Mike Minutes Mastermind 02/26/2025

Hey everyone, hope you're doing good. When started I am on a trip to visit a company that does robotic mowers on large scale. They're larger commercial, doing the whole operation out of it. I kind of mentioned that conference so I will share some video and stuff tomorrow there where I am headed. A couple quick announcements on the Facebook group I released the.

It'S a three page document with 15 tips and tricks around door hangers. Observations from Connor Hutchinson after doing 20,000 of them. So really good media team kind of made it look nice. I added some of the words and just make sure it flowed well for everyone and then check your email if you haven't already gotten Update from Command center from Liz of several updates from them changes and improvements making sure that their service areas you can now update every two weeks just to make sure there's lots of flexibility. We had some problems too with so many locations starting the past couple months. People would get onboarded the first week of the month but then their service area wasn't updated to the first and so that was causing some problems. But also just during the spring rush when you have the flexibility to be able to adjust as demanded because in two weeks things can change so fast, people leave, employees get drowned in work, etc so I want to be sensitive to that. We just can't do it too much, too high a frequency because it does create a lot of operational drag for command centers. Everyone has to download or delete and then download the app, put the PMZ files inside of everything. So all that to say Internet now every two weeks. And that was noted inside of the email as well. So go and jump in. I do have a hard cut off to board this plane, but we'll get through as many as we can here.

All right, first up is from Garrett, Garrett smith in Glendale, Colorado. Our current constraint is LI so I'm wanting to lower P4P percentage. We're in high cost area and so even though our wages were less than 40% of revenue.

I think we need to do it in order to optimize the profit. Labor is not the constraint. We haven't had any keeping good team members and hiring team members. Last year with 613000 in top line with a ten thousand dollar cash loss after debt payments and my salary of 40k this year we are shooting the 800k top line 200k bottom line. Although I understand it can take multiple years of optimization to get there. How would you go about lowering it and when would you lower it? I've thought about lowering 1% per month until you're down to 28, 25 PPP or waiting until after spring rush and getting it all at once. Our Snow techs make 26 to 50 to 6, 26 to $50 an hour. And in snow season, mowing season, it's 22 to $40 an hour. Our minimum wage is 1881 with a base wage of $20 an hour and an hour rate of 120. Yeah. So I would not raise an incrementally like this. That means every single month you have to bring this up to your team. They will be. You'll lose trust in them. I would recommend when you raise prices as you optimize for profitability. I would raise prices. I'm sorry, I would lower the PVP rate as you raise prices. In the perfect world, you're able to do this very quickly in one big price increase. So for example, you could be like, hey, we're raising prices by 20 across the board because we're just at capacity. As soon as you hit 20%, you know immediately you can lower it down your P4P by like 4 or 5%. So I'd rather just take it in chunks. That's why we usually say three years of optimization. Because you know this year you're gonna raise by, say you raise prices by 20%. Next year you raise prices again by 20%. Year after that you have 20% again. That's when you're gonna be at that level. And I would just at each of those levels know that I have room to move my PPP down but I would do at the same time so your crew isn't affected. And I wouldn't bleed it, bleed them out by doing like incremental every month that just me personally I have to address every single month with them. It'd be difficult cause pay periods would fall between the months. So yeah.

And ideally I would do it during the off season and there's less crew members or when they're making a bunch of money on snow, for example. And then you readjust everything. Explain. At one time, at the beginning of spring rush, once price increases are going to the roof.

You can, even if you raise price in the middle of spring rush, just keep their, their number the same until they're all crushing on P to be. So if they have a lull during spring rush, it gets wet or it slows them down a bit with new mows, etc. I would probably just wait until the end of the spring rush and then I would make the hey, we're Reducing the number down. Mr. No, Mike, I'm looking to ADP for payroll, considering paying employees weekly. You know how much more that would cost in fees compared to bi weekly? Is it worth in European or should I stick to a less frequent schedule? Also do I who do I contact at ADP to get set up? Thanks.

So if you're not going through command center's adp, it's a little more expensive but still they still give us like a 20, 25% off. So there's a contact person. I believe it is on the preferred vendor list. But if you just reach out to them and you say you're from Augusta Long Care, I'm a preferred vendor, they will get you set up at the right person. I'm 99 sure. On the dashboard on ADP and a preferred vendor, it has a contact person and you can reach out to them. And in terms of fees, I wouldn't make this decision weekly and bi weekly based on fees. I would make it based upon the fact that what you want on P4P I like to have a wider, a larger pay period because it means the yellow slip, the amount of performance dollars on the table for yellow slips is higher and higher and higher. And I like that. And it allows for just in that second week, especially when they knew they made 500 on P4P last week. 500 performance dollars. They're very careful. It means more when they have yellow slopes. Mr. Anonymous, why do you anticipate the newly recorded franchisee training? When do you anticipate it should be by the end of this week. They have it done all edited, chopped up and ready to go. I'm coming up with a game plan for my manager who's smart, starts on Monday.

