Mike Minutes Mastermind 02/24/2025

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Mike minutes. Mastermind.

We'll get started in just a minute. I think I got like 11 questions that came in before do a couple quick announcements. I put a poll on the Facebook group.

There it is about making a to do automation for making everyone's life easier.

And so feel free to vote on that. It looks like it's pretty much overwhelmingly yes. But I want to make sure any feedback if you're like, hey, I thought that's always how it worked. It's likely that you were in the dispatch review department and there's about 20 locations that were using that and inside of there they would go through and make sure all of your responses to deduce were addressed. But we think you could instead of having that department just make it a part of the process that anytime you mark a to do complete it would then notify command center or if you wanted to have your own office, it could come back to them. So that way they always be notified anytime a to do is completed. And if there's actions that you would ask them to do. For example, Command center says hey, customer called in, they want estimate revision and they have some questions. If you add in X, Y and Z, you could just respond right back on that to do mark as complete they would then get the notification that you did that be able to make the changes and send it to the customer. Versus right now you have to go to connect team because there's not an auto automation set up to trigger a to do being completed going back to command center. So we think that we can make this a lot easier. We've had several requests from owners, especially now that dispatch board review check is going away. I think it'll be actually a lot faster too than even the dispatch review department going through each day a couple times and checking everything now it'd be like instantaneous come back to command center. So feel free to vote on that. Command center will be testing that. Liz and the team working on just making sure it's going to be rolled out well and it'll obviously be optional, so you could always just toggle it off or you could just have it forwarded to yourself or your office if you're doing it internally. But basically be anytime a to do is completed, it'd be notifying command center, your office, whoever you have on the automation. So if that is of interest to you, go ahead and vote on that in the chat or in the Facebook group. Also, Liz will be sending an update later this week, if not next week from Command center inside of there they are going to make where now the territories are updated every two weeks instead of every once a month. So that way twice a month it is going to be updated instead of just once a month.

That way if you are adjusting your service area based upon like just getting way too many leads, they're a little more responsive and it's not waiting till the end of the month to get that changed out.

So we can't do like every single day because that requires file changes across the entire every single computer at command center. But we can do it every two weeks. So she'll have more updates on that. Being able to get screenshots of your territory, seeing nearbying territories, et cetera. They'll be having some updates on that just to streamline that process for everyone coming soon.

All right, let's jump in. Let's see what we got today.

First question is from Mr. Anonymous. Question one. As Augusta goes public, will your focus be to make the holding company as valuable as possible, which will may slightly hurt Augusta members by raising COPA and franchise fees way up, which will increase the holding company's value? I'm personally fine with you doing what's the best interest of shareholders. Just curious your long term mindset. Yeah. So this is why, this is why having only Augusta Nation members and and team members having equity is so important. Because.

You know you're not going to do, you're not going to want to do things that are in the best interest of a quote unquote shareholder. When I look at the shareholders as all the owners inside of Augusta Nation and so.

Also the way we built the company kind of prevents this from ever being having perverse incentives because let's just say I get hit by a bus and someone comes in like let's raise franchise fees. You know, people can leave and without penalty. So I think it, I think the strong tension between what is right for the shareholder and what was right for every single owner is really good because the owners are shareholders in this case as people will invest. And so I don't think, I think there's less chance of perverse incentives when people involved are on both sides of the coin. And so I would, you know, even down the road as an owner, I'd be taking consideration even who's on the franchise advisory council and making votes etc. On my behalf. I would probably want them to. If they are a shareholder and an owner, I'd probably be a bigger fan of them personally if I'm voting for people because I want them to be Thinking about both sides of the coin here. So.

