Mike Minutes Mastermind 02/29/2024

Hello, Augusta Nation. Welcome, Welcome. I sent out the message a couple minutes earlier because I know it usually takes five to 10 minutes to get to everybody. So.

If you ever get the message and I'm not live yet, just know I'm like literally right about to go live because I'm just waiting a couple minutes for that text to go out and everyone to be notified. All right, let me put this into Facebook.

We will get it rolling. Quick clarification.

Earlier this week I had put up a poll about the measurement of properties. I had put it in the comments, but on in groups, I can't pin comments. I can't pin a comment to the top of the comments. And basically we're saying, hey, hey, this is not something that's going to be happening right away. It just, I wanted the feedback and then down the road we take action on it. And it also gives information for the Franchise Advisory Council to be able to discuss. So just FYI, there's not gonna be. That's not gonna be getting changed anytime soon.

I don't really have any major announcements.

Again. I know I mentioned the other day, but it's not this Sunday. But the following Sunday is when basic services at command center will be opened up and that will be when we will be able to.

Do phone calls will be answered, estimate request forms, chat on the website. All of those things that are basic service will get done. I'm just making a quick note here.

Check something with Max AI on Sundays. Cool. All right, let's get into questions.

There it is.

Present Share screen.

Okay.

Question number one, Mr. Anonymous questions for our industry. When is the best time to list a business? Your. One second, let me make sure my audio Check. One, two.

There you go. Okay.

What's the best time to list a business? What is the best process for selling on Augusta location? Yeah, answer these one at a time. For our industry, when's the best time list of business? Typically at least three to six months before the spring rush. Usually. Honestly, the fall is the best time because people have more cash as well as they have plenty of time to get ready for the spring rush. And if they're getting any sort of debt to buy your business, it will take at least three to six months. If they're getting an SBA loan process for selling Augusta location. On the dashboard there is an actual form. You can fill the whole thing out. Trust me, spend time on that form. If you get better pictures, more information, better financial statements, etc. We actually are seeing now a lot of locations do get sold.

And it goes to people that are in a rush to sell. So I. I think I might know who this is. I'm sure I'll. Sorry, I'm just scanning this. I think I might know who this is. So because we've been talking about this already, you know, from what I've gathered, you have plenty of time like you're not in a dire straits to sell. That's the ones that have been able to do really well. When someone's like I next week I got to be out. It's almost never able to sell because what happens is you're recurring jobs thing like your revenue starts to drop off because like you're now like split from the business. And even if like well I'm gonna try to keep doing the recurring, you still just lose so much momentum for the business that just becomes way worth way less.

Okay, let's see here.

Context. Oh, I see what it says here. I feel my location is right for growth and expansion, but I'm not putting the effort others are willing to put in. I'd love to stay for it to stay within the Augusta family if possible. Meaning an existing owner or corporate takes it over. Context. Over the last year I have considered exiting our industry. My business has wrestly roughly $160,000 in recurring revenue annually for mowing. On top of that we can do cleanups and one time projects. So there's a decent recurring revenue base and lots of potential for adding additional income. Truthfully, the growth has been stunted by my lack of interest in pushing things. I'm striving to be self aware but of my motives behind this decisions, perhaps I need to push through a little further. That's why regardless, I'm heading into this year as if I'm not selling and looking to execute on the plan for spring. However, if someone said I'm bought, I'll buy your business today, I would take the offer assuming the math makes sense. Very unlikely scenario. Obviously I have other endeavors that are higher priorities for my life plans which involve significant amounts of my daily and weekly time. My income can be covered through other means, so I'm not dependent on the August income. I don't have the business running with a manager and think realistically. I won't get to that place where it runs without me while pursuing my other plans. If I had the manager, I fear being one step away from having to jump back in if they bailed and couldn't afford that. While pursuing other plans, I've tempted to just cash out and move on and keep my Other business endeavors running. Okay, this is great. This is great. So this is. This ultimately comes down to what sort of life do you want to design, Right? So if you say, okay, there's other businesses, I haven't really put any attention towards this. It's not like it's huge. I'm guessing you're probably doing like 250,000, maybe 300,000 in annual revenue if 160, if it's recurring from mowing. So a couple things. In order to have a general manager, you really do want to get to like, 400 to 500,000. If you were able to, as you kind of allude to here, focus on it for one year, I think you could get it to that spot. And then what I would do is give a huge amount of equity or huge amount of profit sharing to a general manager. If you wanted to keep it, like, if you wanted to keep this as a passive thing that prints off like 3 to $5,000 a month in cash and, like, you don't really have to worry about it, I would consider giving away, like, say 30% equity and 50% of profits to. To someone be like, I never want to talk to you. I want you to run this thing. And I'm just going to give you 50, 50% of all the profits and 30% of the equity, which ultimately means they're actually going to end up getting 65% of profits because you're giving them 30% of the other 50%. So it's a big chunk.