Yeah, like I, I mean I would recommend sending someone to training.

By the time you put them as a label, assuming you're titling them as manager. I would try to get them to training but before then I would have worked with them for a long time. But I don't know who this is so I can't give detailed advice here. So this might also just be like someone dropped out, you know, trying to replace someone else or something like that. So I shouldn't judge. But yeah, it should be by next, by next week for sure. It'll be actually up on the academy. I know it's done all the edits but they're just the upload of time alone. It was like 2 terabytes of data because like 3 cameras that are all high def and then all the audios and Stuff like that for five days, four days, whatever. Mr. I know it's a weird time to mention this, but can we have command center pre qualified lead for Christmas lights? I didn't mention our $400 minimum or whatever it is. Do they already do this? I feel like every person I sent an estimate to complain about the price. So we, we don't have a formal process. What a lot of people did last year, which is really good in their wiki. They literally just had a paragraph that they asked Command center to read people. So feel free to reach out. I think it was Bryson Turner, don't quote me on that, mentioned it on the Christmas lights, WhatsApp hub and what his verbiage was. And a lot of people used that and just edited it slightly, but it was like three or four sentences. Explain this part. So it kind of pre qualified everyone and he said it worked really well and they never missed anything. So usually when you have like random little things like that, they can miss it. But you put it in the right spot on the wiki where it's like, read this script. They can, they can usually do that when you're like, hey, I want, I want you to pre qualify someone. It's just too vague to them considering everyone's going to have different ways of offering qualification. So reading a script, supposedly it works really good for him. I know other people just adopted that same thing, so maybe check that out in the, in the WhatsApp group.

Plano, Texas. Audi. I'm happy to announce cr. My wife and I, along with our team of other people are starting to celebrate starting up to celebrate recovery. I'm not a feeling guy, but I am going to talk about my feelings. I feel a little lonely out here. Allegedly there's a new franchise in wy. Every time I check the map I get, I just, I'm just anxious. It probably means you're gonna make that website. Finally there's seeing how his location will be less than three miles from city turf. That's funny. No. All jokes aside, I'm really not lonely excited mainly because of the future impact. But I was curious about an update. But bless your brother and the team and everyone that plays a part. Part moving they guess the machine. Sounds like someone's joining in. Wiley, Texas. I think he was. They were just here for training. Really, really great operator and so definitely hit him up, talk to him. But yeah, I know, I know Audie has this. From day one, Audi has wanted to compete with city turf. So. No, it's his, his little.

What'S it called not 10 sorry not up sleep all right next question from audience well question the wiki cleaning up I'm looking to clean up some of my other pricing in wiki. Do we still have the ability to adjust it and then submit via email? I seem to have problems my Apple computer and making adjustments and updates without messing it up. Karen and I talked about it but she's under the interpretation we no longer have access to manually adjust in these Word document spreadsheets to gust of dashboard PDF files. So what you can do Audi instead of having to edit all these things just email estimate Augusta longest services.com Tell them the changes that you want and then they will do one of two things. They might send you the file, there's tons of changes and then ask you to send it back or they'll just make the changes for you and that's probably going to be easiest and you don't mess anything up. Especially if you're not comfortable with like changing things on your computer. Just contact them and they'll walk you through the whole process. Estimate GustAlongerServices.com Mr. Anonymous I'm getting my trucks wrapped this week and the company said that they can put a small QR code near the back of the truck near the tailgate. The QR code would direct to the website. Would this be allowed? Thank you. Yeah that's fine. I would just ask when was the last time you scanned a QR code on a truck? Like you have to be very close unless you're making it big which now starts to become the best eyesore if you're making a really big QR code. I'm not a huge fan of that. Look, I don't think people really utilize it honestly only because it gets close to my trucks are usually people that are complaining if they're going to be scanning a little funny QR code. Now if it's big, okay, there's some validity there but honestly it's faster for most people that are using voice to just Talk to Apple, CarPlay, Siri et cetera and just like hey call Augusta Longcake. It's like right now I just contacted Siri by saying the word so.