There'S obviously a lot of pressure to deliver shareholder return whenever there's anyone giving me money. I've never had that sort of pressure. And so it's new and starting next month is probably when we'll allow people to fund it and then the round closing in 2025. So yeah, there'll be some added pressure to make sure that there's like really solid returns, that there's increasing valuations, increasing metrics, et cetera. But I try to build each of the businesses in a way that doing what's right for everyone is better for the business. And so again, I always am trying to think about how do we build the business for a hundred years so that that means Michael not being here. And so I, I try to set up things even from a legal perspective where if someone came along that was nefarious, that they couldn't actually get very far. So is that probably like somewhat of a, you know, overthinking things? Potentially, yes. But like if we, if the goal is to change the love of professionalism, that means that like, that can't stop if, if I get 70 years old or can't stop if I get hit by a. There are a lot of things in place that kind of prevent someone from doing this without completely butchering the shareholder if they try to butcher the owners. So it's kind of set up in that way. Question 2. As we get close to going public and have 6 to 700ish guest locations, will you branch into other industries under a different brand name but under the same holding company? I can see robotics, which my understanding is the point of us going public helping all service industries. This is a potential, once we have service territory saturation, but I'm not like necessarily passionate about it. It would be a matter of need, need to do that to be able to just get a wider grip on the home service industry as a whole and labor, like that would be the thing. But I'm not thinking about this right now. I'm not spending a lot of time on this and I don't think it would become a problem until we get close to that thousand location marker in terms of just territory saturation. Also, no one will be complaining if that happens because the valuation of the territories will go through the roof if we actually get to the point where no one can join without buying a location. So, and I see this right now happening at Anytime Fitness. Everyone's just thrilled out of their mind, even though they've made some big missteps recently on changing everyone from key fobs over to their like scanning in on their phones. Lots of people were. It didn't roll out well in the past year or two. However, everyone's very forgiving because everyone's valuation of their territories have gone up by like 50 to 100% in the past few years since they've hit saturation. So it's one of those things where I think it'll be I don't see this being a big problem in terms of getting into other other industries. I don't know. I just don't think about this a lot. We have a lot of room to to grow and work on our current thing and where we go from there in terms of do we franchise or do we leverage like the franchise network and go more into the robotics. That's what my current thought is processes. But it might be a matter of too like if we need to get more cash, like do we leverage another franchise brand and use the the distribution of the system and mind and the media team to basically create more cash. I don't know. So but it's definitely not on the horizon or focus at all right now. Marco Garcia I interviewed four people and they all showed up on time and some even very early. The conversations with them went great. About after asking the recommended questions on the Augusta dashboard. Is there any recommendations you would give? If all interviews were great, Tyler gave me the advice to choose the person who had the skills to move up to middle management. So it just depends like sometimes you not you actually don't want middle management.

I was talking last weekend at a conference and talking about how compliance usually will bring B players.

And the problem is like you'd be like well I only want A players and I don't want any rules. Well you actually need mostly people that are going to do compliance in this industry. You need laborers, you need people to get the work done. If everyone wants to think outside the box, become general managers and 3 FR if every single person in your team did that, it actually very difficult to run a business. Maybe one out of ten do. And so I personally would not choose based upon the skills to move up to a middle manager. What I would be thinking is what. What do I need from this person in a year? Now if you are going to be hiring a general manager down the road or starting a second location next year, one or two years potentially that's something you think about. But I would be more asking myself if labor is the constraint of me growing the business. I need more labors. You have not yet hit leadership when it comes to the 4L framework. So right now you're trying to solve for a problem which is the next step of the 4L framework, which is leadership. When right now you're, you're trying to find laborers. So if you have three, four or five employees, your, your next constraint is not I need to find a bunch of general managers. No, like find great laborers until the point where you have so many laborers that you need a general manager and you're like, well, I don't have enough work to keep them all busy. Well then now you've moved back in the 4L framework. And that's fine to say that the constraint of the business is leads. So what you could do to Marco is take the top two or three and actually scatter their hiring date. So okay, one person started March 1, one person March 15. Other person is April 1. Offer all their jobs. One of them will probably not accept it. Other one might be like, hey, I'm okay with waiting three or four weeks, that's okay. And then you have yourself kind of a more of a thread, a spread out onboarding ramp. So less of your time and resources is spent on onboarding multiple people at the same time because then they dilutes their training typically. So not a bad problem to have. I don't, I think Libra's gonna be less of a constraint this year in terms of finding people. It will come back to who's the leads. That's why like all of our time and attention is focused on instant pricing and door hangers, website, et cetera.