And so because, like, distributions. So that would be an option, that the other option is to sell it. You're not in a rush. I will say most business owners, when they actually think they want to sell and they start building the business around trying to sell it, they actually end up realizing by the time they actually build the business to sell that they like the business because they take out all the dependencies, they focus on the core services, they cut out customers that are really extraneous, and anything that's going to scare away a buyer, they cut out. And by the end of it, they're like, this is not a bad business. So, for example, if you grew your recurring revenue to, say, 250 this year, and it was doing 500,000 in annual revenue, now all of a sudden it looks kind of interesting to get a general manager and give them 30% of equity, 50% of profit sharing, and make this something right.

Because you probably are not going to get a whole lot of goodwill on a business that's one or two years old. That is under 500,000. You're going to get like equipment costs and that's kind of it, right? So it sounds to me like you have one year in you kind of thing. I would try to. If you were trying to maximize what you can get from this location, I would try to get it to 500,000, which it sounds like you're probably more than halfway there, I'm just guessing based upon the quick math of recurring mowing.

And then giving like very generously to that person. And basically what you're doing is you're buying yourself a stream of income. You're buying yourself, okay, if I can even just get two or three thousand dollars a month from this, like paying my mortgage, well, now all of a sudden I'm able to go buy a house instead of what otherwise is going to be probably just a few thousand a couple. You know, you probably get, you know, your equipment plus 30, 40 grand just depending on who you're selling to. But.

A business that has less than three months, three years of profit and loss statements, very difficult to get any debt against. So that's what you're going to be up against.

So definitely just like on a coaching call, I'd, I'd really make a, a plan with your coach in terms of like, okay, what benchmark do I need to hit along this year? I'm going to give it one solid shot because honestly, like we always say about, like, oh, like a location is determined by the general manager. If you are the solo operator, we can strip it back to saying that the success of your location will 100 hinge on you. And so if you're not able to put your time and attention to location, it's not going to do well. Like, it takes so much time and attention for inertia to get a business up and off the ground. Like the takeoff period, if you don't have someone fully invested, it's just very, very difficult. Like the only way that it works for you not to be involved is you have so much capital to be able to pump into marketing and then you're able to have, and then at the same token, that first year, take a loss on the location as a whole because you have a general manager running it and a whole bunch of leads being poured in from your marketing dollars. That's like how you can become more of a absentee owner.

And then in the long term, it is you. If you're not going to be there, you need to give either a chunk of profit sharing away or a, a piece of equity so that person actually cares. And to your point, they're not, you're not always concerned about them leaving because that's the last thing you want too is like you're building your perfect life. And I'll go great. This thing's like pumping off, you know, 2, 3, $4,000 of free cash flow to me every single month. Let's go. Don't have to do anything. And all of a sudden that person leaves and you're left with you know, three, four employees, several trucks and like what in the world? Now I gotta go back and manage the day to day operations again. So.

You know, this is just be. It just comes down to what do you want in life and are you willing to put in one year to really grind into the business so that it can get to the stage where a general manager makes sense and then I would be extremely generous with them and assuming you want to keep the location, otherwise do the exact same thing and optimize it for profit and optimize it for growth. I'm sorry, optimize it for profit this year and optimize it to sell it. And then you'll probably make five times as much in terms of goodwill if you wait, wait one more year and actually build it to sell it. And definitely read the book Built to Sell because you basically build the business in a way that people want to buy it. Piggyback. Oh, this is Dustin from Champaign.