You know that, that, that, that is much more hands free and then we utilize in my opinion much more than a QR code. So the real real objective is rank well on Google so that when they say that it pulls it up correctly you have a Google listing done, et cetera.

Jason from Knoxville, Tennessee Mike, I'm struggling more than just a little.

Trying to Understand taxes and the best way to minimize how much we pay. I'm very debt averse. Intend to pay cash for purchases 95% of the time we are debt free including our home. Let's go. Except for one small lower payment. $250. My intention has been to not take a huge salary or large distribution and just grow the business. However, that plan is not working very well. Tracy is paid for her work in the office about $40,000 a year and I take a salary of 85,000. My accountant said due to us having retained earnings this year, it pushes our gross income to $275,000. Which also means we have a huge tax bill. This is a good problem to have $275. Good job man. I'm so proud of you guys. Extremely frustrating. Okay, well let's first off say like I think most of us would be happy with 275000 gross income. I think we get started you or you're at 400000 gross revenue. So let's go. So that's first off. Good job. You're crushing it doing frustrating is I really want to leave the money in so we can grow the business. Buy a shop, purchase truck, et cetera. I'm getting hammered and I'm not sure what to do. We certainly can't take a large lump sum out and the business run still runs smoothly. So I certainly don't like what we made anywhere near that number. Okay, got it. So I certainly don't feel like we made anywhere near that number. Sorry for the rant but I'm not sure what is the best approach to take and would appreciate you describing it to me in naming terms so I can understand. Wish you the absolute best in upcoming wedding. Thank you.

So.

First off, that's a lot of salary between you and Tracy. From a tax perspective I think you. You could probably get away with less on your end. From a tax perspective I would. I. You know, especially because you have Caleb involved. I think you could probably warrant paying yourself less just so you don't have to pay as much taxes there. But this is when you like this is. You're. You're in the million dollar club. You're going to be there in July. This is a lot of what we're going to talk about. Unfortunately 2024 has passed. You're going to have a big tax bill. Unfortunately that is just kind of how it is. It passed 2024. This is why it's so important. But November, December to happen have an estimated tax and then really dive into like. So I do is like I have the advantage of Brad being in the office, but so he can kind of do it without me even asking now. But prior to having Brad, every single November and in November on my calendar was a reminder to send all my panels, all my balance sheets to my account and be like, hey, within the next few weeks I need an estimated payments last two weeks of the year. I can make any big purchases. So you're kind of stuck up a creek without a paddle on this one because last year happened already. You can't really get expenses. What I would do is talk to Brad or your account, whoever you're using and start thinking about ways to decrease your tax liability. Now we're going to talk all about this in July. Jason, there's lots of things you can do, whether it be doing a 401k, accept self employment one. You could do a Roth or traditional IRA because of your age, probably go in one direction or the other again talk to an accountant to figure this out your cpa.

And so you can, you can, you can, you could put like say $23,000 into your 401k but then you have to provide that to your team. Like so like there's a lot of little. Can we jump through here? I will say this. The vast majority of people that spend gobs and gobs of time trying to optimize this, like let's say you would probably save on 275. You could easily save 15 or 20 grand in taxes. Easily. And I'm not diminishing that. I'm just saying if you spent like, if you have to spend tons of time thinking about this or it's super, super debilitating feed even like have to jump through hoops and do legal structures in the whole nine yards that you can do to get around taxes, it might just be worth your time to like so focus that time on growing the business and making more than 15 or $20,000. But just be careful of that as you're kind of like getting that point now where it's starting to make sense. Like you can actually make sense of spending time on tax strategy. Many times even, even the richest people I know, they just know that their time is worth so much more as they make more money that they can just outspend. They can out earn this by just focusing on earning instead of defense.

Give me one second, guys.

Give me one second. As many chances of my flight. Give me one second. Sorry. Is the only time this day that I would be able to fit this in and unfortunately was only over.

Okay, folks, let's see here. Is it booting?

Ah, sorry guys. All right, we're good, we're good. All right. I. Hello, Mike, I would like to create Facebook page Google profile Instagram account for Christmas lights using the aggressive email. Is that okay? It is. Just be careful because sometimes it'll boot you out like, oh, actually you have a profile. You can create another profile. That's fine. Yeah, I know. On. On preview Mastermind, you mentioned that you can just change or add into an existing account, Google or Facebook. What's your point of view, having separate accounts for Christmas? You can totally do it. As long as you're using Augusta Lights or Augusta Christmas Lights of your territory name.