Mr. Anonymous, I have started using Grok and other AI tools instead of googling for pretty much everything I others are starting to do the same. How can we use these AI tools? Mention our businesses when asked about lawn care companies in our city. Are you aware of any hacks? So I, I actually did a demonstration. It's on the Facebook group of OpenAI operator doing exactly what we just talked about. And I was like, I said hey, go, go sign up for lawn care from Augusta Lawn Care. And it gets pretty close. It still has to ask me like, hey, these are the prices do you want to accept? But it will get there. And you know, I'm always testing this stuff, whether it be GROK or operator and OpenAI or Gemini, the different models. And yeah, I still think that getting way ahead of it right now is almost futile because it's changing so quickly. And so we take what is currently working and just extrapolate that as much as Possible. And still to this date, the vast majority of traffic is going to come from Google, it's going to come from Bing, it's going to come from search engines and even these, the new models of OpenAI, et cetera, are going onto browsers. So they might be doing things with AI, but they're operating inside of a browser which will still use a search engine. So. Marco. Hey Mike. Start of the week, Sunday nights always feel tough, mentally, emotionally. For me, I constantly overthink about the week ahead, stuff that can go wrong or difficult scenarios I will be in, etc. I know that it's all about putting your head down and just doing the work, but I constantly felt like the most that most Sunday nights since last year. Do you have any advice? I value your honesty and I want to get to the heart of the matter, so please don't hold back.

So there's a few things that.

At stake here. What usually this means is you are pushing up against your personal capacity. And that's not a bad thing. Because the nice thing about personal capacity is it can be flexed and it can be grown like a muscle versus like trucks and equipment. You can do it for a little bit, you can go past capacity, but it can't really expand. Like, you know, all of a sudden be able to use a truck for 30 hours a day.

A certain amount of capacity, amount of miles you can drive before you got to change the oil. And then it needs to be downtime. Same thing as employees. Like you can't just go way past their capacity indefinitely or suddenly over the course of time, they can work 20 hours a day. Just doesn't happen. So the nice thing about personal capacity is it is a muscle that can be flexed. Now the same way that you go to the gym, if you lift the 25 pounds over and over and over again and it's easy and you don't have these sort of this sort of anxiety on say a Friday night. It's because the weight is easy. And so as soon as you start pushing up against your pr, your limit in terms like the gym, in terms of weight, you get sore, it hurts, you don't want to do it, it's hard, it's difficult. And so just know that if you're going to increase your personal capacity, it is going to be painful. And this is the feeling that you will have. The same way you don't want to go in the gym and lift heavy things because it's not fun or exciting. And the reason that most people don't increase their personal capacity. And they live far below what their, their potential is, is because they never actually push their personal capacity. They're always wanting to stay in comfort. So if you're going to push your personal capacity, expect this sort of anxiety, expect, you know, nerves when you're walking up to people's door and door knocking, et cetera. Now you do that a thousand times, you do that 2,000 times, you that 5,000 times, all of a sudden it doesn't seem so bad. You just get the reps in the gym. And so what you're doing there is you're expanding your personal capacity. So I actually embrace that, that, that what you're feeling right now. Now if you go too much, too long, too deep into that, you can burn out. And so that's when you want to be careful. And it's like, well, as much as your goals and ambitions are, hey, I want to get, I want to grow like $12 million this year. Great, that's a 200% increase. Maybe we have to do 100% this year just so that way we don't burn out. Because if you extend too far past your personal capacity for too long, you can burn out. The same way if you go to the gym and just lift crazy amounts, heavy weight and just do tons and tons of reps, eventually your body will give out, you need to have the rest, you need to have sleep, eat correctly, et cetera. And the same thing is true in your business when it comes to personal capacity. But I think overall the vast majority of people live below their means or live below their capacity, their potential in life because they are unwilling to push up against the threshold of personal capacity and therefore it never increases. Kyle Tarvin from Moore, Oklahoma. I'm looking for a way to do employee write ups online to where I don't have to print off a physical paper and they can just sign everything online. Do you have, do you do anything like this for write ups? I don't know if you, I'm guessing you mean the yellow slips.

