Mike Minutes Mastermind (02/27/2023)

Hello, Gust nation. Happy Monday. Let's go ahead and get things rolling. Sorry I'm a little bit late. I hope it didn't mess up my Facebook stream.

Okay, I need to copy this into Facebook. One second here. We had a great weekend.

Okay, sorry.

There it is. Okay, paste. Boom. No.

Literally pasted the wrong thing in. Give me a second here. Copy this one.

All right, let's roll. We got. Let's see if I can pull up the questions.

A couple quick announcements and that is.

There are two new done for you ads on the academy. There's one for just regular Google search. So not performance max and there is one for Google or sorry, Facebook lead forms. So on Google, on Facebook lead forms, the user does not have to leave Facebook. They're not going to come to your website. So the kind of. The downside, there's a good sign and a bad side about that. The good side is that you're probably gonna get more lead forms. The bad side is that they're usually lower quality because they can it auto populates most of their information. And the other downside is you don't get any traffic to your website.

They can go to your website but the vast majority of them are being pushed to basically just.

To just be a.

User inside Facebook and they're going to fill out the form there. So lots of volume of leads. Just keep in mind the quality is going to be usually a little bit lower simply due to the fact that they are. They're auto populated information. So.

All right, let's go ahead and jump into questions. Present.

Well, I have way too many tabs open. Merciful heavens.

Okay, there we go. All right. It's not much of a marathon Monday, I must say. It's only three. Connor from Evansville says picture attached. So I've been working hard to get our Google reviews up. Trying to end the season around 100 Google views this year. Why would you not show up first On Google we are always roughly in the top two to five. However, any company with 30 to 40 reviews is typically a whole one to 5.5 stars below us. So do you think it will actually help us being next to them? Because prospects can see the stark difference between us. I am one of two companies Google guaranteed Evansville so we appear in the top everyone else's landscaping or treatments. Just trying to make sure everything is on point. Let's check it out. Okay, so you're ranked there then you got a Google Ad. Okay. So that's fine.

Wait, what's Siri doing? Go away.

All right.

Yeah, no, I think it's fine. Like the more reviews you're gonna get, the better. Keep in mind that sometimes what you'll see is like companies with a bunch of low star reviews, like low stars will still rank high because they have tons of reviews. So the fact that you're getting a lot of reviews, the volume of reviews, that's important. Now obviously you don't want a whole bunch of one star reviews and like your average being like one and a half stars, you don't want that. But like that volume is going to tell Google, like, okay, people are using this service and like it's going to be relevant information to the person that's searching and so it'll push it up. So there's no never a bad time to get more Google reviews. Like literally, there's never a bad time. So.

Your question though is, do you think it'd be.

Oh, one you're asking like, should you stay at 30 to 40 reviews? No, I just get awareness. Right. And getting awareness means getting more reviews. You'd rather show up on the front of the Google listings page every single time because you have a hundred versus half of the time because you have 30 or 40. But now because you're at 30, 40, you're next to a bunch of other people with less star review like ratings. I would not worry about that. If someone sees someone with 30 to 40 reviews and they have an average of three, four stars and then they see you with 100 and your average is like 4.9, they're going to choose you. So overwhelm them with the amount of reviews compared to your competition. That would be my recommendation. And then that way too. If you have a bad one star review, like it gets buried in the other 300 positives.

I have noticed that not oh, this is from Connor from Evansville. I've noticed that I have not changed our mowing verbiage when sending a mowing quote. Weekly mowing required. March of June, I believe is copy and paste from Bellingham. I was taking talking with some seasoned employees and we thought about moving the start date that is typically to April to March, since that's how sold.

That's how it's sold on all mowing quotes. We typically come into the issue with April being the status quo. About 50 to 70% of our yards are so tall that we essentially have to do a cleanup bag or double the triple cut. This will be my first year hiring four to five new people and having to train them. Mine and Zach's thought was that if we pull the mowing forward which probably always needs to happen that we won't be as overwhelmed with the springtime growth and still allows us to train similar to pulling project for its thoughts on this. Yeah, I 100% think you should move this to March. You're gonna get some customers that ask to be moved forward like hey no, I don't need it till April or whatever it might be. But then you just say like if, if you're not going to start when we tell you, you that first visit's gonna be a permanent per man price. And so yeah, we start March 1st. Do people need it March 1st? Probably not. You could probably get away with another week or two forward into the year typically but it like you said it prevents there being an overgrown lawn and even though the lawn might not need it necessarily March 1st we're going to edge it make sure that that's all dialed in. So that way there's never an additional charge required and more time required compared to budget hours. So yeah, the more you can push this forward the better. I do not mind being the first in our area to do this and break the standard. However, what I do not want to happen is having customers cancel at mass because of this. I'm not sure I would would tell command, hey if someone doesn't want to start this early, that's fine. Let them know we can start in April. That way we can understand that there might be some pushback. But limit the, limit the cancellations where we can. I don't even mind to do a cleanup over time like how you went to services on the property if the growth isn't 100% there on the remaining 50 to 30% that I mentioned above. So just trying to figure out the application and the logistics of it so it's not super messy. Let me know your thoughts. Yeah, so what you're going to do is you're going to send your email out to your customers, the one that's inside of the one click estimate calendar and to all, all your existing customers. You're going to tell them starting next week we're going to go ahead and start mowing your lawn. We look forward to seeing if you can get your property this year. If they don't like that, they'll respond to that email and if they call, it's again not a big issue. They'll, they'll tell command center, hey, I don't my grass isn't growing yet. Can we go ahead and start in April? Command center is used to dealing with those and they'll just move those visits till April. So I would not worry about this. I would send the email out and I guarantee you you're going to 5, 10% of people responding back and they'll push it off. The other 70, 80% will just roll with it and you'll get them dialed in sooner and you'll get a couple extra cuts in the year simply because of that. So and they're proper look better. You won't put your guys through much headache in spring rush in April, so highly recommend being a couple weeks before like mowing really takes off so you can get the edges dialed in, get that initial cut. Like get the cut low. We always tell the guys in March to cut the galans really low.