There are still several locations Nick was trying to help the other day still say Augusta Lawn care services. You are getting calls from people outside your area and you're paying for it. And when that lead comes in, it's being charged your account. Like that's why it's so important on that end. More importantly, from SEO searching and optimization perspective, you want it saying of your territory name and matching the URL of your website. So my POV on this, totally fine. Just keep in mind if you're going to have a Christmas lights account that you don't want it to be sitting dormant for 9, 10 months of the year when you're not doing Christmas light sales. So just be careful of that because it can actually hurt the SEO. But because we now have different websites like Augusta Lights and Augusta Longer services and they're separate, you can build domain authority in both spots. So I'm okay with it. Just, just be careful. I see some people like not posting anything besides like October or November that can hurt your search engine optimization and what you can do if you just focus all your time and energy on the one you potentially as long as you can do it, you're good at doing the reinstatement of the like revalidating your Google account. You could bring out like you can get your Augusta Lights and I have hundreds of reviews and all that goodwill and SEO be brought over somewhat to Augusta Lights. So just an idea, but either way I've seen work some people like both one or the other. I haven't seen a gimmy winner takes all on this one and I track it even more next year because last year the websites were also new. Some of the numbers I think are skewed by just like as the year got better, everyone's ranking was getting better. So like going into this year, I'LL be tracking this just a little bit more like seeing if it how it impacts things alone Ranch I like to track my website now analytics. What tools can I use for that? Just use Google Analytics and if you go to the dashboard and edit your web page you can actually request and we send you access to your Google Analytics account. So it usually takes a few days. We'll set it up for you, we'll send you to login and access stuff. We create a new account for each person that wants that. If you want to. If you have no idea what Google Analytics is.

You are going to be confused.

But if you know Google Analytics and you know how to do that and you want to watch videos about it, you can absolutely request that from the web team. Is there a way to track the input quote door hanger data? You're going to have the information from command center when the SD was accepted and when the instant quote door here they're going to put that in the notes.

Because they're getting that QR code sent back to them. So also you will see on the estimates itself because the way it'll come in is like instant pricing from the website except we're going to have the picture of the door hanger attached to their profile.

And the lead source would be the door hanger too like under where the lead came from.

Kyle Tower from Oklahoma. Do you have a quick way to calculate the point at which you break even on a mowing customer? For example, we may spend 2010100 to acquire them and charge $40 per visit on a weekly basis. We mow 30 times six a year and pay 30%, 80%, $80 per hour. I want to know how many visits it takes for us to break even as customers start making a profit. So the easy way to do this is just to figure out your gross profit margin. So there was two one be your net, one be your gross. So more aggressively we use your gross function. So let's just say you're paying 40% to wages like 5% to like things like gas and other expendables. Just call it 50%. It's an easy number. 50% of $40, it means you're making $20 in gross profit per visit. I like to use gross profit because until you hit your capacity that's actually the number you want to use.

So on if you're running 50 net margins which is again we're just taking our variable costs, our cost of goods sold which is our direct labor etc, let's assume 50, you're making $20 per visit in net in gross profit, got to be five visits. So okay, well we're doing it weekly. Great. So you need to keep them for five weeks. If they cancel within two months of service, you've lost money on the customer.

Morgan Latimer how many tags do you suggest using COPA and what are the top five?

Honestly, I think Augusta uses tags really well. From what I have seen, there are some people inside of COPA use way too many tags. Like if there's 40 tags, I've seen some people with like 20 to 40 tags per customer, it becomes almost unusable. And what I mean by that is you will not notice the fact that it says a certain thing. If it depends on what you're using for. If you're using it for only automations, you could probably get away with lots of tags. Like too many tags I'd say. But when it comes to. If you're trying to like when you get to the customer's profile. Want to see? Okay, is this a what, what services they offer? Limited sourcing like that. I like to be as basic as possible. Tags is an organization mechanism that's helpful for things like price increases.

Things like that are helpful. But for example, like I've seen some people where they have like they have 5 price increases they put on the same customer the past like say five, six, seven years and I would just leave the last tag. Honestly, when was the last time you raised prices? That's the main thing. And I'd put in call notes so they just are searchable. Any other information? A lot of times I see people using tags which really should just be a call in a searchable database. But top five is mostly going to be things like service reminder for dispatch, poop removal reminder.

If an estimate was sent or not. What if they're on a recurring service that's more of a filter but they don't really have a top five necessarily. Bryson, I want to preface this, preface this with the fact that we are in the back end, the main part of winter. So I understand if some of this gets pushed. Snow is a huge. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Long. Okay, one second.