Because write ups would typically be more like a, you know, saying hey, a warning or like, you know, you're doing something wrong in your job.

Yeah, you could do this in DocuSign. You could do this in. There's like a whole bunch of assigned now, I think eight bucks a month for like up to ten signatures a month. As long as you're not doing high volume of signatures. It's pretty cheap. But like we pay gobs of money because most of these envelope companies and digital signature companies, once you get above like 100 or 200 signatures a month. It just starts to get super expensive. We're paying like 6, 7, $800 a month sometimes.

All right, next one is Kyle Tar from Moore, Oklahoma. Would you be. Oh, by the way, you could always do a PDF and then people can sign usually, almost always now from their phone. It's really simple, honestly. Just do a PDF. So you could literally make a Google Doc export as a PDF and send it over to someone and they can almost always sign there. By the way, Kyle Tower from Moklima, would you be willing to give some sort of profit sharing or bonus structure to a key employee doing more operational tasks within a business while you are away? If so, what would that additional compensation look like? Note this person is currently making $3 per hour base pay above everyone else as our standard pay is $15 per hour and everyone has the ability to make P4P. I'm still handing sales and dispatching, but this employee basically does everything else. He's not quite a gm, just helping us operational tasks. I'd probably give him a higher percentage on P4P that way it's still motivating for him to be out in the field performing work because you don't want to raise base pay too high. Because if you do that, you now incentivize him to less to do work out in the field. I would give him a higher percentage on P4P. It's very easy inside of P4P software just to change that number. Now he's still motivated to be out in the field working.

But yet you're giving him a higher rate because there's gonna be other tasks he might do that would slow him down, like training other people, doing stuff around the shop. And you just be honest with them. Hey, I'm gonna give you, I'm just gonna make up a number. Let's say everyone's right now at 25%. Hey, I'll give you 30% because I know there are things I ask you to do and you're so I really appreciate you doing them for me. And they might slow you down like training someone or doing other shop tasks. I'm gonna be. You're gonna be at 30% on P4P. So I think you could get some good buy in from that person too in doing that. And there's that, that understanding that, hey, you do expect them to do other tasks that are not inside P4P.

What do you use to create your calendar on mikeannies.com calendar? Is there a template we can use to make our own.

Yeah, I just use calendar. I used to use Canva.

So I think, I think a couple people inside the Facebook group are sharing. Oh, that might have been on WhatsApp. Sorry. I know some people were sharing like they basically kind of did the same thing and put it inside of a Canva document. So feel free to look at it and you can just literally copy a lot of it if you really wanted to.

But yeah, it's just in Canva and I think I just took like a hourly chart calendar and then just modified it all.

Dustin Beernick Hey Mike, I'm working through our estimates we sent last year through the spring and attempting to not only drag demand forward, but also trying to resell all the work we did last year for jobs that got declined, especially campaign massive growth mode. Should I lower price just to get in the door this year when I'm sending them an estimate, our demand is just getting started and is no way in full swing. But in the next two weeks we'll be flooded with estimates. Curious in your approach when we need work on the schedule, but we'll soon have people breaking down the door to get work done. Thanks. Yes, just be just you've done now, Dustin, enough spring rushes to know when that timing is. That's very good. So you know, okay, probably like middle of March, you know, doors are being knocked down, which means if you're going to do any sort of price discounts, as soon as you hit a certain date, you stop. So you say, okay, up until March 10th, we will do pricing decreases and price discounts to get these people on the schedule based upon last year's estimates. Great. But you know when you hit March 10th after, that's going to get crazy. So you just don't book. This is the advantage of having multiple spring rushes, usually three or four or more under your belt. You start to know exactly when these dates are based upon what the weather's looking like. Because you know, okay, in two weeks we're stopping and so we will just book our schedule very full with this lower margin work. But we're trying to reactivate people from a year ago and that's cool. But then as soon as we know in a couple weeks there'll be leads pouring in and we will, we will want to serve those customers. And then once you hit that date, people can still accept the prices, but you're not going to give any discounts. So I would just do like a more of a sliding scale. So for example, you have like 30 or 40 of these I would do 20 of them. Okay, now you're booked up to the fifth. Okay now I would do five or 10 more the next day. And just make sure I don't ever offer discounts when I'm already booked to March 10th. And I would use this in your.

