Mike Minutes Mastermind 02/25/2024

Hello, Guess the nation. Hope you're doing good. It's late Sunday night, so this is going to replace tomorrow's Mike Knits mastermind. I have a whole bunch of stuff in my schedule so I want to make sure I had time to go through these and Monday's a little bit jam packed for me. So a couple quick announcements if you haven't already. In the Facebook group there is a.

A poll and that is would you want to see Command center when they do OTP over the phone estimates including the driveways and walkways. So this was brought up in a couple masterminds ago. Makes perfect sense from a efficiency standpoint at Command center takes them. It'll take save them a few seconds on every single time they're measuring. And is also the fact that driveways and walkways probably actually increase the time it takes on those property because of edging, blowing off the walkway, cracks of the driveways, et cetera. You're still maintaining all of that and it actually takes you longer than if you were just to stripe over it. Right. So makes perfect sense from that perspective. The only drawback is not having that square footage for the sake of chemical applications. So down the road, if you want to use that for a custom field to be able to have that for chemical applications, it might affect that a little bit. That's like the only drawback I can really think of. So there's a poll. We are going to follow the results of that poll. So I have a feeling most people are just going to want to include it because this is more accurate from a moving perspective. But please post your poll there. We are only going to choose one option. It has to be standard across all of Augusta Nation, so made a poll feel free to post in there. Later this week we have a Franchise Advisory Council meeting that'll be really positive. We communicate with them talking about several other things, but that one specifically will affect all of us. And and so there is a poll in the Facebook group for that. There was a whole bunch this past week of people making changes or adding instant quotes to your website, which is great. It does take us a little bit of time, so we're probably a little bit behind. Usually within two or three days we get those updated and changed or added. We're probably a day or two behind on that just because I think like 30 or 40 people submitted that this week, which is great. Get it before spring rush. Let's rock and roll. I think some people kind of waited until seeing.

It being done at most locations and now they've jumped on board. So now the vast majority of everyone has instant quotes on their website, which is fantastic and so just know that we're a day or two behind on that. Okey dokey. What else? I think that's all I had for announcements. Let's jump into it. Questions Logan from Nebraska I know I'm late to this, but all recurring jobs that were paused early last fall we're not put into copa. I'm working on getting it straightened out with cc, but if anyone else hasn't compared your essay Zooper route to the new COPA route, I highly suggest doing so. You're missing almost half of our recurring jobs. Will CC be double checking any everything from our old software or is it on us to make sure nothing got missed? Assuming CC handled all of all of our transition? Yeah, so they'll be double checking this. This week we saw that there are inconsistencies of how people were pausing, canceling or deleting jobs. In service autopilot, Zooper wasn't really as much an issue, but in service autopilot it was like some people did different things. So for example, if you pause like a month and a half before because someone just pauses early, they might have potentially missed that one. So always a good thing to check because you know those things. Command center is going to run a filter and go for it, so definitely check it. That being said, I have already submitted this into Command center to double check these accounts. But the positive thing is going forward with Copilot having the off seasons, this should be completely preventable because now you will never have to pause or restart services. You'll just set one up with an off season and go for it. So yeah, fantastic.

But yeah, feel free to like. Great, great thing to double check because in service if someone paused like a month and a half before everyone else, there is a chance they got missed just during that transition. But yeah, going forward, like set up all of your off seasons, you should never really have to touch the visit unless ever actually, you know the customer wants to stop service.

Joel, as a thought exercise, if you start on January 1st and had to hit 1 million revenue in December revenue by December 31st of that year through one or more Augusta locations, what would you do? How would you do it and why would you make that choice? Would you try to scale up one big location, create a small regional cluster like you didn't chart last year or something in between? The challenging part was hitting 1 million in revenue by December 31 is the fact that you're actually going to have to hit like 200, probably $220,000 in monthly revenue to actually hit a gross revenue of a million dollars by the end of the year. Because if you're actually trying to hit like a run rate or an annual recurring revenue of.