Piggybacking off to Joel's question yesterday. If our target demographic is the 60, 80 year olds, what is the reason behind jumping into Max AI and developing features like the texting, instant quotes, etc? If it will be three to four years before our target demos are interested in using these sources of outreach or contact, would it or contact. Would it be better to delay the headaches in a couple years till the vast majority are ready to adopt and would prefer these options? I know I've recently got some pushback from customers speaking with Max again because people are contacting us and being ready for the spring. But are these not my target and I should not worry about the pushback or are they a target and they just need to ride the waves with us for a couple years? The reason is I think that Most, I'd say 90% of people are fine with the technology. The other 10% of people, I, I've just seen the correlation between them not being who we want to work with anyways in the long term. That being said.

I think that.

In three to four years when this does become commonplace, we need to have the technology, like the, the historical foundation to actually utilize it. Because you know what we paid a couple hundred thousand dollars for this year to build this will literally become where some, like all of our competition buys in my opinion, for 2, 100 to 200amonth off the shelf from a company. Plug it in, you, you punch in what services you offer, you punch in you know what, what fields quote unquote you want filled out. And it's going to operate just like a Google form in that. It's going to be like, okay, it needs their name, it needs it and just fills it in and then sends it to you. I think that's like a few years away. The difference between that and where we want to be at, which is that it can actually talk to them, make payment, tell them when their next schedule appointment is, tell them if you're running late on the estimate, things like that. I think we'll be there in three to four years versus where everyone else will be like, oh, like now, now that technology is adopted, let's all jump on board with it. And when it becomes adopted now we'll be in the place to where not only is it adopted and people are used to it, but we're just like so much better and more efficient at it. And I think that.

There'S enough people that will adopt this technology for it to not be an issue. And the it makes up for the loss of that, say 10 or 15% is like, I don't want to deal with that person, that business, because they have an AI thing working at the top. It makes up for it in the fact that it can work 24, 7 and never misses a call. And it gets calls on the first second. Like there is no eight second average hold time. There's not even a 10 or 15. If like we're crazy busy during a spring rush, someone has to wait 10 seconds. That's like almost three rings. That never happens. And so all those leaks that get plugged in that process make up for the fact that there's going to be a percentage of people, they're like, I don't really like that. And again, right now we're telling them up front that Max is an AI assistant and that they can always talk to the agents that are human. So if it ever has, if they ever have something, any sort of problem that Max can handle, we have those backup as command center even now with Sundays coming too, which is nice.

Make sure I answer this question one second.

Yeah, I would say that I, I think that the majority are ready to adopt. They're the, the technology is just not there for it to actually happen. And so.

Like for every, for everyone that is.

Saying things against us, like, it's just gonna, it's going to be the standard in a few years. And what's going to happen is there are going to be people that will adopt it late and they're, they will have clunky. It'll be clunky. And then the people who, that like us that have invested in it for several years will be so far ahead of the game that will, It'll be like our unique ability to be able to commute their customers.

And like even what you're seeing, this is something I was really interested, I was talking about a couple people the other day. What you're seeing right now with email where you can't even get to the inbox of. Because it's getting, they're getting so good at spam filtering spam. I really do believe down the road it's going to be difficult to get a hold of people in terms of phone calls because the same technology can eventually be used on the phone. And like right now you might see like, you know, spam alert on your phone or might say like potential spam or something like that. I believe that down the road it, you'll be able, It'll be. We are one feature away from something like an Apple device being like, okay, anything that is detected as spam just don't even ring. Like we are. We. I believe we're close to that. And so it'll come down to more of a messaging type service when it comes to a voice because we don't like to be interrupted. And I, I don't think that's going to go away. I don't think we're all going to wake up one day and just like hope that our phone rings so we stop whatever we're currently doing and answer it.

No one likes that. So like, like there's no one that literally just genuinely loves when their phone rings in the middle of a meeting or in the middle of something, they're doing something in the middle of them having dinner. No one like you would rather have the message come to you in your time. And so I, I believe that one day the, the AI agent will become a personal assistant that you send messages to and from the same way we send text messages and emails. And those technologies have been adopted to the point where voice messages have come down. Like we don't use our phones as often.

So.

Joel, I think there's Only one Joe? I believe so, yes. Oh, there's another follow up for yesterday's question. As a follow up to my question yesterday, would it be possible I'd max in a caller an SMS message with a link to the instant quote form on our websites to get an estimate? Yeah, that's kind of like the next step that we're working on.