In your estimate, your follow up with them. Be like hey, we're offering this discount up until you have to get done before March 10, for example. And we have X amount of spots available like you actually have now a real reason to give them a limit. And it's, it's, you're not like you're not even making this up. Like there's a legit date and amount of customers that you can accept before that time period at that price.

Dustin, back to my question. On Friday for a full time salesperson, a position, should the goal for close ratio be 90 to 100% regardless of growth or profit mode? I know that Lee does a ton of other stuff too, but how do you come up with what you want? His close rate for franchise sales or the benchmark you track, Is it different? It's a different thing than what we are doing selling frontline work to customers. But I'm curious what benchmark you would ask as it pertains to close ratio for a sales guy as this. That is my current position and moving forward we will attempt to hire one.

Now it's difficult to say someone should be having a certain percentage if they're, if you're going to say regardless of profit or growth mode because your prices are going to be different in profit mode versus growth mode. Assuming like yes, assuming that your prices are different, their close ratio will be different. And so.

For Lee for example, it's very different because the show rate, there's a bunch of drop offs and it's a multiple call like sequence so people get weeded out through the entire thing. Like I think like probably 1015 people don't show up despite text emails, multiple calls beforehand, personalized messages beforehand loom and text messages like imessage going forward still 10:15 people won't show up. Then you have some people like immediately on the call. Leanos are not eligible to be inside of Augusta Nation. From a cultural perspective then they might get another call and he realized they don't have enough capital to actually take advantage. They only have 30 or 40 grand which is now something that we don't recommend them joining. We know that those are the people in their second spring rush flame out. They have to turn off leads they can't deal with the amount of volume of work. So again, another threshold, like there's so many filters as a multiple step calling system, it's more a matter of like, of the qualified people that get through those, how many can we close? That's really then what you'd probably consider your close rate. Like how many people you do proposal, like how many people. Like, yes, you can join. Let's get started to actually joining. For Lee's perspective, for you, I would say like 30 to 40% close ratio is usually optimization for profit in terms of your pricing. When you're getting above that and you're saying you're in profit mode, usually you can increase prices. So if you're like, I'm at 65, 70, 80, close ratio and I'm in profit mode, unless you, unless you have massive amount of churn issues that you have to replace, you should be able to increase your prices.