A million dollars, that's not so hard because you only have $86,000 per month in revenue. So hitting that but in one year would be pretty simple. But hitting actually $1 million in gross revenue, you'd have to get to about almost a quarter million. Because, like, the first month you might do 10,000 and 30,000, then 40,000, then 60,000, then 90,000, then 110,000, 140,000. You'd have to eventually hit, like, at such a massive scale. So that would be very difficult. I've only seen.

A couple owners in a gustination get close, like around the 800,000 and 900,000 level in their very first year. And that's phenomenal. Like, you literally have to get to, like, a hundred. And I think 130, 140,000amonth in revenue is kind of like in their first years is sort of the max. All of them in their second year slowed down dramatically because they realized that much growth just caused a lot of structural problems. And a lot of times they. They added too many services. Only about 20 to 30% of their revenue was recurring, so they had a much harder winter, etc. If I was to do this, though, if I was actually trying to hit a million dollars in revenue within one year, I would probably start.

Three locations.

And I would just focus on getting the best general managers, because I do believe it's a lot of, like, I do believe that one location can hit $300,000 in annual revenue in their first year if they have a great GM. I 100% believe that. So I would do a cluster. I would do a few locations. I'd train those gms up like crazy in January and February so that when March comes, they're ready to go. I would probably test a whole bunch of stuff with door hangers as well as Facebook ads driving to my instant quotes. And I would run those two in parallel and just pull money on marketing. I would probably try to spend no more than 50 grand. That'd be my goal. Because if I can get 50 grand in marketing, I have a 20x multiple. If I can do $1 million in annual revenue, and I think if I spent 50 grand between door hangers being delivered and Facebook ads driving towards my.

Mowing, that would be my goal. So I'd probably do Facebook ads, driving a ton of traffic to my instant quotes or mowing and then like recurring services and just blast that. Probably spend like $20,000 on that over the course of the spring rush. And then I would spend the rest of the money on instant quote door hangers and getting them delivered. That's the real cost is getting them delivered. And I would get someone to just be full time door hangers for four to five months. That'd probably be my strategy. Off the top of my head, that's what I would do.

Alex from Stanwood Hey Mike, thank you for sharing your tips on how to better schedule work to optimize the spring rush. Can you expand more on how you decide which project to schedule after the spring rush? I feel that we will maximize our capacity with first time mows, lawn renovation treatments and spring cleanups already. Perhaps we should consider only taking on smaller projects or only accept projects from a tighter radius. Increase hourly rate, but worry about close ratio being too small and having too much work for the estimator. Crush the rush. Great question Alex. And just I want to commend you Alex, being so much more involved the past couple months in the community. I just wanted to say that specifically to you. So thank you.

Yeah, so this is a great question. This is something I'm trying to actually like get better at describing because I think this is a huge unlock. I know we talked about on the last Mastermind about the importance of Spring rush.

Again, if a job is recurring and time sensitive, we're putting it in the spring rush. If it is a project and one time job, it is going in the off season. Now when I say off season, I mean non spring rush. So if your spring rush is March, April, May and June, all the other eight months of the year is where I'd be scheduling your projects and one time jobs.