Is a huge thing here for us. I know a lot of other locations. Well, looking through some of the stuff, some of the stuff I got to have up, I don't, I hope you don't mind if I point out the mindset that could be changed for the better. I really appreciate you hearing us on Instant Hilt Park. I think if we increase the congruity of the aggressive snowboard presence as well as increased friction of the no brainer purchase we could conquer the integrity and help owners gain more commercial if desired. Focusing on this could allow us to not be janky. Winter services. We skip 50% of this time of year due to snowing the ground and completing everything above ground. The people we do service. I don't really feel like we are providing that appropriate value. I would like to. When setting up the instant quote, I didn't see a place to add our description as was presented. Maybe I missed it. But it's not like the one where it's available at the bottom of the form. This is crucial so we know so we can let people know if there's monthly billing.

You might have just missed it because we have all the instant prices. One second. Ah, snap. Okay. Two branded truck on snow sub page. Not a plain white unbranded one. It caught me off guard and it feel off brand.

Oh, you're talking about the truck at the bottom. One second. Well, we just need a picture. So if you can get us a picture Bryson, that'd be great. I know which one you're talking about. You're talking a little button. If we have a picture of an Augusta truck that's actually plowing and it looks good, we would use it. We have some but the trucks look brutal. We're in the middle working. So we decided that one to keep it clean and use that truck. But if you have a labeled truck with a snowplow and it's washed and you are plowing, please get us. The reason it's so difficult for us to get these pictures is because like flying into any location when they're like in a blizzard is almost impossible. So even recently we were out in Ohio and we were able to get snow footage of some other contractor. But it's in the middle of the night, the trucks look horrible, everyone's miserable. The shots are difficult. So if you have one though please let us know. But what I think I'm thinking is we could potentially. Let me think here.

We could potentially and I'm thinking about it. We could. We could probably. The media team could probably.

Graphic design onto that. I'll think about that one. I know exactly which one you're talking about and I'll see if we can get the media team to actually graphic overlay without looking sketchy. Max assets that do not do a snow on each of the offered snow services. Plowing. Shulting says one match something. There is snow. There is snow. Shoveling. Max is shoveling on one and the other one people have used is like a spraying salt on a walkway. Also keep in mind the winter service one second.

The winter oh.

The winter track that we're focused on this year is snow. So to keep that in mind, last year with winter services and.

Really winter services, that was the big focus and Christmas lights. So it's going to take me two years to do all five of them the way I want. And this year shoveling or snow in general is going to be our focus. And one of them I know they're already working on Maxx assets is literally a picture of Max just spreading salt by hand because I know that's what sometimes you do for walkways. Could you give me the reason I'm putting out all the instant price options on the snow page, not just the snow quote.

Could you give me the reason I'm putting all the instant quote options on the snow page, not just the snow quote.

It should just be the snow quote.

Who is this again? This is pricing. Okay, I'll look at your site.

No, it should just be the one. Okay, I've spoken to Snow Troopers GC and I am going to be combining any photo or video assets we may try to have and create some hype content that does well when trying to sell sell snow ice management, especially commercial. Let me know if providence meets it. Provide us value. Just know that like my bar of showing the trucks is high so it might be a matter of like we'll probably have to edit these in for now probably if I push the snow up too much. Just want to make sure I can nail it next year and give everyone the opportunity to take advantage of my favorite couple of photos of our single snowplow truck. Hey, we got pictures. Yes, this is a big focus this year for us and so it's not like I'm brushing you off or we haven't been trying to do this. It's just a function of we can only do so many things well and so this was not the focus in the last year but obviously with instant pricing now available I will be editing and modifying it. Even the other day we changed a couple of things in the snow.

On the snow page or sorry the snow instant pricing form. But I will take a look and make sure specifically that the there's the words underneath. It should be there but I know we're split testing a bunch of stuff last week so I know a couple locations we forgot to put it back so whoever asked the question about Christmas lights pre qualify hit me up and I have the script set up. It was Bryson that deserved the credit. Sweet. Thank you, Cardo. Yeah, Bryson, just know like this summer, like I'm focused on on snow, just not my current sprints. Everybody is a focus into what our winter jersey we're working on for this upcoming season.

And so last year was just winter services and snow. Sorry, winter services and Christmas lights. And so we will adjust the other ones as well. All right, I have to run. I'm running late. Love you all. Hope you have a fantastic day. I will have big pictures and video tomorrow. Some crazy cool robotics. I'm looking forward to share with you all. Take care.