So the, the balance here, the reason I don't ever give really strong numbers on this is because depending on your churn is what you are willing to be able to have in terms of close ratio. Because once you're in profit mode, all you're trying to do is match your churn, like replace your churn with jobs. And so how many jobs you need will be the determinating factor of what you need your close ratio to be. And what you need your close ratio to be will be the determining factor of how high you can raise your prices. So that's why like ultimately when you go in profit mode, getting really, really laser like focused on operations and tightening all of the customer service issues up and training your employees is so important because if you can cut your churn from 30% to 20%, you will need one third less customers to backfill churn, which means you could theoretically raise prices by literally a third. More like the math isn't linear there, but you get what I'm saying. If I'm burning through 100 customers a year and all of a sudden now it drops down to 65, 66, because I simply did a better job of customer service, training my crews operationally, really dialing in my team, I need 30 less customers, which means I can raise my prices until 30 less people accept my jobs. So this is why when you go into profit mode, you turn all of your attention from sales into operations. You cut out in person estimates. Not because you don't have the time as much as like I need to now spend my time on reducing churn. And the number one way to do that in a recurring business model is focus on training like it is. I just went through this last week. Like the training is so important because if your turn is 60 or 70%, you will have. You will never be able to be in profit mode if you're burning through 100% of your customers every year because you're poor quality, poor training, too many yellow slips. Customers are always unhappy. Guys are always messing stuff up. If that's happening, you'll never be able to go in profit mode because as soon as you raise your prices, you lose customers and then you don't have a high enough close ratio to replace Churn. So what do you do? You either spend a bunch of money on marketing, which makes no sense, or B, you can't raise prices because you got to keep enough jobs coming in to replace Churn. So that's why it's so important when you switch into profit mode, having an operational GM or you as the operator, being very much in the weeds with the team, like training, evaluating every team member, like right now, for everyone listening, like most of us have between one and six weeks before spring rush. This is the time to do training with your team. This is the time to get in the truck with everyone, every single person. This is the time to evaluate them on all aspects of their job. This is the time to pull out a stopwatch and start clocking them. Is the time to pick up the weed whacker and show them how it's supposed to be done. This is the time to be able to actually figure out who's efficient and not efficient on P4P and why and give them feedback and do one on ones. This is the time to do it. Because every moment you can spend on training your team now is pays off during the spring rush. And so, yeah, for anyone in profit mode, it's not a matter of like, oh, I just sit back now and just raise my prices. You focus on operations that you get back in with the crew because you were in growth mode. And that's why it says in stage four of growth, which is the 500,000 to 800,000, it says you probably had some waste during the profit wilderness of 200,000, 500,000, you got through as fast as possible. You were in growth mode. Awesome. That will cause waste. That waste comes in the form of poor training. Your crew's not doing a great job. You kind of had to throw three or four people into a truck with like a couple days of training. They're not great. Getting some yellow slips. They're super inefficient. Now it's time to tighten all those things up because you're in profit mode so you can't have high churn in profit mode. It'll lead to a disaster.

Mr. Anonymous, I'm asking this out of curiosity. Pain posted door hangers, prices in the Facebook groups being both being $55 weekly. $55 bi weekly. I like the idea but wanted to see where what you thought of it. I like the idea of if we come weekly, it's 55, we come bi weekly, it's still 55. Yeah, like in some markets it's very common just to do bi weekly. So, so you don't have to like change the design. You can kind of make it a marketing thing. I've seen some people really do well when they cross out the numbers that are printed from vistaprint and then write in a number. By the way, if you're going to write in the numbers, you might as well have vistaprint print them and mark them all down. Not a bad idea by the way. But that being said, for some markets, like in where Ryan's at, bi weekly is very common. It's kind of like the standard. So you're basically saying, hey, whether you do weekly or bi weekly, we still have 55, especially if people like to bounce back and forth between weekly and bi weekly. In your markets. In our market we have one switch and so I try to prevent them from going switching to bi weekly because I want to capture that extra three to four lawn mowings during July and August. That's where like we make all of our profits. So that's why we, we, we do weekly and bi weekly like that. And for the vast majority of us, from a scheduling perspective, it's nice to have the consistency of weekly. But in, in some markets, and Ryan's one of them, bi weekly is just so common. It's just easier to do it across the board like that. And what you could also do, by the way, is print them off as like 55, 75 and then cross out the 75 and do 55 again. If you're trying to really go after biweekly, it's not really like I don't, I don't mind biweekly. It's a matter of I don't like people switching because it messes up my scheduling. So, Mr. Anonymous, I really admire how your faith shows itself through your business life and family. What denomination are you? How do you have any direction? And do you have any direction for a new believer looking for a church home? Wow, we getting deep? Okay. So it's a non denominational church, my dad's the pastor of it. And then any direction for a new believer looking for a church home.

Like, personally I believe that you aren't going to live any higher than your pastor in terms of spiritually. So like, if you can't look at your pastor like, oh, at least spiritually, that's someone I look up to, then you'll probably move on.