And time insensitive jobs. Now there are some jobs that are project based like spring cleanups that you can't book off four months from now. They are time sensitive. That's why it's time sensitive and recurring jobs. Those are the ones I'm focused on during spring rush. So I'd be really trying to pitch all your your existing customers to get a spring a spring cleanup. I'd be pitching it before you start getting busy for spring rush because those are time sensitive jobs that can be pulled forward and and done now. So if you're starting mowing in two, three, four weeks, right now is the time to reach out to your existing customer base and say hey, spring cleanups get them done now before we get booked out three months. Because guess what, when you hit April, you are going to be booked out three months for any project based work. And so I'd be trying to pull any sort of demand forward right now from recurring customers. That's why the one click estimate emails are so important. I'd be sending out your one click estimate email out out two to four weeks before the spring rush, trying to pull any demand possible forward for existing customers. And you're pitching as get in now before we get booked out five, six weeks and you can't get on the schedule. We want to give priority to you as a loyal customer. We want to make sure you're on the schedule before we just get a deluge of customers, new customers coming in. It also shows your loyalty to them and creates goodwill. So I'd highly, highly, highly, highly recommend doing that. And then I agree with you. Like your. If you think you can hit your capacity on first time mows, lawn renovations, treatments and spring cleanups, then it's just a matter of like, there's no reason to be accepting any projects outside of that. Like I just be accepting those things. And so when a job gets accepted, the first thing you're doing is like, okay, great, they are starting June 1st because I'm focusing on these for these three months. I'm just focusing on these, you know, other things. First time mows, lawn renovations, treatments, spring cleanups, just focus on those instead of trying to get all these other projects. And this is the thing, the first couple weeks of spring rush, I see people like, well, I can take this project or whatever. They book themselves out three to four weeks and now all of a sudden they realize they can't take first first time MO's and they're overbooked. So be like, knowing what that spring rush period is, is so important to actually be able to do exactly what you're talking about. And so you know, Alex and other people, you know, this is your third spring rush and this is the time to like, okay, I know what, when it's going to get busy. I know when I'll be able to do first time O's. I know when those come pouring in and I know when that slows down. And just being really religious about that will allow you to increase your recurring revenue during spring rush and it will help you the rest of the off season with recurring work and recurring revenue to cover overhead. So yeah, I 100% agree with you. I would just say that.

I don't think necessarily increase your hourly rate because again, your rate will stay competitive and you'll close them at a time when otherwise you'll be burning through your backlog. July, August, September, most of our backlogs are decreasing. You just don't want to be putting on a three week project in the middle of spring rush, which is going to prevent you from getting 10 or 15 more mowing customers because you have to pause your mowing estimates for a week or two. Landon Smith from Tallahassee, what do you think about us sending out an email that says something along the lines of mowing will start March 1 on a bi weekly basis, then switch to a weekly basis starting the month of April? My thoughts on this is that grass is definitely not growing fast enough to be cut weekly and it could probably make the majority of people happier to be cut on a bi weekly schedule until then. This may exaggerate the demand curve more though, making it hard to match the spike in demand with labor and a truck. I just really want to focus on our attention this year and I think most of my area prefer biweekly outside of May to June and August. September, what are your thoughts? Thanks. You know, again, it sounds like to me, Landon, you figured out what that demand looks like when you know you need to do weekly. So establish those, knowing that's going to increase your budget hours during those four months, right? May, June and August, September. Outside of that, now you're going to have an increased capacity for projects. So what I would say is if you're going to do bi weekly service in March, try to get as many spring cleanups in March because you're going to have less budget hours and some of your people will opt out and say then just start me in April. They might say that we'll get as many spring cleanups done as possible. So when April and May and June come, you can just get all these first time MO's and put them on the schedule right away instead of having all these spring cleanups coming and lagging. So that would be my recommendation. You could probably mix this what you just said in with a one click estimate email for the spring cleanups being like, hey, we're going to be doing bi weekly service in March, going to switch to weekly during April and May because that's or you know, April, May and June. That's when the grass starts getting crazy during March. If you'd like to get on the schedule, click here for the spring cleanups. That way it's like you almost are able to bury that lead. It's like hey, this is happening. Assume the close. This is the schedule. And if you want this, contact us about this, which is the spring cleanups. So you're going to divert their attention and you're going to say, okay, this is happening, here's a schedule. And then if you want spring cleanups, click here and you divert their attention to the spring cleanup instead of the mowing schedule that you've already put in place and now have in writing. So I think that would be powerful. Yes, you're going to get one or two people say they don't get the email and you have to refund them for one or two cuts during March. But that is well worth the other 50% of people that will just roll with this and you'll improve revenue incredibly. A word of encouragement. Okay, we can handle that. I've been paying attention to the criticism of COPEP lately and although I wish there was a simple mode or something to affect that or to that effect, I truly believe Copilot will be a game changer. The meta for CRMs the benchmark to compare to Mike, you're making the best CRM. Although it needs work, that doesn't mean it's as bad as some people are making out to be. We all just need more shakedown time. We'll figure it out. If you find yourself losing sleep over it, just use the time to pray. We didn't join because of the current advantages the Augusta that Augusta offers, but the future ones as well. You got this brother. I appreciate it. There are definitely been some low moments. I do feel like we're on the come up and switching things around. I do feel bad though because we are about three months behind and a lot of the things that Augusta has been wanting and is very comparable to service autopilot, we, you. We were halfway through getting those things done and so that, that it doesn't make me lose sleep, it does make me get anxious and things like, it's just, it's the same thing as if you hurt your, you know, you did something stupid and you hurt your kids, you hurt your, your wife, like you love them. And so it, it is only because I care that it affects me. But I appreciate the word of encouragement. I also know that when you have general like.