Helps so much during spring rush.

Garrett from Glendale, Colorado. Hey Mike. Happy marathon Monday. I'm currently interviewing and staggering my hiring. I'll be training people one at a time. I'm trying to get a capacity with three trucks currently it's me. Cole who is part time will go full time in May. Alex worked with me, full with me last season is returning to work April 3rd when mowing starts begins. I've hired someone to start March 20th, June 6th. I'm sending over job offers day for people to start on March 1, April 3 and April 12. In summary, this is what I have so far. March 1, March 20, March, April 3, April 3, April 12, May 12, June 6. I've been doing a fair amount of pre screening weeding out most applicants. I've had about 40% of people that I've interviewed. I typically am very optimistic and default to believing in people based off what other people have said. I figure one out of five new hires will work out. I would hope that more than one out of five will work out.

Meaning that out of the five people I've hired so far, I would plan on one or none of them working out. Not including Alex and Cole. My question is this. What if everyone or 3 out of 4 new hires work out? This would put us at 7 people total and I don't have enough work. Would I lay off the two newest people? Would it be better to fire the two lowest performers, people without with worse attitudes? I know this is not likely. I just feel I would feel better if I have a plan in case this happens. Yeah, it's like everyone always overthinks this and I've very rarely seen it happen. And that's where you have too many employees because you over hired and then they're all really good and no one left and they all just are crushing it and they all want to stay. So, yeah, out of your March, people, like, probably one of them will be gone by April, May, June, that's three months. Like all spring rush, that's fine. You'll use them. And then by the time you have these, like, minimum May and June people coming, there's a good chance you'll. These people would have left, but we would have been able to use them through the spring rush and it would have been positive.

So I. I don't think you're gonna have seven. You'll probably end up paying five though, right? It's very possible you had five. If everyone does pretty good and natural attrition, I'd say two are gonna weed out. It's like five. So as long as you can cover with five and they have enough work for five, then you're good. If you're one or two people like too many hired that, that's when you need to go into sales mode. And especially at six, seven, eight people, like, it's time to go put on your sales boots, right? Because that means you need to go sell the jobs if you got the good guys to be able to perform the work. So I think this is a good strategy. I think you're gonna be just fine.

Like I said, The March and March 1st and 20th guy will probably. They'll fall off. Likely just natural attrition by end of spring rush. But you'll need them throughout spring rush. As long as you think during the summer months after spring rush, you can keep five people busy, you'd probably be good. But I would assume that either A, you could let your lowest performers go that you really kind of want to get rid of anyways if this happens, or B, you go out and get your sales boots on and start. Start selling. But yeah, typically the issue during spring rush is not.

I need more work, It's I don't have enough employees. So you'd rather default to that.

Cool. All right. Else we got. That's the long care plantation. Running low on cash. Oxygen is very low. I'm about to die. What should I do? Lol. Yeah. So if you're running low on cash, this is the question. Like, there shouldn't be as much marketing going on. You should be taking the customers you have and raising prices. You should be going through the three things where cash is hiding, which is deposits, collecting on deposits, collecting on invoices that are outstanding, and then collecting of completing jobs that are halfway through that you need to collect the rest of the money. On or you need to finish the job and then collect the money. So go out, go get yourself some projects. Literally this is like one click estimates for cleanups. This is go get the cash. This might mean selling something if you're really desperate in terms of equipment that's not being used. And definitely be on a coaching call because they're going to go through all those five or six things I just mentioned and see where we can cut the fat as well as get immediate cash. So the three places your cash is hiding is in work that's almost completed. And the rest of the money you could then collect on it's payments that are overdue. And then it is jobs that.

Are literally completed. Like you just gotta go get the cash. You gotta go out, you gotta be hey, we're finished the job. Like let's get the cash. So I'm talk to a coach. They'll get you on the path and and see where the holes are at that you could potentially capitalize on to get the cash back in the business. And worst comes to worse than you sell stuff. But marketing should be going down. You should be upping the prices of your existing customers if that's something that you are trying to do. If you're just in rapid growth mode, just slow growth down a bit. If you're like, well I'm growing, like I don't want to raise prices. Okay, great. Just realize that you can't grow so fast. You run out of cash oxygen, you die. Right? So you're gonna have to slow that down a little bit. You have to wait for the cash to catch up with you. So it's important. All right guys, have a great day. We'll see you tomorrow.