in theory, until you're in the middle of spring rush, you're booked out five weeks and two people just walked off the job and now you're in a pickle. Like, that does not sound fun. And then the fact that four months later you can't get a single job to get accepted is the roller coaster that just drives us all mad. Everyone, I hope you have a fantastic day. I will see you tomorrow. Take care.