I got some devs coming in later in March and talking about some of this stuff. Once we connect it with Copilot there's a whole bunch of stuff we can do while they're on the phone because we can immediately start using automations. So for example, if we get there their information we can immediately start automations inside of Copilot firing off things like text messages without having to have a separate infrastructure underneath the AI side of things. So really the connection to Copilot is going to be the secret sauce because once, once we connect them to Copilot we have so many triggers like okay, as soon as the client is added because they've given us their phone number, their we, we have their phone number, they've given us their name and their address. Boom. Okay, I want you to fire this text message off to them and do this, this, this, this and that's going to really where it revolves around like the small, medium and large et cetera for instant quotes.

Since MAX is basically an advanced voicemail machine for after hours when a caller is asking about an estimate could, could it ask the caller if they would like to receive a text with a link to fill out instant quote form instead of max gathering information for CC to call back in the morning? Yeah, this, this would be like an easy lift. Intermediary. Um, we see a huge drop off when we do this when we, when we tell them to switch operating systems like from phone to getting on text message and actually doing something. So for example when we, when we ask for them to confirm their email address we only get about 50 to 60% of people. So I can't with, I can't, I don't want to lose 50% of people right now to getting the form. But this would be an easy lift because all you'd be doing is sending a link. You just be like hey, send this and you just be sending them to your site. Really the thing is if we're just sending them a site it feels a little bit like think about yourself as a customer. You call into someone and they're talking to you away and they're like oh yeah, just go to our website and it's like Well, I called to talk to you. Like I called cause I want to be on the phone. And so what my goal is is that yes, we use the messaging as a way to get pictures in front of them. And then on the phone they say, oh yeah, I look my property looks like the small one. So basically keeping them on the same operating system is the goal. That'll be much more challenging. But we will not lose any drop off of people having to switch to switch operating systems to the website. Like so from their phone to a browser filling out another form which we already have information because they're on the phone. So like the goal is to keep them on the phone. And once we tie it with Copilot, there'll be a lot of stuff we can do. That's why we have to have Instant Quote, Max AI and Copilot connected. Because then Max AI can do instant quotes and have it all being funneled through Copilot. That's like the, the end goal of 2024, promoting potential customers could get a quote instantly instead of waiting until the next day. And there's now a chance to upsell those leads through the website for everyone else. I think filling out the instant quote form would result in fewer data entries than Max converting audio or text over a call. I've had trouble understanding what some people say on the call recordings. I would think that most people calling after hours are younger, more text savvy people who understand how to click a link and fill out an online form. And if they don't want to do that, they can still choose to continue the call with Max. So I agree with this. Here's my, my what we've seen, Joel, in terms of the data and that is the more tech savvy younger people, they don't call, they just go to the website and they fill out the instant quote form. That's what we're seeing. Because if they are more tech savvy, they are more text messages. Like they do not go call. Like I would never call a service right off the bat. I would simply go to their website and hope that they have a form or somewhere I can text. Or I'd go to their website and I'd start chatting with them. And so that's like where I think most people would go anyways. If they're talking to Max, they want to talk to a human being and they want to talk to someone, they're trying to use the phone. And so we want to communicate with them on that level as much as possible. And that means measuring the property, sending the quote, calling them like, hey, it's in your inbox now. And then them being happy. The goal of taking that after hour call with Max is that we're the only person taking all their information instead of them going to voicemail to five other locations that they call and getting all their information and telling them we'll get a quote to them right away. And so that's really the only added benefit of after hours. And we've seen that consistently, even after hours, if it like in some months it actually goes up and that is like the amount of people will leave, like, like continue. The entire call with Max can go up over 85% after hours. And I feel this is hard to prove because we don't know how many people they're calling, but I believe it's because they've called two or three other people. They hit on one where they finally can actually complete the call and get all their information submitted so that they actually know a bid's going to be coming their way. And then I like to what we just talked about. The point is the goal would be actually get them to quote on that call down the road once we're able to integrate everything together.

At which point I will be a very happy man.

All right, folks, that's it for today on this episode of the Mike Minutes Mastermind. We'll see you tomorrow. Take care. Oh, for the Franchise Advisor Council. We'll see you in a few hours. Take care, guys.