And there's never going to be a perfect church ever. So like you, you will go to a church and you'll be like, oh, like I don't like the music or like I don't like the way they have things set up or like if they go too long or they're too loud or like there's always going to be that. And like the classic joke, I'm gonna butcher it. But something along the lines of like, there's no perfect church. Every church is perfect till you show up or something like that. If you're always looking for a perfect church, like, you'll never get one. So you know, my direction would be really look at the pastor, see if his, his or her depth of spirituality is something that you would aspire to have. And then are you willing to compromise on all the other little aspects maybe in the church you don't agree with because you never will agree with everything, whether it be standards or how they sing or whatever. So that's my two cents. Probably wrong. If you want to talk more in depth about that, Lee probably has a way better answer. Okay, people say over hire before you get busy. By over hire does that hire six people even if you don't have the work for them right away or gradually get people hired. So I never want to be too far ahead of myself unless you know your spring rushes. So if this is your first or second spring rush, be care very careful with this because it could lead to massive inefficiencies, people working part time, then quitting, as well as.

Massive inconsistency of who's working on your crew and people like not showing up and stuff like that. So I would only hire six more people if last winter, last spring you were short, short staffed and had to turn off your leads and you knew you could have kept three or four more people busy. So once you have spring rushes under your belt, you're okay. You'll, you'll get this, this muscle of, of like expecting, like what to expect in spring rush. If this is your spring rush first one, I would not do six people right away unless you had at least 30 to 40 thousand dollars in a marketing and you're just dumping money into marketing and doing probably full time door hangers for one or two of them.

Oh, here we go. We have, we're planning to hammer down marketing to get from from 90 recurring clients to 300. The majority of girls will happen March to May. How should we structure our timing and hiring people? So if I was you and and you got three or four good people, I would scat spread them out over the two to three weeks in between each of them. So I would start like March 1, March 15, April 1, April 15, May 1, May 15. There's your six people right now I would turn leads off for say indeed to get new applicants. If you've filled up the next few few slots and you're good to go also then if you get two or three people hired and you're hey, we're as busy as we thought, like we're at 150, 160, we don't need to hire yet. Great, just push the next one off. So don't do six at a time. I can guarantee that will mess up. You will not train them effectively, you'll not spend enough time with them. They will not get integrated in the culture enough. What type of bonus structure would you recommend we give our team members for each accepted lawn mowing from a door hanger. So there's lots of perspectives on this. Brian Connor basically said, hey look, if someone's just running door hangers from one to the next, there's no point in giving them an incentive for a closed job because they didn't do anything really. That's a very valid point. Now if you're expecting them to talk to customers, that's when I usually like to give an incentive. So if you're having them do the door hand knock or knock and then give them the door hanger and then you only put the door hand if they're not knocking or if they're able to actually close people that they do run into. Because even if you're doing door hangers and not knocking doors, you'll still talk to people. Assuming you're open to it, you'll Probably, I'd say 1 out of 100 people, they'll be outside in their lawn, their garage will be open or they'll be walking outside, they're driving their car or something. So I like to give some sort of incentive if I expect them to talk to people.

And you know, 10, $20 or whatever it might be if they sign up, you could do that it also depends, like, how much you're willing to spend. The more you give that incentive for them to actually close someone, you might get them to talk to more people. So it's like, do you want that or not? If you just want math to just put door hangers out, then it becomes a matter of, hey, I'm going to have to have a measurement of like, making sure they actually did them. Because they could also just take a thousand door hangers from you, throw them in the trash and then tell you they were delivered. So you need some way to track like their steps. For examp, there's other people have mentioned how different apps to use for that. If you're just strictly doing base one delivery, how do you ensure they pass them out? Pass them out? Wouldn't removing the bones make them want to just take longer to pass them out? Yes, you're 100% right. So, but what you could do, what you could do is you could give them an incentive based on the number of deliveries. So you could say, hey, for every hundred, I'm giving you $20, for example. And then they want to get as many as delivered as possible. You just need to have a counterbalance that and as like, make sure they're getting delivered. You can't have them just being dumped into a trash bin or put into people's mailboxes. And so that's why a lot of people are just having them do an app. A lot of the running apps, Strava, et cetera, where you can just track them and see are they actually going up to each of the doors, etc. So it's like, look, as long as you're clocked into this and I'm tracking you, you can be paid.

All right, everyone, hope you have a fantastic Monday. See you all tomorrow. Take care.