Negativity towards something, everyone kind of gets in the bandwagon and then they assume all the worst about the product. And so like even when I look at support still a lot of times when people do bug reports or they get mad at support, it is like hey, your settings off like this Wasn't changed. And. But it's just, it's difficult when we do have problems to actually be defensive of the team or defensive of the product. And so I've just really, right now I kind of feel like a punching bag because you just have to, when you have made mistakes, it's like, hey, I have to own this. Even if some of these things aren't necessarily right. But.

Ultimately, right now, if we had not switched to Copilot, our new operators joining, I would have to join the elite membership of Copilot or of Service Autopilot. And it costs. It's 850 bucks a month. And for our solo operators, and there's a couple of them starting this year, they would be paying $850 a month for software. And that's like literally more than their franchise fees. It's more than what they spend at Command center just for the software. And so whereas Copilot's less than half of that. And so it makes it really difficult for them to get started. And so I know I'd get a lot of hate from. Not hate, but like, there'd be a difficult time trying to be able to convince new operators to join Augusta when I have this. $850aminimum to get started with Service Autopilot. Although it works and for a lot of you, I understand, it's like, look, we'd pay whatever if it just worked correctly. And so.

Yeah, I just, I really appreciate everyone, like, for the vast majority of everyone, they've been super accommodating and understanding. But I also know, I know there's like 1 or 2, maybe more, 3 or 4% of August Nation that is really mad and they're not going to come to me about it. And so that's why I use this open forum sometimes to say I apologize because, like, you guys are all just so nice. You're not going to come to me and like, and say like, you stink and you're horrible and all the rest of it. And so. But regardless of someone not saying those things, it's not like I don't see the problems and the issues and how I've messed up. So I really do care and I want what's best for all of you tremendously. And I just, I just know that in 12 to 24 months, like Augusta will be so far ahead using Copilot, like, there's been definitely days. It's like I've been so close to being like, okay, like, let's just tear the band aid off and like, let's offer allow other CRMs, et cetera. And I talked about it with Dr. Cashy and the options of what I could do, et cetera. But training 70, 70 people at command center this close to spring rush on a different software and allowing now all the iterations that we had last year, like, it's insanity to me. Now, looking back at what we did last year, where we were having two and three CRMs and command center had to be trained in all of them, just led to so many problems. But I just. I just know that in, like, six months, everyone's gonna be like, okay, that was a good decision. In 12 months, it'll be really obvious because we will have connected Max AI who have connected instant quotes, and we will have connected all of that to copilot with P4P and make this, like, incredible thing that no one will be able to compete with outside of augustination. And so I try to keep my. My focus on that. But, yeah, there's like, lots of times, like last night, I just couldn't sleep. So it's just my brain gets going about how it's affecting you and, like, the fear of the unknown. Because I know there are people that are mad at me inside of Augusta Nation. Like, I don't care about the public. That's why I'm not really listening to the Facebook group. I know there's people that go off, and then those are the same people that a week later, like, I have.